Half Sigma

2006 General Social Survey: wealth and IQ

The U.C. Berkely site now has the 2006 General Social Survey up! For the first time, the GSS asks people their wealth.

Of the 19 people who reported being millionaires, and who also took the Wordsum test, only one millionaire scored a 10, and only one scored a 9. This is evidence that high IQ doesn't lead to wealth.

The median score is 7, which is slightly above the average score of 6. The typical millionaire is only just a little bit smarter than the average American.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -N of cases		Distribution
WORDSUM	4	2
	5	2
	6	3
	7	5
	8	5
	9	1
	10	1
	COL TOTAL	19

Making $50K and living in the big city

These two anonymous comments from the WSJ Law Blog post about the law school scam reflect topics I've blogged about a lot before:

Comment 1:

I’m curious how all these people saying how their 30-40k job is fine actually survive. Where I live, rent alone is about $1000 (with roommates) and that doesn’t include food, utilities, transportation to work, insurance, clothing (you have to have business causual/suits to go to work), etc.; add on a $800 loan repayment, and possibly credit card debt, and I don’t understand how one lives, let alone provides for a family. Seems like a pretty rotten deal to me, especially considering my college educated friends make more than that salary.

Comment 2 in response:

Many of the people I know, if they make less than 50K and live in a big city, their parents help them. Some parents buy all their clothes. Some parents buy their place so they don’t have to pay rent. Some with different situations are supported by their girlfriend or boyfriend. They live like they make much more (90K, some tax free), but don’t talk about any of it - only very rarely. I am not judging this. I make twice (or more) what they do, and don’t have loans, but need to save for the future so cannot spend time hanging with them - its hard to stay friends. And I need to be able to get to work in the morning on time and be super productive. Its not real, all of it - its an illusion - but I think its very interesting what they choose to project and how they live. I think it says a lot about our times. They think I am weird that I work so hard and go out so little and I agree that I am. I think Warren Buffet said that the quality of life has nothing to do with your expenditures on life, and I could not agree more.

I feel a responsibility to help get the word out, because so many people are fooled into thinking those people who "make less than 50K and live in a big city" are actually doing it on their own.

Fantastic tales from 9/11

Six year later, the press has figured out that the story of a "survivor" of 9/11 was completely bogus.

Just click on the link above and look at the photo of the woman. It's so obvious that she does not look like someone who graduated from Harvard and Stanford as she claimed.

Yet another example of how the press doesn't really do any sort of investigation of the stories it prints. This is also reminds me of a rule I go by: if someone tells a story that sounds even just a little bit on the fantastic side, he or she is probably lying.

Warren Jeffs vs. Mohammad, Abraham, and Joseph Smith

Warren Jeffs has clearly been singled out because we think he's abusing his powers as "prophet."

But behind most major religions is a polygamist prophet.

Abraham, the founder of Judaism, had three wives. (Although, unlike the other prophets mentioned in this post, the actual historical existence of Abraham is in doubt.)

Let's look at the life of the prophet Mohammad. Not only did he have many wives, his youngest and also favorite, A'isha, was only 9 years old when their marriage was consummated.

I think it's pretty hypocritical to be all outraged about Warren Jeffs, but then show respect for Mohammad whose crimes were far worse. There's a big difference between a 14 year old and a 9 year old.

Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, had a whole bunch of wives himself, and some were as young as 14 when he married them.

This once again demonstrates that the only difference between a religion and a cult is that the religion is older and has more followers. Even Mormonism is now so mainstream that Mitt Romney is considered a worthy candidate to be president of the United States.

Who could have predicted, 165 years ago, that the guy from [western New York State] who was having sex with a harem of underage wives would one day be considered the founder of a religion so worthy that millions of people follow it and that one of its followers might be President of the United States?

The husband is now being prosecuted

The husband, who allegedly "raped" his wife, is now being prosecuted. (As you recall from yesterday's blog post, Warren Jeffs was convicted of accomplice to rape for arranging the marriage.)

The story alleges that the husband, Allen G. Steed, is being prosecuted as punishment for testifying in Jeffs' defense at the Jeffs trial.

