-Phillip

This analogy makes little sense. Israel and Iran have never actually gone to war with each other. Iran has had ample opportunity, with the recent incursion between Lebanon and Israel in 2006 providing the last chance. While it’s true that both sides have engaged in a low scale style of warfare with the years using quasi-terrorist third parties to disrupt the other, neither has out-and-out declared war on the other. Even before Israel had nuclear weapons Iran resisted the urge to go to war. This has shown a level of constraint that India and Pakistan have failed to demonstrate, and if anything, goes to prove just how devastating both nations leaders believe a full on war would be.

By far though, the best part of the argument is that we should use preemptive violence because our ability to accomplish our objectives through non-violent means just aren’t as good as they used to be. To wit:

…the trick with nuclear-armed opponents, as former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger pointed out last year, is to stop a potential aggressor before the trouble starts, not to retaliate afterward. That requires a constant and patient engagement with allies and foes, not just making sporadic threats. Unfortunately, Schlesinger said last year, that skill has eroded badly.

What this basically boils down to is that we’ve slacked off on our ability to create meaningful negotiations has been downplayed, so rather then trying to beef that skill back up we should just go out and start kicking ass!

Forget the fact this would create far more problems then it would solve, forget the fact that massive force projection would almost certainly create retaliatory attacks on our own forces, the simple fact is that we just don’t have the power use military force in such a way. With two wars already going on in the region, and with troop deployments in over eighty different other nations, the U.S. simply does not have the capacity to enter into any sort of meaningful military engagement with Iran. This would require more then just a simple air strike. If we attack Iran, then it would be guaranteed that they would try to strike back, not through some sort of terrorist or quasi-terrorist group like Hamas, but through their State. And with our troops in Iraq exposed, they could certainly cause some damage as well as destroy what little sort of progress we’ve made in Iraq. It would make it essentially impossible to stabilize the region on any sort of meaningful timeframe.

I think that it’s a bad idea for nuclear weapons to be put into new nation’s hands. But I also think that sometimes you have to understand the limit of what you can conceivably accomplish. If the United States wants to try to enter into talks with Iran and convince them that having a nuclear weapon is a bad idea, I say go for it. But giving up while there’s still time to negotiate and entering into another needless war is senseless and foolish. Let’s at least wait until Iran is set to complete the bomb before we cut off our options.

-Phillip

Most of the things that you’ve heard about when it comes to helping the environment generally end up hurting it. Traditional recycling of paper and plastic actually uses up more energy and resources converting the used material into something useable then it does to simply build a new item. Ethanol subsidies make it economically viable for farmers to switch away from food stuffs which has helped to drive up food costs around the world, damaging people’s ability in poorer nations to meet their basic substance levels. Denying high nitrate fertilizers to those poorer nations also ends up creating economical damage as by far the number one reason for the destruction of the rainforest comes from people trying to expand farming. Allowing fertilizers and other high end technology would create greater efficiency for the land that the farmers already have. And those hybrid cars that you hear everyone talk about? Having to create a whole new car negates any potential windfall that might get out of this short lived car. If you really wanted to be conscious about your driving vehicle, then you should go out and buy a used car. All these activities do is consume more resources, something which, I’m told, environmentalists are against.

So what should we do to try and create a better environment? Well, I’m inclined to listen to Cato scholar Jerry Taylor and his advocacy of a more free market approach. When a person is under a profit motive to lower resource use so as to increase overall productivity and maximize profits then they have a fairly compelling motive for trying to reduce waste. If one company doesn’t reduce its costs, then another company surely will and the first company will lose market share due to its higher costs. People have a natural incentive to use less because it means more profit. Interfering with the market allows for people to game the system, costing the taxpayers money while not providing any sort of assistance to the environment; much like the massive subsides mentioned above for ethanol production.

So for those of you who actually care about the environment, and don’t want to just feel good about themselves, do the research and find out what these “green” activities actually mean. If you really want to help the Earth, then stop “helping” out through these unhelpful, and costly, practices. Or you could always join me on a pointless and destructive protest to spread awareness. Either way is fine by me.   

Bonus Tips on how to protest from the Daily Caller

-Phillip

-Phillip

First off it’s worth noting that the statement comes in the form of a non-binding agreement, which means that if the nations that agreed to it fail to follow through, then there is no penalty. This is usually a sign that the people signing it don’t actually intend to follow through, but are doing it because it’ll play well in the media. All nations that is, except for the United States. It would not play out so well on the international stage if the Obama administration did not at least attempt to do the plan that they themselves proposed. Still, the idea that the agreement is for four years from now means that there is at least the theoretical possibility that a different person might be in the White House when the completion date comes up, and that person might have different ideas about the agreement. Still, one could safely assume that the United States intends to follow through with their push to secure all nuclear material within four years time.

