It is hard to express the primal delight that fills the robots as they play the latest games - You really, really need to be reading Hitherby Dragons every day.
Crimes and Mistakes - Matthew Barganier e-mails me pretty convincing evidence that US troops definitely used phosphorus against insurgents in Fallujah, including text from the SF Chronicle and pictures from the International Herald Tribune. That doesn't support the accusations in the Jihad Unspun article, in which the alleged witness described completely different agents and wound patterns. But my heart sank on reading the following passage in the Chronicle article:
Soldiers with the Army's 1st Infantry Division made their way to the southeastern part of the city, a neighborhood of factories and warehouses where they expected to find guerrillas waiting for them. Instead, the district was relatively quiet, though the units reported being fired on by women and children armed with assault rifles.
Anything's possible, but this reads like a suspiciously convenient preemptive excuse for any female and/or juvenile corpses that turn up afterwards. (The article dates from November 10.) It's inconsistent with the military's later decision to allow women and children to leave the city while turning the men back (which was itself, as I've argued already, criminal and stupid). It reeks of propaganda.
Let me be clear: I didn't dismiss the Jihad Unspun story because I believe our military has conducted itself like angels. I dismissed the Jihad Unspun story because it seems grossly inconsistent with what we know. Offensive use of chemical weapons is a big hairy deal. The military is not going to send US troops into a chemical battlefield without gear. I suspect there would be detectible protocols followed all the way up the logistical chain.
(Wild card: the "sarin discovery" story.)
UPDATE: Explananda writes two things I agree with: 1) "If phosphorus doesn't count, we might ask ourselves whether our categories aren't a bit self-serving." [Hm. Ya think?.] 2) "But since the U.S. is in fact using chemical weapons [phosphorus and a successor to napalm that we know of], and has used them, in Iraq, it's not hard to see why people might be inclined to believe them."
More Conspiracy Theories - This one's all me. That incident in Detroit last night with the beer-throwing fan and Ron Artest? Setup. Artest paid the guy to do it. He wanted to get suspended so he could promote his album like he'd asked all along. Remember, you read it here first. Because everyone else has too much sense of responsibility.
And Rumors of War - An anonymous Iraqi physician tells Panorama radio that US troops used chemical weapons in Fallujah, according to Jihad Unspun:
Observers agree on one thing- Americans decided to use chemical weapons after they failed to defeat the Mujahideen in Fallujah - both a cowardly and inhumane act. The Mujahideen inflicted heavy losses on the US forces in al-Fallujah prompting the Americans to employ chemical weapons for the first time since the fall of Baghdad. Reports have been received that US forces used chemical weapons in the al-Jawlan, ash-Shuhada', and al-Jubayl neighborhoods and again last night in al-Jubayl neighborhood.
Uh, sure. A week and more of media-soaked action with no American troops wearing protective gear, but they made heavy use of some unidentified lethal agent anyway because that's the devil-may-care attitude that made this country great. I'm wondering if this rumor is floating around Iraq, though. Rumors are an important telltale of social attitudes. Years ago, I read Henry Louis Gates explaining various rumors current in the black community, like the Church's Fried Chicken rumor and the Liz Claiborne myth. Gates said, in paraphrase, urban African-Americans aren't frightened because they believe rumors; they believe the rumors becuase they're frightened.
The Last to Know - Thanks to following a meme I got from Zack Ajmal, I just discovered eHow. Cool! If somhow I found it ahead of you, know that it has instructions for doing most things you could want to do. I just found a primer on fixing our bathroom floor, for instance. (Via The Livejournal of zdashamber.)
Shuffle to Judgment - I'm coming to the story of the marine who shot the unarmed wounded man in the Fallujah mosque late. Buggieboy has the best explanation of why the shooting was probably not a war crime. To me the crime was the command decision to send adult males attempting to leave Fallujah back into the city. Both the humane and the prudential thing to do would have been to intern them for examination then and there, rather than doing it several days later if they were lucky enough to survive. That decision was made well above the pay grade of the marine in the mosque. Behind that crime and other crimes, the worse mistake: putting American troops into a situation where every adult male must be regarded as a presumptive enemy - that is, invading Iraq in the first place.
