Week of March 25, 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

CHOOSING LIFE: I missed it at the time, but a month ago a group assembled by the Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America wholeheartedly endorsed the cloning of human cells as consonant with Jewish law and tradition. (Thanks to Dr. Manhattan for the tip.) That report put the most prominent Orthodox groups on the same side as Reform and Conservative bodies—which is quite remarkable considering how fractious these movements tend to be.

Although the Orthodox statement isn't that surprising, given earlier halachic analysis, getting the major Jewish movements to agree on just about anything controversial requires something of a miracle. As this Jewish Week article untactfully notes, the Orthodox ruling "puts the now-unified Jewish position at odds with Roman Catholic and Christian views, which reject cell cloning as a violation of the sanctity of human life." (Catholics are, of course, Christians, and not all Christians agree on this issue. If any Christian denominations have come out in favor cellular cloning, however, I've missed the news and would appreciate any information.)

Judaism really is different, and this issue is one on which the difference matters. Observant or lax, orthodox or liberal, religious Jews (and most secular ones) agree on the imperative to preserve and enhance human life. Not microscopic life. Not spiritual life after death. Real corporeal life, as most people understand the concept, the kind of life that is destroyed by diseases and suicide bombers. Ordinarily that's not a controversial position. Right now it is. [Posted 3/31.]

OLD BUT GOOD: Looking for something else, I came across this Tom Shales column on the breaking-news coverage of September 11 and the following few days. Much of the column is rightly taken up with praise for TV journalists, but Shales was as annoyed by a certain anchor as I was. Here's the pull quote:

Jennings' love for himself is infinite and limitless. He's the Kathie Lee Gifford of network anchors. And we don't need a Kathie Lee Gifford of network anchors.

[Posted 3/31.]

REVOLUTIONARY BLOG: Bjorn Staerk marks the day after Joanne's birthday with a revolutionary new blog format. [Posted 3/31, but it's tomorrow in Norway.]

PROGRESSIVES FOR PROGRESS: Bill McKibben's NYT op-ed against cloning human cells wouldn't surprise anyone who'd read chapter six of The Future and Its Enemies (or, for that matter, McKibben's The End of Nature, which declares, "The prospect of living in a genetically engineered world sickens me"). But McKibben's article did rattle some of his erstwhile allies on the left.

Now a grassroots group of self-described progressives is organizing a petition against efforts to criminalize therapeutic cloning and other forms of human biotechnology. Psychologist Raymond Barglow, who's organizing the petition, writes:

Unfortunately, Bill McKibben has a number of allies among environmentalists and their organizations. As you know, a group of 67 people, many of them respected members of the progressive community, signed what has become known as the Jeremy Rifkin Statement in Support of Legislation to Prohibit Cloning. This statement is being widely interpreted as evidence that most progressives want to prohibit the therapeutic cloning of embryonic stem cells for medical research.

In fact, I'm confident that the opposite is true, and that a large majority of progressives favors this medical research and opposes legislation to criminalize therapeutic cloning. Several of us—not affiliated with any particular organization—have written and are distributing a petition to progressive people we know, asking them to oppose the Senate bill (proposed by Sen. Brownback) that would criminalize therapeutic cloning.

Barglow invites "progressive" readers of this site (my quotation marks, since I suspect pretty much all readers of this site favor progress, but you know what he means) to sign the petition.

Meanwhile over at The American Prospect Online, Chris Mooney reports that not even all environmental groups are lining up with McKibben:

Sure, more radical environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have extended their mandate to cover human cloning, which is not at first blush an environmental issue. But I called around to this country's leading environmental groups—something I did once before in January—and, as of yet, there's no sense in which they're on board with McKibben et. al's legislative mission.

Of course, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with finding yourself in new coalitions, as McKibben has. But such alignments can only be assessed by weighing the strength of the arguments that have brought them into being against their more negative consequences. That's why it's so troubling that philosophically weak worries about the "unnatural" have prompted leading liberal minds, like McKibben's, to ally themselves so closely with anti-choice religious rightists like Brownback.

I'm glad to see progressives finally standing up for progress, but I don't understand why even Chris Mooney has to keep up the pretense that McKibben's view of nature is some kind of surprise. Didn't anyone but me actually read McKibben's best-selling book? [Posted 3/31.]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Joanne Jacobs celebrates a "major birthday" today. [Posted 3/31.]

TECH UPDATE: Thanks to all the readers who've sent advice. I'm in the process of relocating the site to Pair.com, a hosting service recommended (and used) by reader Jeff Wolfe, who's often given me tech advice over the years and whose $1,000 seed money helped get Reason Online started. Once the site is moved, I'll work on the AvantGo problem. [Posted 3/29.]

