Back of the Envelope

So apparently Canada just had an election. I know, you probably didn't notice either. They selected a minority Conservative government. Of course, in Canada, a minority government indicates not that they lost, but that they won a plurality of the seats in the Parliament, but not a majority. As I understand things, Canada has four main parties: the Tories (or Conservative party), the Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc. The Liberals are to the left of US Democrats, and have been in power for decades, such that they've shaped the policies and institutions definitively. The NDP are even more to the left, while the Bloc represents those in Quebec who want to be even more independent--I'm not sure whether they're outright secessionist or not, but they're close. That leaves the Conservatives, who now have the plurality and can name Harper as their Prime Minister. What does that mean for Canadian politics? Well, I certainly have no idea, but Mark Steyn explains that Canadians don't mean the same thing by "conservative" as Americans do:

As I said, Scary Stephen's no Ron [Reagan] or Maggie [Thatcher]. But as a young man in the '80s he was spurred into politics by his clear understanding - unlike most so-called Canadian "conservatives" - that his country had missed out on Thatcher-Reagan economic liberalisation. Essentially, he's a political economist with a libertarian streak: he thinks that if you leave taxpayers with more of their money they're more likely to spend it in ways that do more social good than letting the government disburse it.

And here's where I think Harper could prove Howardesque. He shares two of the Australian Prime Minister's great qualities: he's very secure in his sense of himself, and he has a very shrewd sense of what's politically possible. If he plays those cards right - and I'd bet he will - he could be, as Howard has been, one of those unflamboyantly transformative leaders who leaves the political landscape significantly altered.

They may be able to insert a bit of conservatism into Canadian politics, but their brand of conservatism makes Bush look far right.

Despite my best efforts, I've been having difficulty explaining, in my comments on my previous God or Not Carnival Thoughts post, why outliers make it difficult to see trends in data. Thus, I'll demonstrate by example. The following graph shows the number of murders per 100,000 for each state in the year 2000, and the percentage of the vote that Gore got in each state that year. As you can clearly see, voting for Gore causes more murders per capita.


"Wait a second!" you say. "There doesn't seem to be any pattern."

"But look at that one point, the one where 90% of the voters voted for Gore, and the murder rate is 42 per 100,000. Isn't that striking? See how clear it is!"

"But it's only one point!"

"But look how big it is!"

That's essentially what my argument with Athana has been like. She refers to a study in the Journal of Religion and Society that shows that religion is bad for nations. As proof, it shows the US, with its high rates of abortion, murder, teenage pregnancy, venereal disease, et cetera, versus a whole bunch of other first-world nations, in a graph where religious belief is the x-axis. The problem is, if you remove the US, which is way more religious than the other nations and also has more murders, abortions, teenage pregnancies, et cetera, most of the graphs don't show any discernable pattern. (The exceptions, which look very linear, are abortions, teenage pregnancies, and under 5 mortality, which is sufficient to get an interesting discussion, and also, I think, all symptoms of the same characteristic.) Thus my argument is that the US is too much of an outlier to include, as its differences from other nations is more than just religiosity: it lacks the social welfare programs, is more ethnically and culturally diverse, places higher value on individual freedoms as opposed to community conformity, the list goes on and on... A real trend in a set of data should survive the removal of any single point. If removing one point, or even a couple, eliminates the trend, then it isn't real.

Going back to my plot and its striking outlier: that outlier is Washington, D.C. "Wait a second," you say. "That's not a state." For the purposes of voting and crime statistics it is, which is why I included it. It also has a population higher than Wyoming. "But," you continue, "it's one large urban center, mostly poor and disadvantaged. It's an outlier!" And that, I believe, is my point.

...and it's not afraid to use them. Three guesses whom Chirac's talking about:

France said on Thursday it would be ready to use nuclear weapons against any state that carried out a terrorist attack against it, reaffirming the need for its nuclear deterrent.
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"The leaders of states who would use terrorist means against us, as well as those who would consider using in one way or another weapons of mass destruction, must understand that they would lay themselves open to a firm and adapted response on our part," Chirac said during a visit to a nuclear submarine base in northwestern France.

