煞車, 操舵則加油

"Darkest Of Night, With The Moon Shining Bright..."

2012-02-15T21:40:00.005+08:00

Trying to put over a lot of writing in the next few weeks. I completely forgot that yesterday was Valentine's day; that's what happens when you spend your time hanging out with eagles.

Preceptor

2012-02-14T20:02:00.013+08:00

Much better pictures today - the blue sky background makes all the difference. Not as sharp as I would like, but as good as I was going to get with my 250mm. The following three images are of one of a pair of crested serpent eagles that own Nanhua Reservoir.

Notice the clipped left wing in this next image below: there might be four or five feathers missing there, presumably the result of a fight or possibly from some sort of accident in bad weather...

2nd GE Prototype

2012-02-13T18:06:00.003+08:00

"...as the EM Railgun program prepares for delivery of a second prototype launcher built by General Atomics."

Against the background noise of defense cuts, that's good to hear; surely somebody at Chungshan must have given some thought to an unguided, short range system for point defense against cruise and ballistic missiles.

蛇鷹

2012-02-12T22:21:00.007+08:00

I was out at Nanhua reservoir today taking more pictures for my reservoir essays, and whilst walking back to the road from the dam itself, I caught sight of a very large bird out the corner of my eye: I must have disturbed her because she re-settled in a brisbane tree just a short distance away. My guess would be that either she was just taking a time out from hunting, or she has a nest very close to that spot (which would make sense, since very few people would ever approach the dam structure itself from the western side). Hurrying out the long lens and creeping up as far as I dared go (lest she take off and I lose the opportunity), I took a host of hurried shots whilst holding my breath and trying to keep the lens steady. Then she turned to face me and just lept off the branch - my attempted composure went to shit as I wheeled the camera frantically shooting as much as I could.

However, the images are good enough to allow almost certain identification: she was a crested serpent eagle. Here's another area where I need to work on my camera skills - the images are atrociously blurred, but you can clearly see what a great moment this was...

Ferguson On Hitchens

2012-02-11T16:25:00.001+08:00

"In the event, no hit-obit of any consequence appeared. What he got instead from the world of mainstream journalism was an outpouring of love and praise that was staggering in its dimensions."

Andrew Ferguson in a delayed post on Christopher Hitchens at Commentary magazine. Unlike seemingly most other people, I at least had criticism to make and a question to ask to which I - of course - received no reply.

Scavenging Is Not Salvaging

2012-02-10T02:45:00.005+08:00

I said it just over a week ago: it'll be either Santorum or Romney.

My bet: if the Republicans nominate Romney, they lose to Obama in November. If they nominate Santorum, they win. Simple:

Conservatives are very likely still the largest ideological group in the U.S. at >40%; if they stay home in apathy, the Republicans lose.
The commies will all turn out for Obama, but the uncommitted will not.
The so-called "moderates" will break for a clear alternative candidate due to Obama's record.

Romney doesn't have the necessary background to even understand the relevant questions, let alone answer them. Santorum, on the other hand does recognize the questions (though he doesn't give the answers I would).

If Obama is not to enjoy another four years of subversion and havoc, then, for all his faults, Santorum has to win the nomination; Ron Paul is both better and worse, but the aspects in which he is worse mean he cannot win.

Baihe Reservoir (白河水庫)

2012-02-07T13:25:00.124+08:00

Last Saturday afternoon, I drove up to the little reservoir which lies in Tainan County's northeastern Baihe district (白河區). Taking route 172 out of Lioujia (六甲區), through Liuying (柳營區) and Dongshan (東山區) districts, it was only a thirty minute drive. Of the two google maps screenshots to the right, the first shows the location of Baihe reservoir in broader geographical purlieu: to the north is Chiayi City and to the south are Tainan's three major reservoirs (Wushantou [烏山頭], Tseng-wen [曾文] and Nanhua [南化]). The second screenshot brings the outline of Baihe reservoir itself into clear resolution with the border between Tainan and Chiayi Counties clearly demarcated to the north. Notice that this image describes Baihe reservoir almost by cardinal aspects: to the east the reservoir takes on a fractal shape comparable to the fantastic Wushantou reservoir; to the west, the reservoir splits into a more substantial southern pool and a more meagre northern splinter. However that image fails to convey several important facts for the tourist; the first is that public access is limited to the southern end of the reservoir, and the second is the fact that the northern splinter of the reservoir is hidden from tourist view behind several intersecting hillocks clothed in copses of bamboo and deciduous trees. In addition, whereas the tourist can make visual contact with the reservoir only from its' southern tributary river to the western spillway (a distance of perhaps somewhat less than a kilometer), the map clearly describes a body of water approximately two kilometers in length on a south-west - north-east axis; much of the reservoir's north-eastern extent is precluded from view by the presence of river reeds stretching out toward the first foothills of the eastern mountains. Although the public access road to the reservoir affords only a limited perspective, it may be possible to find a small farmer's road to drive up into the nearby foothills to the north-east to look down on the reservoir from above - the view from the mountains themselves will come at the price of distance and is in any case likely to be obscured by haze.

Route 172 (going northward) has only one sign for Baihe reservoir; to mark out the little left turn onto the approach road through the trees and bamboo thickets behind which the reservoir lies some few hundred meters away. Instead, the route is signmarked for the various hot spring resorts of the locally famous Guanzihling (關子嶺) area. Reservoirs and water management infrastructure is, of course, strictly a minority interest which has yet to be capitalized upon, although the grounds of the reservoir do offer some landscape shots. Unlike Baihe reservoir's three larger cousins in Tainan, it must be approached on foot (there is a small car park in the grounds for a trivial fee). The grounds preceding the actual reservoir itself warrant only a cursory description: a car park, some conventional landscaping and two buildings at either end - one to house an office of the Southern Water Resources Agency to the south-east, and one to to the south-west to house a seemingly pointless tourist reception office for the "Siraya National Scenic Area". Heavily advertised and signmarked along all of the major eastern roads throughout Tainan County, the "Siraya National Scenic Area" is the government's attempt to "promote" what remains of the long-since displaced Siraya people (an aboriginal group) for tourism. The broader ethical subject of how the aboriginal people should now be treated today makes me feel sick: I would treat them as individuals, not as "peoples"; I would spurn the pluralized collective noun so often used by the Left. What those people need, individually, is property rights and an institutional architecture in which those rights would be acknowledged and preserved.

After parking, I decided to walk up to the south-eastern building which is closer to the entrance. The path slopes upwards at a slight angle, meaning that the view of the water itself remains only a promise until you actually pass the building and reach the fence: what you then see is a trickle of the southern river below. It is fenced off from the further encroachment of wetland reeds by a wall of sandbags. To the right, the way was barred by trees, so turning to the left I climbed a steep, rough and obviously earthquake-damaged stone staircase up a small, tree-covered hill. I stopped to shoot a small spider spinning its little web among the long since wild vegetation, but other than that there were only birds. At the top of the hill there is an old, abandoned and fenced off building opposite an inviting but likewise abandoned stone pavillion obviously designed for picnics. It's one of those strange little places liable to give me a sense of dejavu. This little hill offers charmingly imperfect, picture-postcard views out over the river toward the hills and mountains in an easterly to north-easterly direction; the electricity pylons provide a strong focus to pivot the beige-brown of the reeds below against the blue-green of the mountains and sky in the background. However, the thickness of the trees at the hill's summit - both bamboo and deciduous - obscures all view of the reservoir to the north west. Since there wasn't much to do there except finish my coffee and get bitten by mosquitos, I headed off down the sloping, north-westerly trail to the other side of the hill. Even whilst walking this slope, the trees were so thick as to obscure the reservoir all the way until I reached the bottom and rounded them. Below is a shot of that heavily canopied hill overlooking the tributary river from the northern end of the reservoir's dam (since this image was taken facing south-east, the mountains on the horizon patrol the boundary with Tseng-wen reservoir [曾文水庫] and Chiayi County's Dapu district [大埔鄉])...

Baihe reservoir itself, although it has a certain scenic charm, is a comparatively trivial body of water; with a storage capacity of just 9.69 million cubic meters (effective: 6.91 million cubic meters), it is approximately one tenth that of Wushantou reservoir to the south, or - to really distend the comparison - it is one sixtieth (yes, 1/60) of Tseng-wen reservoir. Baihe reservoir provides irrigation water to an area of less than 3,000 hectares which is 4.3% of that of Tseng-wen reservoir (曾文水庫) and 4.2% of Wushantou reservoir (烏山頭水庫). It is comparatively tiny. My first impression of the reservoir was immediately distilled as "a glorified pond", though this is partly because the reservoir is deeper than might initially be suspected and partly because, as mentioned, much of the reservoir is obscured by nature. And yet Baihe reservoir boasts a spectacularly steep spillway seemingly out of proportion to the meagre visual span of the reservoir itself - the contrast is intriguing and impossible not to notice. Where that part of the reservoir visible to the public is cloistered in by trees and small hills to the north and south and encumbered by the encroachment of reeds to the east, the spillway from the dam itself roars down some two hundred meters or so into a wide, echoing valley below - one which has recently been quarried out further with the effect of embellshing the contrast. The apparent mismatch however, is not entirely unjustified. Despite the modest circumference of the reservoir as it appears to the public eye, it has a depth guage at the spillway gates of 110 meters, though this depth will be a mere artifice of the reservoir bed's curvature - which I suspect was excavated at the behest of the engineers during the construction of the dam in the early 1960s. Certainly, as the southern tributary river enters the reservoir, surrounded as it is by reeds, the depth is unlikely to be anything more than a few meters and so the topography of the reservoir bed must be strikingly uneven - a few meters of river water flowing almost immediately into a hundred meter ditch just behind the dam's floodgate.

Fitting with the coziness of its picturesque appearance, Baihe reservoir hosts a small flotilla of those ubiquitous, plastic-pipe rafts which the Taiwanese use for fishing. As I was getting ready to leave in fact, two of the locals grabbed one of these things and headed off toward the northern splinter of the reservoir hidden from view behind the tree-claden hillocks. On seeing that, I immediately thought "eutrophication"; in addition to being dammed, the reservoir is constantly exposed to incoming water through two rivers coming down from the mountains, both of which pass through obviously fertile land. Along with Agongdian reservoir, which suffers from a similar problem (a large quantity of mud transferred through its' tributary river), Baihe reservoir is apparently one of five eutrophic reservoirs in Taiwan. There is a pumping tower adjacent to the public walkway onto the dam, but no information whatsoever is provided as to how often this is used (wild guess: once or twice a year) or the condition of the reservoir. The dam itself is only a short walk of a couple of hundred meters across and is not especially impressive, except for its' spillway - as already mentioned above. The lower reaches of the dam are however, covered in vegetation, which is an obvious sign of heavy eutrophication. The only attempt at interpretative signage at the entire site is this small sign which, in addition to mentioning that the reservoir was constructed in 1965 for the dual purpose of irrigation and flood control, is noteworthy for its clumsily overt psychology - like too much make-up or something:

"Stand on the dam and look at the shoreline slopes, the verdant plant cover, the mist that hangs over the water all year, and the surface reflecting an infinite expanse of green, and you will feel yourself lost in a beautiful landscape painting."

Whatever, woman. I don't need you or anyone else to tell me how I will feel. What I would like to have are facts, particularly facts concerning the design and construction of Baihe reservoir and facts concerning the engineers who worked on the reservoir from 1961 until 1965. Did they learn anything from the problems at Agongdian reservoir (阿公店水庫) further to the south in Kaohsiung County? I would also like to know about the reservoir's flood control effectiveness, and facts about its relative state of eutrophication over the years, possible fish stocks and other wildlife.

It's a shame when an information panel does so little to inform but so much to pander to the uninterested. I at least am not uninterested - that is why I went to see Baihe reservoir in the first place.

Of Course, She Is The Better Photographer...

2012-02-06T11:40:00.003+08:00

The Elision Of Nescience

2012-02-05T01:04:00.018+08:00

Here is the very first sentence of today's Timid Times editorial :

"Taiwan faces a rising national deficit and increasing government debt, so it is reasonable that the government proposes new taxes."

Immediately, the alternative of real public spending cuts, is elided. Why is that? It is because the primary cause of the coming fiscal crisis is the insistence on over-inflated State provision of public goods such as education and social welfare - insisted upon by, among others, the editors of the Taipei Times themselves.

Reality check: in last year's NT$1.79 trillion budget, the two largest items were... education (NT$357 billion) and social welfare (NT$347 billion), neither of which need be funded by the State at all. Perhaps, however, the editors pass over the possibility of depolitizing reforms because they would be too painful. Would not real public spending cuts be especially hard?

