Iraqi Constitution

As I understand it, the two main unresolved issues on the Iraqi Constitution are those of Federalism and whether or not to let former Baath party members hold office in the new government. The Kurds and Shiites are in favor of having a Federalist government and of barring former Baath Party from holding office, and the Sunnis take the opposite view, except that they're okay with Kurdish independence in the North.

I had to look up "Federalism" in the dictionary, so for those, like me, who don't know what this is, a Federalist state is one that divides power between a central government and regional governments, as opposed to a government in which all of the power is in a single central authority. It's what we have here in the United States.

On the issue of whether or not to let former Baath party members hold office, I would have to side with the Sunnis. I can understand wanting to bar certain people from holding office because of crimes they may have committed under Sadaam, but it shouldn't be a blanket ban on all former Baathists.

On the issue of Federalism, I'm a little bit torn. In principle, I like pushing power down to more local authorities. This gives individuals more control of their own lives, and it allows for experimentation on laws on a smaller scale before applying them to a larger population. For the Sunnis, I would think that Federalism would be a good thing because it will allow them to have more control over areas in Iraq that are dominated by Sunnis. However, I think that the Sunnis fear that Federalism will give the Shiites, who dominate the oil rich areas of Southern Iraq, greater control over the oil wealth, which they could then withhold from the rest of the country, or use to gain more political influence.

The fact that the current constitution guarantees the principle of Federalism, but leaves the details to be worked out later, makes this even more likely. Right now the drafters of the constitution are in the lime light, which makes any blatant attempt to control the oil unlikely. But later, when the world isn't paying so much attention, smaller bills can be quietly passed which will gradually give the Shiites more and more control of the oil.

If I were the Sunnis, I would favor Federalism, but I would also require that the Constitution stipulate some principles on how wealth in the nation should be distributed equally, and how high profit regional resources such as oil should be heavily taxed to benefit the entire country, not just the region in which the resources are found. Either that or some other way of distributing the oil wealth equitably.

Maybe this already exists in the Constitution, my knowledge of it is just what I've read in the papers, or maybe there are other aspects of these issues that I don't understand. This is just my opinion based on what I've read so far.

The Ancestor Within

I read an article recently about how cats can't taste sweetness. In hindsight, this really isn't very surprising. Cats are meat eaters, they never eat anything sweet, so what evolutionary pressure would they have to push them to evolve an ability to taste sweetness. I'll bet lots of animals can't taste sweetness, insect eating birds for example. I'll bet an insect has a special savory taste to a bird, just as jelly doughnut has for us. Has anyone compared fruit and instect eating bats to see if there is any difference in their ability to taste different flavors?

All of which kind of begs the question of why do we taste sweetness. I've always felt that fruit has some kind of special appeal that no other natural food does, and I don't think I'm alone in this. My theory is that our ancestors, millions of years ago, were fruit eating monkeys. I think we evolved our love of sweetness during this time, and even though it's been several million years, and our stomachs could probably no longer handle a diet of just fruit, we still retain the love of the fruit taste. I think all of our desserts are just an attempt to satisfy the sweet tooth we evolved back then.

On a broader scope, I think it's possible to look within ourselves, look at our most basic likes/dislikes and behaviors, and get a glimpse of what our ancestors were like. I did something like that in an earlier post where I tried to figure out what kind of mating patterns our ancestors may have had. I've also used this same way of thinking to try to figure out what kind of communication we might have had before we developed language. For example, throughout the entire world, people laugh, smile and cry the same. As far as I know, the other apes don't do any of these things the way we do, so this is something that we must have evolved after splitting off from the other apes.

What else? An angry "Grrr", is that universal? What about the moans people make when making love, or the heavy sigh when suddenly faced with a lot of extra word. I think it would be fairly simple to just do surveys of different cultures around the world, including primitive cultures, to see how many of these different expressions are common. It would have to be done soon while our different cultures still maintain some of their distintness. I think this would make a good doctoral thesis for someone in the right field.

Democratic Platforms / Privatized Health Insurance

I can't remember about whether or not I've actually blogged about this, but during the last election (Kerry vs. Bush), I was thinking about blogging about how the democrats needed to find some fresh material to campaign for. They were trying to turn attention to Medicare and health care reform, old issues that, to my mind, are pretty much resolved. Sure, people complain about HMOs and the lack of prescription drug coverage, but things are certainly a lot better than they were in the days before unions when we had company towns and sweat shops, etc.. To my mind, it seemed like most of these battles were pretty much won, and that maybe the reason a lot of people were turning to the Republican party was because they were tired of hearing the Democrats complaining about issues that were really in pretty good shape.

However, sitting here this morning, I started thinking that maybe the reason the Democrats were starting to harp on Medicare and prescription drug coverage was because they were getting political contributions from the health care / insurance companies to try to force companies to sink more money into the health insurance.

