| Paul Rako is
a consultant living in Sunnyvale, Calif. |
|
Cold Mountains —
As I write this, the search has been given up for the Mount Hood climbers. One has been found dead and the other two are presumed dead. Three confident, virile young men, convinced they could dash to the top of Mt. Hood in the middle of December, all dead.
The sadness, the folly and pointlessness reminds me of Iraq. There too, men with more testosterone than sense felt that 10,000 years of history could be ignored and they could dash a conquering army into Mesopotamia, set up a puppet government, and pump out the oil, all to the applause of the world community. Like the Mt. Hood climbers, they found that the dash to the top was the easy part. Getting back was harder.
I have friends who have said that the climbers got what they deserved and that no one should be risking his life to look for them. There are others who share that view about President Bush and his cabal. The incompetence of both the Mt. Hood expedition and the Iraq war has been staggering. Bad strategy, bad tactics, bad worldview. I call this fractal incompetence. Like fractal math, it scales from the smallest detail to the biggest idea.
As a consultant I have seen many similar examples of deeply flawed judgments. They are a common problem with over-educated managers who think they know how the world works when they really have no idea whatsoever. They live in a self-congratulatory Platonic netherworld where the earth is a merely phenomenal place. They live in the land of forms, where just desperately wishing for something to be true gets them 80% there. After they con themselves and then the people around them, their Platonic truth becomes immutable. This is very handy since nothing that happens after that can be blamed on them. It is just "shoddy execution of the vision," as they might say.
There is one important distinction between the two events. The "idea men" behind the Iraq war will not die a horrible death in the cold. They will not die a horrible death in the sweltering desert either. They will go on to cushy sinecures at major thinktanks, military contracting outfits, or high-toned law firms. Unlike the Mt. Hood climbers, they will die no wiser. — Paul Rako
| Ross Levatter is
a physician living in Phoenix. |
|
Prophylactic shock —
I was in line at my pharmacy when the guy in front of me began complaining to the cashier.
It seems the birth control pills he was picking up for his wife weren't free . . . that is, weren't covered by his health insurance policy. "I just don't get it," he said. "They won't pay for the birth control pills, but they'll pay for having a baby!" he snarled, clearly thinking he had found in his health insurance coverage a logical flaw the size of those in Bush's Iraq policy.
I could have explained the seeming discrepancy to him. His policy paid for childbirth because it is a political mandate. It did not pay for birth control because avoiding pregnancy while engaging in sex is not a disease that comes to us unbidden, but a choice we make or don't make, according to our preferences.
As a result of the political mandate, this man's policy will pay for childbirth, even if he and his wife choose, as it seems they have, not to have any more children. So does my policy, even though I'm a single male. So does the nun's policy. Of course, covered services are not free, even if not used. So his policy, my policy, and the nun's policy are all more expensive, since we pay for a service we'll not be taking advantage of, it not being an option we could choose to pass up.
Health insurance, back in the day, covered the costs of unexpected diseases, just as home insurance covers the costs of unexpected calamities such as fire and flood. Yet there is nothing more expected and predictable than the costs of taking a pill one knows one has to take daily. The idea that shifting costs from the cash register to the health insurance premium payment makes them disappear is both infantile and near universal. As is the insatiable human desire to get something for nothing.
I didn't want to be the one to break it to him, but I doubt his policy paid for condoms either. — Ross Levatter
| Patrick Quealy may be seen in his natural habitat, a Seattle coffee shop. |
|
Few men are an island —
Prince Roy of Sealand is 85 years old. He's getting too old to govern and intends to abdicate sovereignty over his island principality. Prince Regent Michael, Roy's son and Sealand's head of state, is accepting monetary offers from prospective successor regimes.
The asking price is high. Michael hopes to fetch eight or nine figures in pounds sterling for the micronation, a man-made structure sunk into a sandbar about six miles off the coast of England. Its land area is 1% that of the Vatican. While Sealand is nowhere recognized as a bona fide state, it has resisted challenges to its autonomy for four decades, some in courts and some involving exchanges of gunfire.
It is an attractive location for would-be online gambling concerns and illegal file-swapping services. A Swedish group called The Pirate Bay has expressed interest in "buying" Sealand and hosting The Pirate Bay's internet filesharing service there, apparently undeterred by the lackluster performance of HavenCo, a company that similarly tried several years ago to create a Sealand "data haven" but met with limited success due to differences with the "royal family."