"Of course, reform is painful and tax reform especially hard."

Of course, what the brave editors of the Timid Times are prepared to "fight for" is yet more coercive fiat imposed by the government, with, in this case, the implementation of yet more taxes to further the metastasis of the very tumour which is causing the fiscal crisis in the first place: over-inflated State provision of public goods.

I note also that this editorial seems to have been precisely cued by Turton's letter last month after the elections. Indeed, there is not a word in it with which he would disagree. I would write to them to protest, but criticism of this nature has long been unwelcome there.

Here is a question: if the Taipei Times shut up shop tommorow, what fucking difference would it make?

Limelight

2012-02-04T19:54:00.011+08:00

It was approaching three in the afternoon and the sun was blaring out a white glare everywhere to the west, so, for the want of filters, I set the shutter speed to somewhere over 1/1000, dropped the F-stop and switched the white balance up to blue-green. The best I could do: the dam for Wushantou reservoir (烏山頭水庫) is just about visible as a thin, dark, horizontal strip in the centre of the image at the horizon.

I drove out there this afternoon to check out the back end of the reservoir, and then off to have a look at Baihe Reservoir (白河水庫) at the north end of the county. There is a little village at the back end of Wushantou which is visible in the distance from the dam itself. It's called "Wangyegong", a very Hoklo-sounding name, and I drove in there on the big bike - which, when I saw the state of the little backroads out there, I realized was something of a mistake. One of the locals kindly ferried me up and down the steep, narrow, knackered little farm roads on the back of a scooter so I could take pictures. What I need to do at some point is go back early in the morning at or before sunrise and try out a few other vantage points to the north and south.

Persistent Pilot Error

2012-02-04T12:33:00.006+08:00

Question: is there a "drinking problem" in Taiwan's Air Force Academy? They keep crashing their planes, and the investigators keep putting it down to pilot error. The question has to be asked in order to be eliminated: are they just getting into their planes still half-sloshed from the night before*?

Three different planes in the last three years: AT-3s this year, F-5s last year, T-34s in 2010 - and note that two of these planes are trainers whilst the F-5 is presumably considered a step up toward the F-16s, IDFs and Mirage 2000s. So it's unlikely to be the senior pilots who are misbehaving. Then again... somebody should check up on the number of "incidents" with the F-16s.

*Yes, I've heard rumours that this is what's going on.

On "Neoliberalism"

2012-02-04T02:41:00.003+08:00

"I don't trust any label that starts with "neo" and ends in "ism." I'd sell that word short against the Euro."

A good little laugh. Comment #10 by Alan K. Henderson.

Syllogism

2012-02-03T12:10:00.008+08:00

Me to Linda Morgan in the comments thread here. I owe the argument to commenter "IanB", formerly of Samizdata...

Major premise: violations of the non-aggression principle must be justified by appeal to value.

Minor premise: no value can be objectively shown (in the strictest sense*) to be preferable to another.

Conclusion: there can thus be no objective grounds for violating the non-aggression principle.

*Hume’s "is-ought gap", which is to say an “ought” statement cannot be directly deduced from an “is” statement without an intermediary “ought” statement.

Update: I've since made a technical correction to the major premise. See comments.

Wushantou Recursion

2012-02-02T13:11:00.013+08:00

Just a few of the pictures I took on a return visit to Wushantou Reservoir (烏山頭水庫) for my upcoming essay. New interpretive panels have been added since I was there last year, though I wouldn't have thought my previous write-up would have had anything to do with that. Most of Taiwan's major reservoirs are here in the south, but at some point I will need to go up north to Sihmen Reservoir (石門水庫) in Taoyuan County and Feitsui Reservoir (翡翠水庫) to the south-east of Taipei County. I should also try to get to the new Hushan reservoir under construction in Yilan County.

Financial Spandrels

2012-01-30T23:11:00.009+08:00

"Media of exchange are nothing more than vessels for delivering value. The greater the burden of delivering value, the more "that which is unseen" is diminished...

...At some level, I think the public outrage directed at the financial sector is an intuitive understanding that an overweight financial sector is feeding at the expense of "that which is unseen"."

Samizdata peer Midwesterner elucidating another instance of Frederic Bastiat's famous "broken window" fallacy (emphasis mine). The point is a subtle one: what he is referring to is the likely unconscious confusion of the necessity of foreign exchange speculation with the now grotesque extent of its unseen costs.

Banking and financial services comprise a far larger percentage of the British economy than any other sector (except of course, the ~~parasitic~~ "public" sector). The point is not that any of it is unnecessary, but that much of it is a spandrel resulting from attempts to rationally support the maintenance of wealth under the weight of State corrupted media of exchange.

Later...

"Your foray into "value" is symptomatic of the underlying problem in the entire financial meta-context of our time. "End goals" and "means to achieve end goals" are two entirely different things. A "means" is a value, but it is not an "end"..."

This is excellent; his occassional participation is the chief reason I still occassionally read Samizdata. Do read the whole thing.

On The Remaining GOP Candidates In Florida

2012-01-29T13:31:00.013+08:00

I watched the Jacksonville debate yesterday afternoon whilst recovering from a Friday night out; I had already dropped my two cents off to a friend a few days ago, but I re-present them here:

First of all, the presidential election in November must not become the focus of any cathartic release of conservative anger and frustration; not only would a new president be unable - by himself - to take a serious axe to the government, but he will not even be able to accomplish much in the way of slowing the growth of government without the aid of strong congressional support for real public spending cuts in addition to monetary reform. That being said, whoever wins the nomination should easily beat President Obama in any debate - if not the election itself (don't trust anyone on the Left who says they will abstain; they won't, they'll be voting for Obama).

On the GOP candidates:

Ron Paul, aside from his obvious frailties, is a disappointment: although he grasps the necessity of substantive monetary and fiscal reform with a vigor conspicuously absent in the other three candidates, the listless tone of his argument for military restraint, together with his obdurate ignorance of foreign affairs, simply enervate him further. The limited government arguments cry out to be made by a much more powerful voice capable of greater range and subtlety and of genuinely intimidating the sneering little fools at the networks and the papers. Gary Johnson apparently wasn't up to this.

Rick Santorum is the only other remotely tenable candidate for the Right; along with Paul, he wins hands down in terms of a "clear contrast" with Barack Obama. Santorum has at least this to be said for him - he's practical without being a Pragmatist* and will not compromise on principles even if it means losing a vote. Aside from his anti-libertarianism however, the big problem with Santorum is that whilst he is committed to spending cuts on a scale comparable to Ron Paul's (U.S.$5 trillion over five years), he is not apparently in favour of monetary reform.

Mitt Romney is an unconscious Pragmatist and is in that sense at least, an honest one - which makes him (not Gingrich) the proverbial "wild card". Romney will at least listen to exposition from the limited government voices, whereas betrayal by Gingrich would be a certainty. The weakness of a Romney presidency would depend on the composition of the congress - but that's assuming he even gets there. If he wins the nomination I suspect Obama and the Left will simply laugh at him.

Newt Gingrich is a fat, bloated tick on the conservative base of the Republican Party and ought to be recognized for what he is; he'd sell them out to the Left just for the chance to ponce about looking "profound". I smiled when Romney finally popped him in the Jacksonville debate.

So... it'll be either Santorum or Romney.

*An under-appreciated distinction: to be practical is to give consideration to the tactical application of principle, whereas to be "pragmatic" is to allow tactical considerations to corrupt the principles themselves.

***

Later... Brett Stephens at the Wall Street Journal has this to say on Santorum and Paul:

"But Messrs. Santorum and Paul are two tedious men, deep in conversation with some country that's not quite America, appealing to a devoted base but not beyond it. Sorry, gentlemen: You're not going anywhere."

Why not? Especially when the alternative is - Obama? Get real: this is the worst U.S. President in living memory for anyone not on the hardcore Left; electorally, he has to be weak to very weak on every single issue.

Weather Changes

2012-01-27T14:36:00.012+08:00

It's a strange thing - the weather in Taiwan. The weather forecast for all of the southern counties (Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung) has been grey and overcast all week, yet the weather has been superb here in Tainan.

So yesterday I drove up to Chiayi to photo the Renyi Tan reservoir (仁義潭水庫), and disapointingly, the skies were in fact all grey and miserable - whereas they were apparently open and blue all day in Tainan according to friends. Compare and contrast, first the southern end of Tseng-wen reservoir (曾文水庫) looking north-eastwards (taken on wednesday):

Glorious. Notice the clouds to the north (i.e. Chiayi) in that picture and the relative blue in the south. And now the eastern end (looking southwestards) of Renyi Tan reservoir in Chiayi yesterday:

Appalling. The dismal skies in Chiayi meant that I struggled to get anything even half-decent; which meant using the dull conditions as a backdrop for a portrait shot of some random clutter in the foreground.

And even that is ... dull. My pictures at Tseng-wen were much better simply because of the difference in the weather. I'll use some of them in a new essay I'm writing on Taiwan's reservoirs. On my way home, I stopped on a bridge over the Tseng-wen river to get some pictures of the cliff erosion and while I was at it, at the risk of having my camera blown off by a stray gust of wind, I also managed a decent shot of myself:

"Beyond Belief"

2012-01-26T19:51:00.008+08:00

"History repeats the old conceits,
the glib replies the same defeats.
Keep your finger on important issues
with crocodile tears and a pocketful of tissues..."

In the comments thread to a post entitled "Taiwan Election Analysis" at PRS, I chimed in with a note that evidently jarred with the echo at that airy place. It was obviously beyond the expectations of the author "Steve":

"Where intellectual leadership comes from is irrelevant, what that leadership believes and propagates matters."

Remedial lesson #1: when I refer to "the Left", I'm not talking about geography.

"Just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t give you the the right to ad hominum criticize, it’s just a reflection of you and your own biases."

I'll put this on the record here only because my more acerbic response was disallowed there:

"Rights" are not conventions on what can be said in polite company.
My criticism was not ad hominem, it was merely strongly worded - and any honest person can see that.
To dismiss unexpected and unwelcome criticism as mere "bias" is precisely what I'd expect from some prancing little daisy fresh out of "gender studies" class.

That narrow, insectivorous fixation on electoral dynamics is not the broader picture, nor is it even an important aspect. To deliberately repeat the cliche: what is important are ideas and their consequences when put into action.

Against Turton & Navarro

2012-01-25T19:59:00.008+08:00

"As Vicente Navarro pointed out in CounterPunch a few weeks ago, one reason that the southern tier of Europe — Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal — are in a debt crisis is that the price of the right’s acquiesce to democratization was that its wealth would not be fairly taxed."

That was penned by Michael Turton in a letter published in the Taipei Times on Tuesday last week (the 17th). I missed this initially and only found it late on the Friday night after trawling through the archives to collect the various editorial responses to the DPP's election failure.

This argument that Turton refers to (Navarro's) is useful to the Left in as much as it will allow them to try to deflect attempts to attach some measure of blame to them for the current sovereign debt crises. The two key points of Navarro's argument are that tax revenues are comparatively low in the mediteranean countries with tax avoidance and tax evasion apparently endemic, and that the welfare state in those countries is "underdeveloped" relative to their northern European cousins (i.e. it consumes a comparatively smaller percentage of GNP). What Turton does in his letter is to point out that Navarro's argument is similarly applicable in the case of Taiwan.

So what's wrong with Navarro's argument? Three things.

First, as I said it deflects attention away from the culpability of the Left in advocating greater levels of public spending way beyond tax revenues. Whatever the score with respect to why tax revenue was relatively low, it nonetheless remains the case that it was insufficient because the public spending commitments of the Left (and I would suspect sometimes of the Right too) exceeded it to no small degree; the politicians and various journalists and commenters on the Left surely knew this at the time and yet did little to nothing to argue for fiscal restraint. The intellectual leadership of the Left was irresponsible in this respect, and they should quit squirming and think again about Thatcher's famous quip:

"The problem with socialism is that sooner or later, you run out of other people's money."

Second, the argument does not take sufficient account of the monetary and banking aspects to the formation of the problem; it was partly due to the artificially cheap credit which the ECB flushed throughout the banking systems of the Euro member states (with the Bank Of England acting in a similar fashion in the UK) that the governments of the mediterranean countries were able to borrow so much in the first place*. It must be stressed that a monetary system run on the model of a central bank adjusting interest rate policy every financial quarter owes nothing to free market theory and everything to the Statist impulse to coercive government. A free market monetary system would run on competition between private issuers of commodity-based currencies, as Hayek outlined in his paper "The Denationalization Of Money" and which Ron Paul apparently has said he would support. There may also be of course, the future possibility of digitally distributed, inelastic currencies removed from Statist interference.

