Al-Qaida Websites Taken Down

My only question is, "Why the hell did we not do this sooner?" From Britain's The Sunday Times:

Over the past fortnight Israeli intelligence agents have noticed something distinctly odd happening on the internet. One by one, Al-Qaeda’s affiliated websites have vanished until only a handful remain, write Uzi Mahnaimi and Alex Pell.

Someone has cut the line of communication between the spiritual leaders of international terrorism and their supporters. Since 9/11 the websites have been the main links to disseminate propaganda and information.

France Grows Some Cojones

Though instead of sending them back to their respective bastions of extremism, would it not make more sense to throw them in jail? The full story can be found here.

The gulf between British and French treatment of preachers of hatred and violence was thrown sharply into focus yesterday when France announced the summary expulsion of a dozen Islamists between now and the end of August.

A tough new anti-terrorism package was unveiled by Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and a popular centre-Right politician.

His proposals reflect French determination to act swiftly against extremists in defiance of the human rights lobby, which is noticeably less vocal in France than in Britain.

Imams and their followers who fuel anti-western feeling among impressionable young French Muslims will be rounded up and returned to their countries of origin, most commonly in France's case to its former north African colonies.

Singularity

People who embrace futuristic thinking well beyond their time run the risk of being labeled a 'nut'. Suggesting the Earth revolved around the Sun would have landed a person in jail as a heretic in the 17th century. Claiming trans-Atlantic travel could be measured in hours, rather than months, would be absurb in the 18th century. Predicting man would walk on the moon in the 19th century would be a sure sign of insanity. With this post, I hereby embrace that risk.

Technological Singularity refers to the point in time at which "technological progress accelerates beyond the ability of present-day humans to fully comprehend or predict." (Effectively synonymous with the development of artificial intelligence [AI].) When this occurs, the Singularitarians believe that AI will be able to use its intelligence to advance technology at a pace millions to billions of times faster than the pace at which technology progresses under humans. Such an intelligence could easily double the current body of human knowledge, something that has taken tens of thousands of years to accumulate, literally in a matter of seconds. A good description comes from I. J. Good:

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far
surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the
design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent
machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.
Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever
make."

The potential for good and bad here are obvious. Cures for incurable diseases, the undiscovered secrets of our universe, solutions to virtually any human problem, all become knowable in a very short period of time. Some also think AI will enable us to develop technology capable of merging computational intelligence with biological intelligence, e.g. digitally replicating a person's brain and consciousness, or nanotechnology capable of fighting cancer cells or enhancing intelligence and/or memory, etc, to the extent of enabling immortality. It sounds crazy, but some of the world's leading scientists and futurists fully embrace this (see Ray Kurzweil's book "Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever").

Similarly, technology capable of the destruction of life or other unimaginable horrors also become possible.

The (somewhat scary) fact is humans will no longer be the highest form of intelligence in our world. We simply are incapable of anticipating what AI will be capable of accomplishing, any more than a dog or cat can anticipate what the next miracle drug to be discovered will be. Even scarier is the fact that by definition, disruptive technologies are developed at the fringe of society, and consequently, society is never prepared to deal with their implications. The Wright brothers' seemingly innocuous first flight ended up changing the nature of modern warfare and making all territories, military and civilian, part of the battlefield. The development of nuclear and rocket technologies ushered in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction. Genetic engineering now offers terrorists what could be potentially their most fearsome and devastating weapon.

Not only is it not too soon to begin a serious dialogue on how to prepare for the Singularity, it is probably well past due. A good place to learn more on Singularity is the Singularity Institute's website and Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" or his "The Age of Spiritual Machines."

The World

Nakheel, a real estate developer in United Arab Emirates, is building a series of 300 man-made islands called The World off the coast of Dubai that will be in the shape of a world map upon which luxury estates will be built. Very cool:

http://www.theworld.ae/

China Stocks Nukes as Anti-US Tactic

It seems China has started an arms war - though similar to the genocide in Darfur, we are reluctant to call a spade a spade.

By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published July 29, 2005

China is building up its nuclear forces as part of a secret strategy targeting the United States, according to a former Chinese diplomat.

China's strategy calls for "proactive defense," and senior Chinese Communist Party leaders think that building nuclear arms is the key to countering U.S. power in Asia and other parts of the world, said Chen Yonglin, a diplomat who defected to Australia two months ago.

A recent comment by a Chinese general shows that Beijing's leaders are prepared to launch "a pre-emptive attack on the country considered a huge threat to China," Mr. Chen said.

Chinese Maj. Gen. Zhu Chenghu told reporters two weeks ago that China is prepared to use nuclear weapons against "hundreds" of U.S. cities if a conflict breaks out over Taiwan.

The former diplomat, who until recently was posted to the Chinese Consulate in Sydney, said the number of Chinese nuclear warheads is a closely guarded secret.

Asked about a Pentagon report revealing that China has 20 nuclear warheads that can reach almost all of the United States, Mr. Chen said, "We don't know the exact number."

"Everything about nuclear weapons is held by a very limited number of people," he said. "Even sometime vice ministers may not know because it is strictly controlled by the general staff and central party leaders."

The Pentagon report to Congress made public last week stated that China is "qualitatively and quantitatively improving its strategic missile force."

"It is fielding more survivable missiles capable of targeting India, Russia, virtually all of the United States and the Asia-Pacific theater as far south as Australia and New Zealand," the report said.

China's nuclear weapons are developed and built in secret under the direction of a company Mr. Chen identified as the Nuclear Energy Company. The company builds both civilian nuclear-power stations and warheads for missiles and bombers.

"It sounds like a nongovernment company, but it is totally top secret," he said.

Mr. Chen, who is visiting the United States and testified before a House committee last week, said that during internal discussions among Communist Party and government leaders and military commanders, military leaders often have urged going to war against Taiwan, a self-governing island -- also known as the Republic of China -- that broke with the mainland in 1949.

"I've heard a lot about the results of those meetings, and most of the military forces leaders advocate the use of force the earlier the better to solve the Taiwan issue," Mr. Chen said.

He said China's long-term strategy toward the United States was outlined by the late communist leader Deng Xiaoping in the phrase "hide our capabilities; bide our time."

"That means don't draw any attention of the Western world -- and especially the United States, to what China is doing," Mr. Chen said.

China's leaders fear the current U.S. policy of engagement with China could shift to one of "containing" China, he said.

"If the policy of the United States changes to containment, there will be no Olympic Games, there will be no business and there will be no peaceful rise," he said.

Shoot to Kill

It was a horrible tragedy that British police shot to death a man who turned out to be an innocent Brazilian they thought was trying to pull off another suicide bombing. However, the police did the right thing. As a man who appeared to be Middle Eastern emerging from an apartment complex under surveillance as a terrorist base, wearing a long coat in the middle of summer, heading to the Tube and taking off running, hopping over a turnstile, and lunging into a train car when the police tried challenging him, in the context of the bombing and attempted bombing in the previous two weeks, the police had no other choice but to kill him. Every single indication the police had suggested the man was going to blow up himself along with a train full of passengers.

