Around the Web on 8-21-05

Since I often find noteworthy articles on the web and comment on them briefly, I have decided to simply start calling these posts "Around the Web" when they don't have a unifying theme that demands a better title.

Space Elevators

Bradley Carl Edwards (via Instapundit) discusses the viability and potential benefits of constructing huge elevators -- as an alternative to rockets -- for the purpose of transporting cargo and human beings into space. This sounds like it might be viable, except that I find it hard to believe that space debris wouldn't quickly render useless the one meter wide, super-strong ribbon-track used for the cars.

It now costs about US $20 000 per kilogram to put objects into orbit. Contrast that rate with the results of a study I recently performed for NASA, which concluded that a single space elevator could reduce the cost of orbiting payloads to a remarkably low $200 a kilogram and that multiple elevators could ultimately push costs down below $10 a kilogram. With space elevators we could eventually make putting people and cargo into space as cheap, kilogram for kilogram, as airlifting them across the Pacific.

The implications of such a dramatic reduction in the cost of getting to Earth orbit are startling. It's a good bet that new industries would blossom as the resources of the solar system became accessible as never before. Take solar power: the idea of building giant collectors in orbit to soak up some of the sun's vast power and beam it back to Earth via microwaves has been around for decades. But the huge size of the collectors has made the idea economically unfeasible with launch technologies based on chemical rockets. With a space elevator's much cheaper launch costs, however, the economics of space-based solar power start looking good.

Patterico Slams LA Times in LA Times

I seem to recall that TIA Daily had recently reported that the Los Angeles Times experimented with an online forum or something of the sort in the vein of latching on to the phenomenon of blogging. That experiment was unsuccessful. Now, it seems, the paper is trying to ride the blogospheric wave in another way: by inviting bloggers to write columns critical of its coverage!

An occasional column in which the Los Angeles Times invites outside critics to wallop a Southern California newspaper, even when it has a new editor and a new publisher ....

Oh, yeah. And the column about how the LA Times has covered the Cindy Sheehan story was pretty good, too.

Of course, hundreds of mothers across the country also continue to support the war despite having lost their own sons in Iraq. These mothers have no less moral authority than Cindy Sheehan, but their views have been sorely lacking in The Times' unbalanced coverage of Sheehan's protest.

Also missing is the perspective of Iraqis who lost loved ones to the bloodthirsty reign of Saddam Hussein, during which 300,000 to 1 million civilians were slaughtered. An Iraqi named Mohammed at the blog Iraq the Model (iraqthemodel.blogspot.com) recently explained the importance of that fact, in a moving message addressed to Sheehan: "Your face doesn't look strange to me at all; I see it every day on endless numbers of Iraqi women who were struck by losses like yours. Our fellow countrymen and women were buried alive, cut to pieces and thrown in acid pools and some were fed to the wild dogs ….

"I ask you in the name of God or whatever you believe in; do not waste your son's blood."

Sheehan probably would gain more from a single meeting with Mohammed than a second meeting with Bush. Times readers also would benefit from occasional exposure to perspectives such as Mohammed's -- as well as the missing facts about Sheehan's antiwar activism.

Inside the North Korean Slave State

There's a good review of two books about the rule of Kim Jong "Mentally" Il in The New Yorker. The review is interesting for a couple of reasons, one being that the reviewer takes one of the authors to task (mildly) for going through contortions in an effort to be "balanced" in his portrayal of the "charming" dictator. To wit:

North Korea in the nineteen-nineties was, in [author Bradley K.] Martin's somewhat peculiar choice of phrase, "a nightmare by human-rights standards." Farmers were not allowed to relieve their hunger by growing their own food and selling it, for, Kim observed, "Telling people to solve the food problems on their own only increases the number of farmers markets and peddlers. In addition, this creates egoism among people, and the basis of the Party's class may come to collapse." If things were bad in "normal" life, the conditions in the vast North Korean gulag are difficult to imagine. Even here Martin's struggles for "balance" come across as slightly otiose: "While more and more inmates died as a result of malnutrition, the political prison camps continued to be run more as slave-labor and slow death camps than as instant death camps. It may seem a small distinction, but it shows that in this regard at least Kim Jong Il was no Hitler." [bold added]

Aside from knowing to avoid the purchase of Martin's book, I also found the review very interesting for what it says about the situation in Korea, from details about Kim Jong Il's lavish lifestyle, how he holds power, and how he holds the city of Seoul hostage when "negotiating" with other countries. The reviewer also makes the following point about how North Korea might be pressuring China.

It's true that China supplies the state with most of its fuel and food. But it benefits from having a Communist buffer state, and fears the consequences of North Korea's collapse -- not least a stampede of refugees. Indeed, in the two years since the regime served notice of its nuclear-weapons program, trade between China and Korea has doubled, to $1.4 billion.