TECH HELP WANTED: I want to keep Megapath for my DSL connection but move the site to a new web hosting service. I also need advice on how to insert code into my site that will tell AvantGo to cache it instead of sending spiders to check it every few minutes. I not really a "developer" and can't quite figure out the instructions. I know there are readers out there who could save me several hours on the learning curve—time I can put to more productive, or at least more satisfying, uses. If you've got advice about a web hosting service that won't balk as the site grows toward 300MB or if you can help me with my caching code, please send me an email. Many thanks. [Posted 3/29.]

WHAT HE SAID: In a two-part ripping of Joseph Nye, Brink Lindsey faces the uncomfortable realities of foreign policy: You can't figure out what to do by deduction or through labels. As Locke put it, kings live in the state of nature. And not just kings, but various freelance terrorist types. Pretending otherwise is a prescription for disaster.

Finally, what's left of the interventionism vs. isolationism dichotomy in the wake of 9/11? You don't have to tell me that military involvement abroad can be ill-considered, poorly executed, self-defeating, and all kinds of other bad stuff. But right now we are faced with a shadowy group of terrorist fanatics, based in dozens of different countries, and they're trying to kill us. They've already murdered thousands and they're not done. The only way to defend ourselves is to intervene in those countries either unable or unwilling to get the bad guys who threaten us—countries that may include Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, the Philippines, and others.

Meanwhile, there are tyrannical regimes in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea that are hell-bent on developing weapons of mass destruction. They're fanatically hostile to us, and they have a long history of consorting with terrorist groups. We're supposed to sit around and wait until an American city is vaporized before we do anything about this situation?

So it seems to me that the proper U.S. foreign policy is sometimes multilateralist and sometimes unilateralist; sometimes realist and sometimes idealist; sometimes noninterventionist and sometimes interventionist. The difference between sound policy and disastrous blunders is knowing what times call for what approaches. The labels do absolutely nothing to illuminate the choices.

The bottom line is that international affairs are irreducibly chaotic. The world of state-to-outside-world interactions is a flux of changing actors, power alignments, threats, and opportunities—it is not susceptible to grand abstractions. The prevailing abstractions are as useful to the statesman as "buy low, sell high" is to the investor, or "go with the flow" is to the whitewater rafter.

For the statesman, as for the investor or the rafter, success comes not from big generalizations, but from intimate knowledge of ever-changing conditions, seasoned judgment, and the knack of good timing. In the foreign policy arena, those who cling to labels instead of developing these skills are practitioners of foolish consistency. Sooner or later they will miss the critical turn.

Heuristics are useful, in foreign policy as in other matters, but details matter and so does prudence—which should not be confused with inaction. [Posted 3/28.]

SUGAR LETTERS: I got some good letters in response to the item below about sugar protectionism. Here are a few that illustrate the range:

Joseph Britt writes:

FYI, last December Sens. Gregg, Lugar and McCain offered an amendment to scrap the sugar program when the Senate considered the farm bill (this would not have changed the import quota scheme, just the subsidy program). The debate on the amendment was notable for its one-sided ferocity, directed most notably against attempts to evade sugar import quotas by importing molasses from Canada, and the remarkable repetition of what sounded suspiciously like sugar industry talking points in several Senators' floor statements. It would seem there is very little Congressional sympathy for Mexicans wanting to sell more sugar to the United States.

The administration, of course, was nowhere to be found on this issue. During the Reagan administration amendments like this at least got supportive statements from USDA and OMB. But conservatism has moved forward since then.

P.S. By the way, the new farm bill adds a new price support program for peanuts to go with the import quotas for that commodity.

Confirming something I heard on my DC trip, "Ron K," who runs the Cogent Provocateur blog out of Seattle writes:

Sugar subsidies, not endangered suckerfish, are the primary driver in the Klamath Basin water rights foofarah. Water demand outstripped supply in recent years—wet or dry—as growers turned acreage to profitable but water-hungry (1-2 feet per crop) sugar beets. This in turn puts the traditional farmer/rancher and other upstream and downstream stakeholders at each others' throats.

And, finally, on a lighter note, Kenton Hoover knows where to get sugar Coke:

FYI, pretty much any burrito joint in San Francisco (and a few in the Central Valley that I've been to as well) imports Coke made in Mexico. Also, Coke made in Hawaii is made with sugar to avoid the cost of importing corn syrup from the mainland.

[Posted 3/28.]