As an attorney, I could have told him that testifying was a dumb idea under those circumstances. But people will do dumb stuff in order to help out a genuine prophet.

If the husband is found not guilty, does this have an bearing on Jeffs' conviction? An interesting legal question.

Life in prison for religious beliefs

Warren S. Jeffs, the leader of the polygamous Mormon sect in southern Utah/northern Arizona, has been convicted of "accomplice to rape." [NY Times article.]

Now those who read my blog know that I'm opposed to both polygamous and gay marriage. But there are a lot of aspects of this conviction that disturb me.

Jeffs is not actually being convicted of polygamy. No, he has been convicted of "rape" under the theory that, by setting up a marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her cousin, he aided in her "rape." For this he "faces up to life in prison."

This seems like a pretty harsh sentence considering the nature of the supposed crime. The typical prison sentence for a pimp (after doing some internet searches) appears to be 3 years. (3 year sentence for pimping retarded woman, but the crime also involved "infliction of corporal injury on a co-habitant, identity theft, forgery, counterfeiting and dissuading a witness from testifying".)

The actual "rapist" hasn't been convicted of any crime at all. Neither have her parents who went along with the marriage, nor anyone else in the community.

Should someone really get life in prison for preaching the virtues of polygamy?

Was the girl harmed any more by the early marriage than she was harmed in general by being raised by such whacky parents? Are their beliefs really any more whacky than believing that some virgin had a baby who was the son of an all-powerful supernatural being, and said son had all sorts of magical powers? Why is it not child abuse to indoctrinate a child into the mainstream religion, but suddenly it becomes child abuse when you indoctrinate a kid into some whacky offshoot of Mormonism?

Hasidic Jews force their children into arranged marriages, why isn't the Hasidic Rebbe being prosecuted for being an accomplice to rape?

Transcript of speech at Columbia

I found a transcript of the Ahmadinejad speech at Columbia University. It was strangely hard to track down, there was no transcript linked from the major news sites such as the NY Times, Washington Post, or CNN.

Maybe I'll blog about the speech later. Until then, I'll just remind you that Ahmadinejad is trying to be diplomatic, and what he says may not represent his true thoughts. For example, Ahmadinejad says he loves the Jewish people, and I find that very hard to believe.

For another example, Ahmadinejad may believe that there was a conspiracy which fabricated the Holocaust in order to create an excuse to create a Jewish nation in the Middle East, but it would be undiplomatic to say that, so instead he just says that people should be allowed to "research" whether the Holocaust really happened. But what's the purpose of calling for more "research" if one doesn't believe the research will indeed reveal that the Holocaust was made up?

The truth about law school is finally out!

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article revealing the truth about the horrible job prospects available to the majority of law school graduates:

The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University -- where he says he ranked in the top third of his class -- is a "waste," he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt.

The article has some hard statistics to back up my own qualitative observations:

A survey of about 650 Chicago lawyers published in the 2005 book "Urban Lawyers" found that between 1975 and 1995 the inflation-adjusted average income of the top 25% of earners, generally big-firm lawyers, grew by 22% -- while income for the other 75% actually dropped.

In the legal profession, as in the economy in general, the gap between the rich and the poor has widened.

The article talks about student loan payments, and how after student loan payments, law school graduates with crappy jobs have much lower disposable income than blue collar workers.

The article talks about an issue I've written about many times before (and not necessarily on this blog): the deceptive job statistics reported by law schools.

"Prospective students need solid comparative data on employment outcomes, [but] very few law schools provide such data," adds Andrew Morriss, a law professor at the University of Illinois who has studied the market for new lawyers.

Students entering law school have little way of knowing how tight a job market they might face. The only employment data that many prospective students see comes from school-promoted surveys that provide a far-from-complete portrait of graduate experiences. Tulane University, for example, reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of $135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year's graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of the class, a Tulane official concedes.

Futhermore, who knows if the law schools are cheating on top of that? I once again call for there to be uniform standards for reporting law school employment information, subject to auditing by independent auditors. Just as public companies need to go through this procedure so investors can make an educated investment, potential law students have a right o know if their investment in legal education is worthwhile. Law schools are purposely hiding this information, making them no better than Enron.

