Chinese Ocean-Crossing Sailboat Meets Premature End

This is a real shame, but fortunately no one was hurt. In a Chinese twist on the Kon-Tiki voyage, Nelson Liu and his crew sailed a Chinese junk around the world, but the boat was run over by a Liberian-flagged freighter just short of making its destination. This was a damn cool voyage with a crew of Chinese, Taiwanese, American, and Japanese sailors, some of whom were picked up right here in San Francisco before they crossed the Pacific.

Where Kon-Tiki was Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 proof-of-concept that pre-Columbian South Americans could have colonized Polynesia (which we know now from DNA evidence is not the case), the Chinese junk was intended to show that the Chinese could have visited North America before Columbus. There's no proof that such a thing happened, although in my eyes, the proof-of-concept is unnecessary: there's no question that they could have done so. The Ming navy had bigger ships than Columbus, before Columbus. Frankly I think Heyerdahl and Liu were both more interested in having a blast sailing around the world than in science, but more power to them both - I'm just jealous they had the cajones to carry it out. I wish I could've jumped on board when they were here!

Quote of the Day

"Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States."

- Pre Swine-flu Mexican leader Porfirio Diaz

Example of Big Government Interference in Small Business

It's about time we change these laws:

Support Animal Research

There's been a spate recently of animal rights extremists setting things on fire and blowing things up when they don't like what's happening in universities and companies that are trying to save lives. There's a word for this: terrorism. Predictably, extremists get mad when you call them what they are, and in a previous post about an animal rights terrorist getting sentenced, a commenter crawled out of the woodwork and asked me whether these people really should be considered terrorists.

The answer is a clear and obvious yes. The FBI has recently upped the ante on such terrorist (Daniel San Diego), and it's about time.

Because I expect other woodwork-commenters to appear when my blog shows up on their Google news sites, I'll post just one rejection of the old activist canard that all the research can be done with computers now: no, it can't. I do drug research for a living, and if that were the case, we must just do animal research because we hate cute furry little critters, right? It would make research incredibly cheaper if we could just cut out all the animal testing, and let the chips fall where they may when we inject the treatment into a human for the first time. If drugs should go straight from labs into humans, tell you what - why don't you send me your email, and you can be the first to try them out for me. Don't everyone jump at once!

Let's be clear: these animal-rights terrorists are standing in the way not only of the free market to find cures to diseases, they're standing in the way of the right of all research institutions, including (especially) our nation's universities, to pursue scientific research that results in medical advancements.

Fortunately there are groups like Pro-Test, a pro-research, anti-terrorist organization, and this organization recently staged a support rally at UCLA. UCLA was recently the victim of such a terrorist attack (totally underreported by mainstream media) so a show of support for research and freedom of inquiry is especially needed there.

Support medicine, support democracy, support the free market: support animal research.

China China Uber Alles

I always get a little nervous when the government of a country start thinking they're too special. This is called nationalism, and it seems especially out of place in countries nominally based on the international solidarity-supporting writings of Marx. For example, if there were rumors that a country's only political party had commissioned a study to show that the dominant ethnic group was actually a separate (superior) species from the rest of humanity - let's just make up a name, "Han" will do - then that would be worrisome.

Another concern would be if that country's Ministry of Truth (let's make up another name, "Xinhua") issued news releases about nature itself bestowing miraculous protections unto their people. For example, reporting that dolphins had protected your ships from Somalian pirates. I'll take the U.S. Navy over dolphins protecting shipping lanes any day. Naval sharpshooters are better than magical pirate-herding dolphins - and they exist.

Still Think the Patriot Act is a Good Idea?

The Homeland Security Report on right wing terrorists is exactly the kind of thing I had in mind when I asked this question five months ago. But my complaints about the invasions of Americans' civil liberties over the past five years fell on the deaf ears of pretend-conservatives who thought that everything was fine. Sorry if I seem a little irritated with all the eleventh-hour bandwagon jumpers. Where the hell have you been?

Conservative Bloggers vs. Conservative Television

Talking about divides in conservatism these days is not very original, but I haven't seen anyone addressing one that seems obvious to me: the divide between conservative voices in print media (blogs, newspaper columns, and magazines) and broadcast media (radio and particularly television). Of course the divide isn't absolute, but it's getting hard to find a strict super-right religious conservative blogger, compared to two years ago. The same is not true of broadcast media.
Why the huge divide?

One of the two camps is less prone to dogmatism and inflammatory rhetoric, because they are:

1) Constantly aware that they'll be held accountable to their statements

2) Able to come to honest conclusions without having to dumb them down/paint them with sparkly colors for a big audience

3) Uninfluenced by monetary considerations (like advertising dollars or big contracts)

As for #3: as fiscal conservatives we're honest enough to be cynical about human nature. If your auto mechanic gets a bonus for using a certain company's components in car repairs, regardless of their quality, do you want to keep going to that mechanic? This is called conflict of interest, and if you're trying to get undistorted honest conservative thought, you're better off looking for it in print.

