The Economist on the 100,000 dead Iraqis

Economist.com | Iraq

SOME 100,000 souls—perhaps even more—may have perished in Iraq as a result of the American-led invasion in March last year. So, at any rate, says a respected British medical journal, the Lancet. If only half that figure is the true one, it is shocking....

But whatever the precise death-count since Saddam Hussein's fall and however lethal his own regime, several bitter facts cannot be denied: the rate of killing in Iraq has been far greater than those (including The Economist) who advocated war had expected. Moreover, as American and Iraqi forces steel themselves for another heavy assault on insurgents in Fallujah and maybe other rebel towns in the Sunni triangle, the politicians in charge—including a re-elected George Bush—should pause before raining down another torrent of bombs that are sure to kill many civilians as well as fighters...

... Moreover, the Pentagon is quite wrong to refuse to estimate Iraqi casualties, albeit that the margin of error is bound to be high. Reports such as the Lancet's should be taken seriously—and bolster the case for selectivity and restraint, even against the bloodiest of foes.

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In a separate article The Economist reviews the Lancet article and finds the numbers to be plausible and the reasoning sound.

The US invasion of Iraq was followed by the violent death of about 65,000 people -- largely women and children. Another 35,000 deaths, largely of children, may have resulted from the general disruption and chaos. Those who died of violence were not all killed by American forces; many died from insurgent action.

The Economist implies that had they known the death toll they would not have advocated war.

Meanwhile, conservative commentators in the US have mocked the study and made a jest of the numbers. Moral values, you know.

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

It's been a while since I tracked this. Looks like Bostrom has put the discussions together in one spot. I confess to finding the arguments ... persuasive.

Update 2/22/07: The nice thing about living in a simulation is that quantum entanglement and nonlocal action are less mysterious ...

See also:

• The Algebraist and the religion of the eternal simulation
• Reality, perception, Hume, the red pill - and John Tierney
• Churches of the Singularity - is Horgan truly an unbeliever?

Cluelessness in America

The New York Times > Opinion > Bob Herbert: Voting Without the Facts

I think a case could be made that ignorance played at least as big a role in the election's outcome as values. A recent survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that nearly 70 percent of President Bush's supporters believe the U.S. has come up with 'clear evidence' that Saddam Hussein was working closely with Al Qaeda. A third of the president's supporters believe weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. And more than a third believe that a substantial majority of world opinion supported the U.S.-led invasion.

This is scary. How do you make a rational political pitch to people who have put that part of their brain on hold? No wonder Bush won.

The survey, and an accompanying report, showed that there's a fair amount of cluelessness in the ranks of the values crowd. The report said, 'It is clear that supporters of the president are more likely to have misperceptions than those who oppose him.'

I haven't heard any of the postelection commentators talk about ignorance and its effect on the outcome. It's all values, all the time. Traumatized Democrats are wringing their hands and trying to figure out how to appeal to voters who have arrogantly claimed the moral high ground and can't stop babbling about their self-proclaimed superiority. Potential candidates are boning up on new prayers and purchasing time-shares in front-row-center pews.

A more practical approach might be for Democrats to add teach-ins to their outreach efforts. Anything that shrinks the ranks of the clueless would be helpful.

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Another op-ed piece spoke of the end of the enlightenment in America. Conversely, Google News threw up a link to a Chatanooga Times issue. There I read a piece from the other side -- proclaiming the victory of the regular folk over snobbish intellectuals.

The nuclear weapons black market

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | UN warns of nuclear terror race

Mr ElBaradei said the IAEA's investigations into Libya and Iran's suspected weapons programmes had revealed an extensive black market for radioactive materials.

There had been around 630 confirmed incidents of trafficking in nuclear or other radioactive materials since 1993, he said.

"We have a race against time because this was something we were not prepared for," he said.

"We need to do all we can to work on the new phenomenon called nuclear terrorism, which was sprung on us after 9/11 when we realised terrorists had become more sophisticated and had shown an interest in nuclear and radioactive material," he added.

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Sprung on us? Not prepared for?

ElBaradei is a smart guy, so presumably this is either diplomatic code or a translation error. The Clinton administration was very worried about this -- and they weren't the first. It is true that the public learned of the Khan operation only after 9/11 -- but of course that was Pakistani -- not Iranian or Libyan.

Yeah, it's diplomatic speak.

Is America in another great awakening?

The New York Times > Opinion > Gary Hart: When the Personal Shouldn't Be Political

If America has entered one of its periodic eras of religious revival and if that revival is having the profound impact on politics that is now presumed, to participate in a discussion of 'faith' one must qualify oneself.