So, what does this mean exactly? The document makes no claims as to what “secure” actually looks like, or to what standards it would be held up against. Likewise a definition of what “nuclear material” constitutes. If it literally means any material that might conceivably be used to create a nuclear weapon, that’s a rather broad definition. There’s a big step between possessing uranium and creating a nuclear weapon with it. A large amount of processing needs to be done before the material can even begin to take the form of a dangerous weapon.

Just to give you an idea, Iran and North Korea have had access to nuclear material under this definition for several decades, yet have been mostly unsuccessful in refining it into a viable nuclear weapon. North Korea is thought to have under a dozen low yield warheads and Iran possesses none at all. Both of these nations have invested billions of dollars and decades of time into trying to create nuclear weapons. The chances that some small terrorist group might be able to do so with a block of unrefined uranium or plutonium is quite small.

The last group that tried to do so was the Aum Shinrikyo, a terrorist group out of Japan, back in the 1990’s. They eventually settled on the use of sarin gas as nuclear weapons proved to be too expensive and hard to create and only managed to kill thirteen people. This despite having invested more then a billion dollars into creating weapons of mass destruction.   

This is not to say that we shouldn’t secure nuclear material, but we shouldn’t spend money out of proportion to the threat either. Part of the agreement had Canada agreeing to ship all of its nuclear waste, an ingredient for nuclear weapons, to the United Sates for safekeeping. It also had Mexico downgrading a nuclear power plant to a lower yield reactor so that any potential material stolen would be harder to format for a weapon. These things just don’t need to happen. Both nations are capable of securing their own material independent of United States interference, and the chance of terrorists being able to do anything with the material is low even if they did get their hands on it. All that this does is put an extra financial strain on the United States.

It’s not a bad thing to secure the nuclear material that is our there, we just need to recognize the dangers that it actually represents. It is far more likely that terrorism will strike by way of more conventional means. If we’re going to invest money in counter-terrorism measures, lets make sure that the money is actually going towards programs that could actually make us safe, rather then just make us feel safe.

-Phillip

The Economist’s report on ‘remote-control warfare’ refers troublingly to an ongoing refinement in automated warfare aimed at answering those here and abroad who are questioning the ethics of this futuristic form of combat. Cited is Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing.

He proposes involving the drone itself — or rather, the software that is used to operate it — in the decision to attack.

‘In effect,’ the article continues, ‘he plans to give the machine a conscience.’

Is this science-fiction? As I will demonstrate next week, Arkin is not alone among American high-tech explorers devising non-human target killings in attacks on terrorism. To elaborate on the inventive Arkin approach, “The software conscience that Dr. Arkin and his colleagues have developed is called Ethical Architecture.”

During attacks, the judgment of the automated and autonomous Predator or Reaper drone ‘may be better than a human’s because it operates so fast and knows so much. And — like a human but unlike most machines — it can learn.’ After a strike, this ever-alert machine can indeed learn from other sources whether the damage it caused — including dead civilians — exceeded its intentions.

With this information, a drone with a conscience can more precisely tailor future attacks and instruct other drones on how to more carefully direct their Hellfire missiles. Thereby, these ethical drones can provide support to future American officials defending the use of killer drones by showing how carefully the United States is working to be humane in its self-defense against international terrorism.

Full post here.

It’s a real interesting proposal, one that would be extremely compelling if it could work out. I’m not a programming expert, so I’m not sure just how feasible this is, or how long it would take to implement. I will say that I am incredibly reticent of putting the sole responsibility of appropriate force to use when killing people in a machines sole hands. There needs to be some sort of overall human control in the process, if nothing else because it removes the onus of responsibility when civilian deaths, or hell any deaths, occur. Seriously, who gets blamed when the drones kill an innocent bystander? It’s not like there’s a course of action that can legally be taken against a machine. If a machine decides to use excessive force because of a programming error, or it calculates that it’s needed to complete the mission then there would be nothing to stop this autonomous device from unneeded violence. Barring those *minor* problems, I think that at the very least these ideas are worth looking into. After all, what’s the worst that could happen when implementing killing machines?

-Phillip

-          Learning job skill as an unpaid intern is, like, bad man.

-          New research confirms what we already guessed: Government spending crowds out private spending.

-          Despite what some liberals are hoping for, Obama might actually make immigration harder, not easier.

It seems that every year someone puts out a piece on how nothing could be more American then paying your taxes. This year the piece by James Carroll in the Boston Globe caught my eye. Carroll, with all the sweet naiveté of a five year old, claims that taxes are “a prompt for gratitude because the returns we file, checks included, are both a signal and a precondition of the sacred treasure we share as a people – also known as commonwealth. Taxes are its sacrament.”

This laughable idea, that taxes hold some sort of holy and mystical quality over Americans, is almost too much to handle with a straight face. Several times during my reading of the piece I questioned if the article was some sort of joke. And while the architecture of the IRS building in DC does tend to resemble a temple, I’m not so sure that people use holy words when thinking about it (unless as a prefix for the word “damn”).