Third, the claim that certain wealthy people supposedly on the Right did not consent to have their wealth "fairly" taxed rests upon the Left's standard modus fermenti of "social justice". Now before I put my case as to why this slogan ought to be rejected, I should note that it is undoubtedly true that certain people in the mediterranean countries unfairly acquired financial assets from the State prior to the several transitions to democracy and from having had Right-wing political connections both before and after these transitions. Progressive taxation however does not only subtract cash unfairly acquired by these people; it also subtracts cash from all other wealthy people including those who became wealthy from the application of their own iniative and hard work. To call that "fair" presupposes a notion of "fairness" that goes some way beyond taxing wealth acquired on political connections alone.

When the Left speak of "social justice", what do they mean? Obviously it must be something distinct from mere "justice" qua punishing people who have committed natural crimes (murder, rape, arson, theft, fraud and the like). Well there are at least several other ways to answer this question, but here are just two: reducing income inequality and advancing "equality of opportunity". There are several lines of argument for reducing income inequality, but the mantra itself is useful to the Left because it conflates two seperable objectives: helping (or allowing) those in need to improve their circumstances, and inflicting the envious urge for a "redistributive revenge" upon those with greater wealth. Likewise with "equality of opportunity" there is a similar conflation of objectives going on: helping (or allowing) those less well off to improve their lot, and inflicting some gravitational pull downward upon those already lucky enough to have opportunities. In each case (whether reducing income inequality or advancing equality of opportunity) it is the first objective of allowing those less well off to help themselves that is worth holding onto, whereas the second objective is not for several reasons: first it necessitates the application of institutionalized aggression against a general class of people identified not by anything they have done wrong, but merely on account of their possession of wealth; second, it generates negative externalities in that for every dollar taxed away from the wealthy, there is a dollar less now available for capital or labour investment, or indeed, for consumption**; third, the use of taxation for the funding of public goods often has other unseen negative externalities in that it often makes it difficult for the market either to produce the public goods themselves, or to produce alternatives to them. For insance it is now possible to produce water filters at a nanoscale so as to filter out all known bacteria and viruses, yet every modern city in the world persists with gigantic, large-scale (and now antiquated) water treatment and wastewater management systems; the financial incentive to develop water filters on a larger scale is retarded by the continuing existence of large scale public utilities.

***

In making his point that Navarro's argument about relatively low tax yields applies also to Taiwan, Turton goes on to prescribe the following:

"For anyone who wants to reform Taiwan’s economy, obvious moves might include raising capital gains taxes, implementing a stock transaction tax, more closely regulating the sale of land and housing, and, most urgently, raising the government’s assessed value for fixed assets, as well as reducing development funding that goes to Taipei."

The prescriptions follow naturally from his analysis. I share the sense of injustice many southern Taiwanese feel about being taxed to pay for people in Taipei - it is outrageous, but I don't think that outrage should be expressed in the terms of the Left for they will only make things worse. He is talking about a future government raising taxes in a scenario that may very well include monetary collapse.

I think a better answer would be to initiate an assiduous program of rational depoliticization in which the responsibilities of the State in providing public goods through fiscal policy are radically curtailed if not abolished outright in favour of complete privatization. Such a program of depoliticization would make it possible to abolish the corresponding taxes and other negative externalities that often fall disproportionately upon the poor, and it would thereby make it possible to abolish the current monetary system by allowing the private introduction of at least one (preferably several) competing commodity-based currencies.

That's all for now - I may add to this later, when I'm less busy.

*It must also be pointed out that the people living in the mediterranean countries were at no time directly asked to consent to their governments borrowing so much money; so whilst the "PIIGS" pejorative is understandable, I think it is unfair to a lot of people.

**Of course this argument could be played out to much greater detail with reference to Art Laffer's famous work on tax yields for instance, but I'm not so much interested in making government more efficient as I am in replacing government functions with free markets.

"All Creatures Great & Small..."

2012-01-25T11:37:00.007+08:00

The thing about photoing birds of prey is that you really must have both the time and patience either to chase up their position if possible or allow them to eventually drift closer to yours (compare with these two shots here, and here). This is a slightly zoomed in shot, taken yesterday, of what I suspect is either a Common Buzzard or a Greater Spotted Eagle (definitely not a Kite or a Goshawk - look at the tail). I was out at Tseng-wen reservoir (曾文水庫) again yesterday and I'm very glad that I was because, unlike today, the weather was superb - but it was so superb that I ended up with sunburn across my face. This is probably due to an increased exposure time to the sun from driving much more slowly (sans helmet after a certain point), having recently fitted a new drive belt to the big bike.

This little chap is obviously some sort of skink, though I'm not quite sure which species; the black bar running along his right side doesn't quite fit with the descriptions I've read of various lizards in Taiwan. I wouldn't have thought he was rare though since he wasn't too afraid of me, and I seem to remember coming across similar skinks before. Anyone?

Besides chores, I am working on my essays - one on the reservoirs, one on air theatre defense, and one in response to Turton's recent reference to Vicente Navarro's essay last August in Counterpunch. Here's one of yesterday's pictures of Tseng-wen reservoir from where it tails off into obscurity at its southernmost end:

"It Really Is That Simple..."

2012-01-21T01:11:00.006+08:00

"To the extent that a civilization is governed by laws rather than men, it is a peaceful society...

To the extent that the law is bent to the uses of some at the expense of others, society degrades into violence."

Samizdata peer "Midwesterner". My lords, I agree with the honourable gentleman, and would add that, if wielded skillfully, this is a powerful argument for the depoliticization of society, i.e. for rationally repudiating the scale and scope of political power.

Language & Principles

2012-01-18T22:12:00.002+08:00

"Listen: I know that real wages have fallen. That's not the point. What is important here is the language and the principles with which the problem must be tackled; if what we are concerned about is poor people being able to do better for themselves, then, with respect to freedom, this is properly understood by considering the negative externalities that government inflicts upon the poor..."

Part of a comment I left at Free Taiwan in response to commenter "RollingWave" (whose style bears a striking resemblance to that of "Okami", the once serial commenter here who has since disappeared).

"Anticipating The End Of The Year..."

2012-01-17T13:51:00.003+08:00

Essays later; they have to be written first. I can't wait for the Chinese New Year break - I'm going to drive around with the camera and write like there's no tommorow.

Betting On Data Vs Modelling

2012-01-16T11:57:00.007+08:00

"My approach was to listen to the data. The approach taken by James Annan was flawed because he didn’t. He imposed a straight line on the data due to theoretical considerations."

In a piece at the Global Warming Policy Foundation recalling his 2007 bet with climate scientist James Annan, David Whitehouse explains why he thinks he won the bet.

Do read the whole thing. And while I'm at it, I may take this opportunity to once again remind readers as to why I am banned from commenting at Michael Turton's blog and his curious decision to subsequently lie about his reason for banning me (see comments).

On The 2012 Election Results

2012-01-15T13:11:00.005+08:00

On last night's election results: my overriding feeling is one of indifference, though perhaps with a slight tint of vindication that a majority of Taiwanese people did not vote for the DPP; they are not a strong, credible alternative to the KMT.

The reason for this is the crippling Leftist bias which is seemingly infused throughout the party. The fact that this bias puts them somewhat at odds with the U.S. party most willing to support them - the Republicans - seems to be totally lost on them. I have spent the last three years doing what little I can to challenge the Leftist bias in the Taipei Times and among the broader "community" of westerners here - all seemingly to no avail.

Since the initial euphoria of the DPP's early years is long gone, my opinion is that the party will never again win a majority in an election until they purge themselves of their Leftist bent and begin to attack the Nationalist Party from a more properly Liberal platform of constitutionally limited government, private property rights and economic freedom, sound monetary policy and disciplined fiscal restraint.

To take it in its' broadest dimensions, the strategy which the DPP must come to accept is one of depoliticization of Taiwanese society; of reducing the size and scope of government. Not only would such a strategy, if implemented, allow the DPP to present itself to voters as the responsible party prepared to deal seriously with the coming debt, fiscal and monetary crises - for which the governing KMT will have to shoulder public approbation - but it would also allow the DPP to tackle the institutional power of the KMT at its root, in its patronage networks which continue to exist via direct and indirect forms of State support.

Channel News Asia Interview

2012-01-13T12:32:00.008+08:00

Tommorow night I will be taking part in an interview with Andrea Chow for Channel News Asia in Singapore on the subject of Taiwan's elections. The interview will take place after 8pm, which is several hours after the ballots will have closed; it may be that the preliminary election results come through the wires during the show. Why me? Apparently it is because, unlike the rest of the English blogosphere in Taiwan, I pay no "allegiance" to either the pan-greens or the pan-blues. I will post a link in due course probably some time tommorow.

***

Interview just concluded - very, very brief; I was not asked a question on issues as had originally been included in the draft questions sent to me, which was disappointing. I was asked about the legislative candidates, to which I replied that Taiwan doesn't seem to have the equivalent of a Steve Baker or a Douglas Carswell. That's about as interesting as it got. That being said, it's their show not mine.

"You Have To Pay For Everything, But Some Things Are For Free..."

2012-01-10T18:48:00.015+08:00

As a foreigner in Taiwan, I might be expected to be in the tank for the Democratic Progressive Party - certainly, a cursory sweep of the English blogosphere in Taiwan might instill that prejudice - and indeed it is certainly true that I have no affection for the currently governing Nationalist Party either. As it is, I regard both parties with an equally equanimous antipathy.

The reason I dislike the Democratic Progressive Party is simply this: they reflect, in their attitudes toward domestic policy, almost every strain of populist prejudice carried by the Left in the now decaying Western countries: the two most virulent of which are "social justice" and "environmental sustainability". Both of these now stained babble-flags represent more than mere intellectual errors...

In a short yet drawn-out post by one "Matt Bruenig", which has no doubt been doing the rounds among Leftists after Monbiot mentioned it in the Guardian recently, there is a crude attempt to torture a slithered figure of "libertarianism" into confessing its hostility toward climate change claims. Here is Monbiot hissing from his rhetorical zenith:

"A transparently self-serving vision, it seeks to justify the greedy and selfish behaviour of those with wealth and power."

Since Monbiot is reliably arse over elbow (scroll down for comments) on philosophical distinctions, let's leave him to his blades and look at Bruenig's argument itself...

"No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others."

Although Bruenig stretches the argument out over several paragraphs, it is essentially this: responsibility for the negative externalities of air pollution cannot be accounted for under property rights alone without State involvement, and therefore libertarians "deny climate change".

The argument is fallacious on several counts, the most obvious of which is the conclusion: "denial of climate change", which, to rescue the reality from that smothering rhetorical pillow, is actually... skepticism of the AGW hypothesis, skepticism of the pending ecological collapse with which the Left try to intimidate ordinary working people, and dogged opposition to the Left's shakedown for greater Leviathan powers on the tenuity of this hypothesis.

On the substance of the argument itself however, Bruenig's initial premise may be granted: since air pollution observes no geographical property boundaries, responsibility for any adverse effects cannot be accounted for on the basis of geographically delimited property rights alone. Yet Bruenig's conclusion that therefore polluters must be forcibly restrained by the State entails two presumptions which do not directly follow from the premise itself... first, the presumption that any and all infractions of liberty are to be answered with a legal response, and second, that this can only be achieved via a coercive, monopolized regulatory system.

(1) People act to pursue values chosen in a context which typically requires prioritization and the sacrifice of lesser for greater values. Although air pollution may indeed be an infraction of property rights, it is not necessarily worth doing anything about given (a) the comparatively limited resources of the individual, (b) the considerable importance of fossil fuels to the global economy and (c) the negative externalities of permitting yet more political power to accrue to the State and its' agencies. To quote from the admirably eloquent commenter "twostix" on this blog thread (comment #38):

"Seriously, I mean man, SERIOUSLY Asia doesn’t give a fuck about your white, western, self flagellating, puritanical eco religion."

Quite. If AGW is true, then regardless of the severity of its consequences it quite literally cannot be stopped now given the massive industrialization of China, India and Brazil, which only begs the question of what the environmental sustainability movement in the West is for - but that may now be a question for historians and anthropologists.

(2) Since the first point given above renders the entire discussion academic, I am entirely at liberty to make this second, more theoretical point: the contention that only Hobbes' Leviathan can actually render polluters accountable to those who suffer from said pollution is unwarranted; the Statists simply prevent the emergence of alternative regulatory structures from the freely cooperative workings of the market. On this subject more generally, it may be possible to deal with negative externalities better, not through the coercion of government, but by the voluntary production of licensing agreements kept in check by consumer demand; monopolist regulatory agencies do not operate under the economic incentive of competition and are thus more especially vulnerable to corruption.