This is a fascinating column, but I took particular note of the opening sentence. It's one of the first mentions by a respectable commentator that we may be in a "great awakening" ...

National Museum Of The Middle Class

The Onion | National Museum Of The Middle Class Opens In Schaumburg, IL

One of the better of the recent Onion satires. Their best stuff is always too close to the truth.

Life in the church of Bush -- a guide to rationalists

So, what should a rationalist do?

One possibility is to continue on as before. If one's historical perspective extends sixty years or so, this is perfectly reasonable. Certainly in my personal memory (25 years or so) regression to the mean is common, and the "dead" persist longer than expected (local phone companies, fax machines, McGill university ...).

Those with a longer range perspective (100 years, 1000 years) may be less sanguine.

My primary concern is demographic. As the US voting population ages along with the boomers, it will become more socially conservative. Average IQ will also fall -- that's what aging does. (Mine is not what it once was.)

This trend towards social conservatism and increasing simplicity would not have been a problem during the reign of the Pharaohs'. It will not work well in our world. Barring the collapse of civilization, our world will become more and more complex. Technologic transformations, the industrialization of China and India, climate change, petroleum exhaustion, the potential collapse of much of Africa.

The intersection of simplicity, rigidity and social conservatism with increasing complexity is not promising. We cannot necessarily be reassured by the lessons of the past 60 years.

So, what should a rationalist do?

Some initial thoughts:

1. Advocate for states' rights.
2. Live in a state that separates church and state. The role of creationism in the curriculum is a good guide. (Ironically I think there's a case to be made for a form of intelligent design -- but that case implies some novel things about the Designer.)
3. Live in a blue state. (Minnesota is a borderline case actually.)
4. If you can't live in a blue state, then participate in Republican primaries. Attempt to mitigate the damage. Do consider moving however.
5. Consider moving away from major population centers. There may be an advantage to living close to a relatively human-free vastness.

Secondary outsourcing - in Doonesbury

Doonesbury@Slate - Daily Dose

Hey! This was my business idea. This Nov 7/04 Doonesbury strip talks about an alternative to corporate outsourcing -- bringing outsourcing down to the level of the individual worker. I'd spent an hour or so last year thinking about how one could turn this into a business -- partnering US coders with covert overseas coders to enhance their productivity. I think it makes sense. Evidently, so does Gary Trudeau.

So now Maureen Dowd gets religion?

The New York Times > Opinion > Maureen Dowd: Rove's Revenge

...W.'s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We're entering another dark age, more creationist than cutting edge, more premodern than postmodern. Instead of leading America to an exciting new reality, the Bushies cocoon in a scary, paranoid, regressive reality. Their new health care plan will probably be a return to leeches.

America has always had strains of isolationism, nativism, chauvinism, puritanism and religious fanaticism. But most of our leaders, even our devout presidents, have tried to keep these impulses under control. Not this crew. They don't call to our better angels; they summon our nasty devils.

Jimmy Carter won the evangelical vote in 1976, and he won it in Ohio. He combined his evangelical appeal with a call for social justice, integrating his church and laboring for world peace. But W. appealed to that vote's most crabbed insecurities - the disparaging of the other, the fear of those godless hedonists in the blue states out to get them and their families. And the fear of scientific progress, as with stem cell research.

When William Jennings Bryan took up combating the theory of evolution, he did it because he despised the social Darwinists who used the theory to justify the "survival of the fittest" in capitalism. Bryan hated anything that justified an economic system that crushed poor workers and farmers, and he hated that the elites would claim there was scientific basis for keeping society divided and unequal.

The new evangelicals challenge science because they've been stirred up to object to social engineering on behalf of society's most vulnerable: the poor, the sick, the sexually different.

Yet the Bush conservatives do their own social engineering. They thought they could toughen up the American character with the invasion of Iraq. Now they want to reshape the country on "moral" issues - though their morality seems to allow them to run a campaign full of blatant distortions and character assassination, and to mislead the public about the war.

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Ok Maureen, so where were you before the election?

Credit goes to Maureen though for finally noticing the social darwinist strains in modern christian conservative ideology. It's most ironic that a distorted version of their hated enemy's invention has lodged deep in their psyches. Come to think of it, that's probably not the first time that sort of thing has happened.