If you've got an insatiable thirst for pirated music and £100 million burning a hole in your pocket, here's your chance to do something about it. — Patrick Quealy
| Robert H. Miller is a builder,
outdoor adventure guide, and author
of "Kayaking the Inside Passage:
A Paddler's Guide from Olympia,
Washington to Muir Glacier, Alaska."
|
|
Congo's counterfeits —
Milton Friedman secured his place in history when he established the fact that inflation is a monetary phenomenon. When a government prints too much money, the value of the currency is diluted.
It's a lesson that the president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila, seemed to understand, especially after the rampant inflation of the Mobutu years. Kabila, who was just re-elected, won international plaudits for imposing macroeconomic stability on a country that is more an outline on a map than a reality.
But the recent elections have strained the public purse and, as The Economist reports, "Strapped for cash, the government seems, once again, to be cranking up the currency presses: diplomats allege that in the past five months the central bank has counterfeited its own money, by duplicating fresh bills."
Perhaps Congo's central bank reasons that fake currency produces only fake inflation? — Robert H. Miller
| Jon Harrison lives and writes in Vermont. |
|
Greener Mountain State —
While Vermont is by no means consistently libertarian in outlook (in terms of economics, for example, it's sometimes only a little to the right of Castro's Cuba), the Green Mountain State can be very forward-looking when it comes to certain individual freedoms. Witness its first-in-the-nation recognition of civil unions back in the year 2000.
Now some members of the state's officialdom have come out and proposed an end to the senseless war on illegal drugs. As first reported by the Rutland Herald on Nov. 30, 2006, Windsor County State's Attorney Robert Sands has broken ranks with his fellow prosecutors and called for legalization. "I don't want criminals controlling the distribution of dangerous substances. I'd rather have a regulated marketplace," the Dec. 4 Herald quotes Sands as saying.
Sands' counterpart for Windham County, Dan Davis, offered a milder proposal. According to the Herald, Davis favors making the possession of small amounts of marijuana (currently a misdemeanor) a civil offense. Compared to Sands' call for complete legalization, this would be no more than a baby step, but it still looks good when compared to the knee-jerk reactions that law enforcement typically has to the idea of legalization.
Speaking of knee-jerk reactions, Sands' call for legalization prompted one from Vermont's public safety commissioner, Kerry Sleeper. "We're forgetting about protecting the people," said Sleeper. Of course, any official whose paycheck depends on "protecting" the public will first protect his or her own turf, and damn the consequences. (Said consequences in this case being unnecessary and unjust restrictions on individual freedom, increased violence and property crime, and lives ruined by the stigma of a drug conviction.) It should come as no surprise that just as he was deprecating Sands' bold stand, Sleeper was accepting a $1.75 million federal grant to fund Vermont's Drug Task Force.
According to the Herald, Sleeper went on to predict that legalization would lead to a tenfold increase in the number of addicts. Unfortunately, the Herald neglected to ask Sleeper what evidence he had to back up his prediction. As is well known, the number of addicts has soared since criminalization took effect, far outpacing the rate of increase of the population as a whole. Current levels of drug use are so high that it is difficult to imagine just who might be out there waiting for legalization before choosing to indulge. Sleeper's warning of a tenfold increase in addicts is simply without any basis in fact.
On the other hand, some veterans of the drug war, speaking from long experience, have endorsed Sands' proposal. James Dean, for 21 years a federal probation officer at the U.S. District Court in Burlington, Vt., commended Sands for his "intellectual integrity and political courage." And in a commentary written for the Rutland Herald on Dec. 6, Peter Christ, a retired police captain from Tonawanda, N.Y., wholeheartedly endorsed Sands' view, calling for "an end to this madness, America's longest war."
Retired captain Christ is a founder of LEAP — Law Enforcement Against Prohibition — an organization that stands for the repeal of federal and state drug laws. LEAP has 6,500 members, including police and judges as well as average citizens. Only five years old, LEAP may be the vanguard of a movement that will sweep away the awful legal tyranny that is America's War on Drugs. We can but hope. — Jon Harrison
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