Just when it might be worth something (see previous post), this blog has finally made it on to a top 10 list (not counting top 10 referrers to myself, my blogtwin etc). It’s No 7 on the Technorati Top 50 Interesting Newcomers list. Thanks to those whose newly noted links to me seem to have triggered the listing:
Angry Bear
Ken Parish
Gummo Trotsky
Gary Sauer-Thompson
James Russell
Update 11/3 Number 5! With a bullet!
It had to happen. An ex-dotcommer, the former editor of recently-folded dotcom hypemag Red Herring, has decided the time is ripe to make money out of blogging.. His site, called AlwaysOn, is pretty much what you’d expect to have seen if blogs had been around in 1998 and someone trolling for $20 million to produce a slick commercial version had produced a ‘proof of concept’. I can’t believe that there’s anyone left out there in VC-land stupid enough to throw $20 million at a blog, but if there is, I want to be first in line.
Writing in the New Republic Peter Beinart says:
On the subject of North Korea, there are two groups of people in Washington today: People who are terrified, and people who aren’t paying attention. Unfortunately, the latter category seems to include the president of the United States.
I’ve been in the terrified/horrified camp for some months, during which time things have drifted from bad to terrible. Beinart, recently, described as a full-fledged, talon-baring hawk on Iraq backs up his diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder with the observation
the diplomatic reality is that there is no united front. North Korea adamantly rejects multilateral talks, and South Korea, Russia, and China adamantly refuse to turn the screws. The Bush administration is paying the price for having helped fuel the anti-Americanism that elected an ultra-soft-line president in Seoul last December. And it cannot pull out all the diplomatic stops with Moscow and Beijing since its highest priority is convincing those governments not to veto an Iraq resolution at the Security Council. The unhappy result is that the United States is basically facing this crisis alone. (emphasis added).
Beinart concludes
If the Bush administration does understand that it will eventually have to sit down with Pyongyang, then its current delay represents the inexcusable privileging of politics over national security. If, on the other hand, it has no intention of engaging in such talks, its current stalling tactics may stem from a very different calculation: That the United States can only fight one war at a time. As Stanley Kurtz put it approvingly recently in National Review Online, “If our policy is to strike when we may and must, silence makes a good deal of sense.”
This has so far been too chilling an interpretation for most observers. But, in either case, the United States is much closer to the brink than most Americans realize. And, whether out of political self-interest or ideological zeal, the Bush administration doesn’t seem to mind.
I don’t think the NRO analysis cited by Beinart holds up at all. A war with North Korea would be incomparably more dangerous than anything Saddam Hussein could do, and the danger grows every day. If war with North Korea is planned, or even contemplated, any competing policy priority should be dropped immediately. Every asset the US has, military, economic and diplomatic, should be devoted to achieving a victory in which the North Korean government doesn’t use its nuclear weapons and to achieving the victory as soon as possible, before any more weapons are produced.
Given that this clearly won’t happen, I can only hope that the Administration is planning to buy the North Koreans off. A minimal silver lining in this generally gloomy situation is that a victory over Saddam might give Bush enough political points to cover a craven backdown to Kim-Jong Il – at this point there seems to be no alternative.
Update Ultra-hawk Charles Krauthammer takes precisely the line I’ve suggested on North Korea. He even uses the dreaded A-word “appeasement”. Krauthammer covers himself by saying “it would only be temporary appeasement”, but the North Koreans, like the Turks, are sure to demand cash up front. As Paul Krugman pointed out a while back, no sensible person deals with the Bush Administration on any other basis.
There are a lot of anniversaries at present. We covered the 20-year anniversary of the Hawke-Keating government pretty thoroughly last week, but didn’t get to the 7-year anniversary of the Howard government. And it’s 3 years today since the bursting of the NASDAQ bubble. So, I’m inviting any thoughts on these anniversaries before I try to post my own later in the week.
As always, feel free to comment any issue, civilised discussion and no coarse language please.
Come on, guys! Monday evening and no comments at all. I’m disappointed!
