This is a very cool optical illusion (via Volokh Conspiracy)

Jonah Goldberg makes a liberal case for war with Iraq.

Though this would come as a surprise to college students today, there's nothing inherent to liberalism that makes it reflexively anti-war. Indeed, in the 20th century context, it is conservatives who are more reliably knee-jerk in their opposition to military action -the great exception being the right's principled and pragmatic opposition to communism. Liberals created the idea of interventionism around the globe. Woodrow Wilson painted himself as a liberator of oppressed peoples and exporter of democracy. FDR could hardly be called a knee-jerk peacenik.

Obviously, it was Vietnam that drained the will to fight from liberalism, though certainly not from many individual liberals. But it's worth noting, again, that liberals were complicit in getting us into Vietnam and they saw no intellectual inconsistency in doing so.

The liberal justification for war has always seemed the more compelling to me morally. The conservative case for war is obviously more compelling intellectually. Liberals believe in helping people around the world. Conservatives believe in doing what is in our self-interest and no more.
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The point is that -until recently -liberals didn't think liberal ends were negated simply because conservative ends were being satisfied as well. But no more. During the 1990s, liberals opposed any conflict that was defined primarily as being in America's interests and supported any conflict that was defined as purely humanitarian. Hence, liberals supported armed intervention in Kosovo, Haiti and Somalia but had a problem with the Gulf War.

If Saddam Hussein were the president of Belgium, New Zealand or Chad with no oil under his feet, but with just as many tortured and brutalized subjects, I can't help but suspect that liberals would be in favor of removing him from power. What I don't get is why liberals can ignore the indictment against Saddam simply because conservatives have good reasons for going after him, too.

Very good Lileks bleat today describing a new HBO documentary on Saddam.

The documentary had a rushed quality, narrated with haste and edited with a sense of nervous urgency, as if the editor expected a knock on the door any minute. As an overview of Saddam’s family politics, it’s invaluable; we meet his wife, who was a Tami-Feh-Baquer-type, a squat overdone glam queen until Saddam publicly stepped out on her. Then she took up the veil and the frown, and slumps around exuding dowdy bile. We meet the charming sons, Uday and Qusay, described in glowing terms by a grinning little toady who will be played by Steve Buscemi in the movie version. We hear the tale of the defector who fled to Jordon, denounced Saddam - then grew homesick for the smell of the Tigris, accepted Saddam’s promise of amnesty, and took his family back to Iraq. (They’re dead.)

It all felt like “Scarface” on a national level. Except that “Scarface” didn’t have a nightly TV news broadcast, and Saddam does. I’m always fascinated by the way other cultures adopt the conventions of the nightly news - the upbeat urgent theme music, the catchy graphics. Gouged-Out-Eye Witness News! In the case of Iraq, you see a planet rotating in space, stopping when Iraq rolls around. The nation grows green - a taste of things to come, perhaps - and fills the screen; we see a famous statue of a mythological figure pouring water, no doubt a Baghdad landmark. It all seems so normal, so modern, so familiar - and it’s all in the service of a miserable, rotten man who spent his childhood shoving hot pokers into dogs and cats.

Fun Site of the Day
This site let's you mix and match face parts to create new faces. The resulting faces are pretty realistic, if freaky.

'Tough' microbes may offer clues to self-assembling nano-structures.

Sulfulobus is one tough bug. Part of an ancient branch of one-celled life called the Archaea, it thrives in near-boiling springs of sulfuric acid in places like Yellowstone National Park.
How, Jonathan Trent wondered, does it do that? Why doesn't it just fall apart?

The question led the NASA biologist down a long path to an interesting conclusion: The same chemistry that keeps the microbe alive may also be the key to making perfect arrays of tiny particles, one of the goals of the emerging discipline of nanotechnology.

Godfather III as history

An interesting an counter-intuitive piece by Bruce Bartlett on employee ownership plans. I have always supported such initiatives, assuming that having employees directly benefit from the success of the business would contribute to higher productivity and greater well-being for both the employees and the shareholders. According to Bartlett's column, however, the evidence does not seem to support this conclusion.

Economists that have looked at ESOPs generally find that there is no significant increase in productivity at companies with such plans. The benefits to each individual worker are too small to fundamentally change their attitudes. On the contrary, they often use their ownership to block productivity-enhancing changes. The result is that management is even more hamstrung than it was before, leading to losses and bankruptcies.

A Dec. 4 report in The Washington Post looks at the experience of China with employee ownership, which the government strongly encouraged. Workers proved unwilling to make radical changes, blocked layoffs, slacked off from work and often abused corporate assets. At the Jing Wine Company, for example, workers apparently drank much of the profits.

Says economist Martin Sullivan about ESOPs in general, "There do not appear to be any microeconomic foundations to back up claims that employee ownership of large corporations is good for the economy. In fact, there are -- unfortunately -- many reasons for economists to believe employee ownership can just cause problems."

Thomas Sowell comments on socialism and Joshua Muravchik's new book "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism"

In all these very different societies around the world, the story of socialism has been a story of high hopes and bitter disappointments. Attempts to redistribute wealth repeatedly led to the redistribution of poverty.

