A new Iraqi government. Yippee?

I can't shake the feeling that the Iraqi government is largely irrelevant now. What's been going on in the 'burbs and countryside -- the gradual (well, quick and violent) "cleansing" of neighborhoods to purely Shi'ite or purely Sunni, the infiltration of the police and even the armed forces by private militias (especially al-Sadr's Mahdi Brigade) -- makes all the haggling and grudging compromise in the capital (and only a small part of it, at that) seem like a puppet-show, engaging to us but utterly ignored by the Iraqi populace -- or, at least, the segments of it that are interested in violence. And I guess my point is that those segments are big enough to render any promise of stemming the violence . . . irrelevant.

The counter-argument to that is that the militias are represented in the government, but I have to point out that that could just mean that any set-back by one militia's party shall result in violent reprisals in the streets. One journalist, recently returned from Iraq, characterizes the civil war there not as incipient, not as looming, not as "at the brink of", but "raging". Yay for me and my admittedly discredited prediction, I guess, but it seems to me to be the more accurate assessment of the relevance of the new Iraqi government than the Bush-Blair sunshine.

Am I just being negative?

Guantanamo and U.S. law

You know, when the Bush administration asserts that the detention of individuals at Guantanamo (or anywhere, for that matter) are in compliance with U.S. law, I have to wonder which law they mean.

When I say it absolutely violates U.S. law for the federal government to capture individuals inside or outside the United States, detain them in secret, and subject them (either through official policy or individual discretion in opposition thereof), I know exactly what law I'm talking about: the Constitution. You know, the supreme law of our country.

Amendment V states, "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." The exception noted for War or public danger refer members of our military, not "enemy combatants". That leaves the amendment stating not that "no citizen" or "no American" shall be held without due process, but "no person".

Amendment VII sates, "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." Again, no distinction is made between citizens and non-citizens.

That's the letter of the law, and it fits the spirt of the law: the Constitution does not specifiy the rights of citizens, but the limits on the federal government. I've said it before, and it makes me tired to have to say it again. And the absence (or explicit denial) of authority to do something cannot be changed by a legislative act, but only by a Constitutional amendment. There having been none, well, the members of the Bush administration have violated their oaths to defend the Constitution, and are therefore traitors who must be removed from office immediately -- at the very least.

But I should point out one more thing. The Executive branch (including the military, and the Guantanamo base) does not have its own money, but gets appropriations from Congress. So every legislator who votes to approve appropriations for prisoner detention at Guantanamo (or for extraordinary renditions) is every bit as much of a traitor as Bush is. Further, the ones bitching about U.S. actions that are un-Constitutional while still voting to pay for them are out-and-out cowards. Observe, the fatal flaw of democracy: the mob, and those who pander to it. If politicians would have the courage and the eloquence to enumerate the reasons against and the costs of un-Constitutional actions, maybe citizens would actually listen to him or her. But, like the number of licks to the center of a Tootsie-Pop, the world will never know.

Official language . . . again

I'm kind of wondering why Senators Inhofe, Sessions, Coburn, Bunning, and Burns feel amendment 3996, defining English as the official language of government, is necessary. Obviously, I think it's not.

I was going to add a bunch here, but Deborah Schildkraut has done a really good job already.

Further, the Constitution does not authorize the federal government to tell citizens what language to speak. States, or course, might decide to make English their official language -- and several states have. But guess what'll happen: the Hispanics will become the majority there, and rather than an executive order authorizing translation of the English laws, their core will demand an actual change in the law itself, making Spanish coequal with English or -- and I would laugh my ass off if so -- making it the official language of the state. I know that wouldn't happen, but it would serve those ignorant sub-humans right to have to petition for translation of the law into English. Leave the language of government business as English, by habit, without codification, and allow the executive branch to translate the law (with the presumption that the English translation is predominant in any translated ambiguity) -- don't expect the minority, upon outnumbering you, to show you the consideration you failed to show to its members when you outnumbered them.

Man, this shit makes me tired.

Mass marketing and those of us in the middle

So I was reading a piece on China in USN&WR, and a couple of sentences caught my attention. The upshot of said passages was that manufacturers are now producing goods for the Chinese consumer, to fit their tastes. The fact that Chinese consumers are tying their tastes to those in the West as China has tied the yuan to the dollar only intensified a sense of discomfort.

I was a short-haired head-banger who graduated in the top ten percent of my high school class; I didn't live the life, I just liked the music. My friends and I watched in dismay as MTV replaced Headbangers' Ball with yet another three hours of Yo MTV raps, and shook our heads in bewilderment at the popularity of Madonna and the Eurogliders.