The real travesty here is not the shooting alone; the travesty is the next time a situation like that occurs it may really be a 'martyr' wearing an explosives belt and facing political pressure, the police may hesitate just a second longer than they should, and that hesitation may cost the lives of countless innocent civilians.

Hiam Watzman has an excellent piece in the NY Times on this and parallels to the Israeli struggles with suicide bombers.

A Muslim Double Standard?

A common complaint from the Middle East is there is a double standard in the West for victims of terrorism. When Israeli civilians are killed by suicide bombers there is international outcry, the argument goes, while when Muslims are killed by retaliatory strikes or errant bombs in Afghanistan, there is hardly a whisper from the West. To some degree this may be true - consider the West's reaction to the London bombings that killed 50+ people and compare that to the bombings in Egypt that killed over 80 people. Was there a double standard? Did we feel more for the Londoners than the Egyptians? Some say the Middle Eastern victims are getting what they deserve since it is their societies that have allowed terrorism to flower - their chickens are coming home to roost.

Not only do I think this point of view is xenophobic and wrong (the citizens of the Middle East have had very little influence in shaping their societies - the despotic leaders and unchecked mullahs of the region bear responsibility for that), it is incredibly dangerous and is part of the reason we have a terrorism problem today. As I have argued in past posts, the only way we are going to stop Islamist terrorism is to convince Muslims the West has a better vision to offer for the future than the hate and death the Islamist extremists preach; the Muslim world will have to make the decision that no longer will they tolerate the hateful manipulation of their religion.

We must show the Middle East that we value all life, not just Western life. We have to show them we care about and have respect for their needs and beliefs. We must show that part of the world that there is hope for them, that we consider them part of the world community and they too can share in the prosperity and freedom of the Western world. We must show them how backwards and self-destructive the ideas peddled by their extremist leaders really are.

We have made a lot of progress in the military theater (50,000 Terrorists Dead, Captured) of this war, but not so much progress in winning the war of ideas. Recently the Bush Administration 're-branded' the war on terror as a struggle against violent extremist, implicitly acknowledging this fact, although this small gesture should not be construed as actually doing anything to win the hearts and minds. While this is long overdue, it is also encouraging, in a morbid sort of way, to see the terrorists are actually helping us win the war of ideology by continuing to target innocent Muslims in their attacks, which is having a perceptible impact in eroding Middle Eastern support for Islamist terrorism. This week Muslim scholars in North America and Europe released what I believe are the first officially issued fatwas condemning terrorism targeting innocent civilians in the name of Islam, seen here and here.

Again encouraging, but we still have a long ways to go in this war of ideas.

China Trying to Pull the Wool?

China seeks soften image with U.S. - UPI, Jul. 28, 2005 at 9:38AM

China has embarked on an image-polishing campaign to counter U.S. criticism of its growing economic and military power.

Taking advantage of the visit of a senior official to Washington, China is making its case in public for a strategic relationship and is hiring a U.S. lobbying firm to communicate with Congress, the Financial Times said Thursday.

Tang Jiaxuan, state councilor, assured the U.S.-China Business Council, "All this will mean boundless opportunities for U.S. businesses."

China, he said, would "gradually" address U.S. concerns over the trade deficit and intellectual property rights and allow it greater access to services.

Tang reiterated Chinese demands that the United States give China full market economy status, lift restrictions on commodity and technology exports "and correct the wrong practices of trade protectionism."

Tang, a key figure in Chinese efforts to curb North Korea's nuclear ambitions, also met with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The Most Painful Press Conference

If you did not catch it on C-Span or already read the transcript here, Scott McClelland's press conference on July 11 where he took an absolute beating over the Valerie Plame leak is far and away the most painful I have ever seen. It is highly entertaining in a very sad sort of way.

The Destiny of Man

The Earth is the cradle of humankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.
- Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky, The 'Father of Human Space Flight'

Us humans have always thought ourselves special in the grand scheme of things – assuming the sun revolves around the Earth, we are at the center of the universe, the Creator for some reason takes a special interest in us, thinking the planet is young just because our race is, etc. I suppose that is an inescapable side effect of consciousness.

Few people realize how inconsequential we are in the history of our planet, let alone our galaxy, and especially in the context of our universe. To plagiarize a terrific analogy from Bill Bryson in his excellent book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” if the history of our planet (which is really just a teenager itself in cosmic time) was mapped on a timeline that stretched between a persons outstretched arms, moving left to right, primordial life first appears just before the left elbow. Simple plant life shows up somewhere near the right-hand wrist, the Paleolithic era of the dinosaurs begins somewhere in the right-hand palm, and the entire existence of humans (of which recorded history is only about 1/25th) could be scraped off the tip of the right hand’s outmost nail in a single swipe of a nail file.

Depending upon where you come down in the science-theology spectrum, there are really only a handful of possible endgames for our stint here: we are all killed/saved in some sort of Divine Judgment Day; we go the way of the dinosaurs due to a cataclysmic extinction event involving large objects crashing into our planet, again; our planet becomes uninhabitable due to a radical shift in climate, manmade or otherwise, turning the Earth into a barren ice ball like Mars or a sweltering, caustic sauna like Venus; we all get toasted when the sun flares out, becoming a red giant and swallowing the Earth before dying out in six billion years (we’re only 1/3 of the way there); we melt ourselves with nuclear weapons, or some more creative method of self-inflicted extinction; or we conquer the current limitations of our science and figure out a way to sustain humanity in some other part of the universe.

If you share my instinct for the self-preservation of the homo sapien race (and I think everybody does when you put it in the perspective of the fact that at some point, everything around you, everything you spend your life doing or making or building, what job you held or school you went to, the school itself, all of human achievement and creation, all human history, it will all eventually be vaporized when the aforementioned solar flame out occurs, if not sooner), you probably share my dismay over our range of options.

Indeed, if the true meaning of life is to serve a Higher Power or to simply perpetuate life (again, depending upon where you come down), as a civilization we should be fairly concerned with making sure the Judgment Day and/or conquering science scenarios happen while negating or minimizing the chances of the others. (This sounds outlandish, but this idea is being taken very seriously by some leading academics, scientists, and thinkers such as Stephen Hawking, Ray Kurzweil, and Cambridge University professor Martin Rees in the form of Singularity studies.)

So what can we do? In the case of the religious scenario, we can literally do little more than pray. However, since no single religion is practiced by a majority of the world’s citizens and virtually every religion teaches us that non-believers are doomed, the majority of the populace should be working on a backup plan.

In the extinction event scenario, well, again, we can do little more than pray. In the near term, at best we may have some advance warning so we can always do all the things we promise ourselves we will do if we find out a giant asteroid is on a collision course with Earth.

Actually, unless the religious scenario happens (and over which we have no control), we have three options – we get wiped out by some act of nature, we get wiped out by a collective act of human stupidity, or we work together to prevent and/or survive the first and figure out a way to preempt the former.