EXPENSIVE HOUSING: The median value of a house in the United States is $120,000, and 63 percent are valued at less than $150,000. If you live in "blue America"—especially the Northeast corridor or the West Coast—you may find those statistics hard to believe. My latest NYT column looks at economic research on why houses cost so much in a few places, even though the norm for American life is cheap housing. If you're interested in the paper I discuss, you can download it from a link here; the URL in the article, as usual, has problems. [Posted 3/28.]

SITES TO SEE: BrinkLindsey.com, which has fast become one of my favorite sites, features (over a couple of days) an excellent dissection of the Bush administration's trade strategy and why it isn't working.

More than Zero, another favorite, skewers Maureen Dowd with its actual knowledge of what it's talking about: "Regarding the civilizing and fraud-preventing influence of women on business, Maureen Dowd, may I introduce you to the story of Warnaco?" If I were of a conspiratorial mind, I'd say Dowd is a plant by the patriarchy in its campaign to make women look too ditzy for public life. (Anna Quindlen is another plant.) More than Zero's specialty is economics, especially explaining securities-industry-related issues. The media criticism is a bonus. [Posted 3/27.]

C-SPAN VIDEO: Reader David Kuhn sends this link to the video of my Monday morning C-Span appearance, if you missed it and want to see how I perform when I'm half awake. (The video requires RealPlayer.) [Posted 3/27.]

I TOLD YOU SO: Bill McKibben gets NYT op-ed space to muse about finding himself allied with religious right representatives like Sen. Sam Brownback. "The changes engendered by genetic engineering are so far-reaching that they will make the accepted political lineups less relevant," he says. "They could force us to reconsider liberalism's faith in the onward march of science as well as force a new recognition that political conservatism shares a common root with conservation."

He's right about the new alliances, but too narrow about the issues involved—and, of course, all too fond of a steady-state world controlled by experts rather than evolving unpredictably through individual choice. This sudden discovery of the commonalities between Jeremy Rifkin and Bill Kristol, or Bill McKibben and Sam Brownback, comes as no surprise to readers of The Future and Its Enemies. (Thanks to reader Keith Terranova for the link.) [Posted 3/27.]

SERVER WOES: You may have noticed occasional problems loading this page, and my DSL and web hosting company, Megapath, has started to notice the site as well—and not in a good way. It has informed me that the site is twice as big as allowed under my current pricing, so I've got to pay another 50 bucks a month, bringing the cost to about $200/month. And I'm waiting for a call back from the engineering guy who promises to tell me how to keep Avant Go's robots from constantly checking the site and causing big problems for the host.

In other expensive news, Megapath has also become the first DSL provider to pass along to customers the "universal service fees" mandated by the government to cross-subsidize "telephone companies serving high cost areas, low income consumers, schools and libraries, and rural health care providers." So even without a service improvement, my DSL costs are going up almost 5 percent. Grrrr. [Posted 3/27.]

MORE BOOKS: As promised, I've gotten more copies of The Future and Its Enemies at a discounted price. If you'd like an autographed copy of the hardback edition, you can order one for $16.95 (which includes priority-mail shipping) via PayPal by clicking on the cover to the left. If you'd rather send a check, please send me an email asking for the address. If you order the book, please be sure to say what name you'd like it signed to. Thanks for your interest. [Posted 3/26.]

SUGAR PROTECTIONISM: One of the topics of conversation on my Mexico City trip was the problem of sugar lobbies on both sides of the border. In the United States, sugar producers maintain huge trade barriers, despite opposition from big sugar users like Coca-Cola and from environmentalists who worry about the degradation of the Everglades. The rival corn-fructose producers, notably Archer-Daniels-Midland, also find protectionism congenial, since it keeps the price of sugar artificially high. That's why Coke is made with corn syrup in the U.S. and sugar elsewhere, notably Mexico. (Some trendy restaurants in border states import the real Real Thing, served in glass 8 ounce bottles.)

The sugar-processing industry used to be nationalized in Mexico, but it was privatized under Carlos Salinas. (The cane growers are mom-and-pop farmers.) Some of those sales were financed with loans from the Mexican government, and all of them assumed that NAFTA would open up a new market in the U.S. The treaty exempts Mexican imports from U.S. sugar protection.

Except the U.S. hasn't kept its end of the bargain. The American market is just as closed to Mexican sugar as it was before NAFTA. This makes life rough on Mexican advocates of free trade. What are they supposed to say when opponents say "free trade" only helps the gringos?

