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Or is it earth versus the flying saucers?

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Here are links to two articles suggesting that conventional wisdom in both the political and financial spheres no longer works. First, we have Michael Totten’s interview of Robert Kaplan describing what I think may be the Abyssinian campaign of our time: Sri Lanka. The Abyssinian crisis of 1935 convinced many that the League of Nations had failed. Now Sri Lanka may have shown that force and territorial expansion is once again a viable force in international politics and that the UN, if not as moribund as the League of Nations, may be in danger of becoming so.

MJT: So you just got back from Sri Lanka. What did you see there? What did you learn?

Kaplan: The biggest takeaway fact about the Sri Lankan war that’s over now is that the Chinese won. And the Chinese won because over the last few years, because of the human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government, the U.S. and other Western countries have cut all military aid. We cut them off just as they were starting to win. The Chinese filled the gaps and kept them flush with weapons and, more importantly, with ammunition, with fire-fighting radar, all kinds of equipment. The assault rifles that Sri Lankan soldiers carry at road blocks throughout Colombo are T-56 Chinese knockoffs of AK-47s. They look like AK-47s, but they’re not.

What are the Chinese getting out of this? They’re building a deep water port and bunkering facility for their warships and merchant fleet in Hambantota, in southern Sri Lanka. And they’re doing all sorts of other building on the island.

Now, why did the Chinese want Sri Lanka? Because Sri Lanka is strategically located. The main sea lines of communication between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, and between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. It’s part of China’s plan to construct a string of pearls – ports that they don’t own, but which they can use for their warships all across the Indian Ocean.

Sri Lanka defeated, more or less completely, a 26 year-long insurgency. They killed the leader and the leader’s son. But there are no takeaway lessons for the West here. The Sri Lankan government did it by silencing the media, which meant capturing the most prominent media critic of the government and killing him painfully. And they made sure all the other journalists knew about it.

MJT: Wow.

Kaplan: There are a thousand disappearances a year in Sri Lanka separate from the war. Journalists are terrified there. The only journalism you read is pro-government. So that’s one thing they did.

The Tamil Tigers had human shields by the tens of thousands, not just by the dozens and hundreds like Al Qaeda. They put people between themselves and the government and say “you have to kill all the people to get to us.” So the government obliged them. The government killed thousands of civilians.

MJT: Tamil civilians?

Kaplan: Yes. They killed thousands of civilians in the course of winning this war. It acted in a way so brutal that there are no lessons for the West.

Read the Whole Thing. The second item of interest is an interview by Naseem Talem at CNBC which argues from the bad job numbers that we are not seeing “green shoots” and that the financial system isn’t ever going to see “green shoots” because the financial system as we know it is crashing, breaking itself into another form because the current form is no longer sustainable and that consequently”stimulus” efforts will never save it.

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The two videos about the Waxman-Markey climate bill after the Read More are a study in contrasts. The first is by Glenn Beck and Peter Schiff and the second from Amy Smart of Environment America.  The Beck-Schiff video features two men talking at length about reasons why Waxman-Markey is bad; why in fact it is a tax.  The second video is much shorter than the first  It features a beautiful woman and gorgeously photographed scenes calling not only for Waxman-Markey to be passed, but to be made more draconian, more intrusive, more punitive. She gives almost no reasons why any of her proposals would be good or even reasonable.  Rather, she presents a set of bullet points which are calls to action as if she assumes that you are already convinced of why these actions are all desirable. She ends with the challenge: ‘we have the power, let us use it’. It is, by objective standards, a fascist message based on no given reason. But as propaganda it works and it’s important to discover why.

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The terms “a priori” and “a posteriori” are used in philosophy to distinguish two different types of knowledge, justification, or argument: a priori knowledge is known independently of experience, and a posteriori knowledge is proven through experience. So what is the answer to the question: “are taxes going to be raised on people who make less than $250,000 a year?

