Although this thing has already died, I’ve already seen a number of bloggers on the left come out in support of this dumbass idea :

Most of the criticism seems to focus on its being distasteful or improper to bet on death. But shouldn’t the primary consideration be whether the system actually works? Isn’t it our government’s job to “bet on death” insofar as it allocates military resources based on its evaluation of most dangerous threats to national security? Doesn’t the government “bet on death” when it decides to build more airplanes and fewer tanks, or vice versa? It seems to me that market-based decision making is simply another tool for the government to do what it is already doing - and if it is an effective tool… shouldn’t we be using it?

Why? Because it will add even more data to an intelligence system that can’t deal with the data it already has. It would be one thing if this was an expansion of surveillance in existing markets. (After all, 9/11 was “predicted” by some questionable trends in the real stock market.) But setting up a new system in which people can bet on future terrorist activity is ludicrous.

Just like the undefinable “chatter” that prompts our semi-annual jump to orange alert, a terrorism futures market would reflect vague trends that could likely have little bearing on reality. Maybe this kind of ambiguity is acceptable when trying to track elections and the movie industry, but we should expect something a little more solid when we’re trying to decide whether or not we should be going to war.

For example, let’s say an intelligence analyst gets a “hot tip” that Iraq is trying to buy a bunch of Uranium in Niger and before sending this data into the intelligence ether (where it will soon be debunked), the analyst buys 1000 shares of “Iraq acquires a nuclear weapon”. With the analyst’s big buy, the price of I.a.n.w. starts to go up. Despite the fact that the IAEA, the UN, and the CIA express public doubts that Iraq has a nuclear program, the rising price of I.a.n.w. prompts others in the market to invest. Soon the rising price of I.a.n.w. is used to boost previously murky evidence such as aluminum tubes being used to enrich uranium. Before too long, I.a.n.w. is going through the roof and every piece of evidence is compared against the “conventional wisdom” (as determined by the market) that Iraq has clearly acquired a nuclear weapon. At this point, the president’s administration is stuck in a situation wherein they “know” that Iraq has a nuclear weapon but don’t have any specific undeniable evidence to support the claim.

Okay, maybe that example was a little over the top, but I think you get my point. Markets have a tendency to give too much credibility to whims and hunches. Sure, these hunches may often turn out to be legit, but you can say the same thing about your horoscope. If there’s anything to be learned from the last few years, it’s that rampant speculation can often obscure an economic (or in this case, terrorist) reality. Any number of factors could quickly lead to a terrorist threat being falsely exaggerated to the point of turning into the Enron of this pseudo-market. To paraphrase Billmon, this terrorist futures market idea is a bunch of pseudoscientific garbage that should have no role in a serious intelligence gathering operation.

Great post from Oliver Willis today about Bush’s weakness in the war on terror :

America doesn’t negotitate with terrorists.

Groups who practice terrorism intentionally attack nonmilitary targets in an attempt to force governments to cave in to their demands and kowtow to their world view. History has shown us that while the short term effect of giving in to terrorism could save lives, in the long run it just encourages the immorality of civilian murder and even contributes to the deaths of more innocents. No matter what you give those who practice jihad, nothing will slake their bloodlust.

President George W. Bush made it clear in his post-9/11 speech to the nation and world that under his leadership the primary focus of the American government would be fighting against terrorism and states that support it. One of the main reasons given for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was that state’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction in conjunction with the claim that Saddam Hussein directly harbored and supported terrorists.

So why are Saudi Arabia’s criminal activities tolerated, aided, and covered up by the US government?

At some point, somebody needs to just come out and ask George W. Bush why he continues to go out of his way to hide the truth behind who and what caused this :

Okay, these free-market zealots have finally flown off the deep end :

The Pentagon is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.

Two senate senators demanded Monday the project be stopped before investors begin registering this week. “The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it’s grotesque,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said.
. . .
The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts ? essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.

A graphic on the market’s Web page showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown.
. . .
In its statement Monday, DARPA said that markets offer efficient, effective and timely methods for collecting “dispersed and even hidden information. Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions.”

First of all, the fact that our government is essentially setting up a terrorist bookmaking operation is despicable. This is one of the most callous and plainly retarded ideas I’ve ever heard come out of this government.

Secondly, the admission that our intelligence services aren’t as good at making predictions as the odds table at the racetrack isn’t something that should be taken lightly. If our intellegence agencies are that incompetent, shouldn’t we be more concerned with improving the intelligence than setting up some goofy-ass online casino?