The article mentions the anonymous internet poster who goes by the handle "Loyola 2L." No, Loyola 2L is not a Half Sigma sock puppet. But I think that Loyola 2L, whoever he is, has done the world a service but putting the truth out there.

A post about the article at the WSJ law blog already has 330 comments.

Next/previous links on comments

Typepad has added next/previous links at the bottom of comment pages. What a surprise!

I suppose this change reduces bandwidth usage on posts with hundreds of comments, such as my post on why a career in computer programming sucks.

Typepad actually posted this news two weeks ago, but I don't pay attention to that stuff until it affects me.

Remember to click the "Next" link in order to see the next page of comments.

Supposedly the speed of commenting has also been improved, but I still keep seeing duplicated comments every day (from people who re-save the comment because they think nothing has happened). Please only hit the button once and then be patient. I hate having to delete multiple comments.

Maybe, one day, Typepad will fix the problem of allowing unclosed HTML tags in comments, something Blogger had since it introduced commenting. In the mean time, if you use HTML tags in comments, please carefully preview the comment before posting it. If you're in a rush, simple double quotes are fine for quoting someone else.

Poor men, dating, and the NY Times

The ninth most emailed story at the NY Times right now is one about the dating problems for people in their twenties when the woman earns more than the man.

It's a statistical fact that young men's economic fortunes, in comparison young women's, have been sinking over the last few decades.

The NY Times article features stories about couples who break up because the woman wants to eat at fancy restaurants, while the poorer boyfriend prefers cheap diners.

Liberal morality is very strange

Here's a quote from a NY Times Magazine article about Justice John Paul Stevens:

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago in 1941, Stevens enlisted in the Navy on Dec. 6, 1941, hours before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He later won a bronze star for his service as a cryptographer, after he helped break the code that informed American officials that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was about to travel to the front. Based on the code-breaking of Stevens and others, U.S. pilots, on Roosevelt’s orders, shot down Yamamoto’s plane in April 1943.

Stevens told me he was troubled by the fact that Yamamoto, a highly intelligent officer who had lived in the United States and become friends with American officers, was shot down with so little apparent deliberation or humanitarian consideration. The experience, he said, raised questions in his mind about the fairness of the death penalty. “I was on the desk, on watch, when I got word that they had shot down Yamamoto in the Solomon Islands, and I remember thinking: This is a particular individual they went out to intercept,” he said. “There is a very different notion when you’re thinking about killing an individual, as opposed to killing a soldier in the line of fire.”

I don't understand Stevens' point at all. It's OK to kill conscripts who don't have any say in their country's political or military policies, but there's a moral problem with killing the guy who's the architect of the enemy battle plans?

Liberal morality is a very alien thing. I feel sorry for the poor Japanese schmucks we had to kill because their leaders, such as Isoroku Yamamoto, decided it was a good idea to go to war against us. But Yamamoto got what was coming to him.

Why are there no rich psychics?

If I had psychic powers, such as the ability to "see" things that other can't, predict the future, read minds, etc., I'd use the ability to become rich.

There are lots of people who claim to have psychic powers, but none are rich. Why is this? Here are some possible explanations:

1. The same genes which cause psychic powers also cause the holders of such powers to have a strong belief that they shouldn't use their powers for personal gain.

But still, there's a fine line. What if someone used their psychic powers to develop a new technological process, and then sold the patent for millions of dollars? Yes, they'd have personal gain, but they also helped the world a lot by giving the world something it otherwise wouldn't have had. If a psychic uses his powers to discover a cure for cancer, which saves tens of millions of lives, who would begrudge him a few million dollars? Psychics are willing to take $125 to read your soul, so why not a mere dollar per life saved?

In fact, the above paragraph makes you wonder why psychics use their powers to predict which Hollywood stars are going to get married during the next year, instead of for more useful purposes such as scientific discoveries.