In the specific case of bringing the fossil fuels industry to account, we must remember that States are indirectly dependent upon the economic importance of fossil fuels, and so there is a conflict of interest. If we are to believe the exaggerated claims that entire coastal cities will no longer be viable places to live following catastrophic rises in sea level, then we must also accept that the State will have to intervene on behalf of the fossil fuels industry to ensure that their accountability, although it may require them to "redistribute" some of their cash, does not quite put them out of business.

A less hyperbolic scenario would be that, if and when there is a very modest rise in sea levels over the next century, it will likely only be a relatively small number of residents and property owners in the world's coastal cities who will need to relocate. Since relocation will cost money and that money will have to come from somewhere, any attempt to demand the fossil fuels industry pay for this will likely be fought over in the courts (especially given point (1) above). Since the problem is essentially one of economic costs, the obvious solution is, as always, allowing more people the freedom necessary to accrue greater wealth from producing innovative solutions to social problems and bringing these to market, rather than attempting to hammer at them through the force of government. Two places to start are the repeal of land-use legislation and the careful privatization of utilities.

***

To draw this brief post to a close, let us return to Bruenig's argument by repeating the earlier quotation:

"No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others."

The argument is not that property rights justify pollution, but that Statist attempts to bring polluters to account will not only be ineffective but will themselves result in other kinds of negative externality that will make real solutions far more difficult to produce.

What Bruenig doesn't appear to understand is that, although property rights are of course an important aspect of libertarian thought, they are not the be all and end all. Property rights, along with the rights to free speech, free association and - dare we say it? - free exchange, are a political manifestation of the deeper claim of self-ownership; that people are not slaves and each of us is individually sovereign, as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson understood.

Of course I do not expect the Statists on the Left to quite grasp this, since after all, they regard such authors as Locke as little more than philosophical antiques long since surpassed by the advance of Pragmatism, the under-heralded school of epistemology which has made possible the resurgent Marxian puritanism evinced in the wild by such creatures as Monbiot.

As I have stated elsewhere, there is only a subtle difference between the belief that all aspects of the market and civil society ought to be controlled by the State, and the belief that there is no aspect of either one which ought not to be controlled by the State. In other words, the old Liberal paradigm of limited government is now an alien idea outside of "terrorist groups" like the U.S. Tea Party movement.

Negative externalities must be paid for, but the critical point is that this is best achieved through business, not government. Some things, however, are for free - and my criticism is one of those.

"Let Me Tell You About My Qualifications..."

2012-01-08T18:23:00.006+08:00

I find I'm with FOARP on the ridiculous subject of the "Best blogger awards".

Of course, I wouldn't have a cat in hell's chance of winning; my only regular commenter is a troll - straight out of the 'dorms - who hates my guts and probably wishes he was a giant pneumatic robot so he could trample me to death or something. Ain't that a bitch?

Oh, and "My Kafkaesque Life": - you're most welcome.

Onwards...

A Singularly Important Casualty Of U.S. Defense Cuts

2012-01-07T02:14:00.007+08:00

One of the medium range sinkers firing out from Taiwan's electoral wake is the almost total neglect of defense issues. Partly, this may be due to an unwillingness to make the Chinese lose face (at least this may be somewhat true of the incumbent President), and partly it may be due to a relative absence of interest in defense issues among the public. Either way, I find it ominous that defense issues are not a major aspect of public debate in the run up to these elections. I am currently preparing an essay on Taiwan's air theatre defenses and future options, and in connection to that I thought the U.S. President's announcement of further budget cuts to defense of half a trillion (i.e. in addition to the already settled cuts of >U.S.$400 billion prepared by Secretary Gates) was noteworthy...

"Other examples are the ... Navy’s hypersonic electromagnetic rail gun, which could help combat Chinese anti-ship missiles aimed at our carrier strike groups in the event of a conflagration in the Pacific, the region President Obama claims he’s so worried about. It lost its funding earlier this year."

That particular weapon system - the Navy's railgun - is I think, a potential "game-changer" in deterrence capability that simply must be developed if the USN is to be prepared to deter future PLA aggression across the Taiwan Strait.

However, and as I have argued elsewhere, not only is that assumption likely to become more questionable over time with the ongoing advance of the PLA's access-denial capabilities (and the more general rotting of American spirit), but Taiwan's Chung Shan Institute really ought to be talking to those guys at General Atomics' EMS division in order to develop a Taiwanese railgun program; it could be a very formidable point defense weapon to deter PLA aggression. Over the long term, Taiwan's people simply cannot afford to rely on the perhaps doubtful prospect of continued U.S. military support - and nor should they.

The Rot & The Rat

2012-01-04T17:55:00.005+08:00

The rot and the rat
upon a bookstack
were quibbling over a spelling;
Said one to the other:
"I'll pardon your blunder,
but "T-R-U-E" spells "advantage".

So as to save face,
the other made haste;
he quit nibbling the end of the pencil.
He spat back at the other:
"Erasing the T ensures,
you'll regret it was ever in question."

Agongdian Reservoir (阿公店水庫)

2012-01-03T03:07:00.135+08:00

Early last month I exchanged a few emails with a Taiwanese expat living in Northern California on the subject of my brief posts on the reservoirs in Tainan County earlier this year*. Among other things having to do with his knowledge of the history of Taiwan's reservoirs and the "unsung heroes" of Taiwan's civil engineering projects, he mentioned Agongdian reservoir (阿公店水庫) to me, which I was unaware of and which is yet located in the Gangshan district of Kaohsiung County (north of Kaohsiung City; Gangshan is already very familiar to me having previously lived in several districts of Kaohsiung and having driven between Kaohsiung City and Tainan City countless times for work and other reaons).

Approach To Agongdian From Tainan

Since I had never heard of it and never been there previously, I figured that the best way to get there from Tainan City would be to take Route 19 and drive through the Guanmiao district (關廟) of southern Tainan County and into Alian (阿蓮) and then Gangshan (岡山) districts of Kaohsiung County.

Largely this is because I'm sick of driving Route 1 down through the Luzhu (路竹) district of Kaohsiung County and Gangshan town itself. It was the right decision - both the road quality and the scenery are much better going through Guanmiao and Alian districts. You know when you have arrived in Gangshan district as soon as you catch sight of the distinctive hill which towers over the entire area...

The north-western side of the hill shown here from Route 19 is populated by an archipelago of restaurants, small eateries, a hotel and a fairly large temple. Beneath the hill there are farmers fields stretching out north and west for miles.
This is typical of the geography of Taiwan's west coast. Approaching from the east, the hill itself is prefaced by a cement works (the picture on the right shows the cement works looking down from the hill itself). At the top of the hill there is a radar facility serving the nearby training base for the R.O.C airforce (so naturally it is off limits to the public, which is a shame because the radar is at the western edge of the hill where the views toward Agongdian reservoir are likely to be good). The airforce base in Gangshan has a complex literally across the road from the reservoir, though the airfield itself is some distance away. This is one site where Taiwan's trainee airforce pilots come to do their flight formation training in T-34 turboprops. A kilometer or so further along after sighting the hill along Route 19 toward Gangshan town itself, there is a poorly signmarked left turn toward the reservoir nestled among a minor hamlet of houses and factories betwixt vegetable farms.

The first time I drove there (I've since made several trips) was with my girlfriend - I instinctively knew the correct left we would have to take before we ended up in Gangshan town, but she insisted on making the decision based on our GPS position she was updating on google maps on her iphone - so we passed by the left turn before she assented to it. We didn't argue over this, but in finding my way I almost always tend to choose inductive inference first and deductive inference second (but then only if I get lost). I remember driving from Kenting to Hualien city some years ago - I was shocked when somebody asked me whether I took a map (it's very simple: just drive north - the coast should always be on your right hand side - for about ten hours until you get there).

The views of the reservoir from the circuitous and hilly approach road are inconvenient and partial at best. As always with Taiwan, there is also the problem of frequent haze which makes photography an art of timing in a sense other than shutter speed; in addition to two historical photographs provided by my source in California, the images I use in this post were taken from several different trips I made under different weather and light conditions.

The Reservoir

Construction of Agongdian reservoir began in 1942 during the Japanese occupation of Formosa and was not finally completed until 1953 under the rule of the KMT. This construction process was fraught with difficulties and temporary disasters: periodic flooding during the late summer rains and the bombing raids of U.S. B29s during the war. Following the arrival of the ROC after 1945, responsibility for completing the Agongdian reservoir project fell to Mr Yung-Chien Chu, a Chinese engineer who was born in Changsha, Hunan province circa 1907. Under the direction of Mr Chu and his team of engineers, Agongdian reservoir was finally built with the labour of the Nationalist Army servicemen.

None of this I learned from actually visiting Agongdian reservoir (for this information I am indebted to my aforementioned source in California). After visiting the reservoir, one of the things which impressed me most was the scarcity of substantive historical detail presented to the public. Moreover, searching the web (in Chinese) returns precious little substantive historical information. It appears therefore, that a serious historical study of Agongdian reservoir has simply not been attempted (I would gladly be proved wrong - please comment below). Today of course, the reservoir is not quite the vital public works project it was when it was completed in the early 1950s...

Although much, much smaller in area, Agongdian reservoir is somewhat similar in layout to Wushantou reservoir in at least three respects. First, both reservoirs are situated well to the west of the central mountain range meaning that they are quite shallow in contrast to the deeper reservoirs of Tseng-wen and Nanhua set deep in the mountains themselves (Agongdian and Wushantou have maximum depths of 40m and 60m respectively, whereas Nanhua and Tseng-wen have maximum depths of 185m and 230m respectively). Here is a picture of Nanhua reservoir showing it nestled among the steep shoulders of the mountains..

Contrast that with this image of Agongdian reservoir's control tower below from a nearby hill at the north end; the reservoir occupies a comparatively low-lying area of land populated by pig farms and small townships...

Second, both reservoirs are based upon a similar design principle: a single, relatively low but very long earth-work levee through which a controlled flow of water is allowed to pass to feed the irrigation needs of the low lying plains stretching out to the west. The reservoirs in the eastern mountains by contrast, are based upon narrow but very steep and much taller dams. The levee at Agongdian is 2.3 km long but only 42m high; at Wushantou, the levee is only 1.2 km long but is substantially taller at almost 67m. By contrast, the dams at Nanhua and Tseng-wen are much narrower and taller: 509m long by 187m high for Nanhua, and 400m long by 235m high for Tseng-wen. Compare: the image immediately below alludes to the long but rather low profile of Agongdian...

... whereas the following image illustrates the much taller and more massive nature of the dam at Tseng-wen (notice the dumper trucks in the foreground to the left)...

Third, both Agongdian and Wushantou follow a very flaccid and circuitous eastern perimeter, such that the fullest view of either reservoir is only available from atop their respective western levees. Compare the following two images from google maps.

First, Agongdian reservoir:

Now Wushantou reservoir:

Notice the scale legend in the bottom left corner of each of those images; although Wushantou occupies a substantially larger area than Agongdian, its appearance to the human eye would suggest otherwise. The levee embankments for both reservoirs are very long and the chief body of water in both reservoirs spans approximately three kilometers from one end to the other. If however, you compare northern to southern extremeties of each reservoir, then Wushantou comes out at just over nine kilometers with Agongdian at almost six kilometers.

Although the embankment levees for both reservoirs are of a comparable scale, it is the levee at Agongdian which is most popular with locals; they come here to walk, jog and cycle every day at regular times - which is typical of the Taiwanese (especially among the older generations). The levee at Wushantou, though it does attract some locals and offers far superior views out west over the Lioujia district of Tainan County, is surrounded by a smaller and more dispersed population, whereas the levee at Agongdian is very close to Gangshan town itself which, for Taiwan, is a fairly substantial "township" with a more densely concentrated population; it is one of the major stops on the local railway network and was until recently one of the administrative nerve centres of the Kaohsiung County government (Gangshan also has an excellent fresh fish market on weekend mornings from about 4am on until mid-morning).

The Levee

I use the word "levee" rather than "dam" because the two words evoke, to my mind at least, quite different images (see the comparison with Tseng-wen above). At just over 2.3km long, the levee at Agongdian reservoir is easily the longest in Taiwan by quite some distance.