With this perspective, there are really only two pursuits worthy of humanity’s attention – science and politics. The science is clearly to enable us to figure out a way of continuing human life elsewhere (perhaps virtually, as a merger between life and technology?) once our planet becomes inhabitable and/or figuring out ways of avoiding cataclysmic natural extinction events. Politics may seem trivial in the context of trying to save humanity from extinction, but it is critical for our national and international governing bodies to prevent humanity from destroying itself before science has the opportunity to save it.

A brief survey of national priorities and the current state of international affairs suggests that perhaps our priorities are misplaced. International affairs remain dedicated to conflict, which historically is nothing new, the existence of military technologies capable of destroying humanity most definitely is new.

Meanwhile, the single greatest engine of scientific innovation, the United States, faces a future where this distinction may itself face extinction. Our public school systems lag those of the rest of the industrial world, especially in math and science, our post-secondary institutions, while still the best in the world, are increasingly filled with foreign students, especially in post-graduate programs. American students are majoring in high-paying, yet ultimately meaningless (relatively, given the context) majors such as law, while China, India, and Japan continue to churn out thousands of scientists and engineers for every one we graduate.

Since doomsday does not appear to be just around the corner, this may all sound quite silly and probably more than a bit kooky. However, with the stakes involved, is this something we can afford to dismiss?

Deterrence at Work

More evidence that deterrence works, even with stateless psychotics like terrorists and murderous drug kingpins. Apparently Usama and company wanted to poison a load of cocaine and introduce it into the American drug market. The drug lords who were initially cooperating with al-Qaida eventually balked, no doubt in large part because they realize that the US government is serious enough about fighting terrorism, and also quiet possibly unpredictable enough (some may say crazy enough), that cooperation with Qaida would lead to the certain destruction of their organizations in addition to their own lives. The story from Drudge:

PAPER: Bin Laden Had Plan To Sell Poisoned Cocaine To Americans In 2002Tue Jul 26 2005 09:43:35 ET

Osama bin Laden tried to buy a massive amount of cocaine, spike it with poison and sell it in the United States, hoping to kill thousands of Americans one year after the 9/11 attacks, the NEW YORK POST reported on Tuesday.

The evil plot failed when the Colombian drug lords bin Laden approached decided it would be bad for their business - and, possibly, for their own health, according to law-enforcement sources familiar with the Drug Enforcement Administration's probe of the aborted transaction.

The feds were told of the scheme earlier this year, but its existence had never been made public.

The Post has reviewed a document detailing the DEA's findings in the matter, in addition to interviewing sources familiar with the case.

More Abortions = Less Crime?

I think the concept of abortion is appalling. I also find appalling the concept of unwanted children who are born in to miserable lives and who disproportionately project that misery through crime, violent or otherwise. So which side is 'right' an occupies the moral high ground? Having thought about this a lot, I really do not know. The following column from George Will is stimulating, at the very least:

John J. Donohue III and Steven Levitt (co-author of Freakonomics) are not in the least like Capt. Gonzalo de Aguilera. Before considering who Donohue and Levitt are, consider who the captain was. He was a polo-playing ex-cavalry officer selected by General Franco as a press liaison during the Spanish Civil War. He said the fundamental cause of the war was "the introduction of modern drainage. Prior to this, the riffraff had been killed by various useful diseases; now they survived and, of course, were above themselves." And: "Had we no sewers in Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao, all these Red leaders would have died in their infancy instead of exciting the rabble and causing good Spanish blood to flow. When the war is over, we should destroy the sewers."

Donohue and Levitt, professors at Stanford and the University of Chicago respectively, say: "Legalized abortion contributed significantly to recent crime reductions." In their paper for Harvard's Quarterly Journal of Economics they do not recommend abortion as anti-crime policy. Rather, they explore, as social scientists do, whether causation explains a correlation. This one: "Crime began to fall roughly 18 years after abortion legalization."

Since 1991—18 years after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion—murder rates have fallen faster than at any time since the end of Prohibition in 1933. Homicide rates are down 40 percent, violent crime and property crime are down 30 percent. The five states (New York, California, Washington, Hawaii, Alaska) that legalized abortion earlier experienced earlier declines in crime. And states with especially high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s had especially dramatic crime reductions in the 1990s.

Donohue and Levitt consider the many variables besides abortion that could explain declining crime—more incarceration, more and better-used police, reduction of the crack-cocaine trade, more victim protections (security guards and alarms), a strong economy. But many cities that have not improved their police have had reductions in crime. Crime has fallen even where there never was a substantial crack trade. And research has not established a strong link between economic performance and violent crime. After controlling for such factors, Donohue and Levitt conclude: "Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime."

And why not? Even if you think, as pro-abortion people do, that killing 27 million unborn babies (or, as some pro-abortion people put it, causing 27 million clumps of "fetal material" to "undergo demise") in 18 years is a morally negligible matter, it is not a minor social development. Abortion obviously has reduced the size of the high-crime cohort—young males. Less obvious, but even more important, there is a "selective-abortion" effect and an "improved-environment" effect. These matter because 6 percent of any birth cohort commits about half of that cohort's crimes.

There is a "selective-abortion" effect when a disproportionate number of women having abortions are particularly likely to give birth to children who would have a higher than usual propensity for criminal behavior. Abortions are not distributed evenly across the entire population of pregnant women. Unmarried and poor women and teenage girls are "substantially more likely" to have abortions, and children born to such mothers have a higher than normal probability of committing crimes in the peak ages for crime, 18-24.

The "improved-environment" effect can occur when women use abortion "to optimize the timing of childbearing." A woman's willingness or ability to provide a nurturing environment may vary with her age, education, income, avoidance of drug and alcohol abuse, and the presence of a father. The likelihood of future criminality declines if children are born into better environments. Teenagers and unmarried and poor women are most likely to consider a pregnancy unwanted, and unintended pregnancies are associated with poor prenatal care, greater smoking and drinking during pregnancy, lower birth weights and other injuries to life chances.

Now, nothing in the Donohue-Levitt paper is shocking, or even counterintuitive. However, given the way professional race-mongers poison public discourse nowadays, Donohue and Levitt should brace themselves for ritualistic charges that they are racists urging eugenics."

And why not? Even if you think, as pro-abortion people do, that killing 27 million unborn babies (or, as some pro-abortion people put it, causing 27 million clumps of "fetal material" to "undergo demise") in 18 years is a morally negligible matter, it is not a minor social development. Abortion obviously has reduced the size of the high-crime cohort—young males. Less obvious, but even more important, there is a "selective-abortion" effect and an "improved-environment" effect. These matter because 6 percent of any birth cohort commits about half of that cohort's crimes.

There is a "selective-abortion" effect when a disproportionate number of women having abortions are particularly likely to give birth to children who would have a higher than usual propensity for criminal behavior. Abortions are not distributed evenly across the entire population of pregnant women. Unmarried and poor women and teenage girls are "substantially more likely" to have abortions, and children born to such mothers have a higher than normal probability of committing crimes in the peak ages for crime, 18-24.