2. Most of the ultra-rich people actually are psychics, but they keep this fact a secret in order to protect themselves. They lie to the public and say they achieved their wealth through hard work.

3. Maybe there are no psychics, and everyone claiming to be a psychic is a big fat liar?

UPDATE

As "Kurt9" points out below, the easiest way for a psychic to get rich is to play the securities markets. Always winning at poker will get you kicked out of card games pretty quickly, but Warren Buffett turned a small amount of money into a multi-billion dollar fortune, and he is regarded as a hero rather than a cheater.

If psychic powers actually exist, Warren Buffett is far more likely to have them than some self-proclaimed psychic who predicts the love lives of Hollywood stars.

Here's a Half Sigma psychic prediction: sometime in the next 12 months, a famous Hollywood star will have relationship troubles.

* * *

I got the idea for this blog post from the comments at a Freakonomics blog post.

Paul Krugman, full of ****

With the free NY Times comes a new Paul Krugman blog, and I alm already ticked off by his first post.

He has a chart showing that the top 10% are pulling ahead, and so far I have no disagreement. I even agree that this is a problem Americans should be concerned about.

But then he goes into Paul Krugman hatchet-swinging mode in which he blames conservatism, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich for everything bad.

Newt has been out of power for a decade, and Bush's economic policies are big government policies, as Alan Greenspan has recently pointed out.

Krugman writes:

Because of movement conservative political dominance, taxes on the rich have fallen, and the holes in the safety net have gotten bigger, even as inequality has soared.

That statement is completely wrong. Under Reagan, marginal tax rates were lowered, but deductions were eliminated, and the end result was that the richest Americans actually paid more taxes. High marginal tax rates mean nothing if people avoid paying them because the tax code is riddled with loopholes.

Regarding the "safety net," it's far bigger now than it was in the late 1940s and 1950s. For example, Medicare and Medicaid didn't even exist until 1965. Furthermore, since the The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 (passed when the evil Reagan was president), emergency medical care has become a legal right, and hospitals must provide it even to people who can't pay for it.

Krugman ignores the effects of immigration, a very important reason for increasing inequality. It's obvious that, by increasing the ratio of labor to capital, those with money (capital) will benefit. But immigration is championed by liberals, not conservatives. It's no coincidence that the periods of greater equality in the Krugman graph were also periods of low immigration.

And why do we need another law school?

A post at the WSJ Law Blog asks the question I should have asked in my previous post about Erwin Chemerinsky. Why do we need another law school?

The job prospects of people graduating from a bottom ranked law school (which UC Irvine will be) are generally not worth the costs (including opportunity costs--even free tuition is usually a bad deal) of attendance.

Erwin Chemerinsky, BarBri lecturer, liberal, dean

Initially, Chemerinsky was fired from being dean of U.C. Irvine's new law school immediately after being hired, because he was too liberal. But the NY Times reports that he's back as the dean.

I just saw Chemerinsky this June at the Constitutional Law BarBri lecture in Manhattan. The guy is an amazing lecturer. He stands in front of the podium, with no notes, and he recites the entire very complicated lecture from memory. I spent the first day of the lecture looking around for a teleprompter or someone holding up notes. I couldn't believe anyone could perfectly memorize such a lecture. It was sort of inhuman.

Reading a little about his history, he has indeed taken some extreme liberal positions on various political issues, but he was still a great BarBri lecturer.

The mystery is why Chemerinsky would want to give up being a professor at Duke, a top-14 law school, to be the dean of some crappy new law school. Maybe it has something to do with his liberal beliefs that law school should be available for the intellectually disadvantaged?

$128 million gift to high school

Barbara Dodd Anderson, whose father was Columbia University professor David Dodd, co-author of the famous Graham & Dodd's Security Analysis, donated $128 million to her high school, the George School, an elite college preparatory boarding school in rural Pennsylvania.

This is an example of how most charitable donations by rich people primarily benefit other rich people. Why is this stuff tax deductible?

Liberal vs. conservative morality

From a NY Times article about the research of Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia:

[P]eople who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals — those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity.

The take is surprisingly sympathetic to conservatives:

Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view.