This strikes me as naive. Were North Korea to collapse, I doubt China would hesitate to make full use of its military to send the refugee problem southward. I take this as yet another example of Chinese collaboration or sponsorship.

On the Legal Status of Terrorists

An article in Legal Affairs by Douglas R. Burgess Jr. entertains the interesting notion of treating terrorists like pirates under international law to solve several legal dilemmas. It is interesting to read about how piracy was treated over the ages and how that problem parallels terrorism in many ways.

Coming up with such a [legal] framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists. Dusty and anachronistic, perhaps, but viable all the same. More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, "enemies of the human race." From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction -- meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism.

While there might be merits in having an international legal framwork to combat terrorism, such a framework would really only be useful among civilized countries. And so the following passage bothers me.

The rise and fall of state-sponsored piracy bears chilling similarity to current state-sponsored terrorism. Many nations, including Libya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, have sponsored terrorist organizations to wage war against the United States or other Western powers. In each case, the motivations have been virtually identical to those of Elizabeth: harass the enemy, deplete its resources, terrify its citizens, frustrate its government, and remain above the fray. The United States is credited with manufacturing its own enemy by training, funding, and outfitting terrorist groups in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Central America during the cold war.

The author is trying to draw a parallel between the Declaration of Paris of 1856, when several European powers that had been covertly sponsoring piracy all agreed to abandon the practice entirely upon realizing they'd created a monster. Unfortunately, the parallel breaks down when the author starts ticking off states sponsors of terrorism as soon as the list gets to Iran, if not before! What does Iran care about ending terrorism? Having a framework within international law to fight terrorism will be useless unless civilized countries recognize each other's right to invade state sponsors of terrorism. This moral distinction is practically absent from the membership requirements of the U.N., whose definition of piracy Burgess cites at one point. (This would make implementing this idea in the context of the U.N. moot in many respects.)

On top of that, the article makes a major error best observed here.

Second, this definition would deter states from harboring terrorists on the grounds that they are "freedom fighters" by providing an objective distinction in law between legitimate insurgency and outright terrorism. This same objective definition could, conversely, also deter states from cracking down on political dissidents as "terrorists," as both Russia and China have done against their dissidents.

But what of domestic terrorism? In the paragraph before this one, Burgess says that, "If a group directs its attacks on military or civilian targets within its own state, it may still fall within domestic criminal law." So Britain, for example, whose own citizens bombed its subways in July, should certainly have the ability to stop home-grown terrorists. But if this is so, what's to stop a despotic regime like China from doing exactly what Burgess thinks it won't do? In any case, one problem I have with the article is that it seems to focus too much on terrorism as an international problem.

While I see merits to this idea, the article seems to err too much on the side of treating terrorism like a criminal activity (1) when a state's own citizens perform terrorist acts, and (2) by too easily assuming that all nation-states are civilized, or at least are interested in ending terrorism. Its idea of having an framework under international law of dealing with terrorism is a good one, but only if a distinction between civilized nations and state sponsors of terrorism is made, and only if the definition of terrorism is not limited to the international variety.

PARADE has a good Q&A

I usually have to be in a really perverse mood to even open the PARADE supplement in the Sunday paper. Between the mindless celebrity worship, Franklin Mint ads, the enshrinement of Marilyn vos Savant as some kind of oracle, and the pushing of whatever silly health fad happens to be in fashion, I start feeling like I'm in a time warp back to the days when the leftist media was all there was. THIS was news and entertainment: soft-pedaled socialism, inoffensive blandness, and the general assumption that there was nothing so stupid that it could insult the intelligence of the average American.

But in my post-traumatic flashback, I digress.... Get a load of this, from the "Personality Parade" feature.

Q A while back, I saw a young environmentalist known as "Grizzly Man" on David Letterman's show. Whatever became of him?

A Sadly, Tim Treadwell met the fate that Letterman jokingly predicted: "Will we be reading one day that you've been killed and eaten by bears?" Treadwell, 46, and his girlfriend, Amy Huguenard, 37, were killed two years ago in a remote area of Alaska by a rogue bear. His extensive video footage was turned into the documentary Grizzly Man, which won an award at the Sundance film Festival and was just released in selected theaters.

From a web page about this incident:

Tim was a friend of the bears. His passion was to share his observations that grizzlies are not the ferocious beasts we have always thought them to be. He had a childlike quality that helped him educate the thousands of children he visited in classrooms every year. He also taught that people should not approach wild animals and do what he does, and his website goes on teaching that today. Another of Tim’s purposes was to deter poachers who sometimes boat along the coast of Katmai National Park after the tourists leave. The protected bears of Katmai are among the largest grizzlies in the world. They live longer than bears in hunting areas, and they grow to truly trophy size. Tim wanted to stop poachers from shooting his friends and slipping away undetected.

With friends like those, Tim didn't need "ferocious beasts".

-- CAV

Updates

10-13-05: Added hypertext anchor.