Right now, the United States is an active participant in two civil wars: Iraq and Afghanistan.
Read the rest of this entry »

How much is a human life worth?

I’m reminded of that question again, because of this case out of Pasadena, TX (a relatively poor suburb of Houston). Here’s what happened:
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m normally a big fan of John Stewart, and I also generally have a lot of respect for Ted Koppel. But I was bothered by something that the two of them said yesterday during Koppel’s appearance on The Daily Show. Koppel was promoting a Discovery Channel special that has yet to air on capitalism in China, and the subject quickly turned to America’s debt, about one quarter of which is owned by the Chinese. Stewart then asked Koppel if he thought that China was about to “pull the rug out” of the American economy. Koppel basically responded that “they rely too much on selling products to the American consumer to want to do that”–certainly a true response. But no one mentioned the larger point about the developing Chinese-American relationship, contained in an old adage: if you borrow $10,000, the bank owns you, if you borrow $10 million, you own the bank.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Supreme Court of the United States today struck down a Washington, DC ban on all handguns. I can’t say it’s one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever, but it’s surely a bad one–both in content and in language. First, the amendment in question:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Read the rest of this entry »

My wife just sent me a fascinating article on Slate that I thought I would share with you. Some geneticists recently completed a study on how genes for homosexuality could continue to exist given that homosexual men tend not to procreate. They tested a number of theories against the data, and discovered that what seems to happen is that there actually isn’t a genetic marker for homosexuality, per se, but instead a series of genetic markers that lead to a dramatic increase in attraction for males. Women who have this set of genes tend to produce significantly more children than women who don’t have this set of genes; but if they pass those genetic markers to their sons, then those men are significantly more likely to be gay. (Which is not necessarily to say that most or even many of them are gay, just more than you would otherwise expect.) The study was only concerned with homosexuality in men, and does not address homosexuality in women at all.
Read the rest of this entry »

The GOP is trying to turn this election, in part, into a referendum on President Bush’s handling of the War on Terror. In particular, conservative pundits (cheered by both the White House and the McCain campaign) have attacked Obama for praising the response to the first World Trade Center attacks, bringing back the charge that Democrats have a “9/10″ outlook. It is certainly true that there is a vast divide between the two approaches; I just don’t understand how anyone with even a passing respect for either the Constitution or basic human dignity could prefer the current GOP strategy.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was reading an article in the National Review today, that really made me aware about a fundamental divide in this country. The article (predictably) argues against Obama. But it does so by putting forth 10 reasons to be wary of Obama. Of them, I found 4 to be strong arguments FOR Obama, and several others I didn’t really care one way or the other about.

It was interesting, because its a fundamental different paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) for thinking about foreign policy. I found the arguments totally unpersuasive, because they were talking from different assumptions about what guides behavior, and the causal mechanisms involved in foreign policy.

I’m a big fan of compromise, but I don’t know how compromise can occur when people come from such different central assumptions about effective foreign policy…

There seems to be a lot of confusion out there between “moderation” and “compromise”. On the one hand, people assume that those who are either extremely liberal or extremely conservative are unable to compromise. On the other hand, there is an assumption that moderates want compromise. In fact, neither of these things are necessarily true.
Read the rest of this entry »

Energy policy is one of those tough topics to talk about intelligently. The problem is that everybody knows what the problems are (fossil fuels are bad for the environment and have a finite supply), everybody agrees what the ultimate solution has to be (we need to find new sources of cheap, plentiful energy), and no one has the slightest clue how to get from here to there. But because politicians don’t get elected by saying “I don’t know”, they make stuff up, and end up sounding vague, clueless, or both.

So my goal for today is to have a reasonably intelligent discussion of energy policy. Read the rest of this entry »

When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he told us that experience matters. After all, he had twenty years of Washington experience to build on. George W. Bush, on the other hand, had been a politician for exactly six years, all of it as Governor of Texas, and before that the highlight of his resume was convincing the citizens of Arlington, TX to spend their tax dollars building a state-of-the-art baseball stadium for the Rangers. Of course, the Republican Party insisted that experience didn’t matter. Moral character mattered; leadership mattered; being in touch with the American people mattered. Experience, we were told, was just another word for “Washington insider”, and we needed something new and different.
Read the rest of this entry »