I have a relatively short torso and arms so long that I get road rash on my knuckles if I slouch. Tell me where I can find a shirt that both completely covers my arms and doesn't hang down to my knees or flow like a fucking tent -- certainly not at Walmart or Target.

I've already mentioned that I was a big fan of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer -- but none of the products advertized on that program held the least interest to me. Meanwhile, I've seen American Gothic, The Tick, and Wonderfalls get pulled off the air, and I've heard that HBO pulled Carnivale -- all shows that I (and my wife) really liked.

I am one of many victims of mass consumerism. Between sizes, demographically inappropriate in entertainment choices, I am doomed to have my tastes completely ignored by the major producers and distributors, and be forced to pay twice as much for stuff that fits me and my preferences. And with several, I don't know, trillion foreigners set to add their tediously conformist voices to those listened to by the mass market, my situation (and that of those like me) can only get worse.

A reasoning person must conclude that the first evil is found in demographic and actuarial analysis, where individuals are destroyed and replaced with composites of superficial details. If I give my age, my ethnic heritage, my education and income level, my birth order, my places of birth and residence, my preference in music, books, movies, etc. -- for a market analyst or an actuary, that's all there is to know. On that basis, they feel they can determine my future, or what I am willing to buy. And they're almost always wrong. But I can never correct them, because I am never heard: only my age, ethnic heritage, etc.

I'm sure folks smarter than (and not as smart as) I have written much more erudite and eloquent diatribes about this sort of thing, so I'll just give up now. I just wanted to throw this out there as one of the unforeseen consequences of the rise of a Chinese and Indian consumer class.

Energy III: Ethanol -- someone's smoking corn-silk

I've been avoiding this because I don't have all that much to say. The bottom line is the same that I have given for hydrogen: ethanol cannot be produced by burning ethanol. At best, we are burning petroleum at a different point of our energy cycle, and getting correspondingly less energy from doing so. We may be producing less particulate pollution, and less carbon monoxide, but that by definition means an ethanol reaction produces more carbon dioxide. To be sure, carbon dioxide is not as toxic as its oxygen-deficient relative, but there is no serious challenge to the conclusion that human activity has raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to levels last seen when global temperatures were higher than they are now -- and it's probably as cool as it is now only because particulate smog has deflected sunlight, dropping temperatures an average 1 degree for every 2.5 degrees they are raised by greenhouse gas heat retention (I confess: I saw the Nova episode). For this reason, ethanol is even less realistic than hydrogen.

As I noted on Sage Thrasher's site, we've known for a while that producing ethanol from corn results in a net energy loss. A study by David Pimental puts that energy loss at 41% -- more than 4/10ths of energy used to create ethanol is simply lost. Other studies indicate a loss higher than 65%.

These figures are based on the energy required to grow the corn, as well as to ferment ethanol from it, and as such represent some problems: given that we also eat corn, and assertions by some commentators that usable materials remain after fermentation, some of that energy may be improperly allocated to the fuel generating processes. However, that calls into question how much arable land, fertilizer, waste-water processing, and other costs would be involved producing enough ethanol (from corn, which is much less glucose-rich than Brazil's sugar) to replace the 100 million gallons of gasoline we use each day. If we assume that 36.5 billion gallons of gasoline per year represents 111 T(tera)g (803 kg/cubic meter; .0038 cubic meters/gal), that means about 4,771,000 TJ (teraJoules) per year. That would require 179 Tg of ethanol, or 59.5 billion gallons. Further assuming 406 gallons of ethanol per acre of corn, that would mean 146 million acres. Further assuming 78 million acres under corn, that would mean we would have to cultivate under corn almost twice as many acres as we do now. Even assuming that we could, through improved vehicle efficiency, satisfy demand with only the current 78 million acres, that would mean none of that corn could be used to make popcorn, corn fritters, corn tortillas, or high-fructose corn syrup. And that assumes that we use some other energy source than ethanol to produce that ethanol.

Check my math, if you like. I can see no way that ethanol can replace gasoline in the U.S. Those who propound it as such are clearly smoking corn silk. Or perhaps blowing said smoke to score political points in the Midwest.

So you have an energy source we couldn't even produce in sufficient amounts to run our transportation system, which releases carbon dioxide when produced and more carbon dioxide when combusted in an engine. Hydrogen's better, and you know what I think about hydrogen.

Immigration

I'm so tired of this debate. I already did a piece about this, and I support the Libertarian position of open immigration, so I deem the whole issue of "amnesty" irrelevant. Illegal immigrants should be given a blanket amnesty, given visas, and allowed to come and go as they please -- subject to inspection of luggage, as called for by scanning or whatever random determination ICE may use. Subsequently, the U.S. should work with countries (okay, Mexico) to check the visas of everyone entering the U.S. -- no visa, no entry. We'd also have to grant amnesties for documentary fraud in specific cases. That'd mean a lot of new, temporary offices for legitimizing folks all over the country, and more surveillance at the border for the longer term. Again, though, that's only after we give visas to everyone who's already here -- and without liberalizing visa application, we'll be right back here again in another 20 years.