Dr. Haidt, who describes himself as a moderate liberal, says that societies need people with both types of personality. “A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital,” he said. “I am really glad we have New York and San Francisco — most of our creativity comes out of cities like these. But a nation that was just New York and San Francisco could not survive very long. Conservatives give more to charity and tend to be more supportive of essential institutions like the military and law enforcement.”

This explains why extreme liberals hate the idea of team sports, because they promote group loyalty, both amongst members of the team as well as their fans. Anyone who roots for the home team isn't an extreme liberal.

Let the news be FREE

The New York Times will stop charging for its website. No more "TimesSelect," no more access denied to articles older than two weeks. Everything from 1987 onward will be FREE. Tomorrow, the news will be liberated.

Chess and girlfriends

“Chess is my life,” Little Daddy said. “You can’t play chess and have a girlfriend, because they don’t want you playing chess all night.” [NYT]

Defending young brains

A NY Times op-ed article by Mike Males defends young brains:

Commentators brand teenagers as stupid, crazy, reckless, immature, irrational and even alien, then advocate tough curbs on youthful freedoms.

. . .

Why ... do many pundits and policy makers rush to denigrate adolescents as brainless? One troubling possibility: youths are being maligned to draw attention from the reality that it’s actually middle-aged adults — the parents — whose behavior has worsened.

He goes on to list various problems of middle-aged people. The most scary of which is declining intelligence:

[T]he experts never mention even more damning new “discoveries” about the middle-aged brain, like the 2004 study of scans by Harvard researchers revealing declines in key memory and learning genes that become significant by age 40.

My own take on this is that the depiction of young brains as abnormal and older brains as normal is obviously from the perspective of older people who control society's resources and political power. But modern man's lifespan has been extended unnaturally by modern medicine. Few of our caveman ancestors lived to be the age of a typical member of Congress. From the long-term perspective of our species, it's the young brain that's normal and the old brain that's an oddity.

Other good stuff in the NY Times

There's more good stuff in the NY Times today than I have time to blog about.

There's an article about Ayn Rand and the literature of capitalism.

There's an article about how some people are making so many millions of dollars in hedge funds that they are able to skip going to business school. How lucky for them. This is in contrast to the article a few days ago about how Master's degrees are booming. Perhaps this presages a future where rich people only need a Bachelor's degree, while the poor chase after the imaginary ticket to riches by pursuing more graduate education and further indebting themselves to the student loan companies.

There's an article about how Japanese housewives are collectively big players in foreign currency speculation.

The city of Washington, DC is becoming more white. I'm not surprised, Northwest DC is a very nice place. "[T]he city could cease to have a black majority by 2015." "A local blog has posted complaints about graffiti that reads: 'Go Home Rich White People.'" But the truly rich surely are still in Virginia where the state income tax rate is about 5% lower. Most of the white people in DC are people with government jobs who can only afford the place because they have rich parents subsidizing them. Kind of like a mini-Manhattan.

Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?

There's a NY Times Magazine article about "why can’t we trust much of what we hear about diet and health." It's about bad epidemiology.

I even learned some new stuff, such as the "healthy user bias" and the "bias of compliance." Here's an excerpt about the bias of compliance:

[T]hose men who said they took more than 80 percent of the pills prescribed fared substantially better than those who didn’t. Only 15 percent of these faithful “adherers” died, compared with almost 25 percent of what the project researchers called “poor adherers.” This might have been taken as reason to believe that clofibrate [a cholesterol lowering drug] actually did cut heart-disease deaths almost by half, but then the researchers looked at those men who faithfully took their placebos. And those men, too, seemed to benefit from adhering closely to their prescription: only 15 percent of them died compared with 28 percent who were less conscientious.

The placebo was more effective at warding off heart disease than a cholesterol lowering drug. How funny.

The slippery slope of gay marriage

A Mormon resident of St. George, Utah told a NY Times reporter:

If it's legal in some states for people of the same sex to get married, why is it not legal to marry more than one wife? [link]

Bogus research

In the WSJ's Science Journal Column (subscription required), Robert Lee Hotz reports how most published research is bogus:

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong.

Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye.

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.

And that just refers to the formal findings that appear in journals. The version we read in regular newspapers are usually mangled even further.

I decided to try putting this into action by typing "researchers" into Google News and seeing if something bogus looking comes up:

People are more likely to get sick and die young if they're lonely, and researchers said yesterday that they may have found out why -- their immune systems are haywire. [Washington Post]

The implication is that you can be healthier if you get out more and make yourself less lonely, but what I get out of the article is that the same genes that cause a predisposition to loneliness also cause immune system problems. I also get out of it more evidence that one's personality is genetic.

Why the best and brightest don't go into computer science

Via Marginal Revolution, I came across this article about the problem of lack of computer programmers.

Rich Karlgaard, the technology entrepreneur who is publisher of Forbes, tells the story of a trip he took with Microsoft’s Bill Gates in the early 1990s. On the flight, he asked Gates, “Who is your chief competitor?”

“Goldman Sachs” was Gates’s surprising reply.

Gates went on to explain that he was in the “IQ business.” Microsoft needed the best brains available to make top-shelf software. His primary rivals for the smartest kids in America were elite investment banks such as Goldman or Morgan Stanley.

“Microsoft must win the IQ war,” Gates said, “or we won’t have a future.”

The best and brightest 25-year-old kid can make $195,000 if he goes to a top-14 law school and then gets a job at BIGLAW in Manhattan were the salary these days is $165,000 plus a $30,000 bonus.

Allegedly, the Goldman Sachs career track pays even better than that.

So why would the best and brightest seek a lower paying career in computer science when, in the long run those careers wind up being dead-end? See my post on why a career in computer programming sucks.

No one wants to pay U.S. computer scientists $200,000 salaries when there are plenty of immigrants willing to do the job for five figures.

The issue of the last post was Iran

The last post was about Iran. Specifically about why Iran is more likely to use nuclear weapons than other nuclear powers. But obviously, any post about the Middle East arouses passions and prevents people from looking at anything logically, or focusing on a single issue, the issue of whether Iran is likely to use nuclear weapons.

Instead, the debate separates into pro-Israel and anti-Israel camps, in which the pro-Israel side takes every single position that is thought to be pro-Israel, and the anti-Israel side takes every single position that is thought to be anti-Israel. For some reason or other, the argument that Iran is more likely to use nuclear weapons than other nations is deemed to be a pro-Israel position, so anti-Israel people are vehemently trying to say what a great "democracy" Iran is, and then throwing in all sorts of arguments which have nothing to do with Iran.

So the following arguments were raised:

(1) Israel is not part of the West. This has nothing to do with whether or not Iran will use nuclear weapons, except to make it more likely that Israel will be a target of said weapons because Israel is a lot closer to Iran than it would be if it were geographically part of the West.

(2) Stalin killed more people than Ahmadinejad. I suppose that to the extent that how many people one has killed is correlated with willingness to use nuclear weapons, then this means Ahmadinejad is less likely to use them. But it may simply be that Stalin had the opportunity to kill more enemies of the state.

(3) Suicide bombers are "Palestinians" and not Persians. Muslims seem to like the idea no matter their ethnicity. The releveant diffence is only betwen Shiites and Sunnis, not Persians and Arabs. Shiite suicide bombers have been operating out of Lebanon. According to this article, Iranians strongly believe in martyrdom. Iranian children's TV shows glorify sucicide bombing. Iranians, at the moment, simply have less opportunity to suicide bomb anyone because of their distance from Israel and because Iran is not currently at war with anyone. Would Iran's leaders commit a mass suicide bombing in the form of a nuclear exchange?

(4) "Iran has legitimate reasons to be angry at Israel ... " Part of an anti-Israel comment, but it really makes Iran more likely to use nuclear bombs on Israel because if its "legitimate" anger.

(5) "I have never understood why actually US is interested in Israel at all? ..." Another anti-Israel comment that has nothing to do with whether Iran might use nuclear weapons. Whether or not you care about the victims of the nuclear explosions, surely it's useful to know if the nuclear weapons might be used, if only for the selfish reason of knowing to take your money out of the stock market (except for oil stocks) before the bombs go off.

