Israeli House Demolishing

I thought I had posted something about this before, but I can't seem to find it, so maybe I didn't. Anyway, a couple of years ago I saw something on TV about the Israeli's demolishing the houses of Palestinians, but I haven't heard anything about it since. Today, I finally found another article on the subject:

Israel Halts Decades-Old Practice of Demolishing Militants' Homes

I find it somewhat stunning that something that's so critical to understanding the justification of the Israeli/Palestine conflict is reported on so seldom. I'd also like to hear reports of whether or not there is any discrimination against Palestinians in Israel in terms of getting jobs, getting goods and services. I suspect that Palestinians and Israelis mix pretty well in shopping centers and resaurants, etc., because otherwise the suicide bombers wouldn't be able to get in there so easily, but I'd still like to see a news report on it.

A fish can't see the water!

I just thought of a new old saying on the way home from work today. It's:

A fish can't see the water!

Isn't it great? It means that someone who grows up with an idea or custom or whatever, can't really see it objectively; they just assume that that's the way everyone does something, or if it's an idea, that it's just obviously true.

National Debt

I decided to do an analysis of which political party is the most fiscally responsible. I've always felt that one of the cheif complaints by Republicans against Democrats was that Democrats spent to much money on social programs and such. They gave too much of the Rich People's money away to poor people who didn't deserve it. Maybe some of that is my own personal bias, but that is the impression I've always gotten. Anyway, I decided to do some of my own research to find out if this is true or not. I took information on our national debt from the Bureau of Public Debt website (note the .gov suffix on the URL), and information about when the Presidents were in power from another website. The dates on which the national debt was reported didn't match up exactly with the presidential transitions in power, so the numbers below aren't completely accurate, but they're as close as I could get with the resources I had available.

Another good reference is http://www.federalbudget.com/, which displays a graph that shows where the federal money goes (a little less than 1/3 of our taxes goes to pay the interest on the national debt), and http://www.kowaldesign.com/budget/, which shows a graph of how our national debt has increased over time.

Below is a table showing our most recent presidents, and the amount the debt increased during their term. Republican presidents have a red background, Democratic, blue. The key column is the right-most column, which shows the average increase of the debt per year of the presidents term.

President	Starting Debt	Ending Debt	Increase/Year
George W. Bush	$5,674,178,209,886.86	$7,616,792,798,166.73	$431,692,130,728.86
Bill Clinton	$4,064,620,655,521.66	$5,674,178,209,886.86	$201,194,694,295.65
George Bush Sr.	$2,602,337,712,041.16	$4,064,620,655,521.66	$365,570,735,870.13
Ronald Reagan	$930,210,000,000.00	$2,602,337,712,041.16	$209,015,964,005.15
Jimmy Carter	$653,544,000,000.00	$930,210,000,000.00	$69,166,500,000.00
Gerald Ford	$492,665,000,000.00	$653,544,000,000.00	$53,626,333,333.33
Richard Nixon	$358,028,625,002.91	$492,665,000,000.00	$26,927,274,999.42
Lyndon B. Johnson	$303,470,080,489.27	$358,028,625,002.91	$9,093,090,752.27
John F. Kennedy	$290,216,815,241.68	$303,470,080,489.27	$6,626,632,623.80
Dwight D. Eisenhower	$266,071,061,638.57	$290,216,815,241.68	$3,018,219,200.39

The results here are kind of surprising, at least for me. I had always thought that Ronald Reagan was a big spender, but he pales in comparison to later presidents, both Republican and Democratic. It's possible that my impression that Republicans thought that Democrats spend too much may have come from the Carter administration, though I'm not really sure. Certainly, the biggest increases were during Republican terms where the general trend seems to be that each Republican President about doubles the previous President's deficit. But the real trend seems to be a simple increase over time, that's not definitively tied to either party.

I'd like to point out that according to the graphs on http://www.kowaldesign.com/budget/, some of the highest deficits (not counting G.W.Bush) were during the early part of Clinton's term, but these were offset by actual surpluses during the end of his term. I was tempted to try to say that it took Bill a few years to turn around the policies of his predecessor, but now I'm beginning to think that maybe this was simply due to he and Congress being too preoccupied with the Monica Lewinsky scandal to spend a lot of money.

Race and gender differences

There has been a lot of hoopla lately because of the statement by Harvard President Lawrence Summers concerning the possibility that biological differences between men and women might be the cause of there being more men in the field of science than women. This is similar to the argument that some races might be genetically superior to other races.

In an attempt to eliminate prejudice, our society has decided that there are no differences in intelligence between the different races, but what if that isn't true. What if there are statistical differences in intelligence between the average intelligence of one race versus another? No one has proven that all of the races are the same, but heaven help anyone who might suggest otherwise.

The whole thing reminds me of something I read in high school. I don't remember the name of the book, but it was something like an autobiography of a fur trapper among the Eskimos some hundred years ago or so. Apparently, the Eskimos believed that a women couldn't get pregnant by having sex with a man only one time. This is going to seem like a bit of a tangent, but I'll show the connection in a bit.