And finally, as stupid as this idea is, there is a little nugget of truth here. Terrorist incidents can be predicted by market forces :

From August 26th to September 11th 2001, events in the stock market should have alerted those in government that something was amiss. Were those trades missed by our “experts’ that cost us 30 billion dollars in taxes each year or did our government know what was happening and look the other way?
The presently unknown “speculators” operated out of the Toronto, Canada and Frankfurt, Germany, stock exchanges and their profits have been estimated to be in the billions of dollars.

These speculators sold “short” 38 stocks that could reasonably be expected to fall in value as a result of the attacks of September 11. Short selling of stocks involves the opportunity to gain large profits by passing shares to a friendly third party, then buying them back when the price falls.

So far, there hasn’t been much revealed (as ar as I know) about the 9/11 insider traders, but it’s pretty clear that if the government is trying to root out terrorists, they should spend more time paying attention to the real stock market and forget about setting up their own betting pool.

Wasn’t the whole “seperate, but equal” thing settled a long time ago?

New York City is creating the nation’s first public high school for gays, bisexuals and transgender students.

The Harvey Milk High School will enroll about 100 students and open in a newly renovated building in the fall. It is named after San Francisco’s first openly gay city supervisor, who was assassinated in 1978.

“I think everybody feels that it’s a good idea because some of the kids who are gays and lesbians have been constantly harassed and beaten in other schools,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday. “It lets them get an education without having to worry.”
. . .
State Conservative Party Chairman Mike Long criticized the creation of the school.

“Is there a different way to teach homosexuals? Is there gay math? This is wrong,” Long said. “There’s no reason these children should be treated separately.”

The Hetrick-Martin Institute’s Web site says the school will give its students “an opportunity to obtain a secondary education in a safe and supportive environment. … We believe that success requires the ability to respect and value the diverse human community.”

First of all, the “gay math” thing made me laugh, but more importantly, Mike Long is totally right. Opening up a “gay-friendly” school is a terrible idea. Shouldn’t every school be “gay friendly”?

Why isn’t the “some of the kids who are gays and lesbians have been constantly harassed and beaten in other schools” quote raising a big red flag here? Does the New York public school system routinely look the other way at gay-bashing? Integrating schools isn’t just about giving minorities a safe learning environment, but making the rest of the kids learn how to be mature enough to accept people who are different.

If schools aren’t safe for everyone, then Mayor Bloomberg should make them safe. That means cracking down on anti-gay harrasment, punishing any school officials that condone harrasment, and, if necessary, using force to ensure that every kid is given an equal opportunity to learn. There’s a reason Kennedy had to send in the National Guard to forcefully integrate the University of Alabama. The fact that Bloomberg is taking the easy way out shows how little he cares about the rights of homosexuals.

Ever have one of those days where everything you read makes you think “I shouldn’t have to explain why this is wrong.”? Well, this is one of those days :

Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: “If you want your family released, turn yourself in.” Such tactics are justified, he said, because, “It’s an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info.” They would have been released in due course, he added later.

Never mind that this is (as Atrios has pointed out) a clear violation of the Geneva Convention. Common decency should dictate that you don’t kidnap the wives and children of your enemies and hold them hostage. Yes, this is a guerilla war, but that shouldn’t matter.

Isn’t one of the main reasons (I know, “what reasons?”) we’re there because we’re trying to set a moral example? I was under the impression that the military is trying to give the Iraqis hope through liberation. What’s the ultimate message that they’re trying to send? “We’re not quite as bad as Saddam”?

Considering that we’re spending much, much more on military than any other country, can’t we afford to at least pretend to be the good guys? Forgive me for getting a little off topic (and being overly optimistic) here, but it seems to me that one of the things we should expect from having a military as advanced as ours is to be able to take the moral high ground more often than we do. That not only means playing fair when your opponents are playing dirty, but playing by “the rules of war” that the rest of the world has agreed on.

From the indifference to civilian casualties (”Shock and Awe” anyone??), to the bombing of Iraqi state television, to the use of depleted uranium, clusterbombs, and landmines, to last week’s parading of the corpses of Saddam’s sons, it’s clear that the short-term results of our military’s “win at all costs” strategy have become as morally corrupt as those of the regimes that we’re trying to depose. Considering that we’re in the right here (as much as I oppose the war, Saddam was an evil guy) and that we’ve got massive amounts of resources at our disposal, why can’t our military “play” fair?