The "Southern Region Water Resources Office" is the State agency responsible for the management of reservoirs in South Taiwan; they answer to the Ministry of Economic Affairs and their office lies at the south end of the levee. At the entrance to the car park there is a map of the reservoir with a legend indicating the various buildings that surround the water. I was parked at the north end. The levee bounds the reservoir to the east and faces west outward toward the pig farms to the north, and a military training school to the south.
Entry to the school is of course barred to the public with razor wire atop the walls, but anybody can easily see over the top of those walls from the levee itself; aside from barracks and administrative offices, there is a courtyard. At one time perhaps this courtyard would have held tanks; now however there are now only dirt diggers dressed in fasionable military green paint with their "Caterpillar" brand name still intact. I would imagine that they are intended for future natural disaster response deployments by the Army.
Along with the perimeter trail (see below), the levee attracts many local people every day for their routine of either walking, running or cycling. Cycling has really taken off in Taiwan over the last five or six years. I can recall once being one of only a tiny handful of cyclists circling Cheng Ching lake (澄清湖) in Kaohsiung every other weeknight when the volume of cyclists around the lake at night seemed to suddenly swell. Within a week I had to quit because there were simply too many mad people on an already treacherous road.
Certainly, for the numbers of cyclists to have taken off so rapidly in recent years, somebody at Giant must have run a great marketing campaign. For myself, I have long since given up the bike since I got my dog nearly four years ago; I take her running with me in our local park, and for long drives out into the countryside. Besides, where I live in Tainan the traffic is typically so constrained by narrow roads that riding a bicycle amounts to knowingly putting oneself in greater danger of being knocked over. Personally, I'd prefer a helicopter...

All across the span of the levee, there are ample views out across the reservoir toward the village on the eastern side where two buildings in particular are especially salient despite the ever-present haze from the farms and air pollution.
The southern most of these is a Taoist temple which is remarkable for no particular reason at all other than that somebody thought to remark upon it when drafting the material for the information panels. Although I must admit I'm no expert on the finer architectural points of Taoist temples, this particular specimen looks no different to me than the thousands of others throughout South Taiwan. Since our absent hosts apparently had nothing substantive to say about this temple, perhaps I may be allowed to offer my own commentary.
There are so many of these temples throughout every town, city and village in Taiwan that it is no exaggeration to say that they are almost as common as 7-11s. What amazes me about them is that local people willingly chip in to contribute fairly substantial sums (e.g. a few thousand U.S.$) toward their construction even though they serve no obviously demonstrable purpose - other than reflecting the anachronistic superstitions of the older generations. The connection to organized crime (e.g. as portrayed in the recent gangster film "Monga" [艋舺]) may still exist here and there, but the question which occurs to me (and it is admittedly an impertinent question) is what other productive uses could all that money have been put to; like everyone else Taiwanese people are hardly short of problems to solve.
Our absent hosts also make mention of the other temple further to the north: the Buddhist temple. Like Buddhism itself, these things come in a variety of forms - whereas this one has a fairly spartan, Chinese-Bauhaus like appearance, others are far more elaborate; in the Guiren district (歸仁) of Tainan county for instance, there is an entirely gold (painted) Buddhist temple with very conspicuously large water fountains at its' entrance; in Britain, these things might be called "follies", and perhaps not without justification.

At the approximate middle of the levee, there is a large channel running underneath which is parenthesized by two mechanical gates operated from a control house on the other side of the road away from the levee; the purpose is flood control. The channel continues underneath the road beyond the levee and through into a snaking, open-air aqueduct; apparently the channel itself is large enough to allow the displacement of 81 cubic meters of water per second - which might seem like a lot, but of itself this one channel does little to allay the problem of recurrent floodings to the Gangshan area when all of the various channels, streams and irrigation outlets are overwhelmed by prolonged rainfall during tropical storms and four-day typhoons.
The Gangshan area is a natural flood-plain to begin with but the floods are exacerbated by several other features of the built landscape; one is the common occurance of fish farms, which insulate their fish pools by small dikes which then retard the outward flow of water; another is the relatively small number and narrowness of rivers and streams heading west toward the Taiwan Strait (some of these have since been widened); another is the generally poor and ageing condition of wastewater infrastructure - particularly in Gangshan town itself.

As a brief aside however, I should perhaps mention that there is a secondary escape channel for water toward the north-eastern extremity of the reservoir (i.e. way beyond the main body of water and out around the back end among the farms).
It is not by any means small. I'm slightly curious about this because the sign forbidding entry beyond the warning ballustrade is rusted with age and the entire causeway is overgrown with vegetation. It has the appearance of being designed as another flood control channel (wide and tall concrete ballustrades to direct the flow of obviously large volumes of water), and yet it is on the wrong side of the reservoir - the eastern side; water exiting this channel would not move through the flood plain toward the Taiwan Strait but would get clogged up in the fields and farms at the back. If, on the other hand, it was designed as an irrigation channel then where in the world is the corresponding outlet control station?
There wasn't one immediately obvious from the main road (although I may have driven by it without realizing, or - perhaps more likely - it is set back some distance from the main road among the trees and thus out of sight). And if it is an irrigation channel, then why is it so obviously built to handle very large volumes of water comparable to the flood outlet system on the other side of the reservoir? An inquiring mind wants to know...

Back on the western side of the reservoir proper, and some short distance north from the aforementioned flood control outlet with the control station across the road, there are the irrigation outlet gates below the levee and directly opposite the control tower which sits in the reservoir itself. These gates allow water to flow out at a rate of 3.88 cubic meters per second into a narrow irrigation channel which immediately disappears rightward into a copse of trees.
The water flows out from the irrigation outlet gate under the road through a channel toward a purpose-built little bridge passing over an additional flood control ditch which runs parallel to the levee and has a depth of perhaps ten meters or so (thirty feet). Although the little bridge over this ditch is narrow, it is designed to be walked across (presumably for someone to clean it out if it gets clogged up with dead tree branches and other debris following a typhoon) but the entrance by the side of the road isn't exactly ceremonious. Once astride the bridge, the eye can follow the ditch to the left (southwards) for only a short distance, and to the right not at all - there are simply too many trees growing both in and around the ditch whose branches cast the place into a partial shade which diffuses the glare of the sun with that dappling effect that moving leaves tend to have.
Some care is needed in walking across the bridge because the branches reach fairly low and are transversed with six-foot cobwebs made obvious by the broken up light streaming through the canopy. Cobwebs. Of course that can mean only one thing, or in this case many of them. Like most people I think, I have an instinctive revulsion to spiders but it is a small thing, something which is immediately felt as a sensation but which has no lingering pull on the mind. This is good because these spiders are really quite photogenic...
Readers are advised to click on that image to get it larger although, as a consequence of the Blogger platform's recent reorganization, it is no longer possible to click on images and blow them up with the zoom function - which is a shame because the little hairs on the spider's chelicerae (teeth) are clearly visible in that image. This is a species of golden orb-web spider, nephilia pilipes, common throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia and especially here around Agongdian reservoir.
They are easily found throughout the countryside all over Taiwan, especially in the vicinity of overhead electricity cables. My first encounter with one of these was some years ago now in the Sandimen district of Pingtung County; I was out on a drive through the mountains one sunny afternoon with my girlfriend on the old bike and had stopped by a staircase leading down to a stream in order to take a "rest break". After I finished doing what I had to do, my girlfriend - looking down from the top of the stone staircase - called out and gesticulated wildly at something obviously quite near me though I couldn't see what it was she was pointing to. It was only when I took a step or two to my right that the light changed and it came into view - one of these spiders was perhaps a foot away from my face. As with other spider genera, the female is significantly larger than the male and it is not unusual to find them as large as - or larger than - the span of a human hand as with this particular little monster (her body alone was perhaps four inches or more across, which is massive). There is of course nothing to be afraid of; their venom poses no risk. They make good subjects for nature photography, although their webs can sometimes shift suddenly when caught by a breeze. This is a problem when the camera is set to automatic focus because the lens will suddenly alternate back and forth between the spider and some leaf or twig in the background, an effect which is disconcerting. For this reason I prefer to use manual focus (although I generally prefer manual for other reasons also; I don't understand why other people find manual focusing difficult).

The Trail

Another reason why Agongdian reservoir is so much more popular than Wushantou is that it is encircled by a ten kilometer trail - so not only do the locals walk up and down the length of the levee, but many of them perambulate the whole reservoir (most by walking, but not a few by running and cycling). It is a convenient distance; I often run between four and six kilometers on weekday nights at my local park, but I have to do it by the repetitive means of twenty to thirty laps. At Agongdian the trail is much more lively and interesting with twists and turns, ups and downs and it is generally well marked to indicate distance from a starting point.
Beginning at the north end of the levee, which is the north-west corner of the reservoir's main body of water, the trail heads off eastward. Although dogs aren't allowed on the trail, there were one or two old people with little daschunds pitter-pattering after them; generally speaking, rules about dogs in Taiwan are presented de dicto, but are interpreted and applied in a de re fashion: i.e. only small dogs are acceptable (although on my second trip to Agongdian, the security guard at the south end of the reservoir was very gracious and allowed me to take my dog in with me for a quick walk - I kept her on the lead).

The northern end of the trail heading east affords views across the reservoir to the small control station jutting out from the levee to the west. There is only a single control station for the entire reservoir - water passes out beneath it through the aforementioned gate to feed the irrigation channel stretching out to the west at a rate of almost four cubic meters per second. The water level for the reservoir is typically maintained at the 35 meter mark with excess water drained off; remember, the levee itself is just over 40 meters in height.
The trail carries on eastwards punctuated twice by viewing platforms complete with information boards - one in Mandarin, one in English in both cases - which inform the visitor about the reservoir's provenance in geographical and historical aspect. At the first of these stops, we learn that Agongdian reservoir is formed from two seperate creeks: Zuo Shui and Wang Lai, both of which are problematic in so far as they carry with them volcanic mud which clogs up the reservoir and (presumably) complicates the efficient operation of the control tower. These information panels are encased in perspex but have nonetheless faded over time - the photographs that accompany the text are now borderline illegible.
At the second stop, which the visitor stumbles across as a preamble to the suspension bridge crossing the northern side of the reservoir's main body of water, we learn that the small village on the eastern side of the reservoir was formerly the site of a brown sugar factory from the Japanese colonial period until it was closed in 1967; from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the early twentieth century, the economic aspect of people's lives here in Taiwan was shaped to a significant extent by the production of agricultural products for export - in this case to satisfy Japanese demand particularly during the war.
As is usual in Taiwan, the various government agencies go to the trouble of providing information in English but without bothering themselves about quality control - and so the English information boards are littered with semantic and grammatical errors. Whoever in the office happens to have the best English gets to write them! Unlike other foreigners however, this doesn't really bother me - especially in the case of Agongdian reservoir since those errors that do occur are not so bad as to impede comprehension (though this is most certainly not the case at the recently constructed museum at Anping Fort in Tainan where the English is so bad as to be almost incomprehensible - it might as well be in Runes).
The next panel mentions that the present geological challenges to managing the reservoir also plagued its construction, so much so that even after the Japanese left Taiwan in 1945 they still had not completed the project. The incoming KMT government eventually completed it in 1953; eleven years after the project had commenced. To put that into context, the much more massive Tseng-wen reservoir was completed in only six years between 1967 and 1973. The problem at Agongdian was (and is) the regular silting up of the reservoir with volcanic mud from the Zhuo Shui and Wang Lai rivers and the consequent need to drain it before the summer rains arrived, necessitating a considerable diversion of labour (there is another information panel at the south end of the reservoir which describes this at just slightly greater length).
The volcanic mud is transported down to the reservoir through the two rivers which flow through an area of low lying volcanic hills to the south-east; these are clearly visible from the south end of the reservoir itself. I took the initiative to drive out to find them and it would have perhaps taken me only fifteen minutes were it not for my habit of stopping to photograph near every damn little thing. The image of water and hills to the right below was taken from a small road bridge at the southernmost end of the reservoir.
The hill to the left marks the beginning of a chain of volcanic hills which demand several precious hours of exploration by foot, whilst the hill to the right houses a local, traditional Chinese cemetery. The volcanic hills themselves are a minor tourist attraction for the locals; a trail of unspecified distance takes visitors steeply up into, and around the hills. The entrance to the trail is prefaced by a really rather good plastic model of the volcanic "mountains" and another Buddhist temple.
Entry to the trail is free and I would have liked to have trampled my way up and down it with the dog but it was already well after three in the afternoon when I arrived. Although the map lacked any indication of distances, I made the inference (from past experience at similar places) that it would require a good two or three hours to do it justice and I still had other places I wanted to photograph before evening set in and the light started to fail (which in Taiwan's winter begins at about 5.00pm to 5.30pm). The cost of draining the reservoir every year in order to remove the volcanic sediment must be considerable; what happens to this silt once it is removed? Processed for use as fertilizer? I don't know, but I may yet return to take the trail on and get some good pictures of the bubbling mud to add to this post, or alternatively, write up a seperate post in itself.