What it means to be a souther american christian conservative (SACC)

where souls brimful of love -

When you grow up being raised in this environment, whether you give it any credence or not, what starts to happen is that you see things very easily in terms of whether they fit into the 'Us' category or the 'World' category. Since, um, most things fall into the World category, it gets very easy to compartmentalize in your head, and to, for example, start thinking, 'the media is a tool of Satan, I shouldn't believe what people are telling me.' And even if you don't think 'TOOL OF SATAN!!!!' every time you hear the media, if you've heard other people around you and in your church say it enough, even subconsciously you start doubting the media. How this plays out is that you begin to filter your environment as a conservative christian based on what you can easily categorize. Once you have identified, say, George Bush, as one of Us, it's much easier to disregard negative news about him because the Media is one of Them, and the two things can be easily canceled out in your mind.

In the South, the tendency to categorize things, combined with the fact that we are taught to expect persecution as a Christian people, has led us to segregate, commit acts of racism and intolerance, and to be very, very suspicious of anyone from the North or the West, because all of you are part of the World.

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An interesting insider overview. My internal anthropologist is fascinated.

We need a formal name for this religion -- a fusion between calvinism and 21st century capitalism. I don't think the Us/Them divide is unique though -- it's common to all fundamentalist faiths. (I suspect the underlying xenophobia is in fact more fundamental than the faith and may precede it -- but I admit that's a radical supposition.)

An embedded reporters summary of the Iraq situation

Embedded in Najaf - The twin torments of a departing reporter: survivor guilt and second-guessing. By Alex Berenson

The Wahhabists are the boogeymen, the guys who will chop the head off any American they catch. And they will destroy Iraq without a second thought if they believe that the instability will benefit them. The hard-core Baathists would also rather have chaos than peace; they want to convince Iraqis that their only choice is between the iron fist of tyranny and the red claw of anarchy. The third group, the local fighters in Fallujah and other Sunni cities, may be more willing to compromise, but only after the United States proves that it is unafraid to occupy their cities. The local fighters have grown increasingly bold in the last year and now seem to think the United States is afraid to challenge them; the U.S. military must convince them otherwise.

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

News

Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - An error with an electronic voting system gave President Bush 3,893 extra votes in suburban Columbus, elections officials said.

Franklin County's unofficial results had Bush receiving 4,258 votes to Democrat John Kerry's 260 votes in a precinct in Gahanna. Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct.

Bush actually received 365 votes in the precinct, Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, told The Columbus Dispatch.

State and county election officials did not immediately respond to requests by The Associated Press for more details about the voting system and its vendor, and whether the error, if repeated elsewhere in Ohio, could have affected the outcome.

The endtime - part VXIXX

Slashdot | USAF Studies Teleportation

Folks. this is how it works: It is 90 days till the end of the budget cycle. You have $2-3 million left over, If you do NOT have a documented use for that money come Appropriation Day then your budget will be docked by this amount. Budget and the size of your department are all that matter in government land. It matters not one jot what this is spent on, it MUST be spent and it must be spent in a document able way. If the idea is hair brained, stupid, and a waste it may or may not be dredged out of the cesspool of bureaucracy and scrutinized on Slash dot or other forums (like the Congress), but in most cases it just makes another month's pay for a Beltway Bandit "Think Tank" or "Institute".

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In the 1990s the GOP, with help from Dems, exempted herbal remedies from FDA. This made sense only if one of the following was true:

1. The remedies were completely ineffective and thus innocuous.
2. The remedies were magically both effective and never harmful. Presumably because they were "natural" (eg. like tetrodotoxin).

The evidence suggests these regulators believed #2. This is magical thinking.

Fast forward to 2004. We re-elect a president on the basis of the belief that he's been divinely appointed. Meanwhile the military is repeating Soviet-era studies (they published libraries of this stuff) on the efficacy of psychic teleportation.

I do so hope China will inherit our lost mantle of rationalism.

Jane Smiley on the nature of Bush's victory

The unteachable ignorance of the red states

The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million—my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.)

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I've long wondered how politicians are able to mask their disgust and disdain for the undecided voter -- and for those who are so easily manipulated.

Udell's Flash Demo of the electoral college flows over 60 years

Jon Udell: Electoral ebb and flow

The NYT images are neat, but Udell's Flash version takes it to another level. Astounding to watch the presidential EC outcomes over time. 2000 and 2004 are sui generis.

My take is that we are seeing the future. I think the science of polling and of dividing up the electorate has developed to the point that, barring a collapse of democracy, and given an effective two party system, the parties will morph until each divides the country in half. One will always include the faith-based thinkers and the xenophobes, the other will include the weak, the different, and the outcasts. Otherwise they'll divide up the rest.