The political damage exists regardless of the military justification. Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere aren't going to make the effort to see things from Buggieboy's perspective. Red State Iraq sees one of their own, helpless, getting blown away by an outsider. The comment-thread analog at Little (Muslim-)Green Soccer Balls will be humming with outrage. I'll bet you the marine who tapped that wounded man is a pretty good guy, and that the memory of what he did will wake him from many a sleep in the coming decades. If his night fits disturbed the sleep of George Bush, DIck Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, the staff of the Weekly Standard and the board of the American Enterprise Institute there would at least be bitter consolation. But it won't. For such as they, a man like that marine is material. He is a casualty of their war as sure as any coffin cargo or concussion case. I'm sure they feel "regret," but a keener pang would attend the loss of a fly to a snag in Jackson Hole.
Other war business: A few days ago, Diana Moon e-mailed me that
It looks like your conjecture that Fallujah was hyped isn't correct. It's based on the notion that Fallujah wasn't a difficult fight. I think it was hell, even if there weren't 5K insurgents.
Diana is largely right, I think. Depending on how much you trust the casualty numbers, a lot more insurgents stayed to fight than I expected. The most recent figures I saw were 1,000 dead and 1,000 prisoners. I think some of the corpses may have "joined the resistance" upon death, and some of the 1,000 may have simply been surviving males caught in the sweep. But it could be that there were as many as 2,000 insurgents in the city during the combat. In advance, I expected no more than half that.
In that sense, I was clearly wrong. On another level, Too Soon to Tell. If the number fighting that stayed was high, was the number that fled even higher than estimated beforehand? Instead of 5,000 insurgents in pre-assault Fallujah, were there 8,000? Beats me. My other claim was that taking Fallujah would not cripple the insurgency. This puts me in contradiction to General Sattler, and we'll see who was more correct in time.
Who Knew? - Write about insurance, get tons of interesting, informative e-mail. Roundup tomorrow.
Hey, Degenerates! - Why are you reading this depraved weblog? Nate e-mails:
I'm at a Panera near Dulles airport, where I have to pick someone up later this afternoon. Paneras are great because of the free wifi, but there are downsides. Got this message when trying to visit UO:This site is blocked by the SonicWALL Content Filter Service.
URL: http://www.highclearing.com/
Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category "Adult/Mature Content"
I presume your pornblog is maintained under a pseudonym?
I shouldn't have done that shower scene with Terrell Owens. Oh well. There's always cabl - oh shit!
Not Enough Wrinkles - Atrios puts on his economist hat and sets out to explain insurance, with, based on the caliber of the explanations so far, way more disdain for his ideological adversaries than is warranted. The first item explains the principles of "insurance classic" (fire, auto and such), and saves health insurance for a second go-round. The major problem with the first is a relentless demand-side focus that will come back to bedevil him, and liberal approaches to the question of health insurance generally, in the second item. Simply put, profit is nowhere to be found:
So, consider something like fire insurance. Every year there's a 10% chance that your house burns down and you lose $100,000 and a 90% chance you don't. Because you don't like the uncertainty, you're willing to pay some amount to remove that uncertainty from your life. Since an insurance company can bundle up a large number of people, as long as fires are uncorrelated events (no entire blocks burning down), the law of large numbers ensures that the total losses (equal to total insurance payouts) are essentially predictable. That is, the insurance would pay out an average of $10,000 per policy per year.An actuarially fair policy would have an insurance premium precisely equal to the expected (average) loss, or $10,000 per year, and a competitive insurance market would result in a price of just about that.
Well let's see how an insurance company with 100 customers does here:
Income: 100 x 10,000 = 1 million dollars per year
Outflow: 10 x 100,000 = 1 million dollars per year
We've eliminated not just profit but even overhead. There's no money to pay for administering the program, which even a nonprofit or government insurance program would need. As for the other kind - an actual business - go ahead, invest your 401K in this one. I dare you.
Now I don't want to overstate my case. Atrios probably thinks he's tucked away a little for the providers somewhere between "a competitive insurance market" and "just about that." Economic theory does say that profit should progressively vanish as markets mature. In the real world, though, it has to be worth it to provide a service, and the profit margin of an ongoing industry has a functional floor not too far below what you can get on a passbook savings account down at the bank.
I think the problem is lying in the weeds of his initial post on health insurance, where he misses the real problem of such insurance as it exists in the United States. Insurance classic is about the pooling of risk. Contemporary health insurance is that, but it's also the pooling of certainties. Example: I was diagnosed with essential hypertension when I was 25 years old, and I've been on blood pressure medication ever since. That guarantees several hundred dollars in drug costs and a couple hundred more in office visits per year for someone. Most of it is paid by whichever insurance company I have. The law requires them to do this, even though it is in no way a risk - it's a damn sure thing. Contemporary medical "insurance" is more like a service contract you would buy for your car than a classic risk management vehicle.