Attempts to free ordinary people from oppression repeatedly led to what Mikhail Gorbachev frankly called "servility" to new despots. How and why are spelled out with both facts and brilliant insights expressed in plain words.

Human nature has been at the heart of the failures of socialism to produce the results it sought, even when socialist leaders were idealists like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania or Pandit Nehru in India.
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Worst of all, the concentration of political power necessary to try to reduce economic inequalities has allowed tyrants like Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot to impose their notions and caprices on millions of others -- draining them economically or slaughtering them en masse or exploiting them sexually.

Must've been the big plate of goat and beans he had for dinner last night.

Lisa Snell has an interesting piece on how schools use the "learning disability" label to cover up their failures.

The SLD label is increasingly popular not because it suggests a particular pedagogical approach but because it brings schools extra money. The incentive to identify students as disabled is especially strong in schools with large numbers of low-income students. Such schools can obtain funding under Title I as well as IDEA, double counting each low achiever. "In essence," write Wade Horn and Douglas Tynan, "low-income, low-achieving students can be ‘twofers’ when it comes to maximizing procurement of federal and state funds."

It is commonly asserted that special education puts a financial strain on schools. Yet during the last four decades per pupil spending has increased from $2,360 to $7,086 in inflation-adjusted dollars, while student outcomes have been flat. "Whatever the causes for this productivity crisis in education (spending more without improving outcomes)," the Manhattan Institute’s Jay Greene notes, "it is not reasonable to blame special education for consuming extra dollars or burdening schools with more difficult to educate students." Even as they shift more and more students into special education, schools have more money for general education than ever before. "Schools are classifying more normal but low-achieving students as learning-disabled using vague criteria," Greene writes. "Schools get more money for these special-education kids but don’t spend much to ‘treat’ them."
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Unlike special education, early intervention with intensive instruction appears to reduce the number of children who have reading difficulties later in life. The research suggests that when children like my nephew Clayton are taught the basic phonological skills necessary for reading, they can avoid a disability label altogether. The experience with early intervention programs that emphasize phonemes (basic units of speech) indicates that the rate of truly intractable reading problems is close to the rate of other serious disabilities. In five recent studies, when kids with poor phonological skills were given intensive instruction in phonemes and phonics, the expected incidence of learning disabilities, originally 12 percent to 18 percent, was reduced to around 1.5 percent.

"The emphasis on prevention begs the question of what constitutes a disability," write reading expert Reid Lyon and his colleagues in the Rethinking Special Education report. "If the role of inadequate instruction is taken seriously, and more aggressive attempts are made to teach all children to read, the meaning of disability could change in the future. In this scenario, the actual diagnosis of LD could be reserved for children whose reading or other academic problems are severe and intractable."

Howard Feinberg looks at recent studies of adverse health effects from the Three Mile Island accident and finds that ... there were none.

Judge Sylvia Rambo of the U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, trained a skeptical eye on the effects of TMI when faced with the anti-nuclear vanguard - trial lawyers. In June, 1996, she dismissed a class action lawsuit linking the accident to adverse health effects: "The parties to the instant action... have had nearly two decades to muster evidence in support of their respective cases... The paucity of proof alleged in support of plaintiff's case is manifest. The court has searched the record for any and all evidence, which construed in the light more favorable to plaintiffs creates a genuine issue of material fact warranting submission of their claims to a jury. This effort has been in vain." Translation from legalese to English: after all this time, there is not the slightest evidence of so much as a cold linked to the TMI accident.

Like much of the other anti-technology, Luddite thinking of the Greens, the strong anti-nuclear positions holds no water. I live about 8 miles from Indian Point and am constantly being presented with local petitions to shut it down. Nothing about effects on the local economy, jobs lost, or power shortages is considered, just the "Nuclear Power Bad" mantra repeated endlessly.
Nuclear power has been trumpeted for decades as a threat to our health for decades, but it never spawned the development of any Godzilla-like disaster. Even the meltdown of the Chernobyl plant in 1986, one with few of the safeguards and protections of American plants, killed only 41 people, not the 2,000, 15,000 or 110,000 rashly predicted at the time.

It has always amazed me that the folks who worry most about pollution and greenhouse emissions from coal and oil sources also oppose replacing current energy sources with nuclear power plants one of the cleanest sources we have that is practical (excluding solar for the forseeable future). Fears of what to do with nuclear waste are also greatly overstated. As for safety concerns, note to the solar-power greens, the sun kills over 15000 people a year. Could there be a major nuclear plant accident...Yes, but the Sun could at any moment explode and obliterate life as we know it. Life is risky and the only certainty is that it's not permanent, so get over it. It terms of actual risks, over the last 50 years the number of deaths attributed to the Sun exceeds 75000 not including heat-related deaths. Deaths to to coal-mining, oil-refinery fires etc... I'm sure also goes well into the thousands over the same time period. Nuclear related deaths during the same period are less than 100 (mostly due to Chernobyl). So if you really want to protect your health, maybe you should get a nice house near a nuclear power plant, stay indoors as much as possible and always wear sunscreen.