Back to the trail: here is the suspension bridge crossing the northern end of Agongdian reservoir...

This bridge marks the northern boundary of the main body of water - to the left the reservoir continues up into its northern and north-eastern extremities which are so extensive as to seem to soak up at least as much in area as the remainder of the reservoir (see the google maps image above). The views are limited by the hilly countryside, including the large Gangshan hill visible on approaching Gangshan hill from the north, and the route which the water takes is a highly circuitous one. I imagine there might be some sly little backroads through to this area for the fisherman to get to the out-of-the-way reaches of the reservoir with little risk of being disturbed. At the far end of the bridge there is another pair of information boards though these are less informative than previous ones as they simply state that the construction of the reservoir was initiated by the Japanese and completed under the KMT, with rennovations since.
This is a shame because rather than provide the public with redundant information, they could have went into greater historical detail - for instance the fact that when the KMT government took over construction of the reservoir, they used Chinese labourers (i.e. from the "mainland") brought to Taiwan as part of the ROC armed forces. These men would not have been paid in anything other than food and lodgings, and the construction process took an exceedingly long time hindered as it was by the location's vulnerability to flooding. It must also be remembered that malaria was widespread as late as the early 1950s and control measures would likely have been only partially effective at best; it is thus an open question how many of these Chinese labourers may have died during the construction of Angongdian reservoir. It is not right that their achievement, and the likely costs of that achievement, should still go unacknowledged today almost sixty years after the reservoir was first completed.
After crossing the northern bridge, which sits beneath the watch of Gangshan hill with its' military radar, the trail heads up into the hills before turning south-eastwards and back down through the village (which was formerly the site of the brown sugar factory) and out to the southern end of the reservoir where it crosses another suspension bridge. It must be said that this trail, connected by suspension bridges at either end, is a real asset to the reservoir as a public good. Wushantou reservoir for instance, although of a somewhat similar geography, has nothing like this; there are no bridges, no trail and it is simply not possible to cross to the other side except by boat (there is barely even road access).
Although the Agongdian trail appears to be generally well-managed, I do have one design criticism which is that although bend-mirrors are provided at certain points, there is no bend-mirror on the eastern side of the north bridge at the spot which most demands one. At this spot, which occurs just after the northern suspension bridge, there is an almost ninety-degree hair-pin bend preceding a sudden, steep embankment down which the tarmac trail recklessly cascades like a dangerously narrow, wobbly ribbon.
The gradient of this bank is somewhere from 15% to 20%, so the absence of a bend-mirror at this spot is an example of almost incredible thoughtlessness; the cyclists coming down the bank are breaking of course but they are still moving at perhaps 40kph or thereabouts when they enter what is effectively a blind turn populated by old people walking along often two or three abreast. It's an accident waiting to happen, but what perlexes me about this is that there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why a bend-mirror could not be attached to the steel bannister of this particular bend in the trail. And yet the trail happily sports bend-mirrors elsewhere where the need for them is not so urgent.
The wooded area of the trail, although not well lit, has plenty of wild things to point a camera at during the daytime, such as Miss nephilia pilipes...
I found another species of spider hanging between the rods on the suspension bridge on the north side of the reservoir, but I found it impossible to take a good picture for obvious reasons (i.e. being on a suspension bridge, I couldn't focus properly). It's quite likely that there are other little monsters wandering about in the woods (e.g. snakes), but I wasn't about to go prodding about looking for them. One creature which you certainly will not find at Agongdian however, are the eagles and buzzards that populate the mountainous areas around Tseng-wen and Nanhua reservoirs up in Tainan County. Agongdian reservoir is simply too far into the lowlands to offer the necessary high peaks (the two hills in the immediate vicinity to the north notwithstanding), and being near an airforce pilot training base probably doesn't help either.
The trail concludes after crossing the suspension bridge at the southern end of the reservoir after a long, circuitous journey of just over ten kilometers. It's a good length for a weekly run either in the morning or late in the afternoon, and there is the additional possibility of sunrise and sunset photography at these times made attractive by the way the surface of the water catches the light, all else is a question of weather, timing and framing the shot in as interesting a way as possible.
I suspect that at night, most people wouldn't want to run here due to the absence of lighting, even though (in the summer) the temperature is comfortably cooler. I wouldn't think that an area like this would be especially crime-prone (though elsewhere, I have previously encountered reason to suspect otherwise), but the absence of good lighting is always going to be something of a discouragement for most people whichever way you look at it. That is actually a major problem in Taiwan more generally - street lights are very poor and in some areas (e.g. the Xinshih district of Tainan County) there are frequently black-outs due to the need to prioritize a limited electricity supply (and yet the Presidential candidates of both major parties are apparently committed to phasing out the use of nuclear power). I wouldn't think there is any chance of changing that in the near future; various research groups in Britain and elsewhere (I know because I used to be employed at one such group) have been looking at tackling this kind of problem with the use of ambient light reflecting polymers at certain spots but these are significantly limited (basically, unlike bulbs they don't project light over any significant distance, which is what is really needed).

Agongdian reservoir is not by any means the largest or most visually impressive of Taiwan's reservoirs (that prize belongs either to Tseng-wen reservoir in Tainan and Chiayi counties, or possibly to Shihmen reservoir in Taoyuan county), but it at least manages to be as interesting as Wushantou reservoir in its historical and engineering aspects, whilst both more attractive and popular than Wushantou.

I now have some historical material on the "unsung heroes" of Taiwan's civil engineering past and some additional research leads made available to me by my source in California which I will delve into with a view to producing some actual journalism on Taiwan's reservoirs. This post will have to suffice in the meantime however.

*Here: Tseng-wen (曾文水庫), Wushantou (烏山頭水庫) and Nanhua (南化水庫) (and again here); I actually made many more trips out and around the reservoirs of Tainan County in the summer and also one or two trips up into the northern districts of Kaohsiung County.

Like Eating Steak With A Wooden Spoon...

2012-01-03T02:55:00.005+08:00

I have finished my post on Agongdian reservoir which has been in the works for some time; it just needs proof-reading and some last minute editing. One of the problems with using the Blogger platform I find is that the preview function is bloody hopeless; although the placement of images either to the left or right of the main text body is sensitive to the syntactical structure of the text, the preview version isn't anything like the actual version you see when you hit publish because borders are added onto each image after publishing. This is annoying because one reason why writing this post took me so long (one reason, there were others - not least among which was the collection, sorting and editing of photographs) was because I had to ponder little syntactic adjustments to my sentence structures in order to accommodate the neat and tidy placement of all of my pictures. I now see all of that was a waste of time.

Criminal World

2011-12-31T02:21:00.006+08:00

Here is the original version of the song "Criminal World" written by Duncan Browne and Peter Godwin and performed by their band "Metro" in the late 1970s.

Here is Bowie's version of that song, from his "Let's Dance" album of 1983.

Background music whilst I busy myself with writing other things: another reservoir posting (quite large; good picture weather has been a problem) and a piece on Taiwan's multi-layered air defenses (the problem is trying to ascertain a measured sense of their likely effectiveness, or otherwise, based on publicly available information).

Meanwhile...

Life's a bitch: as if I didn't have enough problems of my own already, another one fell into my lap after 11pm on Thursday night; whilst walking the dog at the park, I found a tiny little pedigree spaniel curled up shivering in a ditch.

She had no eyes.

I don't mean she was blind - I mean she literally had holes where her eyes should have been. Anyway, I fed her and called my Taiwanese friend who came to pick her up and then took her to the vet's on Friday afternoon. I had initially suspected extreme cruelty (or perhaps an unfortunate encounter with a cat) but apparently the vet believes she has congenital blindness, which I'm not sure about because it wasn't that her eyes didn't work, it was that she had no eyes. Aside from that however she had no other problems. The vet's story is that it's likely she was used by one of Taiwan's many professional breeders to give birth to as many spaniel puppies as possible and then once she'd performed this function, she was ejected: to die alone in the darkness, shivering in a ditch.

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 10

2011-12-23T23:35:00.002+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 9

2011-12-23T01:48:00.001+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 8

2011-12-22T01:30:00.002+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 7

2011-12-21T02:31:00.002+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

A Question On Hitchens

2011-12-20T02:45:00.008+08:00

Here is a question for those on the Left with any brains: why did Hitchens defend the positions of his "comrades" with such weak... not even arguments, but mere prejudicial psycho-babble?

This was a journalist, no less of the Left than of anyone else, who could describe in detail - and without flinching - the monstrosity that was Bill Clinton during the latter's time in office. That has to be celebrated, because so many people (including on the Right) seemed to cower under Clinton's stare at the time.

And yet, over a decade later, in the face of the obsese monetary and fiscal flop that the U.S. government had become, and at the long instigation of the Left, Hitchens seemingly lost his nerve and had nothing substantive to say.

I have three* hypotheses (the third being a null) to account for this: either Hitchens was guilty of an intellectual failure, or, and this is somewhat more adventurous, he was playing Nietzsche's old joke on his remaining friends on the Left (i.e. I will not publicly give you up, but I will defend you with the weakest arguments possible).

Which is it?

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 6

2011-12-20T01:36:00.001+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 5

2011-12-19T01:29:00.001+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism". Tom Sowell again in this one.

Parsing The GOP Candidates

2011-12-18T13:30:00.007+08:00

Electoral politics is absurd. There is however no question that the current President of the United States is the worst in living memory. Andrew McCarthy inculpates the editors of National Review for journalistic flippancy in respect of their dismissal of Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann and their turn toward Jon Huntsman:

"I don’t want to cringe reading an editorial written by friends of mine any more than I want to wince hearing Newt talk about Bain Capital."

The temptation to laugh is sad. Of all the invited candidates, it is only Ron Paul who seems to be on nodding terms with the gravity of the Statist stupor the U.S. is in - but it is also only Ron Paul who seems to have nodded off on foreign affairs some time ago. Anyway, back to the circus. The highlight of McCarthy's piece was his snide remark on Jon Huntsman's under-reported comments on neo-Keynesian stimulus:

"In 2009, Huntsman opined that the problem with Obama’s failed Keynesian stimulus was that it wasn’t big enough — it should have been $1 trillion (gee, I wonder why President Obama figured he’d be a good fit)."

I seem to recall making this same point elsewhere some months ago. Then there is the small matter of Huntsman's somewhat less-than-fluent Mandarin: I can recall, after the story broke on Slate, Gingrich pointedly remarking on Huntsman's "fluent" Mandarin during the November 9th Michigan debate - at which point the cameras showed Huntsman looking obviously pained. That being said, McCarthy's defence of Gingrich will merely keep the juggling act going. Perry is even more inarticulate and gaffe-prone than Bush was and does not have clear limited-government qualifications. Bachmann does not really have a political record to measure her against. Gingrich would murder President Obama in a debate - of that there can be little doubt - but his record alone indicates he would be a terrible President and is no more trustworthy than Romney or Huntsman, as Avik Roy made abundantly clear.

Since Gary Johnson is being deliberately excluded, and Ron Paul is unlikely to win the nomination, I'm wondering whether Rick Santorum may yet get a mention as an alternative candidate to Romney...

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 4

2011-12-18T01:45:00.002+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism". Check out Tom Sowell!

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 3

2011-12-17T00:43:00.002+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 2

2011-12-16T03:16:00.001+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 1

2011-12-15T02:15:00.002+08:00

Via "Commonsense Capitalism".

"And I Challenge You To Produce One..."

2011-12-14T15:02:00.006+08:00

The key question is brought up at the five minute mark by Peter Jay; notice how Milton Friedman answers it. Jay may have thought that Friedman was blustering there and trying to worm his way out of answering the question. He wasn't.

I am not paying much attention to Taiwan's electoral politics and the various electioneering gimmicks and smears and all the rest of the nonsense in advance of the legislative and presidential elections next month. The DPP has to win. However, the DPP is, as their name suggests, infested with democratic-progressive policy aims such as the unjustified pursuit of reducing inequalities of economic outcome.

A Second Iranian "Accident"?

2011-12-13T11:34:00.003+08:00

Following up on the story of this blast which took place sometime between September 9th and November 22nd, there are now confusing reports of another explosion having occured in a nearby salt mine on November 28th. There is no visible explosion damage in the satellite images, though a before and after shot shows that some buildings have disappeared sometime between August 27th and December 5th.