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The administration is expanding a Federal bailout program to allow those deeper “underwater” to refinance with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. While the program is supposed to help out homeowners facing foreclosures, critics have called it an expansion of the disastrous subprime loan program. The Wall Street Journal describes the refinancing scheme:

Strapped borrowers with mortgages worth up to 125% of their home’s value will now be eligible to refinance under the program, as long as they are not behind on their payments. Currently, the program caps eligibility at a loan-to-value ratio of 105%.

In addition, mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said they would offer incentives to lenders to encourage certain underwater borrowers with 30-year fixed-rate mortgages to refinance into shorter-term loans.

Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan announced the new higher loan-to-value limit while touring a foreclosure-ridden neighborhood of Las Vegas, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) and Rep. Dina Titus (D., Nev.).

The move is aimed at helping homeowners who have been unable to refinance into lower-rate mortgages because their homes have plummeted in value. But the effort could be hampered by rising mortgage rates.

However the Business Insider criticized the move, saying that “before your LTV ratio could only be 105%, because, well, as we’ve learned, fat loans relative to value are more likely to go bad. As many have described it, Obama’s solution to the housing crisis is: more subprime loans. Like the original subprime loans, they’re really only going to work out if home prices grow rapidly over the next few years, otherwise you’re looking at the perpetuation of people living underwater in their homes.”

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One of the regular commenters on this site, who we know as “Fred”, passed away. His obituary is at Neo-neocon’s, where his handle was FredHjr. One commenter at Neo-neocon’s says, “I feel like I lost someone that I knew personally.” What does it mean to know someone personally? Perhaps its true meaning is to “see within”; to gain insight; to look past external appearances and gain a glimpse into the person inside. Fred told us what he felt; what he feared; what he rejoiced in; what he hoped for. And that is more than we can say about so many people who we meet ‘personally’ in our daily lives. So maybe we can, with justification, say that we lost not just a commenter, but a friend.

One novel whose title I can’t remember begins with a scene describing an old woman, who, suddenly reacting to a greeting from behind, turns and momentarily forgets her age. For an instant the observer can see in her fleeting smile the girl inside the aged body; the spontaneity which she allows herself to show in a careless moment. And it raises the question of whether, deep inside of each of us, there isn’t something unchanging under our mutable circumstances. Perhaps the greatest miracle the blogosphere has wrought was in allowing us to meet those who snobbery, reticence, and lack of opportunity would have kept us from knowing. We knew you Fred, but a little and for a while.

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come,
then that which is in part shall be done away.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face:
now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

Until then.

Update: Neo-neocon embeds a link to Leonard Cohen’s “If it be your will”.  The lyrics are on the page. As a child, Cohen bore a peculiar burden. “I was told I was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest,” he said.  I had never heard it before, though I knew Suzanne and Hallelujah and regret the gap in my education, but I know it now, as is Your Will.

The Telegraph describes how a polar bear expert has been banned from attending a conference in his field in Copenhagen because his views are inimical to the orthoxy on “global warming”. The news story says:

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. … Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea. …

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week’s meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor’s, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: “it was the position you’ve taken on global warming that brought opposition”.

Dr Taylor was told that his views running “counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful”. His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was “inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG”.

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Imagine debugging a million lines of code. How would you do it? The problem is a harder than simply finding the time. My old textbook reference suggests using the strategy of “test sets”. Put data in and check to see it is processed correctly. Sounds good, but the problem with this approach is that most programs have infinite sets of legal inputs, and therefore infinite numbers of test sets, any one of which might show up a bug. Another tack would be to prove that a program’s steps were mathematically correct. The practical difficulties of trying this on a million line code base are easy to imagine. But we’re not out of moves yet. One thing we can try is to prove the correctness of the program by parts; in effect showing that certain blocks will always be produce a true result given a legal input. Why am I talking about debugging million line programs? Because someone is so sick of incomprehensible, pork-laden legislation with all kinds of scams embedded in it that he has proposed a 28th Amendment. Bob Gale writes:

Earlier this year, Congress passed a “Stimulus” Bill. It was 973 pages long. This past Friday, the House passed a “Climate Change” Bill. It was more than 1200 pages long. … This got me wondering: how long, exactly, is our Constitution? How many pages did it take our country’s founders to lay out the structure and functions of our Federal Government? … Think about that. The entire foundation of our country - the complete design for our entire government — is clearly explained in only 11 pages.