Unfortunately, the piece was not a joke. This was truly a heartfelt writing about the joys of taxes. Carroll even managed to try and insert some historical evidence for his thoughts, claiming that the original Tea Party was “took the government’s right and duty to levy taxes for granted,” they just wanted it to be their government. This on the surface is true, the Americans of the day wanted to be legally represented for their taxes. But it wasn’t simply so that the people taking their money were a part of their local framework; it was because they wanted to be free of unneeded taxes.

The whole idea behind the Tea Party, and eventually the Revolution, was that the British government was taxing products and services unnecessarily. The British were pressed for cash due to their large empire and constant quarrels with France and Spain. To offset their negative cash flow they put forth a series of duties on American goods. High use products such as paper, stamps, and tea were all heavily taxed. This was on top of laws demanding that Americans could only buy these products from British sources. This meant that the price was already higher due to a lack of competition in the government enforced monopoly. To add taxes to this meant that many of these products were placed out of reach of the normal person. To add insult to injury, the revenue that was collected by taxes was largely sent back to the British Isles, essentially creating a complicated form of tribute from the Americas. For the Americans to demand representation to give into taxation was to demand that money not be siphoned off for some cause that they didn’t care about or need. They wanted representation so that if their money was going to be taken, it would at least be used for something that they could all gain from.

This is the same reason why the people of the modern Tea Party, which Carroll pooh-poohs, are protesting. The government is taking increasing amounts of money from the public to pay for things that it doesn’t want. Even worse, it continues to draw in even more money through lending to ensure that future tax rates will be even higher.

A grossly bloated defense budget, expanding entitlements in the form of Medicaid and Social Security benefits, these are all things that a vast majority of people don’t benefit from. Taking their hard earned money to pay for them is a blatant example of robbing Peter to pay Paul. When people grumble about having to pay taxes, it’s not that the vast majority of them want the government to cut all spending. It’s that they want that spending to be done on things that will matter, and benefit everyone. If someone is going to demand your money from you, the least that they can do is spend it wisely, and not take any more of it then they absolutely have to.

-Phillip

Even under the best of intentions innocent people get killed, there’s really no way around it. This is why people should think long and hard when they quickly jump on the war bandwagon, because things like this are what’s going to happen. So the question becomes, do the ends justify the means?

-Phillip

The purpose of a nuclear arsenal is three fold. First: to provide a viable means of deterrence to prevent attack. Secondly: to provide the basis for a first strike capacity when facing a clear and present danger that must be eliminated swiftly and completely to prevent a first strike against one’s own nation. And thirdly: to provide the means for a second strike to be inflicted upon an aggressor nation that had already launched a first strike themselves.

The real value comes in the form of the first objective: deterrence. A first strike can cost the aggressor nation an incredible amount of ill-will in the international community and almost never tends to be justified from a moral standpoint. It could also lead to a similar attack on one’s own nation to prevent any further first strikes or in a “revenge style” second strike from the victim nation. A second strike, while useful for meting out consequences to an aggressor nation, cannot reverse the damage already done that made it necessary for a second strike to begin with. Deterrence therefore is the means that will ultimately provide the most use for a nation, preventing the use of violence in the first place.

Understanding this, the decision to cut back our ability to respond to weapons of mass destruction is frustrating at best. For deterrence to work properly, the enemy has to be convinced that it could be on the receiving end of a nuclear strike. Yet if we have already put forth a doctrine that countermands that argument, then it incentivizes our enemies to use those weapons. The best possible situation for an enemy of America is to engage in brinksmanship, doing as much damage as they can while receiving as little overwhelming force directed at them as possible. If we remove the one major component of that overwhelming force, nuclear weapons, then we remove a major impediment to attacking the United States or its forces.

For a third world dictator, the value chart is different then in democratized nations. There is no incentive to care about the people of the nation; they are only useful as a power base to prop up the tyrant. Many are willing to trade the deaths of a handful of American troops or civilians for the destruction of their own military base and the death of several military troops. Examples of this can be seen in pre-invasion Iraq when Suddam Hussein would regularly try to destroy American aircraft and personnel, despite the retaliatory strikes against military targets that would always follow. Yet during all of this, there was never an instance when Hussein used chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops, not even during the first Gulf War when America freed Kuwait. Despite possessing ample supply and opportunity to use these weapons, the threat of nuclear retaliation against his country, wiping out his power base as well as himself, kept him in check. Without those same kinds of threats, who’s to say that some other nation won’t try and use chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops?

Keeping our options to use nuclear weapons in a retaliatory strike is a key part of our nuclear deterrence strategy. When the President takes away the use of deterrence, our nuclear weapons provide a much smaller benefit, rendering useless their greatest asset. This strategy seriously harms Americas national security capabilities and opens us up to attacks from weapons of mass destruction without the fear of a like reprisal.

-Phillip