小白 ("Shao Bai") After Surgery

2011-12-11T23:34:00.005+08:00

Shao Bai (小白) - flat out on the sofa next to my dog. The funnel collar is to stop him licking the stitches on his left shoulder where the tumor had been*. His coat looks manky because now that he has a big open scar with stitches on his left shoulder, I'm reluctant to wash him, although I had to put him in the shower last night after he wet himself without warning (I was careful to only wash his legs, tail and underside and to stop him from shaking himself dry so as to prevent his stitches becoming wet). As with my dog, he didn't like the hairdryer.

Since I got him back from his surgery yesterday afternoon, he's done almost nothing but sleep. All day today he's been flat out on the sofa and shown little interest in food and drink. It wasn't until a few hours ago, when giving him his medicine, that I managed to coax him into eating a few bits of cold chicken and a drink of water. He seems quite happy enough though, and certainly he's warmer and more comfortable here than he would be outside now that winter has set in. The only problem is that with the two of them on the sofa, there isn't really enough room for me! So other than putting my dog out on the balcony for a while, I've had to pick Shao Bai up and let him lie on top of my stomach at times, which is a bit awkward when I'm trying to drink coffee or reach for the keyboard (off image to the right). Coincidental with Shao Bai's surgery this weekend has been my coming down with cold now that the weather has finally changed to Taiwan's winter. It was already chilly enough that I had to wear my long coat or leather jacket, but now that I'm loaded up with headcold and mucus, I'm wearing a scarf when I go out too.

*The tumour was about the size of the meat ball inside a small 餛飩 (wonton); I'll get the pathology results later this week, though I won't be surprised if it was cancerous.

Animal Protection 2

2011-12-09T22:17:00.008+08:00

Previous entry on this subject here.

"Dogs that I saw being tested for distemper, already showing clear signs, were left in the intake area next to puppies and other dogs being adopted out. We tried to explain to the staff that dogs testing positive for distemper need to be quarantined, but no one would listen."

I'm not surprised: a trip to the animal "shelter" can be as good as a death sentence for a dog in Taiwan, and canine distemper is very common. Shao Bai (小白) came down with canine distemper two months ago - but he recovered because he was very lucky to have me on his side and some very hepful Taiwanese friends of mine (although recently he has been wheezing, which could be a sign of relapse - I will take him in again and put him back on the vitamins).

A Taiwanese friend of mine does voluntary work at a "shelter" in Tainan County (I say "shelter" in inverted commas because actually they are little more than a means for parents to save face in front of their children when throwing away their dog) and he tells me they are simply overwhelmed by irresponsible Taiwanese people dumping their dogs because they can't be bothered to look after them anymore. This happens every day. So when Larisa Duravetz writes...

"It is time for the government to recognize this problem and make serious changes to the conditions of their shelters."

... she fails to grasp the root of the problem; the rotten condition of shelters is merely a symptom, and having the government spend money to clean them up and impose fines on the people who dump their erstwhile pets isn't going to work (for several reasons: the money will not be made available and is stolen in any case; the fines will be unenforceable since people will just dump their dogs on the street instead of taking them to the "shelter"; and the steady flow of abandoned dogs will just continue to overwhelm the shelters anyway even if they are cleaned up because there aren't enough people willing to adopt).

The root of the problem is the absence of personal responsibility. In the first place there are various economic and psycho-cultural reasons for why Taiwanese people abandon their dogs (basically, owning a dog is a low priority and is therefore easy to abandon when money becomes tight). For many Taiwanese people, a dog is a status marker as much as it is a pet, hence the relative popularity of small and "cute" pedigree breeds whilst the shelters, streets and parks are invariably teeming with mongrels. That is why so many dogs cannot find owners and are abandoned - nobody wants a mongrel except for the few people (such as myself) who already have one (or several). Moreover, there is a strong tendency among the older generations in Taiwan to regard dogs (even pedigrees) as pests. Another friend of mine, who has since moved to Taipei, told me many stories of her parents being upset and uncooperative when she came home with a puppy at her daughter's request.

In fact, it was just this afternoon that another Taiwanese friend of mine was telling me that the old people who occupy my local park in the morning have called the government to come and take away the remaining strays at the park whom I have looked after for a long time now*. Their complaint is that they can sometimes see the dogs defecate and that they tear open the garbage bags. Of course the dogs shit, what else are they supposed to do? I'm already going to the park three times a day and cleaning up after them, but I cannot be there 24/7. As to garbage - I'm the one who has to clean it up! Last night I had the bamboo rake and dust pan out because there were nappies (diapers) covered in baby excrement lying around in front of the garbage can! And why? Because the lazy bastards who dump their garbage in the park late at night can't even be bothered to put the black bag into the garbage can because that would involve lifting the lid. And why does this even happen at all? Because the people dumping their garbage in the park do so because the garbage collection service arrives in their neighborhood whilst they are still at work (newsflash: not everybody works the 8-5 shift). The answer to that would be to privatize the garbage collection to let people choose from a menu of different times and to pay a monthly bill accordingly. But no... it's more convenient to just dump stuff in the park like other people dump their dogs - and if the dogs make a problem, oh well we can just murder them can't we?

Needless to say, I am not going to allow that to happen.

*Picky for three years, Black & White for two plus change, and the three pups Coco, Shao Bai and his brother Wan Wan (Coco's brother Da Bao has since died whilst at the vet, which is another story).

I, Heathen

2011-12-07T00:58:00.015+08:00

"Ugh. I understand the historical reasons behind why the Aborigines typically vote blue, but to me it seems as incongruous as a working American mom supporting the GOP. There's a logical disconnect when one thinks about who is actually acting in one's interests."

Jenna Cody - in the comments section to this item at Turton's place. I picked that quote out because it captures two very important points of epistemology and social psychology.

1) The first point, the epistemological one, is that Cody's comments offer an illustration of confirmation bias. Rather than interpreting the incongruity between other people's behaviour and her understanding of their interests as evidence that her understanding of their interests might be mistaken, she instead supposes that this incongruity arises from the failure of other people's intellect rather than her own. Now you might think Cody's opinion is extremely arrogant (and it is), and you might think it fails Occam's Razor (and it does), but it also seems to involve the presupposition that other people's "interests" are seperable from the people themselves. To grant that assumption is to deny the agency of the person in selecting values, and is the necessary first step toward justifying political tyranny since it then becomes possible to argue that such and such a policy is "for the good" of those oppressed by it. Cody is herself every bit as patronizing as she supposes the KMT government is toward the Aborigines.

2) The second point, on social psychology, is that the effect of confirmation bias is to protect the believer (and by extension, those with whom she shares this belief) from the exposure of their beliefs to error. Since beliefs inform evaluations and priorities for action, overturning them can be significantly painful since they are typically inter-related in a hierarchical fashion and underpin our relationships and associations with others. A mistaken belief can persist in the mind of the believer simply because it has become "too big to fail", i.e. overturning it would lead to a collapse of the broader belief structure that would be psychologically difficult to deal with*.

Of course, the social psychology of confirmation bias occurs on an institutional scale also as when the individuals comprising that institution all share similar opinions. The fact that genuine spending cuts (carrying, of course, the implication of privatization) to State socialized welfare, health and education services is still considered taboo or otherwise "unrealistic" among U.S. Democrats in spite of the ongoing fiscal crisis is a current example of this. Look at how people on the Left seem to be desperate to try to pin the blame for the U.S. fiscal crisis on the defense department (20% of the Federal budget), rather than the social programs (60% of the Federal budget).

The Republican primary debates offer another example. Not a single candidate, other than Ron Paul and the excluded Gary Johnson, have had anything substantial to say about monetary reform (although that may simply be because they don't understand the subject).

I would have responded to Cody's remark (and Turton's), but I have been made unwelcome at Turton's blog (and elsewhere) precisely for my criticism and skepticism.

*I went through this as a postgraduate at Edinburgh.

"Science Is The Belief In The Ignorance Of The Experts"

2011-12-04T15:25:00.020+08:00

"So if you don’t believe scientists, do you believe poor people struggling to survive? Or you just care about your corporate fossil fuel sponsors, you spineless astroturfer, when you refute climate change?"

This is the sort of "guerilla comment" I regularly get from the anonymous "reporter" at the Taipei Times. Corporate fossil fuel sponsors? Well I don't know about anybody else, but I never get my cheques on time...

Anyway, I was moved to write this post today after stepping back into the subject of climate change; I want something on my blog to refer back to in future so that I don't have to keep repeating myself (at least, until such time as new facts come to light).

***

I have to say, following the recent Spectator article by Nils-Axel Mörner and his subsequent savaging by Monbiot and others at the Guardian and elsewhere, I find it difficult to believe anything Mörner might say on sea levels. Now it may be that Mörner was correct about the 2.3mm adjustment he alleges, and certainly Monbiot didn't refute that, but I am now disinclined to believe what Mörner has to say. It's not just the fact that he got booted out of INQA and is into dowsing and other nonsense, but it was this email exchange with the Australian scientist Robert Hunter that just made me wince. Mörner sounds like a naughty schoolboy trying to keep up the lie that he did his homework but can't find it, and Hunter sounds exactly like I have sounded in the past when going after people whom I just knew were wrong.

Fraser Nelson made a big mistake in publishing that piece, and I made a mistake in trusting him that this guy's work was kosher.

That being said, sea levels at the Maldives are akin to cold or hot weather here or there in that of themselves they say nothing definitive as to whether climate change has a significant anthropogenic element. If Mörner is wrong, that only means that the scientists measuring sea level through tidge guages at the Maldives and through satellite telemetry are not guilty of manipulating their data and deserve an apology. Mörner being either wrong or untrustworthy however, does not mean that all skepticism of anthropogenic climate change is bunk.

Let's review the subject.

The Greenhouse Effect

The very first thing to note is that the subject has been cursed with a confusion spreading misnomer from the beginning - "the greenhouse effect". In an actual glass greenhouse, an increase in temperature is brought about by preventing convection from working; the air and ground beneath are exposed to sunlight but the heat is unable to escape. What happens in the earth's atmosphere is not quite the same thing at all. The heat does in fact escape by radiating into space. The convection of atmospheric gases in the earth's atmosphere is regulated by pressure. As a column of warm air rises in altitude, it expands due to the lower air pressure and this brings about a drop in temperature; as the now cooler column of air descends, it recompresses due to the increased air pressure and thus increases in temperature. That is why, in the troposphere, temperature is higher closer to the surface of the earth, and drops the higher in altitude you climb. Because some of the heat from the warm air columns in the troposphere is lost through radiation into space, the heat cannot be said to be "trapped" as in a greenhouse.

This is where much popular misconception comes in. The claim is that greenhouse gases "trap" the heat in the upper atmosphere and prevent some of it from radiating into space. That is an oversimplification; if the heat really was "trapped", then the upper atmosphere would not be so very much colder than the lower atmosphere. What actually happens is that the greenhouse gases retard the rate at which heat is radiated into space; over time, this means that the average altitude from which heat is radiated into space must increase, and therefore the pressure differential between the surface and the upper atmosphere at which heat radiates must undergo a marginal increase also.

The increase in global temperatures attributed to the "greenhouse" effect is actually a consequence of a change in the atmospheric pressure at which heat is radiated out into space.

However, the mere presence of greenhouse gases by themselves are insufficient to support the predictions of catastrophic global warming. Those predictions are based upon the supposition of positive feedback effects (e.g. increased water vapour, or higher altitude cloud cover) and the comparative absence of negative feedback (e.g. low altitude cloud cover). This is where the scientific controversy is (or isn't, if you dismiss all skeptics).

Climate Change Models & Trust

Here there is a problem.

The first point is that many of the alarming predictions of both scientists and others involved in the AGW field have been falsified by the actual facts. Recently, the IPCC's fourth assessment report contained the famously erroneous claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. In 2005, the UN predicted that there would be up to 50 million "climate refugees" by 2010 - which claim has proved false (and which, according to this report in Der Spiegel, has subsequently been removed from the UNEP's website). And of course, James Hansen's temperature predictions of 1988 which informed his Senate testimony of the time have been falsified by actual temperatures in the succeeding two decades since then. Here is the chart (via Jo Nova):

If you want people to trust you, you have to tell the truth and be seen to be telling the truth, together with all the uncertainty. If you attempt to hype, scare, bully or otherwise manipulate people into believing what you want them to believe - and then get caught out by facts - it should come as no surprise if people regard you as a hyperbolic, scare-mongering, manipulative bully.

Because that will be what you actually are.