The money has to come from somewhere. Let's imagine a system where I pay my own insurance premiums all by myself. For it to be worth the insurance company covering me, my premiums have to exceed (to provide profit) the actuarial risks that impinge on me, plus the certain expenses of my existing conditions. For there to be a profit to them on covering my blood pressure, I have to be paying them more than I would pay out of pocket, which is a bad deal for me.
So what can make covering my blood pressure medication worth it to the insurance company and me? Free money! Put "free" in sneer quotes, please. My employers pay more of my premiums than I do. That's money that could be going straight to me, but for oddities of the tax code. There is another important source: my fellow employees. The healthier employees are paying to cover not just their own risks but my certainties.
There's one further trick to this, but I've got to go to work. In the meantime, let me suggest that a Rawlslike "veil of ignorance" exists in classic insurance that is only artificially mandated in contemporary medical insurance. Much depends, in political terms, on it staying in place.
QUICK UPDATE: Michael Croft points out, via e-mail, that I'm ignoring volume purchasing power in the certainty-pooling aspect of medical insurance. (And after chiding Atrios for skipping over stuff.) It's an important point, though I don't think it vanishes the ethical "free money" issue to the extent Michael suggests. More tonight.
Imitation Tech Blog Item - I ended up saving my profile, uninstalling all versions of Firefox and reinstalling from scratch. Then I discovered I'd saved the wrong profile, so I lost a lot of bookmarks and such. Still, I have Firefox 1.0 up and running, and thanks to two readers, including Dave Meyer and another who wishes to remain anonymous, I've switched to Sage as my RSS utility. Sage has a very cool Discover Feeds feature. (It's not perfect, missing Major Olmsted's site feed among others.) And it successfully parses more feeds than RSS Panel, which I used with Firefox 0.8.
Now if only someone with pull in the Firefox community would get someone to make a searchbar plugin for the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the only American-English dictionary worth using.
Also, I really really really really miss a working Google toolbar. Someone write in and tell me it's there and I just didn't find it. (It not being listed with, you know, the search tools.) I especially miss the way you could just click on your search terms in the toolbar to do a Find in Page once you'd chosen a search result. But the loss of one-button site search rankles too.
Two impassioned defenses of current-model hybrid cars have come my way. Kate Nepveu:
Articles like this make me roll my eyes. I have a Toyota Prius, 2003 model--the older version. Yeah, of course they get less than the EPA mileage--*every* car gets less than its EPA mileage. I get about 45-48 MPG, depending on the season, which is entirely reasonable considering the EPA's combined estimate of 48. And I notice that the article doesn't talk about the reduced emissions from not running the engine all the time (plus whatever other tech they employ).Yes, I believe if you do the numbers, you don't quite make up for the extra cost of the hybrid system in the gas savings. I knew that, and I didn't buy the car for the gas savings--yes, it's nice, but I bought it because it had really low emissions and it was damn cool, so I could feel virtuous and geeky at the same time. I think that's a perfectly good reason to get a car.
The hybrid article you point to is almost unalloyed hooey. Its patent lack of logic licks the boots of the lazy corruption "oh, well, this new thing isn't perfect, so I'm perfectly fine to do nothing at all."
My only car is a hybrid, I did a bunch of research on hybrids and other cars before buying it, and I hang out in hybrid forums. I know magnitudes more than Bob Elton about hybrids, and I'll point out a few places where he's full of it:
"...the difference [hybrid to non-hybrid fuel economy] is nowhere near as great as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) numbers suggest." Bob says this is because the electric-only EPA "city" numbers skew the average--he offers no explanation of how it is that the gas/electric "highway" numbers still whoop the ass of any gas-only car. Nor does he seem to have the foggiest hint of a clue that Honda hybrids are an entirely different engine than Toyota/Ford hybrids--Hondas never run on electric only.
"Fuel needed to recharge the battery" my eye. The battery recharges mostly when the car is braking—using fuel energy that gas-only cars are just throwing away.
And no doubt we'll all be shocked one day to find video footage of EPA techs frozenly stepping out of a gas-only car, teeth chattering as they gleefully congratulate each other on another efficiency rating scotched by unauthorized AC use.
Cutting to the chase: Not getting EPA numbers on your car's gas mileage? Duh. You'll note that after every car encounters the real world the hybrids are still on top.