(6) "The Middle-East is a basket case. The USA has no business there. Let them sort it out by themselves." See my response to the comment above.

(7) "Ahmadinejad has had plenty of opportunities for both personal and national martyrdom and has passed them up." History is full of leaders who weren't interested in personal death but who had no problems sacrificing the lives of others in order to meet their own objectives. Even Harry S. Truman used nuclear bombs in warfare, and he's the good guys. Just because Ahmadinejad doesn't want to commit a pointless suicide doesn't mean that the risk that he might not be safe in his bomb shelter would be enough to deter him from the glory of being part of the destruction of Israel. Surely, the culture of martyrdom makes Ahmadinejad and Iran's Ayatollahs less concerned about personal death in war than typical national leaders. Furthermore, Iran might use nuclear bombs on Sunni Muslim enemies who don't have a nuclear deterrence.

(8) "What about the fact that American politicians (namely Bush) consistently threaten Iran with a preemptive strike." A very dumb policy. If you are going to preemptively strike someone, you shouldn't give warning. But the fact that Bush has stupid foreign policy has nothing to do with whether or not Iran is more likely to use nuclear weapons than other nuclear powers.

(9) "Iran might have ONE nuke in 10 years" Even if true, it has nothing to do with whether Iran might use the nukes once it gets them. This is an argument for delaying doing anything about the problem, assuming you think we should do anything at all. People just can't focus on the one issue.

Iran vs. the former Soviet Union

I know the issues of geopolitics are covered ad nauseum in other blogs, so this is kind of a waste of a blog post, and I'm probably just repeating opinions that countless other pundits have already expressed (nothing original here) but nevertheless, I'm writing a response to the following comment by "DML":

Wow, don't tell me you're one of these people (neocons) who actually fears imminent development of nukes by Iran. This fear mongering is absurd, especially when put in light of the 40,000 nuclear war heads to Soviets had aimed at the United States (and these were *real* nukes that could hit us from the Soviet Union).

The only presidential candidate with a reasonable position on this is Republican candidate Ron Paul.

First of all, Ron Paul is a libertarian nutjob who believes in abolishing the Federal Reserve and returning to a gold standard. The fact that a guy with lots of whacky positions supports allowing Iran to get nuclear weapons doesn't add much value to the idea. (This is not an ad hominem attack, because Ron Paul's name was only mentioned in order to bolster DML's position. I'm pointing out that this name dropping has the exact opposite effect.)

So what's the difference between nuclear Iran and the nuclear Soviet Union? Primarily that the guys running the Soviet Union were atheists (one of the few redeeming qualities of communism). They feared a nuclear exchange because they didn't want to all die.

The Iranian leaders are devout Shiite Muslims who believe that martyrdom through jihad leads to an automatic entrance into the best possible afterlife. Yes, this sounds stupid to the typical U.S. or Western European reader. We simply have a hard time understanding that these guys actually BELIEVE this stuff. The religious people running Iran may believe they are actually doing their people a FAVOR by killing them in a nuclear exchange, because by doing so they make them martyrs who will have a better afterlife than they otherwise would have been entitled to.

Iran's leaders may be tempted nuke Israel because they believe they have a holy mission to eradicate the Jewish presence from rightful Muslim lands, and any Iranians who die in the Israeli counterattack go immediately to Paradise, so there's no downside. Anyone who doesn't buy into the notion that Muslims gladly sacrifice their own lives to kill Jews obviously hasn't been reading the news.

What's the difference between Kruschev banging his shoe on the table and and Ahmadinejad saying he will wipe Israel off the map? The difference is that Ahmadinejad is on a mission from Allah, while Kruschev was just an irascible communist who meant that, in the long run, communism would prove to be the better system of government and not that the Soviet Union would prove the superiority of communism through a nuclear first strike.