The "improved-environment" effect can occur when women use abortion "to optimize the timing of childbearing." A woman's willingness or ability to provide a nurturing environment may vary with her age, education, income, avoidance of drug and alcohol abuse, and the presence of a father. The likelihood of future criminality declines if children are born into better environments. Teenagers and unmarried and poor women are most likely to consider a pregnancy unwanted, and unintended pregnancies are associated with poor prenatal care, greater smoking and drinking during pregnancy, lower birth weights and other injuries to life chances.

Now, nothing in the Donohue-Levitt paper is shocking, or even counterintuitive. However, given the way professional race-mongers poison public discourse nowadays, Donohue and Levitt should brace themselves for ritualistic charges that they are racists urging eugenics.

This, because they report research showing, not surprisingly, that after 1973 the drop in births was not uniform across all racial, ethnic and social groups. While the sudden availability of abortion had only modest effects on the fertility of white women, it coincided with large reductions in teen fertility and teen out-of-wedlock fertility among blacks. And Donohue and Levitt come to common-sense conclusions like this: "Given that homicide rates of black youths are roughly nine times higher than those of white youths, racial differences in the fertility effects of abortion are likely to translate into greater homicide reductions."

But Donohue and Levitt are no more advocating abortion than Galileo was "advocating" planetary motion. Which is not to say that their social science is as nonnormative as astronomy.

One problematic aspect of their analysis is their term "unwantedness." They report evidence that mothers of "unwanted" children are less likely than other mothers to hold, nurture and breast-feed those children. However, the term "unwanted" is not applicable to all children born of unwanted pregnancies. Unplanned children, even those resented in advance, can often elicit parental love when born.

Furthermore, here is a pertinent question, albeit one difficult to research: Does the policy of abortion-on-demand, which reduces children to "choices" and pregnancies to casually disposable inconveniences, contribute to the mentality that does make many children —not just pregnancies—"unwanted" by their mothers? In which case, the abortion culture itself is an incubator of crime. If this and other issues raised by the Donohue-Levitt paper make people uncomfortable, good."

Who Wouldn't Fall for Such a Clever Trick?

PALERMO, Italy (Reuters) - An Italian couple stole 50,000 euros from a woman in the Sicilian city of Palermo after convincing her they were vampires who would impregnate her with the son of the Anti-Christ if she did not pay them.

The man, a cabaret singer, and his girlfriend took the money from their victim over four years by selling her pills at 3,000 euros each that they said would abort the Anti-Christ's son.

Police uncovered the fraud after the 47-year-old woman's family became concerned when they discovered she had spent all her savings, local news agencies AGI and ANSA reported.

Itstrenenig Rscheearch

This has been floating around the Internet for a while. If you have not already seen it, it is pretty cool:

"Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itstlef but the wrod as a wlohe."

And Some Not So Good News From London

A horrifying development on Friday's shooting in the Tube, sure to be a step backwards for the efforts to protect London from future attacks, from NYTimes.com:

Scotland Yard admitted Saturday that a man police officers chased and shot to death at point-blank range in front of horrified subway passengers on Friday had nothing to do with the investigation into the bombing attacks here.

Taliban Taking a Pounding

Encouraging news out of Afghanistan (encouraging that the Taliban/Qaida may actually be in 'last throes', not that they are recruiting children, of course), from CNN.com:

Taliban-led rebels have been hit so hard recently they are being forced to recruit children and their command structure has been fractured, a U.S. commander said Saturday despite a recent surge in violence.

Who Brought the Nearsighted Kid to the Pool?

Justin Gardner's post on Donklephant showing Chelsea Davis' impact with a diving board inspired me to share this.

With Friends Like This

We are fortunate to have allies like Australian PM John Howard and Tony Blair. Too bad continental western Europe seems inable to breed leaders like them. An excerpt of PM Howard's comments on yesterday's attempted bombings in London, found at Donklephant:

Now I don’t know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can’t put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I’ve cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

More Hope, Less Tragedy in London

Yesterday and today's attempted attacks in London should offer additional hope for the West. Prior to yesterday, al-Qaida could spin its image to be a global organization with Divine guidance that was successfully fighting and bringing down the Western world's superpower in the eyes of the young impressionable youths who are the targets of their recruiting efforts. Usama and company have been very careful with the images and messages they released and have consequently done well in creating the Qaida 'brand' they were seeking to create.

With the recent copy-cat London attempts, however, like the stories of Saddam climbing out of his spider hole to surrender and the pictures of him in his underwear, part of the the al-Qaida illusion has been forever lost. Qaida's agents in this case were very publicly revealed impotent in carrying out their missions when their bombs fizzled rather than exploded. Any teenager can set off fireworks on public transportation lines, this is hardly the hallmark of a Divine army.

More telling is the fact that at least one of the attempted attackers took Qaida cowardice to a new level. By throwing the bomb and running off the train, this would-be attacker showed that not only was he not man enough to fight like an actual soldier in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, he was also too cowardly to carry out his 'martyrdom' mission.

Qaida is either deeper in to their 'B Team' than we previously publicly thought, or they are pressed for recruits to the point where they need their stooges alive to carry out multiple attacks, or their cause has now diluted and mutated to a point where their goal is to indiscriminately kill as many innocent civilians as possible. Either way, the 'pureness' of their 'holy' cause has taken a hit, along with their credibility in the eyes of the Muslim world.

Boss Tweed Lives

It appears the spirit of Boss Tweed lives in Chicago's City Hall.

A Sino-Suicide Pact?

Thomas Friedman with an incisive piece on our dangerous lock-step with China, particularly timely in light of these reports on China's military buildup here and here.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

If you have not seen this movie, you should. While it captures the worst in human nature and the dangers of unchecked corporate and political cronyism, particularly with the exploitation of the California energy crisis, it unfairly lays the blame on deregulation. The California crisis did not happen because of deregulation, it happened due to a lack of competition - had Enron not been the only game in town, they would not have been able to inflate energy prices one hundred-fold and give the state no other choice than pay for it.

Raising the Stakes for the Terrorists

Representative Tom Tancredo made a reckless comment today that should terrorists succeed in hitting the US with nuclear weapons, a possible avenue for retribution could be destroying Mecca, Islam's holiest site. While this is an incredibly stupid and ignorant comment - true Muslims abhor terrorism as much as we do; by his logic, Britain should have considered bombing the Vatican in response to IRA bombings; etc. - he does hit upon an important point.

One of the reasons terrorists are so difficult to stop is they have no country, no army, no substantial assets of any kind against which to retaliate for attacks. The United States can prevent other countries from attacking with serious threats of in-kind retribution. Any country daring to hit the US with a nuclear weapon would face immediate vaporization. Any dictator stupid enough to blow up an American airliner will be undoubtedly bombed and subjected to sanctions until the perpetrators were dead or in custody. Any government bold enough to crash commercial aircraft into American skyscrapers would soon find US Marines at their doorstep and their country occupied.