Despite what the Bush Administration thinks, the ends don’t justify the means. Fighting dirty, whether it’s a kid on the playground pulling someone’s hair or an American G.I. kidnapping an Iraqi child, is the kind of thing that you’d expect of someone who is weak and outmatched, not the most technologically advanced military on Earth. If our military is really the good guys here, maybe they should start acting like it.

Matt Yglesias has opened my eyes to the “flypaper theory”, which is one of the newest (to me anyways) justifications for the Iraq war (quotes via Talking Points Memo) :

Being based in Iraq helps us not only because of actual bases; but because the American presence there diverts terrorist attention away from elsewhere. By confronting them directly in Iraq, we get to engage them in a military setting that plays to our strengths rather than to theirs’. Continued conflict in Iraq, in other words, needn’t always be bad news. It may be a sign that we are drawing the terrorists out of the woodwork and tackling them in the open.

“Bring Them On”
Andrew Sullivan
andrewsullivan.com
July 3rd, 2003

Separately, Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, commander of coalition ground forces, told CNN that “we still have a long way to go” before eliminating resistance.
Iraq had become “a terrorist magnet,” drawing some anti-American extremists from abroad to “a target of opportunity.”

“But this,” General Sanchez added, “is exactly where we want to fight them.”

“U.S. Must Act on ‘Murky’ Data to Prevent Terror, Wolfowitz Says”
International Herald Tribune
July 27th, 2003

There’s a huge difference between signing up to defend your country and being used as a target. As Matt said, “Now, yes, the fact that our soldiers are volunteers does make some difference here, but still they’re soldiers not human shields. “, but it’s not even that simple. If our soldiers were being used as human shields, wouldn’t they be shielding something? If the “flypaper theory” is true, our soldiers are just being used to attract terrorist attacks. If the proponents of this line of reasoning had any intellectual honesty, they’d cut through the bullshit ephemisms and call this what it is : The Cannon Fodder Theory. I’m not entirely sure this theory is valid, but it would certainly explain Bush’s ambivalence towards the daily deaths of our soldiers.

Am I allowed to get offended over this or are conservatives the only ones allowed to love our flag? (link via DailyKos)

Bush really should know better than to write on a flag like that. I guess he doesn’t see the flag as being anything more than another scrap that he can use to write his signature on.

You know, the problem with liberals these days is that they get along too well and never, ever argue among themselves. Luckilly, Michael Tomasky is here to help change all that :

So here’s a thought for an enterprising senate candidate: Attack Nader right now, and with lupine ferocity. Say he’s a madman for thinking of running again. Blast him especially hard on foreign policy, saying that if it were up to the Greens, America would give no aid to Israel and it would cease to exist, and if it were up to the Greens, America would not have even defended itself against a barbarous attack by going into Afghanistan. Have at him, and hard, from the right. Then nail him from the left on certain social issues, on abortion rights and other things that he’s often pooh-poohed and dismissed as irrelevant. Cause an uproar. Be dramatic. Don’t balance it with praise about what he’s done for consumers. To the contrary, talk about how much he’s damaging consumers today by not caring who’s in charge of the Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Communications Commission.

I’m sure that felt good to get off his chest, but let’s get real here. I have plenty of problems with the behavior of the Greens during the 2000 election, but if Democrats want to win next year, they shouldn’t waste their time arguing with other progressives. At least Dennis Kucinich gets it :

We stand together in opposition to the death penalty; in support of living wages; in support of boosting alternative energy rather than wars for oil; in support of medicinal marijuana; in opposition to corporate hog farming; in support of organic farming; in opposition to nukes in space; in opposition to Star Wars; in support of cutting the military budget by 15% and applying those funds to public education.

We stand together for national health insurance, Canadian style. We stand together on public financing of campaigns, on same day voter registration, on instant runoff voting. We stand together on civil rights, and equal rights, and human rights. We stand together on voting reforms for ex-felons. We stand together on ending the trade and travel embargoes on Cuba. We stand together in opposition to the current war on drugs, which is all too often a war on the urban poor.

We stand together in demanding that publicly-owned clean water is a human right. We stand together in demanding that the developing world’s debt be forgiven, as if it were still the Jubilee Year; and that we act seriously to build a world in which arms sales decline, hunger declines, poverty declines, and human rights increase.