"This response could be a conventional one. It could also be of a different kind."

Chirac, who is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, said all of France's nuclear forces had been configured with the new strategy in mind and the number of nuclear warheads on French nuclear submarines had been reduced to allow targeted strikes.

It was the first time he had so clearly linked the threat of a nuclear response to a terrorist attack.

Chirac, 73, did not say whether France would be prepared to use pre-emptive strikes against a country it saw as a threat.

So is France willing to use force to protect a third party, such as Israel? Doubtful, but it's actually encouraging to see that some fire's left in France. (Hat tip to Clayton Cramer.)

It seems that great minds do indeed think alike, and Jonah Goldberg has joined the anti-mullah party:

Iranians are a proud, nationalistic people and would probably rally around their government — or any government — were it threatened from without. That's one reason Ahmadinejad has been rattling his sabers so much lately: It's an attempt to bolster his unpopular regime.

A coup by sophisticated and serious members of the military would be great news. Even better would be a popular uprising. And best of all would be a combination of the two. An Iran with an old-style military dictatorship charged with defending democratic institutions would be an enormous, epochal victory for the West and for the Middle East. That would go a long way toward guaranteeing success in Iraq and would neutralize the threat of the Iran's nuclear ambitions, even if they decided to pursue a bomb. After all, the argument about nuclear weapons is no different than the argument about guns. The threat is from the people who have them, not from the weapons themselves. Lots of countries have nukes; we only need to worry about the ones run by whack jobs.

Alas, while there's reason to believe the White House shares this view in theory, there's less reason to believe it's doing that much about it in practice.

Let's do it.

Mark Steyn proposes something I suggested a long time ago:

So what can be done? Right now, Iran can count on at least two Security Council vetoes against any meaningful action by the "international community". As for the unilaterally inclined, the difficulty for the US and Israel is that there's really no Osirak-type resolution of the problem - a quick surgical strike, in and out. By most counts, there are upwards of a couple of hundred potential sites spread across a wide range of diverse terrain, from remote mountain fastnesses to residential suburbs.
...
But, granted the Iranian destabilisation of Iraq and their sponsorship of terror groups in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority, surely it shouldn't be difficult to give them a taste of their own medicine. Who, after all, likes the Teheran regime? The Russian and Chinese and North Korean governments and the fulsome Mr Straw appear to, but there's less evidence that the Iranian people do.

The majority of Iran's population is younger than the revolution: whether or not they're as "pro-American" as is sometimes claimed, they have no memory of the Shah; all they've ever known is their ramshackle Islamic republic where the unemployment rate is currently 25 per cent. If war breaks out, those surplus young men will be in uniform and defending their homeland.

Why not tap into their excess energy right now? As the foreign terrorists have demonstrated in Iraq, you don't need a lot of local support to give the impression (at least to Tariq Ali and John Pilger) of a popular insurgency. Would it not be feasible to turn the tables and upgrade Iran's somewhat lethargic dissidents into something a little livelier? A Teheran preoccupied by internal suppression will find it harder to pull off its pretensions to regional superpower status.

Back in Novermber of 2004, in a post on Bush's foreign agenda for his second term, I said:

Iran. Iran needs to be dealt with, and there isn't a whole lot of time to do it. The military option may be possible in two years, once things settle down in Iraq, but right now it'd be a stretch. Oh sure, we could bomb the living daylights out of them, that's easy, but if we could get regime change from a bombing campaign Saddam would've been gone in '91. My personal preference is direct and indirect support for the democratic movement in Iran. We already know that Iran is supporting the Islamist movement in Iraq, so I think we need to return the favor. Overt moral support and covert monetary and military support would be my preference. I don't know whether Bush is planning on doing this. So far it seems to be let the UN and the EU-3 do its thing, but we've seen how effective that is, and I think Bush will take a more proactive role. At the least, expect him to talk up the democratic movement in Iran.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to propose this.

I haven't written much about politics in a while. I guess I just haven't been very interested. Essentially it's the same old arguments with the same old people saying the same old things. Maybe it will perk up around the November elections. I'll post on something I find interesting enough to discuss.