Brownback Demands Sanctions for North Korea

Normally not my favorite guy in the Senate, Sam Brownback is doing the right thing by calling for sanctions on North Korea after their rocket launch. The six-party talks have resulted in a North Korea that can limp along with foreign donations of food to keep its people in Stalinist subjection while they work on nuclear weapons and delivery systems. The anticipated silver lining of North Korea's incurable confrontationalism is that the West is finally waking up.

Civilization Has Not Yet Collapsed in Portugal

Too infrequently, when we're debating the effects that a political decision could have in the United States, we don't take advantage of other countries that have already tried the same experiments.

North Korea: A Reminder

"14-year-old Shin Dong Hyok and his father were made to sit in the front row of a crowd assembled to watch executions. The two had already spent seven months in a North Korean prison camp's torture compound, and Shin assumed they were among those to be put to death.

"Instead, the guards brought out his mother and his 22-year-old brother. The mother was hanged, the brother was shot by a firing squad.

'Before she was executed, my mother looked at me,' Shin said in a recent interview. 'I don't know if she wanted to say something, because she was bound and gagged. But I avoided her eyes.'"

This what happens inside Yodok Gulag in North Korea. Full article here.

Here is a satellite picture of the camp itself, which is humming right along while you read this:



Want to read more about Yodok? Start at Wikipedia, or better yet read The Aquariums of Pyongyang.

You can also view the crayon drawings of a child who escaped from North Korea. Here is one of them:



If that's not enough, here is U.S. Senate testimony from another North Korean escapee.

This is the government that is holding two American journalists.

This is a government with nuclear weapons, that is about to launch a missile.

Dumbing Down American Science Books

Stalwart Iraq War-defender Christopher Hitchens once made the literary observation that when you're reading the work of Proust, you feel as if you have no business at all trying to write professionally. Consequently, rather than trying to paraphrase Hitch, I will include the money-quote from this article about the current effort to dumb-down science books in Texas:

The Texas anti-Darwin stalwarts also might want to beware of what they wish for. The last times that evangelical Protestantism won cultural/ political victories—by banning the sale of alcohol, prohibiting the teaching of evolution and restricting immigration from Catholic countries—the triumphs all turned out to be Pyrrhic. There are some successes that are simply not survivable. If by any combination of luck and coincidence any religious coalition ever did succeed in criminalizing abortion, say, or mandating school prayer, it would swiftly become the victim of a backlash that would make it rue the day. This will apply with redoubled force to any initiative that asks the United States to trade its hard-won scientific preeminence against its private and unofficial pieties. This country is so constituted that no one group, and certainly no one confessional group, is able to dictate its own standards to the others. There are days when I almost wish the fundamentalists could get their own way, just so that they would find out what would happen to them.

America's business leaders have been making their voices increasingly heard on this topic, though not always as harshly as hedge fund manager Barry Ritholtz.

So which is it America - do we want to maintain our technical and economic leadership, or not? It shouldn't be such a hard decision. And it's not one that China is having any problems making.

The Left Can Never Resist for Long

Never resist becoming a caricature of itself, that is. Whether or not you agree with the political opinions it disseminates, the Huffington Post has ventured into even more goofy territory now with an article that seems to be about teleportative medicine. The HuPo is turning into the hippie Enquirer.

Bachmann, Stop It - You're Embarrassing

Rudd's Chuminess with China

Ming-era map showing China, Australia and New Zealand. Source: Sydney Morning Herald.

"'Now, if China was to turn its back on that or not be responsible, the world would soon know,' Rudd said. 'They're not perfect. They've done some bad things in the past. But let's look at the opportunities, rather than simply assume it's all threat and all risk.'"

Ahem Mr. Rudd: they're doing bad things right now. Freedom of religion? Freedom of expression? Elections? All a pipe dream in today's China. As I wrote before, there are some progressive voices in the CCP who realize that a more confident and successful China is a liberalized and open China. It's not there yet, and the world's democracies are well-served by remembering that better than Mr. Rudd is doing.

Interestingly, this is the same Australian PM (and ex-ambassador to China, and ex-KPMG China expert) who lobbies for China's voice at the G20, tells us China is an ally, and is the head of the same administration that built a Great Firewall around Australia. I don't want to get all Manchurian-Candidate, but Rudd is clearly putting Australia's Asia-Pacific relations ahead of encouraging democracy.

Time for Prison Reform

Jim Webb is going to introduce a prison reform measure today. I'm very interested to hear it.