I refer you to my piece on citizenship & suspicion (link above), because some of y'all may be bleeding from the ears at the thought of TERRORISTS entering our country with impunity. Empowering platitudes aside, an individual cannot make a difference: unless you've got a virulently communicable disease or a bomb in your belly, you're no more threat to me than some redneck with a rifle in his truck. Again, the state must control the border (and once we have a functioning visa system, there shall be considerably less ambivalence on catching and detaining illegal border crossers), and in doing that, visa application background checks, and inspection of luggage, we'll oblige even the most evil and brilliant of evil geniuses to buy their tools of mayhem here. If you want to talk about black market arms et al., well, that's a whole other topic that's important whether it includes immigrants or not.

An immigrant visa is not citizenship, and we would still need naturalization procedures -- and it'd be like sampling the merchandize before committing to buying it: work and other records of immigrants would certainly give us an idea of whether we'd want them in the club for real. We'd still need records of citizenship for voting, and for claiming any other rights of citizenship. We can not hold that law enforcement, innoculations, or even emergency care are services only for citizens, because they are all designed to keep citizens safe: by stopping criminals no matter who their victims are; by preventing endemic childhood illnesses from becoming epidemic; and by removing the need show id before getting a tourniquet -- and all of these things also useful in making sure tourists aren't afraid to come to a city. Public schooling provides a means of indoctrinating and assimilating the children of non-citizens, instilling in them the insidious notion of individual rights and responsibilities, which they can spread in their home countries (spreading democracy more effectively than by military conquest). Remeber that all of these are funded by property and sales taxes at the local level, which individuals who rent property or buy goods pay, no matter what their status -- and they are provided to citizens even who are poor. Non-citizens shouldn't get Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, or other forms of federal welfare, although one should bear in mind that everyone getting a paycheck pays FICA tax; of course, y'all know what I think about Social Security.

So that's my plan. I'm sure it'll generate disagreement, which is fine. A few ground rules, though:

1) No claims that immigrants, legal or otherwise, overwhelm local services: see above on local taxes. Also, see below on the relative effects to the tax base of a lower-wage workforce or an unemployed one.
2) No claims that immigrants, legal or otherwise, depress wages. It is not immigrants that depress wages, but the presence all over the world of individuals who can do the same work for less money. That, and the fact that an absence of legal status makes one less likely to change jobs or report abuse. I mean, without immigrants, legal or otherwise, there would be no U.S. domestic textile industry. Remember where most of our manufacturing started going in the 1980s? Notice where our call centers and software development is going now? It is always better to have the work done and the wages earned inside your tax jurisdiction. My depressingly stupid distant relative, Dana Rohrbacher (among others), talks as though an individual has the right to a job, but true Americans know that you have the right only to such job as someone is willing to pay you to do. If you lack the skills to command a high salary, you don't get one. Hell, illegal immigrants are coming in, getting paid shit, and still sending money home, so surely Americans can do the work for the same salary. It's also important to note that Mexicans who come here illegally have already been recruited: a friend of a friend of an employee of a guy says the guy would be willing to hire the friend of the friend of the friend of his current employee, who's probably related to or from the same town as said new recruit.
3) No claims that immigrants, legal or otherwise, represent security risks. Security is contextual: we have cops to protect us in our homes and in public spaces, and such spaces as need more have more -- and activities are dangerous or wrong no matter what the status of the individual doing them.
4) No claims that immigrants, legal or otherwise, are "destroying America". America isn't about a language, or about a religion, or an ethnicity, or a culture; it's a set of ideas that xenophobic fascists have forgotten: power corrupts, no individual's ability or virtue is knowable, that government is best which governs least. I can translate the Constitution into each of the six languages I speak besides English: the ideas transcend the language of their articulation. That means that you don't get to use the power of the state to tell someone else what language to speak, metaphysical belief to hold, color or costume to wear -- or what to do at all unless it has direct effect on another individuals sovereignty over self and property. Never mind that immigrants of this century are following the same trends as those of other centuries: the adults may never learn English, but their children always do, and they and are subjected to the same pressures as all kids to fit in -- you know, assimilate. Historical trends of immigrant populations, applicable to illegals from Mexico as well, show that by the third generation, the language of the immigrants is, in the majority of cases, no longer spoken (or spoken well, anyway).
5) No claims about ethnic superiority or inferiority, or anything else that cannot be demonstrated through evidence. You know, like that America is a Christian country.

And remember, as always: I'm right about this.