We stand together on rejoining the rest of the world, and signing the Kyoto Treaty, the International Criminal Court Treaty, the Land Mines Ban Treaty, and all the rest of the treaties and agreements and working relationships that the current Administration has so cavalierly tossed aside.

We stand together in opposition to excessive CEO salaries; in opposition to offshore tax havens for corporations; in support of real pension reforms, real SEC enforcement, real crackdowns on corporate scofflaws. And we stand together in opposition to sweetheart deals for corporate friends of this Administration, whether it’s Enron wrecking California for profit, the drug companies ripping off seniors and HIV patients and poor people for profit, or Halliburton ripping off Iraqi oil revenues for profit.

I am a Democrat, but I understand that Greens and Nader voters are not just liberal Democrats. Still, I note that in Europe, even when political parties disagree on issues, they are often able to work together with each other in coalition. I’d like to raise that possibility again today. And I note that Ralph Nader has suggested that my candidacy is worth supporting.

We all know we will do better if we work together. Perhaps we can find common ground on issues and principles. I would like to open up that possibility. And I would like to ask that you give serious consideration to my candidacy for President. Because a better world is still possible.

I have faith that most of the Greens who think there was no difference between Gore and Bush know the error of their ways by now. I can’t imagine a situation in which a significant number of progressive voters favor Bush over the senate candidate (and that includes Lieberman). Seriously, we need to get all this “Nader is an asshole” stuff out of our systems if we want to win next November.

It’s been 25 years since the first “test tube baby” was born :

Louise Brown, the world’s first “test tube” baby, celebrated her 25th birthday and the landmark fertility treatment that has led to an estimated one million babies throughout the world.

Now working in a post office in Bristol, southwest England, Louise made history on July 25, 1978, when she became the first baby to be born as a result of in vitro fertilisation (IVF).
. . .
In each case, the woman is given fertility drugs to help her produce more eggs. The eggs are surgically removed and fertilised in a laboratory. They are then placed in the womb, which has been prepared with hormone injections.
. . .
Despite a significant improvement in IVF success rates in the last decade, only one in six treatments in Britain is successful, according to the latest government figures.

At the time, religious groups accused the scientists behind this breakthrough of “playing God”, but in the years since has there been even one misuse of this technology? Are there mad scientists creating IVF babies as personal slaves or surrogate mothers giving birth to “test tube” babies just so we can harvest organs? Of course not. Like most knee-jerk reactions to scientific progress, all the worst-case scenarios were just a bunch of hogwash.

That said, wouldn’t now be a good time to reevaluate all the criticism that’s now being leveled at human cloning? With all the talk about “playing God” that’s now been adapted to the human cloning debate, does it really make sense to believe that all the horror stories that were supposed to come true with in vitro fertilization are any more valid now that they were 25 years ago?

Here’s one that’s slipped through the cracks :

The former head of the world’s chemical weapons regulatory body was wrongly dismissed last year at the insistence of the U.S. government, according to a ruling at the International Labor Organization in Geneva.

Jose Mauricio Bustani was voted out of office as director general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in April 2002, after Washington accused him of mismanagement and rallied other countries in a vote to have him dismissed.

At the time, Bustani’s supporters said Washington wanted him removed not because he performed poorly, but because he supported making Iraq a member of the OPCW, which might have interfered with U.S. plans for war in Iraq.
. . .
In a copy of the July 16 decision obtained by The Associated Press, the court said Bustani was not given a fair opportunity to respond to Washington’s charges, which it qualified as “extremely vague.” It said the lack of due process in his dismissal was “an unacceptable violation of the principle on which international organizations’ activities are founded, by rendering officials vulnerable to pressures and to political change.”

It said that while the United States had followed procedures, Bustani should have had a chance to defend himself in a court free of political pressures.

The OPCW is charged with ridding the world of chemical weapon stockpiles and production facilities. It has 153 member countries, including the world’s two largest possessors of chemical weapons, the United States and Russia. Member countries are subject to inspections of weapons and chemicals banned under the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

If OPCW chemical weapons inspectors had gone to Iraq and, like U.N. weapons inspectors, failed to find banned chemical weapons, it could have hurt the Bush Administration’s case for war.

Why isn’t this bigger news? The Bushies forced this guy out because he threatened their push to go to war and now it’s revealed that not only was he right, but the U.S. has been criticized of violating this guy’s right to refute the charges against him. I’m not saying it should be front page news of anything, but it’s at least worth a mention.