I'm including some more pictures of New Orleans from the day after Christmas. After going to the Lakeview area, which was heavily flooded by the hurricane, we went to the French Quarter. The French Quarter wasn't hit by the flooding, and there was very little damage in sight. There were also very few people around, even considering that it was the day after Christmas. Below is a picture of the lone street performer I saw at Jackson Square. Usually there are a bunch of them.



The performer was right in front of St. Louis Cathedral, which is right up against Jackson Square.



There wasn't any visible damage of the cathedral.

For lunch we ate at the Napoleon House, which also was undamaged. The Napoleon House is a famed restaurant and bar, whose building was originally built as an abode for Napoleon after he was banished from Europe. Napoleon died before he could come to the US. All the restaurants reopened after Katrina has one of these pink signs:


It says "Napoleon House Approved for Reopening After Katrina."

I was familiar with the Napoleon House since it appeared in the game Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father. It looks a lot like it did in the game.



It has a nice courtyard, too.



The restaurant wasn't really crowded, but there was still a twenty minute wait because they didn't have enough staff to wait all the tables. New Orleans's biggest need is not money, but people.

Before Katrina, New Orleans had a population of over 1.3 million. Katrina scattered them all over the place, mostly Louisiana, but also Texas and Mississippi and even further. The population of the nearest large city, Louisiana's capital, Baton Rouge, previously 500,000, has grown by 300,000. Corporations have moved their entire businesses, including their workforces, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Repopulating New Orleans faces a Catch-22. No one knows how many of them are planning to come back. Businesses can't return unless their employees do, and employees can't return until they have work. The French Quarter, which is relatively untouched, still faces this problem. As I said, when I was there the day after Christmas, it was relatively empty, with few tourists and few businesses. The Napoleon House, where we ate lunch, had a long wait, not because of lack of room, but rather lack of employees to wait tables. Thus there's a similar Catch-22 with tourism, as it takes attractions to bring tourists, but it takes tourists to make running the attractions worth the effort it takes to find workers. On the bright side, workers looking to make a lot of money quickly can go to New Orleans. Burger King is offering a $6,000 sign-on bonus. In fact, just for day laborers, you could board a bus in Baton Rouge, go down to New Orleans and spend the day clearing debris, and come back in the evening with a couple of hundred dollars. New Orleans is hoping the festival season, culminating in Mardi Gras, will help jump start the economy with the tourists it brings, but there is a need for strong economic incentives to help businesses overcome the difficulties they face.

Mark Steyn urges feminists to take on Islamists, arguing that they're more of a threat to feminism than George W. Bush will ever be. His last line is priceless:

C'mon, gals! Anyone can beat up post-feminist neutered Western males. Why not pick on a target worth the effort?

Read it all.

Mark Steyn has a very depressing article in the New Criterion:

In his book The Empty Cradle, Philip Longman asks: “So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism—a new Dark Ages.”
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Longman's point is well taken. The refined antennae of western liberals mean that, whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100 percent of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70 percent of them are “white” or only 5 percent are. But, if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90 percent of the population or only 60, 50, 45 percent.

Since the President unveiled the so-called Bush Doctrine—the plan to promote liberty throughout the Arab world—innumerable “progressives” have routinely asserted that there’s no evidence Muslims want liberty and, indeed, Islam is incompatible with democracy. If that’s true, it’s a problem not for the Middle East today but for Europe the day after tomorrow. According to a poll taken in 2004, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia—in the United Kingdom. If a population “at odds with the modern world” is the fastest-breeding group on the planet—if there are more Muslim nations, more fundamentalist Muslims within those nations, more and more Muslims within non-Muslim nations, and more and more Muslims represented in more and more transnational institutions—how safe a bet is the survival of the “modern world”?

Not good.

“What do you leave behind?” asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It’s the demography, stupid. And, if they can’t muster the will to change course, then “what do you leave behind?” is the only question that matters.

He's been saying this a lot. I hope he's wrong, but it doesn't look good.