The following is the text of the British amendment to a second resolution to the U.N. Security Council demanding that Iraq disarm:
Determined to secure full compliance with its decisions and to restore international peace and security in the area,
Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations,
1. Reaffirms the need for full implementation of resolution 1441 (2002);
2. Calls on Iraq immediately to take the decisions necessary in the interests of its people and the region;
3. Decides that Iraq will have failed to take the final opportunity afforded by resolution 1441 (2002) unless, on or before 17 March 2003, the Council concludes that Iraq has demonstrated full, unconditional, immediate and active cooperation in accordance with its disarmament obligations under resolution 1441 (2002) and previous relevant resolutions; and is yielding possession of UNMOVIC and the IAEA of all weapons, weapon delivery and support systems and structures, prohibited by resolution 687 (1991) and all subsequent relevant resolutions, and all information regarding prior destruction of such items;
4. Decides to remain seized of the matter.
Assessment Obviously this gives the US automatic authorisation to go to war simply by vetoing any resolution consistent with the terms of Item 3. Hence, it is simply a mean and tricky version of the previous draft, which itself was weaselly in its failure to include an explicit an authorisation of war. The obvious countermove is a resolution imposing specific demands on Iraq in place of what is in effect a demand to satisfy George Bush.
Given that I just reread High Fidelity, I can scarcely refrain from the current trend for listing a top 5 group of referrers. My stats counter only gives this ranking on a “lifetime’ basis, so I need to aggregate across various incarnations of the same blog, and this makes the actual ranking a bit tenuous.With that caveat regarding order, my all-time top 5 referrers are:
Jason Soon;
Tim Dunlop;
Ken Parish;
Steven Den Beste; and
Me;
The first three don’t surprise me, and shouldn’t surprise anybody. These are the blogs I read most regularly, link to most often, comment on most frequently and generally regarded as my closest neighbours in the virtual world of Ozplogistan. Den Beste’s is the only one of the top-ranked US blogs I comment on with any frequency (generally critically) and he occasionally replies. Since he has about 50 times as many readers as I do, this invariably produces a huge but short-lived spike in visitor numbers – I guess the majority of USS Clueless fans are unlikely to become permanent readers of my blog.
Finally, when I started the blog I saw it in part as an exercise in cross-promotion with my website, and it has succeeded in this respect – I get more visitors to the website and a steady flow of referrals back to the blog. I didn’t realise, of course, that moving from running a website to running a blog was like going from marijuana to crack cocaine, but it’s too late now.
What I should be reading is Magill and Quinzii Incomplete Markets, an excellent work on finance theory that drops the usual assumptions of perfect rationality and complete markets. Of course, this is just the time when I decide it would be a good idea to reread the complete works of Nick Hornby and watch the movie versions for purposes of comparison. So far we’ve all watched the movie of Fever Pitch and I’ve reread most of it, as well as High Fidelity.
Tim Blair finally concedes (only implicitly) that opponents of war aren’t anti-American, saying “It’s all about Bush. These people are as shallow as Lake Eyre .”
Tim, and other warbloggers who have taken the same line, are showing the shallowness of their own thinking. Of course it’s about Bush and his Administration. In any war, the questions “What are we fighting for” and “Who are we fighting for” are at least as important as “Who and what are we fighting against”. Having judged that the Bush Administration is consistently dishonest and pursues policies based on a narrow calculation of the short-term interests of the United States (and in domestic policy, only the wealthiest inhabitants of the United States), I’m unwilling to follow them into a war if I can avoid it.
In the particular case of Iraq, if you don’t believe the statements of the Bush Administration, the core of the casus belli, namely the need for immediate action on WMDs, collapses completely, as does the claim that war with Iraq will assist in fighting terrorism. And if you don’t trust them to engage in constructive democratic nationbuilding in the aftermath of a war, the humanitarian case for war also fails.
Update Kevin Drum reaches much the same conclusion, based particularly on the exposure that claims about Saddam’s nuclear capabilities (which were, at one time, central to the Administration case for war) were based on clumsily faked documents. Kevin attributes the Administration’s acceptance of these documents to incompetence rather than dishonesty, but the logic is the same.
For a variety of reasons related to post-war planning and Bush’s seeming indifference about tearing down international institutions in order to get his way, I’ve been on the fence about war with Iraq for several weeks now. Basically, I figured that all it would take is one more thing to send me into the anti-war camp, and I think this is it. If we’re planning to start a war based on intelligence from the same guys who made this mistake, it’s time to take a deep breath and back off.