Then Bob goes on a tangent about how if car manufacturers were going to apply to a gas-only car all the expensive engineering and careful materials choices that aid the hybrid's efficiency, it still wouldn't be as good as the hybrid. Gee, let's hold our breath for that to happen.
Bob's point about the metal in hybrid batteries? I invite you to look down the road 20 years to when oil is at $100 a barrel. Which of today's cars will be abandoned by the wayside? The hundreds of thousands of 15 mpg hulks of metal, or the thousands of 50 mpg hybrids? Talk about your criminal wastes of resources.
His point about hybrids being unsafe to people cutting them open is possible, though in the Insight at least the powerlines have been designed with that in mind, running though the center bottom of the car where they're least likely to be sliced or damaged. His point about mechanics being in danger is ludicrous.
"So, if the hybrid’s mileage advantage is minimal..." Go on, Bob, name me other cars on the market that compete. I'll be right here. Meanwhile, you suggest walking. Well, I'll lay it to you: who do you think is more likely to walk and bicycle? The person with the hybrid, or the person with the SUV?
And, frankly, he can just stop dissing the Stanley Steamer. Steam engines were the most efficient around, the fastest cars in the world. They lost out to mass production and simpler startup procedures. And those electric cars he disses? When the manufacturers came around to collect the test batch and crush them into cubes a couple years back, the people leasing them begged and bribed to keep them. No dice--America is too easily distracted chasing the hydrogen fuel-cell pie in the sky to attend to the pie lying at its very feet.
A key point here seems to be recharging the battery with waste energy from the brakes.
On Second Thought - Gas prices being what they are, Mrs. Offering and I have looked longingly at higher-priced gas-electric hybrids. The Auto journalist Bob Elton suggests they may not be All That after all. Just one perspective, but a sobering one.
(Via Marginal Revolution.)
Reverse Paypal Button - How about if I offer everyone in America money to shut up about Nicolette Sheridan and Terrell Owens on Monday Night Football already!!!!! It's two days later, people! The whole inane brouhaha makes me feel so, so - European somehow.
The irony is I just spent half an hour listening to Doc Walker and Al Koken discussing the issue - and other outlets have framed it this was too - as a matter of the NFL using sex to sell football, when it was actually ABC using football to sell sex (ginning up viewers for Desperate Housewives). What is this country coming to when we can't even get our citizens to pay attention to sex without dangling sports in front of them?
What am I Doing UP at this Hour? - Science! Offering Boy really wanted to see the Leonid meteor shower even though it was a school/work night and an off year. I made a silent bargain: I'd pretend to try to wake him, intending to sleep through the night. If HE woke ME, he by gollum deserved to see the meteor shower. And that's what happened. Tonight's reminder while trying to find the Frost passage about how
. . . Every child should have the memory
Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.
"The Fear" is a damn scary poem that just refuses to pack itself back into its box when it's over.
UPDATE: Memory Lane Dept.: This blog's first-ever Leonid encounter.
Evil Shakespeare Overlord A pretty good list: THE THINGS I WILL NOT DO WHEN I DIRECT A SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTION, ON STAGE OR FILM.
30. As much as I enjoy his films, I will not steal from Kenneth Branagh. It's not like people won't notice. 33. Also, I will not require Caliban to hump Stephano's leg while telling him about Miranda, no matter how big a laugh it will get. 36. Keanu Reeves will not be allowed near the production. 37. I will not pantomime every image employed in the text in concert with its recitation under the assumption that it's the only way the dumb audience could possibly understand Elizabethan text. 71. People playing human (non-elf/fairy/spirit) characters will not be made to wear costumes that sparkle unless there is a good reason for it. 77. I will not make my cast simulate slow motion. 92. I will not project a PowerPoint slideshow onto a large screen above and behind the actors, ever, for any reason, no matter what.
Lots more where those came from.
Annals of Rejected Travel Promo Themes - "What Happens in a Greyhound Bus Station Men's Room, Stays in a Greyhound Bus Station Mens Room."
Blogging is Light while I work on a writing project. Also I had to work this weekend at my day job. To keep yourself busy, read an amazing ginmar entry, "What you read" - not just because it paints a hopeful enough picture of Iraqi-American interaction in the South of the country to make one think we might really get out of the place some day not too badly off, but because it's just, like much of ginmar's work, a damn good piece of writing. Excerpt:
This is such an ancient country. Parts of it along the rivers seem almost primeieval, with the ten foot rushes and the fan-shaped palm trees. You expect to see a dinosaur, especially at sunset, when the earth is black and the sky is gold.