The closed U.S. market also makes life rough on sugar producers who counted on U.S. sales when they made their investment decisions. Indeed, half the industry has been in such dire straits that the Vicente Fox government has renationalized it in lieu of debt payment. The Fox government's free-market allies are disgusted with this betrayal of principle—not all those companies should stay in business, even if the U.S. market were open—but they blame U.S. protectionism as well as Fox. My tongue-in-cheek suggestion: Get ADM to buy the Mexican sugar companies.

Meanwhile, American candy manufacturers are moving their plants abroad, where they can buy sugar at market prices rather than artificially inflated ones. Life Savers is going to Canada, as this recent Los Angeles Times feature explains. The threat to domestic candy makers has made Chicago Mayor Richard Daley one of Big Sugar's fiercest opponents, since Chicago has long prided itself on being "Candy Capital of the United States" and it's losing its candy factories. (I thought Hershey, Pennsylvania, was the candy capital. You learn something new everyday.) Last year, Spangler Candy Co., which makes lollipops and and candy canes, rocked the industry by announcing plans to move 20 percent to 40 percent of its manufacturing to Mexico from rural Ohio. "We use 100,000 pounds of sugar every day," CEO Dean L. Spangler said at the time. "At a price differential of 12 to 16 cents a pound, that's an extra $12,000 to $16,000 a day to this company. That's a very difficult trade impediment to overcome. We couldn't be satisfied just coming up with the right answer; we needed the best right answer."

As with steel tariffs, the main effect of sugar protectionism is to hurt U.S. consumers, including the companies that use sugar (or steel) and the workers they employ. And, as with steel, sugar protectionism hurts U.S. credibility and the general cause of free trade abroad.

FreeTrade.org has lots of material on sugar protectionism. [Posted 3/26.]

MANY THANKS: Thanks to the many readers who read my year-end results and sent in Amazon and PayPal payments to support the site. Net of commissions, I've received about $150 via PayPal and $100 via Amazon. Many thanks.

Thanks also to those of you who sent nice notes after my C-Span appearance on Monday morning. As a late-night person, I was semi-conscious at 7:45 a.m., despite a couple of cans of Diet Coke, so I'm especially appreciative of your support. At least I didn't completely embarrass myself.

For those of you who can't get enough of my media appearances, I return to Hugh Hewitt's national radio show this Thursday at 4:40 p.m. Pacific, 7:40 p.m. Eastern, and (most important for me) 6:40 p.m. Central. [Posted 3/26.]

EDUCATION EVOLUTION: Today's Washington Post features an interesting look at how home schooling has evolved to supplement parents' teaching with "learning cooperatives." It's a good example of incremental improvement and spontaneous order that wouldn't be possible if the law (or parents) insisted on rigid definitions of "school" and "home." Writes Rosalind Helderman:

More and more, home schooling no longer means just schooling at home. Parents work together in learning cooperatives, sometimes in each other's homes and increasingly in empty wings of churches and community centers. And academies such as Westminster—where they argue that family, not location, is the essence of home schooling—are dotting the nation.

"What we're finding is, especially as the kids get older, there are fewer and fewer purists. It's a rare family in our program where the parents are doing all the work at home," said Greg Somerville, principal of Covenant Life School in Gaithersburg. That school hopes eventually to offer a full curriculum of high school classes to the 400 home-schooling students affiliated with its group....

Westminster's organizers say "the home-schooling school" is not as convoluted as it sounds. Parents are still expected to be their children's primary teachers, and academy classes are meant to supplement work at home. Westminster accepts only families in which one parent commits to being home whenever a child is not in class.

"This same concept, even though we're not very well-connected, is springing up all over the country spontaneously," said Greg Williams, chairman of Westminster's Board of Trustees.

[Posted 3/26.]

FIGHTING CORRUPTION: One of Mexican reformers' biggest challenges is breaking the habits of corruption that developed during 72 years of one-party rule. The criminal justice system often seems less concerned with fighting crime or doing justice than with generating bribes. This Washington Post story recounts how a Salvadoran immigrant hoping to make it to the U.S. instead wound up in a Mexican prison for a year, because police found it convenient to declare him another person. (He didn't look a thing like the actual suspect.)

Figuring out how to break the culture of corruption isn't easy. One approach, which Vicente Fox's government is encouraging, is local innovation. As this Dallas Morning News article explains, Mayor Luis Paredes Moctezuma of Puebla has done away with fines for traffic violations and other minor offenses, such as prostitution and zoning violations. As a result, Paredes says, citing polls, bribery has fallen by 98 percent. Mexico City has cut traffic fines in half, for similar reasons. If fines are low or nonexistent, police won't be able to shake down citizens in exchange for ignoring the offense. [Posted 3/26.]