The Eskimos had no police. If a man was murdered, it was up to his family to avenge his death. This threat of revenge was the main incentive to not kill people. However, when a man visited a village far from his own, he didn't have any family in the area to avenge his death, so for his own survival he had to be "adopted" into a local family. The "adoption" was formalized by the man having sex with the wife of the adopting family. Avenging a man's death was a dangerous thing, and simply saying that you would be willing to avenge someones murder in the event that they get killed wouldn't be enough. Too many people would back out of it if there weren't any real emotional bond. Sharing your wife with your guest provided that bond.

However, there is a catch here. If a child is born from that union, who is responsible for raising it? Often, it may not be clear who the father is. To get around this, the Eskimos convinced themselves that a women can't get pregnant from one sexual encounter. They even continued to believe this after they encountered the European fur trappers and started having babies with red hair.

The point here is that societies are perfectly capable of inventing whatever beliefs are necessary for their society to function smoothly, and they'll strongly resist acknowledging any evidence to the contrary.

I know this is somewhat heretical, but I don't think it really matters, because I think it's clear that the range of intelligence, or any other virtue for that matter, within a race or gender is greater than any possible difference between them. Regardless of anything scientists are going to discover about differences in the way men and women think, for example, the smartest woman is always going to be smarter than the dumbest man, and vice versa. When you're interviewing someone for a job, you don't care what the averages are, you care only about the individual that you're interviewing.

Now, as I write this, it occurs to me that the averages do matter in terms of trying to ascertain whether or not there is bias in the job market based on race or gender. If, for example, science does determine that math ability differs between men and women by 3%, and one sex outnumbers the other in math related fields by 10%, then we might be able to say that there is some bias not related to ability that may need to be corrected. However, as far as its impact on society and the way we lead our day-to-day lives, I don't think it matters.

The hidden powers that we don't vote for

I thought I had posted on this subject before, but I can't find it, so maybe I didn't.

During the last election, John McCain, who had run against Bush in the primary in 2000, and who had generally been a thorn in Bushes side, suddenly began toeing the line and acting nice to Bush. One article I read someplace theorized that this was because McCain wanted to run again in 2008, and he needed the support of the Republican Party to do that, and to get that, he needed to support Bush during this election.

This started me thinking about these mysterious "parties", both the Republican and Democratic parties. We don't learn much about the organization of these parties in grade school when we're learning about how our government works, so, to me, they're fairly mysterious. I don't think it's a serious problem now, but at least based on what little I know, there is a potential for these parties to become the real powers in this country, with only puppets being elected as Congressmen and as the President. Who runs these parties, how are they elected, and how often?

This is more a curiosity for me, rather than a real concern, and is more a result of my personal ignorance rather than any secrecy on the part of the political parties. I have enough faith in our "Freedom of Speech" ammendment to believe that if there was a hint of a problem, the newspapers would be all over it.

Anyway, today there was an article that sheds some light on this process:

State Democratic party leaders back Dean to lead national group

Apparently there is a "Democratic National Committee" and an "Association of State Democratic Chairs". There is also something that was referred to as the "executive committee". I'm not sure what the relationship between these groups is, but I'm pretty sure the DNC is what is generally referred to by the term "Democratic Party".

Anyway, it's interesting to note that there is an official leader, and that leader is elected, at least by someone. It's also interesting to note that at least one contender (Donnie Fowler) is not a politician. He is described as a "Democratic Activist".

I hope Howard Dean runs again in the next election.

Guantanamo Bay

1) "A federal judge yesterday ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainees must be allowed to challenge their imprisonment in court with a defense lawyer, delivering a major blow to the Bush administration's bid to hold suspected fighters in the war on terrorism without judicial oversight."

I've written about this subject before, and that I thought that there was never an excuse for imprisoning someone without due process of law, and how this showed that Bush had no respect for human rights. However, I want to soften that somewhat. In this article, the Bush Administration is claiming that:

"The petitioners are asking this court to do something no federal court has done before: evaluate the legality of the commander in chief's capture and detention of nonresident aliens, outside the United States, during a time of armed conflict," Leon wrote.

First of all, it shouldn't matter whether the prisoners are held inside or outside of the U.S., except that in some cases, prisoners held outside the U.S. might also be subject to the laws of the country in which they are imprisoned. It also shouldn't matter if the prisoners are U.S. citizens or not. They're still people and still deserving of human rights.

However, the part about during a time of armed conflict is valid. The problem is that there are different degrees of armed conflict. On one extreme is the case where we are being attacked by another country and are in grave danger of losing and being overrun by the enemy, in which case extreme measures are more justified. On the other extreme is the case where we've invaded another country that poses little or no threat to us, and we've already won.

In the present case we were attacked, but there is hardly a danger, at this point, of us being conquered. The group that attacked us, Al Qaeda, is still out there, but is greatly weakened. They would probably be a lot weaker if we hadn't diverted our attention from the war on terrorism to attack Iraq, but that's another issue.

The point is that allowing a president to imprison people with minimal process of law during wartime is an expedient measure to allow the nation to focus on defending itself. At this point, we have plenty of time and resources to spend on insuring that we're not imprisoning innocent people, and that those we do imprison are treated fairly.