Now, just to change topic slightly, I think it's kind of odd that our government is forcing companies to buy health insurance for their employees. The idea that you would make a law forcing people to buy something is somewhat counter to the idea of free enterprise. I understand how and why it happened. I understand the need for health coverage for everyone, and I understand how a faith in the ability of free enterprise to keep costs down would cause us to try to create a privatized health care industry, but just on principle alone, I don't like the idea of making laws that force people to buy something from someone else.

Now, if it were just on principle that I didn't like the idea, but the idea was working pretty well, I wouldn't have a problem with it, but there are some problems with our system. First of all, costs are still pretty high. Maybe the cost of health insurance simply reflects the high cost of medicine and we're really getting just what we're paying for, or maybe somebody along the way is pocketing huge profit margins, I don't really know, but it's still an open question. Second, not everyone is covered. By forcing companies to buy health insurance for their employees, you're obviously not covering people who are either without jobs or are self employed. Also, the way our laws are structured, you don't cover people who are working only part time, or, in many cases, the family members of the owner of a small family-run business.

This is not to say that I think we should switch to a government supplied health coverage like they have in Canada. We have a huge investment in our current system, and I don't think we should be bouncing our laws around willy-nilly unless there is a very good reason for it. People plan their lives and careers based on the current system, and to go changing that out from under people will create a lot of havoc. Nonetheless, if I were to make a recommendation to another country that was just starting to try to provide health coverage to its citizens, I wouldn't necessarily recommend our system.

Of course, I don't really know enough to say which system is working better, so I wouldn't necessarly recommend against our system either. So why am I even bothering to blog about the issue? Because it's 4:00 in the morning and I don't have anyone else to talk to, that's why.

famine as population control

There is an article today in the NY Times about the food crisis in Niger (here). I don't mean to sound cold hearted, but what did they think would happen when each woman in the country has an average of 7 children, and how do they think simply sending in more food, or helping more of these people to live, is going to resolve this problem. If more babies live, that will just create more people 16 years from now who are going to be having more babies.

The math here is obvious. Unless you have a steadily increasing food supply, you can't have a steadily increasing population. That means that the number of births per year can't exceed the number of deaths. If women are having an average of 7 babies over the course of their lifetimes, 5 of those babies must die if the population is to remain the same. Famine is one way for these babies to die. War and disease are other ways (they don't have to die as babies, they just have to die before they produce babies of their own).

It seems tragic that these deaths must happen, but think about it for a second. Our ancestors must have lived for thousands of years under similar circumstances. There was no birth control for them, so they must have produced roughly as many babies per woman as is happening now in Niger, and that means that they must have had a similar death rate. This is simply the natural state for our species. The situation in Niger right now is somewhat exacerbated by two factors. First, a drought this year reduced the level of population that the land could support, requiring that more people must die in order to bring the population level down to the new limit. Second, humanitarian aid from previous years also allowed the population to increase beyond the limit that the land could support.

So what's the solution? I don't know. First, I don't think throwing more aid into Niger is going to help. It's only going to make the situation get worse down the road. I think that providing free birth control would be a good start, but it may be difficult to convince people to use it. I suppose it's possible that they might see some logic in only having two babies, and then focusing all your efforts on insuring that those two survive, but I've heard that that isn't usually what happens. I've heard (and I'm not an expert on this, it's just what I've heard) that it takes about a generation of high infant survival rate before people become confident enough that their babies will survive that they will be willing to risk only having two babies.

Another solution might be to just let them be. Let them starve. I know it sounds cold hearted, but it might be arguable that it is better to live only a few short years than to never live at all. Also, by having a high birth/death rate, you increase the selective pressure on your gene pool, thus insuring a genetically stronger population. And besides, this is the natural state for our species. It's tragic, but it's the level of tragedy that exists for all species that care about their children. It only seems unusual to us because we've managed to break that cycle in our society, through a combination of low mortality rate, and a low birth rate to match it, and that, as I've mentioned in previous posts, is going to cause a problem for us through a gradual entropy of the gene pool.

betrayed trust

I've been on vacation for about a week now, so I haven't been keeping up with the news too closely, but I just read an article in CNN about a bunch of marines from Ohio that were killed in Iraq. I'm not going to try to speak for the families of these men, because I don't really know how they feel, but I can speak for myself. In my opinion, these men joined the military because they wanted to protect their homeland, and George Bush betrayed them and sent them to attack another country for his own selfish purposes.

Whether he did this knowingly or through ignorance is irrelevant. Any man who forms his opinion before seeing all of the evidence, and then only asks to see evidence that supports the opinion he's already formed, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, shouldn't be allowed run a small grocery store, let alone the most powerful country in the world. (My apologies to grocers everwhere.)