No single Amendment is a full page. Many are only a single sentence.

Yet the bill that was passed on June 26, 2009 by 219 of our elected representatives — people to whom we’ve entrusted our Constitution, men and women who have sworn an oath to uphold it - was more than 1200 pages long. That’s over 100 times longer than the U.S. Constitution! And not one member of Congress, NOT ONE, read the whole thing! A word comes to my mind to describe this: “INSANE.” I cannot believe that this type of legislation and legislative behavior is what the signers of our Constitution intended when they invented Congress.

Therefore, I am respectfully proposing a 28th Amendment to our Constitution. I call it the Brevity Act.

No law, bill, resolution or any act of Congress shall exceed 2000 words, including all footnotes, amendments and signatures. Congress shall not vote on any item longer than that. Each item requiring a vote shall be read aloud in its entirety in session to a majority of members. Those not in attendance may not vote on the item.

Now you see where this is going. Let me rephrase the original problem: how do you debug a 1,200 page “Climate Change Bill”? How do you find out whether a billion dollar ripoff is concealed deep in the bowels of this monster before it is enacted? The first step is understanding what it says. The intent of the hypothetical 28th Amendment is to make legislation short and readable. But a 2,000 word limit? Surely you jest. Well, maybe not. The payoff of breaking Hope and Change down into 2,000 word chunks is that we get to try the strategy of enforcing correctness by parts. That means of course, that big legislative agendas have to be modular. But why not? Most everything that works in the world we live in can be built on a modular basis. Why not laws?

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Spengler, at the Asia Times, tries to trace the outlines of Barack Obama’s elusive Grand Bargain and doesn’t think it will work. “In Obama’s imagination, a Sunni Arab coalition - empowered by Washington’s turn against Israel - would encircle Iran and dissuade it from acquiring nuclear weapons, while an entirely separate Shi’ite coalition with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would suppress the radical Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This was the worst-designed scheme concocted by a Western strategist since Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery attacked the bridges at Arnhem in 1944, and it has blown up in Obama’s face.” Put that way, it does seem unlikely.

But it raises the question of why, without assuming that the President is a fool, that Barack Obama should think it would work. The apparent answer from the Asia Times article, is that Obama calculated from static assumptions; he did not allow for the dynamics of the situation; didn’t work out what the Sunnis and Shi’ites — and Israel — would be doing while he was setting up his Grand Bargain. Spengler writes:

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Andrew Breitbart describes the rise and fall of “Perez Hilton”, AKA Mario Lavandeira, a person who readers may recall had derogatory words for the former Miss California and who recently had a dust-up with Will I. Am of the Black Eyed Peas, who readers may also recall authored that paean to Barack Obama, Yes We Can. Mr. Lavandeira is a man whose profession fits no known description, so I shall not attempt to characterize what he does. Breitbart however does. “What Mr. Lavandeira does on his Web site goes beyond satire or biting criticism. It is cruelty of the worst kind. No taunt or insult is too low. Using primitive drawing skills, he and his crew even scrawl vulgar pictures on the faces of their victims.” So you can draw your own conclusions from that.

The morality tale which Breitbart describes begins when Lavandeira attends a party presumably to suck up grist for his rumor mill, only to find that recent object of his derision, Mr. Will I. Am of the Black Eyed Peas, in attendance. Mr. Am’s inquiries provoked, according to Lavandeira’s own re-enactment of the scene, an urge to flee the club. But the Black Eyed Peas party followed him out and gave him, appropriately enough, a black eye. Breibart seems almost thankful for the bizarre circumstances which allowed a kind of rough justice to take place. He argues that, in politically correct America, no one else could punch out Lavandeira’s lights except a black man. Breitbart writes:
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