I still believe strongly that we need a tough-minded long-term policy aimed at eradicating terrorism and modernizing the Arab world (among others) — and that this policy should include the use of force where necessary — but not this time. This is the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
Further update Jean-Paul of The Agonist has also switched away from support for war, calling the bogus claims “One lie too many”. Josh Marshall reaches the same conclusion, on slightly different grounds.
The pros and cons of handling Iraq have never been separable from how you do it, the costs you rack up in the doing of it, calculated against the gains you’ll get in having accomplished it. At this point, we truly have the worst case scenario on the international stage. And I think that those costs now outweigh the gains.
(links via Matthew Iglesias. And the NYT has also switched. It’s pretty clear that it’s now or never (or at least not for a long while), as far as war is concerned. The latest evidence means that Powell’s UN dossier, which still forms the core of the Administration case, has been comprehensively discredited (the only substantial evidence still standing is that from the telephone intercepts, which are essentially uncheckable). It will take a week or so for this to sink in among people who follow the news less closely than those I’ve cited above, but the decline in support for war is only going to accelerate.
An imam in Britain has been sentenced to nine years jail for incitement to murder and inciting racial hatred. This raises the question of whether a separate offence of inciting racial hatred is necessary. In this case, I don’t think so. The standard law prohibiting incitement to murder was adequate, and I think it was unreasonable to tack two years of consecutive imprisonment for inciting racial hatred onto the main sentence. On the other hand, it would be easy enough for a moderately clever preacher of racial hatred to word their statements in such a way as to encourage racial attacks without actually saying enough to be convicted of incitement to murder.
I noted a couple of days ago that the economic argument on Kyoto has largely been won. The BCA shift to a neutral position reflects the fact that the economic costs of Kyoto will be small. Warwick McKibbin <a href="http://www.msgpl.com.au/msgpl/download/ep10.pdf”>continues to argue (PDF file) that his alternative provides a better way of dealing with uncertainty about implementation costs, and he makes some good points. In my view, Warwick’s arguments are more applicable to the design of a substantial post-Kyoto initiative than to the first steps involved in Kyoto itself.
It might be useful to point to some developments in the scientific debate, with the warning that, like most bloggers, I’m not an expert on most of the relevant issues.
The most impressive evidence against the global warming hypothesis (GWH) has been the satellite data, which originally showed a strong cooling trend, directly contrary to the evidence of surface-level warming. The inconsistency was partially resolved when Matthias Schabel and Frank Wentz pointed out that the measurements, taken by a team led by John Christy at the University of Alabama, had failed to account properly for the gradual decay of satellite orbits. When this adjustment was made, the satellite data showed a weak upward trend. There’s been a bit of back and forth adjustment since then, but now Schabel and Wentz have struck again with a statistical analysis (PDF file that brings the satellite data much closer to the ground-level, though there is still a gap between the trends. This research is still unpublished, and no doubt there will be more debate, but it looks as though the contradiction between the data sets has been reduced to a minor anomaly, which will be resolved in due course. As Schabel and Wentz note in their abstract, this is bad news for critics of the standard modelling of water vapor feedbacks, who have relied heavily on the satellite data.
A second area of contention has concerned events at the poles. I tend not to put too much weight on this because I’ve formed the impression that polar climates are inherently highly variable, poorly understood and subject to severe measurement problems. This impression has been reinforced by what I’ve seen over the last year or so, which seems to have something for everybody. On the one hand, the spectacular break up of an ice-shelf recently gave rise to this report suggests that sea-level rise may proceed more rapidly than was previously thought. On the other hand, large parts of Antarctica appear to be cooling, not warming, which is not what the GW models predict.
Although it often seems as if these issues will never be resolved, at least one hypothesis should be subject to a conclusive test in the next few years. A number of sceptics have argued that the high global temperatures of recent years are due to the combination of variable solar activity and the El Nino cycle. No-one disputes the importance of El Nino, but the solar cycle idea is rejected by most climatologists.
Sceptic John Daly points out that the peak of solar activity has passed, which he says should imply declining global temperatures over the next few years. Obviously it would be good for all of us if he was right – on the standard version of the GWH, serious environmental damage seems inevitable even if we implement then extend Kyoto.
If, as I expect, we see a continuation of the warming trend, an acceptance by Daly and others that their hypothesis had been refuted might help to mobilise serious action.
Unfortunately, there is always the intermediate possibility of data that is not conclusive either way. Murphy’s Law suggests that this is what we’ll get.
John Quiggin 