Ronald Bailey explains why inserting animal genes into plants does not make them non-vegetarian, and how biotech advances may in fact save the lives of some animals.

It is easy to see how committed vegetarians, concerned as they are with animal welfare, might be worried about the effects of genetic engineering on the health and well-being of animals. But it is far from clear why vegetarians would object to inserting animal genes into plants. Ethical vegetarians want to prevent animal suffering. But genes have no feelings, no capacity to suffer, no desires of any kind. Genes are just sequences of the chemical bases adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine that provide recipes for combining amino acids to produce various proteins. Worrying about eating animal genes is akin to worrying about the ethical implications of eating a page out of a steak cookbook.
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Vegetarians (although not strict vegans, who eschew all animal products, including milk and eggs) already have a precedent to guide them on the issue of animal genes in food. Until 1990, the vast majority of cheese was produced using a curdling agent called rennet, the sole source of which was the linings of the fourth stomachs of slaughtered calves. Twelve years ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a biotech version called chymosin, which is produced by yeast and bacteria into which the calf gene for the enzyme has been spliced. Now nearly 80 percent of all hard cheeses made in the United States are produced with the biotech enzyme. Many vegetarian groups have embraced cheeses made with chymosin as "vegetarian cheese." They recognize that an animal gene spliced into a fungus is saving millions of calves from being slaughtered for their rennet. Surely this is an animal-friendly result.

Mark Steyn has another exceptional piece in the Telegraph about Canadian/European anti-Americanism.

...I was in the Gulf six months ago, and I came to the conclusion that a majority of the people I met - somewhere between 55 and 70 per cent - were, to use the technical term, nuts. That's to say, they believed things that no rational person could believe. You'd be talking to an attractive, westernised, educated Bahraini lady doctor and she'd suddenly start babbling on about how there was no plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11, all the footage had been faked by the government. "But I know someone who saw it from his office window," I said. "He just thinks he saw it," she replied. "The Americans know how to do these things."

John Derbyshire of America's National Review thinks the Middle East needs a massive invasion of psychiatrists. Well, about halfway through this last week in Canada, I realized I was beginning to feel about my homeland exactly the way I'd felt in Araby: these guys are nuts. Quebec's biggest English-language radio station, CJAD, conducted a listener poll on the question "Is George W Bush a moron?" Every single person said yes, he's definitely a moron, except for two who thought he was merely an idiot. On the letters pages, it was the same, except for Art Peel of Hamilton, Ontario, who complained that calling Bush a moron "does a disservice to the mentally challenged, most of whom are kind, gentle people".

Exactly. Most Canadians and most Europeans are kind, gentle people but, Bush-wise, they're the ones who are mentally challenged. The "moron" line is simply inadequate: no rational person can believe a twice-elected Texas Governor, successful US President and overthrower of the Taliban is a moron unless a majority of Americans are morons, too. And in that case how come the morons have a global dominance unparalleled in history? As with those wacky Arabs and their Zionist conspiracies, Euro-Canadian anti-Americanism is a psychosis.

In fairness to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, when he dubbed the US the Great Satan he at least understood that America is a tempter, a seducer: his slur attempts to explain its appeal. Calling America the Great Moron, by contrast, is just feeble. I happen to like moral clarity myself, but I can appreciate that for some tastes Bush's habit of dividing the world into "good" and "evil" and using these terms non-ironically might seem a little simplistic. But it's nowhere near as simplistic as dividing the world into "I'm right" and "you're stupid".

Rich Lowry explains that the plight of poor Latin American coffee growers, is not as the anti-globalization activists believe, due to Starbucks and the other evil American corporate interests, but rather is due to the entry of poor Vietnamese coffee growers into the market creating an oversupply.

Joel Mowbray has a good piece on why, even if the proposed Information Awareness Office, which is meant to gather all sorts of personal data on everyone--from what movies you watch, what meals you eat, what flights you take, etc... -- in order to locate people who fit certain "profiles", were not a flagrant violation of 4th amendment protections against unreasonable search (to say nothing of the current Supreme Court views of constitutionally protected privacy rights), it would be another ineffective federal boondoggle.

Very funny site containing news clippings, signs, etc. Check it out.

Sorry for the light blogging today. Max is out and I had to sort through a ton of stuff after being away all last week. Jerry has been filling in admirably. When going through all my emails I came across this from last weeks Best of the Web which I found particularly amusing:

I suffer from pretraumatic middle-aged white-male disorder. As I grow older I become increasingly traumatized by the mantle of responsibility that I will acquire. It will soon be my fault that African-Americans were forced into slavery. It will be my fault that Native Americans were stripped of their heritage and lands. It will be my fault that women were second-class citizens and don't earn as much as I do. It will be my fault that Muslims around the world must face Zionist aggression (and I'm a Methodist!). It will be my fault the homeless have no home, the pro-choice have limited choice, and the poor have fewer tax breaks. And I'm supposed to laugh all of that off on the way to the bank?