Not only does our current enemy not have a substantial infrastructure against which to retaliate, he welcomes death, emasculating virtually all of our deterrents against carrying out a suicide attack. Carrying out an attack carries no cost to a suicide bomber. While we are slowly but surely winning the war on terror, dismantling terrorist networks, mowing down their brainwashed conscripts, removing their safe havens, and drying up their funding, we freely admit to the morbid fact that suicide attacks will continue occurring and taking innocent civilian lives.

This does not have to be so. Just because our current traditional deterrents do not apply, that does not mean none exist.

To deter suicide attackers we must make these so-called 'martyrs' pay a dear price for their actions and look to other countries who have faced this problem for inspiration. Israel used to have a standing policy that the homes, and sometimes neighborhoods, of suicide bombers would be immediate razed by army bulldozers.

While this clearly was not enough, these are the kinds of policies about which we should be having a national debate. Would the American people be willing to support a policy whereby the families of any suicide attacker would be detained, or worse? Can we live with our conscience doing something that atrocious? Can we live with our conscience knowing that if we do not resort to these kinds of tactics, more innocent Westerners will be slaughtered?

In this most unconventional war, we must ask ourselves: what honor are we paying to the memories and sacrifices of all the men and women who fought and died to establish and protect the freedom and safety of the Western world if we voluntarily choose to let a dishonorable band of thugs single-handedly chip away at their accomplishments because we are too timid to do what it takes to stop them?

This is How We Are Going to Win the War on Terror

While we need to be killing or capturing every last one of the cowardly thugs who wish to destroy the Western model of liberty, doing so alone will not win the war on terror. Many politicians and pundits pay a lot of lip service to winning the hearts and minds of the Middle East 'street', yet we are painfully shallow on follow-through. A bunch of neanderthals posting to amateur websites from their parents' houses in Iraq often show more media savvy than our government.

If we are going to stamp out Islamist terrorism, we are going to have to win the battle of ideas. We must show the people of the Middle East our concepts of freedom and liberty are superior and desirable over the culture of hate and death espoused by the terrorists. Unlike military conflict, the battle for the mind is played out in the open arena of ideas - no amount of money, numerical advantage, military hardware, or technology sophistication can provide an edge on this battlefield. Only the best ideas win.

That is why it is so encouraging to see the stories of compassion and humanity spun by ordinary Americans doing their part (and making the sacrifices our political leaders have been too weak to ask of us in the war on terror) to win this war. Like this story in the New York Times about a handful of citizens who heard the story of a young Iraqi boy disfigured by an American cluster bomb and flew him and his father to New York for three weeks of reconstructive surgery, all expenses covered except for the hotel. Although we will continue to win the battles, it is not citizens of the West who will decide when the war on terror is won. It will be when the Muslims around the world decide the West has a better future to offer than the terrorist thugs.

Clinton for Secretary General?

After President Clinton left office in 2001 there was intermittent talk about him angling for Kofi Annan's job as Secretary General of the United Nations. While at the time this was anathema to those of us who think Clinton was a disgrace to the Office of the President, it is really not a bad idea at this point.

While his personal shortcomings make him a poor choice for the role of chief executive, his personality and talents make him ideally suited to serve as the figurehead of a deliberative and diplomatic body such as the UN. Few have a deeper knowledge and understanding of history, and he is skilled and gifted in the arts of diplomacy. While his unending popularity campaign as POTUS did little to bolster national security, his popularity around the globe could go a long way towards building sorely needed good will and credibility for America. He would undoubtedly be successful in making inroads with countries ambivalent to our Western causes and deepening ties with our allies, ultimately making good on the national security obligations he was unable to wholly fulfill as a president paralyzed by political scandal.

But the biggest contribution President Clinton would make to the United States in serving as the Secretary General of the United Nations actually has nothing to directly do with him, but rather his wife, Senator Clinton. With President Clinton at the helm of the UN, it is virtually certain the already nepotism-weary American body politic would would deny Hillary the slim chance she currently holds of becoming the next President of the United States.

Communists and Fascists Made America Great

America owes a great debt to communists and fascists. Not because they gave us ideology and technology, but because the competition (and armed conflict) with them made us sharpen our own ideology and develop technology superior to theirs. One of the great tragic ironies of international conflict (specifically war) is that more than anything else, this force has single-handedly led to more human advances than any other.

In the very beginning of human history, it was conflict that drove early peoples to band together to protect themselves from external threats, creating the first political constructs that eventually evolved into the modern concepts of political economy. The technological underpinnings of our world today - the jet engine (from WWII missiles and airplanes), the computer (WWII code breaking), nuclear energy (WWII), the Internet (decentralizing government infrastructure to hedge against Cold War nuclear strikes), satellites (Cold War space race), even our existence as the world's beacon for liberty and freedom (the original 13 colonies uniting to defend liberty from imperial oppression) - can be traced back to conflict and war.

While it was a terrifying time through which to live, the Cold War focused our national priorities and provided the incentive to be the best. To contain communism, we had to have a robust economy to pay for the effort, technological superiority and the scientists to develop it in order to maintain the military and intelligence superiority, and a political model of freedom that was more alluring than the socialist state.

As the threat from the Soviet Union began to slowly dissolve in the 1980s and then after its collapse in the 1990s, we became adrift. We became a nation obsessed with the trivial and superficial, lacking a greater purpose than indulgence and self-absorption, as so painfully illustrated in the political leaders we chose. As such, we became soft - no longer were the Soviets inspiring us to aggressively push ourselves in education, science, engineering, and third world development. No longer were we graduating the world's best scientists and engineers from the world's best schools; we instead graduated reams of lawyers and business majors who had designs only on making money, not making history. Instead of the space race, we had the Dow Jones race.

No, the job of intellectual innovation and excellence has fallen to the countries that remain hungry to the best, like China and India. Those countries have their motivation - a target upon which to train their sights and focus their energies - the US. Ironically, it is our technology enabling them to compete with us without having to cross any borders.

We need an economic and military rival to energize and focus our collective conscience and keep us from falling into complacency - if nothing else, Americans understand competition is a good thing. China is worthy competitor.

China's barely concealed ambition is to overtake the US in terms of military, economic, and geopolitical power. The Bush Administration showed encouraging signs indicating they understood this when they first took office. Unfortunately, our government has become completely blind to anything not related to the war on terror. Contrary to the leaders' assertions, Islamist goons are not an existential threat to our way of life. The overwhelming majority of the world rejects their vision of society, their infrastructure is steadily being dismantled and destroyed, and they are severely overmatched in intelligence, technology, funding, and sheer numbers. They are definitely a lethal, painful, and expensive nuisance, but not a mortal threat.

The China threat cannot be overcome so easily - they have four times as many people (the plurality of the world's population, to put Osama's thugs in perspective) and thanks our aforementioned nearsighted political leadership in the 90s, our very own advanced military, civilian, and nuclear technology. China is not going any where and will not rest until they accomplish their goal of toppling us as the world's dominant superpower.

There is no question that when we Americans, uniquely free in our western model of liberty and with all the advantages we possess, are focused on a collective goal, there is nothing which we cannot accomplish. We cannot triumph, however, if we do not even realize the competition is taking place until it is too late.