The next thing one might argue is "Who cares if Iran nukes Israel? That's no one's problem besides Israelis'. To care about this means you are part of the Jewish Israel lobby." That's an interesting point to debate, whether the U.S. should care if there's a nuclear exchange in the Middle East, and whether people who are opposed to the idea are secretly loyal to some foreign country and not to the U.S. But as far as I can tell, 99% of people who say we should leave Iran alone don't believe that a nuclear exchange would be the outcome of their proposed course of inaction. They are completely sure that Ahmadinejad shouldn't be taken seriously when he talks about Israel being wiped off the map. So I don't think I will address the "Jewish Israel lobby" issue with this blog post.

Rumors of attack on Iran

There seems to be a bunch of renewed rumor-mongering about a possible U.S. attack on Iran. Or maybe it's going to be an Israeli attack using tactical nuclear weapons.

Time Magazine reports that Israeli planes invaded Syrian airspace. This is assumed to be some sort of preparation for war. Either Israel is testing the possibility of flying through Syria in order to get to Iran, or Israel is testing the efficacy of Russian-manufactured air defense systems that Iran also has in its possession in order to help out the U.S.

DEBKAfile reports that two U.S. carriers, the Nimitz and the Truman, are headed towards the Persian Gulf. Of course, DEBKAfile reports a lot of stuff that turns out to be bogus, but sometimes they're right.

I still think it's more likely than not that both George Bush the Israelis will wuss out and acquiesce to letting Iran develop nuclear weapons.

Good and bad religions, and prison libraries

This article in the NY Times shows the problems caused by refusing to distinguish between good religions and bad religions.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

It's common sense not to allow inmates to read radical Islamic materials. But the problem is, in order not to discriminate against Islam, the Bureau of Prisons took the sledgehammer approach of banning books from all religions.

It would make a lot more sense to just ban Islamic books, or at least limit the Islamic library to approved titles. There's no need to ban books of peaceful non-terrorist religions. The inmates who are heavily into peaceful religions like Christianity, Orthodox Judaism, or even Mormonism (the Mountain Meadows Massacre excepted), are less likely to be recidivist when they are released.

Bigamy vs. polygamy

There was a comment in which I was criticized for making Mitt Romney's polygamous great-grandfather an issue, but ignoring the bigamy of Barack Obama's father, a more immediate ancestor.

There is an important difference between polygamy and bigamy. Bigamy is having two wives, the implication being that neither wife knows of the other's existence. From what I know about Obama's father (and please correct me if I'm wrong here), when he married Obama's mother he was still legally married to some woman in a foreign country. But during the time he lived with Obama's mother, he never had contact with the other wife, so this is sort of a legal technicality and is not that much different from a guy who divorces, remarries, divorces again, and then remarries his first wife. The latter example is perfectly legal, and even happens from time to time.

The kind of polygamy practiced by Mitt Romney's great-grandfather is a plural marriage in which one man lives simultaneously with many wives. This is not a case of deceit by the man, but a voluntary (to the extent that a young girl really has any say in the matter if her family and community tell her she must become someone's fifth wife) arrangement that's endorsed by the Mormon community.

But should we hold Mitt Romney responsible for the sins of the great-grandfather? Ah, but here's the rub. According to the LDS church, what Mitt's great-grandfather did was not a sin, it was perfectly acceptable. The LDS church may have gone along with the outlawing of earthly polygamy as the only way for Utah to become admitted to the Union, but the Church still believes in polygamy in the afterlife.

Furthermore, although the official public position of the LDS church is that polygamy is an offense warranting excommunication, in fact, polygamy in Utah seems to be tolerated. Even though tens of thousands of people in Utah are living in polygamous marriages, the law against polygamy is currently not being enforced.

The LDS church controls Utah as if it were a theocracy. If the Church really wanted the law enforced, there would be prosecutions.

We don't know what the LDS church really thinks, because unlike Christian and Jewish denominations, Mormonism is a cult-like religion in which only the true believers who have received the Endowment are taught the true religion, knowledge which is not to be shared with outsiders.

In addition to the LDS church, there are a variety of smaller Mormon sects, the majority of which currently support polygamy (according to this pro-Mormon polygamy FAQ).