As the article points out, prison reform is a tough issue because it's tough to argue for a better prison system, and not come across as arguing for a weaker prison system - and competing politicians are happy to use that confusion against each other. But it's time to discuss this, because it's too expensive not to. In my state, 1 out of 200 people is incarcerated (160,000 people) and the overall U.S. rate is the highest in the developed world, higher even than South Africa. While this suggests that there may be - or are - deeper problems - that's not an excuse to start paroling dangerous offenders. While we look more deeply at why we have this problem, we still have to keep offenders off the street, but to do that in a more rational manner we should ask ourselves two questions:


1) How to make prisoners more productive. We still need roads and ditches, don't we? We're hobbled by a racist past against chain gangs, but I'm all for increased transparency into the operation of prisons if it means the prisoners can offset the cost of rent and food for these hundreds of thousands. In fact, why not set up parole programs so that one of the factors in determining parole is how much value the prisoner has produced? Someone who's turned out ten thousand units in his time is probably a better risk than someone who's turned out one thousand.

2) Decide who most needs to be in there. I'm sure there are statistics about which types of criminals are more recidivist. What I wonder about is whether there's any connection to parole decisions. Someone who's in on a marijuana conviction is not the same risk as someone in on an assault conviction.

I haven't seen Webb's proposal but I support any effort to solve this problem.

Tesla Motors Unveiling Model S Sedan for Under $50k

No pictures yet, but details here.

Nuclear-Armed Orwellian Dictatorship Kidnaps Americans

Image from Theodoresworld.com.

With all the rumbling about bias in the news media, I often wonder why there isn't more outrage about the lack of attention to North Korea.

An Orwellian nightmare nation that has active concentration camps (see one on Google Maps), that has that openly declared it has a nuclear weapon, that has tested it, and that has delivery systems capable of striking the United States, has now kidnapped two American journalists, apparently from across international borders. The silence is deafening.

It bears repeating: North Korea has weapons of mass destruction, right now, and no one disagrees about this, including North Korea. Imagine if Saddam Hussein in 2002 had openly declared that he had nukes, and was kidnapping FOX journalists from Turkey?

This isn't the first time North Korea has done this. You're not safe from their programmers even outside their borders - in the 1970s they developed a habit of kidnapping Japanese vacationers off the beaches in their own country (check out the Megumi Yokota story on Wikipedia or on Netflix). If ever there was a foreign policy cause for conservatives to champion, North Korea is it, and has been. This year at Cannes a film-maker chastised the international community for its inattention to the conditions that persist in Kim Jong Il's hell-on-Earth. Understand what this means: journalists from Al Gore's TV channel, and a film-maker who lives in France, are ahead of American conservatives in loudly denouncing the literal evils of a communist country. Where are you now, Glenn Beck? Or Michael Steele, or John Boehner? Anybody!

The Obama camp is already revealing the troubling Democrat tendency of assuming rational self-interest on the part of all players in international affairs. With the rulers of places like North Korea and Iran, we cannot do this. Consequently, there could not be a better opportunity for the GOP wants to reclaim the strength, resolve, and moral leadership that it held, and that America held, in the Reagan years. But someone in Washington has to wake up.

My Love-Hate Relationship with Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

Grassley is a straight-talker who doesn't let the national party dictate his positions. On the other hand, he also doesn't let the national interest get in the way of his state interest. Great if you're an Iowan, not so great if you're from one of the other 49. But that's how representative democracy is supposed to work. It's expected that everybody tries to work his or her own angle, and it's everybody else's job to keep each other honest. You can't expect Grassley not to try to squeeze in that extra yard for Iowa.

Normally Grassley is spot-on, as he was in this case, but occasionally he deviates from plain old common-sense rationality, and it usually has something to do with corn. He has argued against all reason that ethanol from corn can supply a substantial part of the nation's energy without raising gas prices or food prices (wrong; it will raise both). Now he's raised the old bogeyman that "marijuana leads to harder drugs". The first question is where's his evidence? For four decades people have been repeating this tired old saw, without producing data to back it up.

In economic terms, marijuana is often compared to corn. Since the mid-1980s in the U.S. marijuana has been a bigger cash crop than corn. From a Libertarian standpoint, what we have now is a marijuana prohibition that criminalizes a harmless substances with medical benefits and creates a criminal class that is currently terrorizing our southern border. But I can't help but think that legalization would lower the amount of acreage dedicated to corn production and damage the corn lobby. Coincidence?

Glenn Beck and His Pseudoconservative Circus

In anticipation of his revival meeting, the Great Leader and flag-hugger extraordinaire is distributing tracts by cranks pretending to be conservatives. I've flipped through it. On its face it contains general statements that most Americans can agree with, but before you're very deep in you can tell it was written by a religious extremist with some pretty damaging ideas. Associating this with modern conservatism is exactly the kind of thing that's marginalizing the GOP and the public's view of conservatism in general. If an America run by Mormon imams is what he's advocating, I'm out, and so are most Americans. No wonder the GOP, in California and elsewhere, continues to spiral inward and down.

Reason #344 To Love Chuck Grassley (R-IA)

"...I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward [the AIG executives] if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide."

- Chuck Grassley interviewed on Cedar Rapids KWMT.

I'm on record as a big fan of Senator Grassley. This only deepens my appreciation.