We can win the war on terror while protecting our benign global hegemony from the China threat - we just have to be asked.

Terrorism's Fuel

It seems all al-Qaida recruits share something in common - they are all failures in the Western world in which they had hopes of succeeding. Unfortunately, their failed governments, artificially propped up by oil revenues - something they never had to work for - failed them with the dysfunctional societies they created.

With free wealth, the oil-rich governments of the Middle East have no need for functioning economies or a free, educated middle class workforce to fuel them. Consequently, when these citizens (the Qaida recruits) venture out of their isolated societies seeking success in the education-centric Western world, they find themselves woefully unprepared. This, however, is not the entire story - there are many angry people in the world, and while the looniest of the bunch have indeed lashed out with random acts of violence, no other modern group of people responds by blowing up scores of innocent civilians with hundreds of suicide attackers.

To keep their relatively uneducated, unemployed populations placated, Middle East governments pump propaganda out of their state-owned media blaming their societies' ills on the West while also exploiting one of the oldest tools of government control - religion - by funding the mullahs who actually control their societies. Many of these mullahs preach a strict interpretation of Islam that has not been updated for over 1,000 years due to its teachings that it is The Superior Religion and the Koran is the direct word of God that should be strictly adhered to and never altered or interpreted. These teachings have had a profound impact on Muslim societies and people strictly obeying them - trying to sustain an eight-century society really stifles innovation, in everything from technology to language.

So when these young 'Muslims' (it is an insult to true Muslims to call these terrorists followers of Islam) are taught their religion and society is Superior to all others, yet they find Western countries more successful, wealthy, and powerful than their own, and then fail trying to share in this success, we begin to have a clearer understanding of why these young men want so badly to destroy the West; especially when their sheiks pervert their religion's teachings and provide Divine endorsement of holy war and 'martyrdom' (despite the fact that the Koran specifically and explicitly prohibits taking the life of innocent civilians, as well as the taking of one's own life).

Christians and Jews rely on many of the same holy texts as Islam, yet both of these religions have acknowledged antediluvian writings need interpretation in the context of the world in which they live. Passages in the Bible and Torah endorse executions by stoning and owning slaves, among countless other atrocities, yet no mainstream practitioner of those faiths accept any of these passages as tenets of their religions.

Clearly by design, radical Islamist terrorists and the strain of Islam they have hijacked is not something the Western world can combat with surgical precision. After 9/11 President Bush rightly observed this war started at the time and choosing of the terrorists, but it will be finished on ours'. If the Muslim world wants to stamp out Islamist terrorism on its own terms, change is going to have to come from within.

Update - July 15, 2005: Thomas Friedman published an excellent column along these same lines in the New York Times today called, "A Poverty of Dignity and a Wealth of Rage"

Has the Beginning of the End of 'Martyrdom' Begun?

The world, and more specifically the British, response to yesterday's cowardly attacks in London is a model of courage, stoicism, and resolve. The Underground is back up and running, Londoners are going about their lives as if nothing happened, the G8 carried on with their agenda, world stock markets are surging, etc.

To some extent, we have already won the war on terror. For one, the best terrorists can do any more is apparently small-time, opportunistic, amateur bombing of civilians, and we have really just begun our reformation of society in the Middle East. Secondly, it should be clear to anybody and everybody that no terrorist activity, no matter how spectacular and deadly, will ever make us fear the terrorists, much less weaken our resolve to destroy them and wipe them from the globe.

One has to wonder, having seen hundreds of so-called 'martyrs' blowing themselves up and seeing the West's response be unity, determination, and decisive retribution, the impressionable youths in the Middle East and Central Asia who are the targets of terrorist recruitment must begin questioning the proselytizing encouraging them to 'martyr' themselves for the 'Islamist' cause. They must now be thinking twice about taking place in suicide missions if they know their death will do nothing to advance their cause. They may be brainwashed by a virulent, perverted strain of Islam, but they are still (arguably) human.

Hope in Tragedy

Today's bloody attack on innocent Londoners, while tragic, heinous, and deplorable, should also offer a ray of hope for those of us in the civilized and modern world. With this desperate and cowardly attack, al-Qaida inadvertently offers confirmation that our global war on terror is succeeding.

Their attack is desperate because these cave-dwelling dogs have had four years since 9/11 and the ensuing Afghan war to plan a spectacular attack against the US and Britain, and this is the best they can do. Four small, amateur bombs - a truly juvenile attempt with a human toll that pales in comparison to the sacrifices our society has made in past struggles for liberty (e.g. the 30-50 million civilians killed during WWII). Of course, these thugs do not have the courage, intelligence, or means to actually fight us in a real war. Instead, arming their charges with Western technology and weapons funded by Western money obtained through oil revenues (if they were truly pure believers, they would not have to use Western weapons - they would be fighting us with weapons native to their midieval strain of Islam; weapons like stones and swords), they hide like frightened dogs and rely on ignorant, brainwashed youths to fight for them.

It is cowardly because once again, it was carried out by henchmen stupid enough to be brainwashed into doing the biding of the impotent infidels hiding in Afghanistan. Cowardly because they target civilians who have done nothing to them and who could not care less about their demented radical 'Islamist' cause and their perverted delusions of grandeur. Again, if these dogs were true men, they would be fighting our soldiers in the battlefield, not targeting innocent civilians that are easy to hit.

Fifty-plus fatalities is a travesty and an outrage, especially to those families, and deserves an equally merciless response. But 50 fatalities in an entirely unoriginal, pathetic, and tired attack borrowed from terrorist playbooks going back to the 1970s is a long cry from the global revolution they think they are sparking.

If there is any good to be found in today's attacks, it is a strong indication that steadily and surely, these backward Islamist radicals are losing the war we are taking to them, even though they may not be intelligent enough to yet know it.

The Dangers of Foreign Oil Dependence: Are Painful Oil Prices The Way Out?

Another example supporting my post on the vacuum of political leadership today is our national energy policy. The current Administration and Congress have made low fuel prices a plank of the official energy policy of the United States - a great policy for short-term political gain, but disastrous both from an economic and national security vantage in the long run. Our economy is wholly dependent upon this constrained resource (The Washington Post's coverage of a recent oil supply disruption exercise, "Oil Shockwave," details the terrifying extent to which our economy is held hostage by oil), the production of which we have very little control over, and with the economic rise of south east Asia (namely China), we face a not-too-distant future in which demand will outstrip supply, potentially leading to devastating political, economic, and even military conflicts.

A free-market capitalist will recognize painfully higher-priced gasoline as one of two forces capable of reducing domestic demand for foreign oil and incentivizing the private sector to develop widespread, viable alternative sources of energy. While incredibly efficient technology exists, the current economics of energy do not make it feasible for the private sector to produce these technologies on a wide scale.

So how can we do to change the economics of the industry? It is actually very simple - make alternative energy less expensive and make petroleum energy more expensive. To do so, the government should be subsidizing research to the point that automakers and petrochemical companies do not have to choose between developing alternative energy and profits. This is a much bigger undertaking than many make it out to be. Current technologies such as nuclear, solar, and hydropower are only useful for producing electricity, which primarily comes from coal-fired generators; these alternatives will do virtually nothing to reduce our dependence on oil since virtually all of the US oil demand comes from motor vehicles. The focus must first be on hyper-efficient gasoline powered engines, while long-term, the focus needs to be on more efficient and affordable electric and/or hydrogen motors. Additionally, we should be subsidizing the development of alternative energy production capacity until the industry can recognize economies on a comparable scale to current petroleum-based industries.

Finally, instead of seeking to reduce the price of gasoline as our current political leaders are doing, the government should be taking a cue from our European friends and levying considerable taxes on petroleum fuels and petroleum-burning vehicles to minimize the cost-differential incurred by consumers shopping for alternative energy-powered vehicles.

As I alluded to in the beginning of this post, the economics of energy is but only one small symptom of the larger problem our foreign oil dependency represents. Our oil addiction leads us to two gloomy ends.

The obvious one is oil revenues from the US are propping up despotic, tyrannical, greedy, and ineffective governments in the Middle East and Central Asia. These governments found an elegant out for deflecting the poverty-fueled desperation and anger arising from their failed economies - funding radical Islamist mullahs and madrassas who are only too happy to funnel this discontent towards the US and allies. There is no doubt our oil payments are only two to three degrees separated from the bank accounts of al-Qaida, Hizbollah, and the like who fund the terrorists and weapons killing our soldiers and citizens around the globe.

The second long-term outcome of our oil addiction makes Islamist terrorists and their thousands of innocent victims seem mundane. With 1.3 billion citizens and an economy a fraction the size of ours, and growing at a fantastic pace with designs on overtaking the US as the world's premier economic and military power, China (in conjunction with the US) is already straining the current global oil production capacity. The Chinese government is taking advantage of disdain for the US in the Middle East and Central Asia and forging relationships with countries in that region, in addition to South American countries in our own hemisphere. China seems intent on securing guaranteed oil supplies while pushing US influence out of their hemisphere. The current strains we see today with rising oil prices and the Chinese expansion of economic influence (the state-owned Chinese energy firm CNOOC’s bid for Unocal is the most recent example) will only get worse until we collectively surpass the world oil production capacity. At that point, China will resort to military options to secure its energy supplies (as would we), and there are disturbing indications that the inmates may be running the asylum in the People's Liberation Army. Going to war against a country with four times our population and equipped with our military technology is far scarier prospect than anything cave-dwelling Islamist neanderthals can hope to conjure.

It is clear we are at a point where going forward, there are only increasingly devastating economic, geopolitical, and national security repercussions if we do not begin reducing and eventually eliminating our dependence upon foreign oil. It is also clear our current energy policy is leading us in exactly the wrong direction.

In The Name of Capitalism: Bring Back The Estate Tax For The Super Wealthy

In writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson penned the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” and thus captured what untold millions have since fought for at the bully pulpit, in the courtroom, and on the battlefield: the essence of the ideal that is America. The United States was to be the great level playing field for humanity. A place where all men are born equal and given equal opportunity to do, invent, create, achieve, and be; where all the castes, fiefdoms, and classist orders of the old world were rejected. A place where men are born equal, but free to set themselves apart from equals and to enjoy the fruits of hard work, creativity, and natural gift. Our forefathers began the greatest experiment in democracy and meritocracy - a marked departure from the contrived social order of the old world in which lineage dictated one’s potential and future.

While by no means did the Founders successfully implement this ideal 230 years ago, it seems today we are moving away from it, rather than towards it. Increasingly our social and political structures look like the ones they were supposed to supplant. Ever more, America’s boardrooms, courtrooms, and cloakrooms are filled with men of the same last name. In the last presidential election, the country did not have a choice but to vote for a candidate belonging to this new vein of American royalty: both candidates came from old families with old money and old power - which does not necessarily imply they are not the best qualified for the job, but without competition, how can we ever know? And if they are the best qualified, is that not saying something about who has access to elite education and opportunity? US citizens still have the ability to choose their leaders, but only those with the right names, the right connections, and the right bank accounts can break in to the rarefied pool of candidates.

How is this so? Over the years, families with great concentrations of wealth are able to protect, grow, and pass that wealth through the generations. Money equals power, or at least access to it, and there are now entire generations of American royalty born with the right name that gives them access to incomprehensible sums of money and the levers of power. Sure, there are still exceptions, but every new individual achieving the American dream of success and wealth can ensure their descendants will be American royalty for generations to come.

Of course those of extraordinary genius, courage, and innovativeness should and deserve to be rewarded for their gifts, achievements, and risks – they are the ones who cure our disease, bring us to the outer reaches of our universe, and invent the technologies that improve the quality of life for billions of people. Of course they should be able to make a better future for their family and future generations by passing their hard-earned wealth along.

What they should not be able to do is dub their future heirs permanent royalty by virtue of inheritance. The accumulation and stagnation of power by idle idols will always lead to oppression. This is evident in the recent spate of television shows (“The Simple Life”, HBO’s “Born Rich”, MTV’s “Rich Girls”) celebrating America’s newest uber-heirs. The delusional misogynic, classist, and racist comments of these deluded teen idols would not be so scary if they did not have the access and influence their fortunes afford (or will soon afford) them.

Do I wish I had inherited their kind of money? Absolutely. Do I think I would be better off because of it? Absolutely not. To the contrary: the hunger for the security and freedom that such wealth will afford me and my family will hopefully lead me to achieve things that will benefit society.

The repeal of the estate tax should be lauded for the positive impact it has on American families, farmers, and business owners. If shows such as “Born Rich” and “Rich Girls” serve no other purpose, they serve as commercials for the very real need for the reinstatement of the estate tax on the super wealthy. The exact numbers and margins are unimportant. What is important is for the estate tax to allow families to pass their farms, businesses, and wealth from generation to generation while preventing the further establishment and perpetuation of the American royal class.

An Observation:

Something I find to me more true every day: If you have to say you do, you don't; if you have to say you are, you aren't.

Where Did Our Leaders Go?

Abraham Lincoln was somewhat of an inept man. Any child can recount the stories of his many failures in life, business, and politics before becoming one of the few pre-Roosevelt presidents the average American can name. As commander in chief during the Civil War, chaos reigned within his administration. Lincoln would regularly procrastinate on issues or fail to make decisions entirely. His self-proclaimed policy was to have no policy. Yet it is hard to imagine another man guiding the country through the war and holding together the fabric of our nation.

He may have been a heavy-handed and disorganized manager, but Lincoln was a giant of a leader. Through willpower and force of personality alone, Lincoln was able to reshape the world around him to reflect his vision of a united nation, righted along the path of destiny. Disciplined, principled leadership sees no bounds and knows no barriers. History's great leaders have created empires, crushed them, defined civilizations, deciphered God's secrets, triumphed over disease, conquered the worst in human nature, harnessed the best in human nature.

Today we have a dearth of these thoughtful, visionary leaders who can lead society into a better future of their own design. If leading in the now was once measured in years and months, it is now measured in days, if not hours. We have become so immersed in our hyper-now culture that we lost our ability and willingness for vision beyond tomorrow's headlines. Consequently, political attention spans and the scope of strategic calculations have atrophied.

This surely makes the job of our leaders much easier - and they certainly have taken advantage. Policy horizons no longer stretch over decades, only election cycles, with agendas dictated by opinion polls. At some point our leaders (and the majority of the world's leaders) missed the lesson that by definition you cannot lead people by asking where they want to go. I am a firm believer that over the long-term, the free and educated masses will always get it right. In the short-term, however, the masses are more likely to be wrong and therefore require leaders to paint and guide towards the future. Governance by popular opinion is not only erratic and unprincipled, it is extraordinarily dangerous. The most brilliant, prescient, and tested collective of political philosophers, our Founding Fathers, understood this, which is why our government is a republic, not a democracy.

Unfortunately, the detriments of our modern short-term myopia are manifesting themselves in frightening ways with our political institutions convulsing to lurches in popular opinion and largely ignoring the important long-term problems that truly threaten our ideals of liberty.

In Iraq, 1,700 American soldiers and 24,000 civilians have been murdered, yet this is often little more than a headline while Congress and the president devoted an inordinate among of attention, calling special sessions and going to great lengths to prevent a feeding tube from being removed from a brain-dead woman in an irreversible vegetative state; when was the last time the president cut short a vacation or Congress passed special legislation to give thousands of our troops the armor they so desperately need, or trying to rescue now-beheaded hostages, or to devoting serious effort and resources to winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the Middle Eastern 'Street'?

On health care, energy, trade, the environment, taxes, et cetera ad infintum, the examples are sadly abundant and provide material for countless posts, but all lead to the same question - where have our leaders gone?

Urban Traffic Congestion:

A rumination on the economic and national security implications of urban congestion, written as an op-ed for The Chicago Tribune:

A visit to the Illinois Tollway’s website will reveal Governor Blagojevich’s $5 billion congestion relief plan proudly splashed across the front page, as it well should be; traffic congestion in Chicago is some of the worst in the country. The Texas Transportation Institute’s “2005 Urban Mobility Report” lists Chicago as the eighth most congested city in terms of commuter time spent in traffic, while the economic cost ranks third in the nation at $4.3 billion a year, or approximately $1,500 for every household in the Chicago metropolitan area. That is not even taking into account the detrimental health impacts of the stress and pollution directly attributable to area’s gridlock.

And while the financial waste is enough to make any citizen take notice, the real outrage is that commuters unnecessarily burn through 3 million-plus barrels of oil each year sitting in traffic, putting at least an extra $150 million a year into the bank accounts of despotic Middle East regimes and financiers of terrorism.

Digging into the Governor’s proposal, despite the seriousness of the problem and the promises of relief, there are exactly zero data documenting the impact the project will have on traffic. That is because the project will reap negligible results. If you are doing the math, the Governor is spending $5 billion for a ten year makeover on a highway system that will cost the state at least $50 billion in economic waste over the same period.

At the highest level, there are two options for reducing congestion – increase the supply of or reduce the demand for Chicagoland’s highways.

The Governor is taking advantage of the lack of legislative Tollway oversight by focusing on the supply solution since it is the easiest and most politically palatable. After all, the Governor gets to take sole credit for creating new jobs and saying he is doing something to combat traffic, while he will be long gone from the Governor’s Mansion by the time the ten-year project is complete and proves to be a failure. Does anybody who regularly sits in Chicago traffic, seeing the frustrating magnitude of the problem and utter lack of space into which the highways can expand really believe that adding a few new lanes to a handful of highway sections will solve the problem? The expansion and tollbooth removal plan completely ignores the most congested sites on the highways – for one there are no tollbooths in many of these locations, and if for no other reason, simply because there is no space for expansion.

As the Chicagoland population continues to grow and the amount of highway-usable land remains a constant, the only true solution is to significantly reduce highway demand and increase the number and availability of alternatives.

The Tollway Board seems at times to understand the demand side and has made several encouraging moves in the right direction. While in theory raising tolls for non-I-Pass motorists should help reduce tollway usage and encourage usage of the more efficient I-Pass system, their effort in doing so was half-hearted at best. An additional 40 cents will not discourage nearly enough motorists to have an impact, as evidenced by the fact that Illinois toll rates remain extraordinarily low compared to other states. Moreover, by introducing peak and non-peak rates only for trucks, the Board has ignored the reality that commuting office workers, by definition, cause the vast majority of rush-hour traffic (not to mention the fact most trucking lines reimburse drivers for tolls).

The Tollway Board needs to raise tolls, significantly, and introduce peak rates for all vehicles.

Additionally, the City of Chicago should take a cue from its sister cities in Europe and consider imposing congestion charges on motorists choosing to drive within defined 'congestion' areas served by public transportation (click here to visit the website for London's congestion charge program), especially since Chicago is home to one of the finest confluences of public transportation in the world.

While public transit within the city and the Metra-Pace network connecting the suburbs and the city are excellent systems, they are not enough. For most lines, both systems are already heavily utilized. Additionally, the downfall of rail systems is they are not very scalable; it is expensive to add new lines and again, there is little available space to do so.

To expand capacity and increase commuters’ options, Chicagoland can also learn from Minnesota’s Twin Cities, where the bus lines actually provide more service on the highways connecting the cities and the suburbs than within city limits and get to bypass highway traffic by riding the shoulders of the road.

To reduce the expense incurred by commuters and consequently further demand for public transit, the state should also divert highway money into funding for CTA, Pace, and Metra, rather than devoting the billions to producing computer-generated videos of I-Pass lanes and renovating roads.

The state should also be offering a combination of income tax incentives and disincentives to further shape highway demand. The state should offer commuters graduated tax breaks for living within specified distances of their respective place of employment, and conversely, the state should levy tax penalties on workers living outside of certain radii from their place of employment.

The state should grant businesses economic incentives to pass along to employees who carpool and/or utilize public transportation for their commute. This has the advantage of not creating additional cost or bureaucracy for the state since it is relatively simple and cost effective for employers to track their employees’ mode of transit (automotive commuters will need parking passes, for example).

Finally, the city should make car ownership more expensive for citizens living within the reach of public transit. Meaningfully higher title and registration taxes will discourage car ownership and subsequently reduce the amount of traffic within city limits and help ease the pain of the particularly acute lack of parking in the Loop and Near North side.

Traffic congestion in the Chicago metro area is a problem much more serious, expensive, and far-reaching than the thoughtfulness of the current proposed solutions would suggest. For too long our political leaders have treated highway usage as an unalienable right of the citizenry and shied from truly addressing the traffic problem. Congestion is not a problem remediable with politically motivated road construction projects and press conferences, but it is altogether not a difficult problem to solve. A common sense approach geared towards reducing the demand for highways while increasing the demand for and supply of public transportation alternatives will solve a major economic problem and continue Chicago’s tradition of serving as a leading innovator among US cities.