One line of defense to this, is that those false predictions were made by people at the fringes of the AGW network rather than by the professional climate scientists themselves. Yet the leaked email cache of 2009 and 2011 appears to reveal otherwise. In the 2009 cache* we learned about how they denied FOI requests by third parties to replicate their temperature record, how their coding was poorly programmed, how they tried to prevent other scientists from publishing in certain journals, how they deleted emails once they knew there was a leak and so on. In the 2011 cache we learn more about their own uncertainties about their climate models and internal disagreements with one another. One such chap writes of Michael Mann for instance:

"I am afraid that Mike is defending something that increasingly cannot be defended. He is investing too much personal stuff in this and not letting the science move ahead."

Another writes:

"What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably."

It is against this background of private doubt and possible deceit, that the certainty with which climate predictions are made in public appear so cynical and manipulative. As Lord Turnbull put it earlier this year:

"The Really Inconvenient Truth is that the propositions of the IPCC do not bear the weight of certainty with which they are expressed."

That is not the same thing as a catagorical denial that there may be some truth to the AGW hypothesis, just that the IPCC's claims ought to be regarded with caution - which is a very far cry from the manner in which they have been advanced in the past.

We would also be remiss however, in failing to note that climate science has been politicized for over two decades now, and that - suprise, surprise - it was politicized by those who have tirelessly sought to expand the power of the State: the Left**. Here is Andrew Orlowski on the destructive effects of politicization on climate science:

"While in private, the scientists despair of their lack of understanding of the chaotic physics of climate, and are scathing about the quality of temperature reconstructions (for example), they are faced with constant demands from the bureaucracy and the media to tell a convincing story. Groupthink takes over, and evidence to the contrary is shunned, and scientists who advance it ostracised or smeared."

The confirmation bias Orlowski refers to here is (although I must admit I am somtimes guilty of it myself, most recently in regards to Nils-Axel Mörner's piece in the Spectator) also noted by Matt Ridley in his recent Angus Millar lecture in Edinburgh. Following his introduction to the subject, Ridley describes how he himself changed his mind on AGW. In his own words:

"In the mid 2000s one image in particular played a big role in making me abandon my doubts about dangerous man-made climate change: the hockey stick*. It clearly showed that something unprecedented was happening. I can remember where I first saw it at a conference and how I thought: aha, now there at last is some really clear data showing that today’s temperatures are unprecedented in both magnitude and rate of change – and it has been published in Nature magazine. Yet it has been utterly debunked by the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick."

He goes on...

"I urge you to read Andrew Montford’s careful and highly readable book The Hockey Stick Illusion*. Here is not the place to go into detail, but briefly the problem is both mathematical and empirical. The graph relies heavily on some flawed data – strip-bark tree rings from bristlecone pines -- and on a particular method of principal component analysis, called short centering, that heavily weights any hockey-stick shaped sample at the expense of any other sample. When I say heavily – I mean 390 times.
This had a big impact on me. This was the moment somebody told me they had made the crop circle the night before."

***

The qustion of how best to respond to climate change is separate from the question of why, and to what degree it is occuring. Naturally, those of a liberal/conservative mindset advocate market and technological solutions, whereas those on the Left might pragmatically accept some of those suggestions whilst nevertheless advocating a great expansion of the administrative-regulatory State into those few remaining un-politicized aspects and elements of social life. The fact that the Left have long advocated expanded State powers to deal with this or that social problem is the historical reason for why small government liberals/conservatives are skeptical about the politicization of climate science - we see it as an elaborate excuse for expanding the State (and for many people on the Left, it certainly is that).

To add to this, there is the fanatical zealotry of the media pundits and other politicizing figures on the Left (people like George Monbiot at the Guardian, and the blogger Michael Turton here in Taiwan). People who dare express skepticism about AGW are immediately branded as "denialists" and shunned in public, banned from journals, newspapers and blogs, subjected to vociferous ad hominem attacks, even so far as being called "liars" and "hate-mongers" and so on. As if that wasn't enough, skeptics are now routinely referred to as the "anti-science crowd", even though many of the skeptics are themselves scientists or otherwise have a scientific background.

I am however, uncertain as to how to judge the implications of the current poisonous political atmosphere concerning climate science. On the one hand, it has indeed provided yet another angle from which the Left can advocate the further expansion of the State toward what they idealistically think it should be. On the other hand, however, vociferous and bad-tempered debate can serve to concentrate the mind; the persistence of skeptics and critics of the Left - added to the manner in which we have been treated - has been, I think, absolutely vital. We are in a fight, for sure, but this is a fight which can only be won by reason and the discipline of finding, communicating - and admitting - the truth.

***

*The Russell inquiry did not take testimony from a single knowledgeable critic of the AGW hypothesis.
**I can still recall reading Al Gore's book "Earth In The Balance" many years ago before I became a skeptic.

"Looks Like We're In For Nasty Weather..."

2011-12-03T23:38:00.008+08:00

I was nine years old when the Berlin Wall came down. I can vaguely remember it being on the six o'clock news on television. I took German as my second language at GCSE and A-level. I took part in a school exchange program with a school in Essen, near Dusseldorf. In my early twenties, I visited Berlin several times as well as other German cities including Munich (although I much preferred Vienna). In all that time I grew up with the sense that Germany had been, was, and would continue to be one of the world's richest, smartest, cleanest, best-run countries.

On the other hand, I knew about the second and first world wars and the distrust of the Germans that my grandparents generation had had. There were undercurrents of this distrust in football and TV comedies too.

So I grew up admiring Germany and the Germans, though I kept some sense of heavily conditioned wariness under wraps; sort of like the way you might regard a reformed ex-convict - you want to like them, but with the suspicion that there's something else there underneath it all.

And of course, there is...

"Men who look like Nazis, call themselves Nazis, blow up Jewish cemeteries and kill Turkish shopkeepers are not little boys playing cowboys and Indians. They're Nazis."

That's Claire Berlinski writing at Ricochet just a short while ago on the existence of actual, murdering neo-Nazis in Germany.

Given the financial crisis the European (i.e. French and German) banks find themselves in now, and given that Chancellor Merkel is openly talking about a European fiscal union, I think there's a good chance that they'll eventually have to start monetizing their debts through inflation in order to keep the Eurozone together.

That is not too dissimilar from the route the Weimar Republic took.

Iranian Accident Or "Accident"?

2011-12-03T20:19:00.004+08:00

There is a very interesting piece up on Defense Tech comparing two google earth pictures of a missile lab outside Tehran. In the first picture, dated September 9th, the compound is intact. In the second picture, dated November 22nd, the compound has been destroyed. As commenters point out, the initial explosion seems to have occured at the top left corner (north west) of the compound, with the rest of the compound being either burned out or suffering blast damage (or both). Either this was simply an accident, or it was an "accident" with possible U.S., Israeli or British involvement.

Dellingpole In The Wall Street Journal

2011-12-03T16:35:00.002+08:00

"Like the first "climategate" leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public."

James Dellingpole, who is now - and good for him - writing for the Wall Street Journal, which is the only major newspaper in the U.S. whose circulation figures are not in decline, unlike the circulation figures of say, the desperately partisan, New York Times.

Mörner & Monbiot

2011-12-03T13:59:00.005+08:00

From Nils-Axel Mörner's piece in the Spectator:

"In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’..."

Mörner may be a dowsing rod lunatic, but that is not the question - the question is whether the implication of what he is saying here is true, i.e. that the satellite altimetry record was adjusted in 2003 in order to show a trend. Here is George Monbiot's response to that claim:

"Mörner however chooses not to believe the published satellite record, probably because it shows a clear upward trend across the global oceans of 3.3mm a year. This conscious rejection of the established satellite data comes about, the Spectator reveals, because of something Mörner claims to have overheard several years ago at a scientific conference in Moscow which he interprets as evidence of a conspiracy."

[Emphasis added] Of course, but that is the point. Mörner is rejecting the established satellite data because he says it has been manipulated in order to show a trend, and Monbiot does not refute or even question this but simply passes over it as something Mörner "overheard" and "interpreted" as evidence of a conspiracy. Regardless of whether or not Mörner is a lunatic, if this particular claim of his is actually false, then Monbiot ought to attempt to refute it.

It may be more likely that the "manipulation" Mörner claims is actually measurement error leading to overestimation of sea level rise, although with the second release of emails, you'd have to be wary about such a charitable interpretation. Here is Andrew Orlowski quoting one such email message from a certain Peter Thorne:

“The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run...”

Climategate 2.0

2011-12-03T10:25:00.007+08:00

"In the short term, the issues raised by Climategate I, which subsequent inquiries failed to explore, are back with a vengeance. Parliament looked at several issues including transparency – withholding code and raw data to allow third parties to replicate CRU’s temperature work – corruption of the peer review process, poor quality programming, and the destruction of internal emails."

Andrew Orlowski at the Register on the second release of email correspondence from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.

First order of business is a reminder: it was precisely my mention of just these things, particularly the poor quality programming, for which Turton banned me from his blog in October last year. He deserves all the discredit he can get.

Second, I recall my attempt in September last year to discuss with David Reid his claim about rising sea-levels due to climate change and the risk they pose to Taiwan. It's quite likely that David Reid had simply bought the IPCC line uncritically, since, in attempting to support his claim, he had to rely on reports citing local factors for the erosion of Taiwan's coastline. The extraction of sand from Taiwan's rivers by the construction industry has nothing to do with climate change - which is a point I put to him at the time with no reply. Bearing that exchange with David Reid in mind, consider this quote:

"... the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) tells a different story about sea levels worldwide and is worth quoting in some detail: ‘Even under the most conservative scenario, sea level will be about 40cm higher than today by the end of 21st century and this is projected to increase the annual number of people flooded in coastal populations from 13 million to 94 million. Almost 60 per cent of this increase will occur in South Asia.’

This is nonsense. The world’s true experts on sea level are to be found at the INQUA (International Union for Quaternary Reseach) commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (of which I am a former president), not at the IPCC. Our research is what the climate lobby might call an ‘inconvenient truth’: it shows that sea levels have been oscillating close to the present level for the last three centuries."

That is Nils-Axel Mörner writing in the Spectator*. Read the whole thing.

Oh and Matt Ridley has come out as a skeptic too, for which heresy he will now of course be continuously villified by the Left.

I am not surprised at all. The Left's obvious appetite for the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has been, at least since Al Gore's "Earth In The Balance" (which I can still recall reading), explicable as an "objective" justification to fuel the expansion of the State. That is not to say that meterological research on climate change is all false or unnecessary, just that it has been hijacked for political purposes and this has been obvious for at least two decades now.

*Update: George Monbiot has a piece in the Guardian about Nils-Axel Mörner and his Spectator article. Now, I don't know whether this stuff about Mörner being involved with dowsing rods and other nonsense is true, but Monbiot's piece, whilst a damning hack job, does not challenge Mörner's claim I quoted above, that sea levels have "oscillated close to the present level for three centuries". This is the relevant claim. Having said that, I do now feel sick at having quoted Mörner without checking his background.

The Warp Of Electoral Politics

2011-12-02T00:19:00.007+08:00

"Living in a nuclear wasteland"

This is the headline to today's editorial piece in the Taipei Times after trace amounts (>30 Bq/kg) of radioactive isotopes (cesium 137 and cobalt 60) were found on Lanyu island (蘭嶼), where a low-level waste site is located. Essential context: there are legislative and presidential elections in January.

Reflect on the comparison once more:

"Nuclear wasteland"... >30Bq/Kg cesium 137 (trace).

Draw your own conclusions. Previous on this issue, here.

AH-1W

2011-12-01T00:54:00.001+08:00

Not as sharp as I would like, but if you click on the image to enlarge, you should notice the gun turret and barrel underneath; the M197 has a jamming problem, but since the Army's AH-1Ws will soon be replaced by AH-64s, I doubt they will be bothered about upgrading it.

Flora Faun

2011-11-30T17:35:00.005+08:00

"I am completely at a loss as to why humanity has sunken so low."

Of course you are, Flora.

That is why a disastrous career in politics awaits you.

OH-58D

2011-11-29T02:39:00.004+08:00

Non-Negotiable

2011-11-28T01:20:00.003+08:00

On snitches...

Taiwan has a valuable future too - but not under the "cradle of leadership" of the Left and political, lick-spittle snitches like Torch Pratt.

Old Wine In New Bottles

2011-11-28T00:29:00.009+08:00

"The danger in dismissing other people's pursuit of values as "gratuitous" is that someone else might do the same to us should they have the political power of an unchecked majority behind them (which is why the Left want direct democracy)."

Myself, commenting on this old thread at Nathan Novak's place on Saturday. The point about direct democracy ought to be obvious: historically, the modern Left have always struggled against constitutional restrictions on the reach of government (they trace their origin to the bloodbath of the French Revolution) and it should therefore be no surprise that their insatiable desire to politicize all aspects of society can no longer be contained by the electoral cycle. And so...

"Set up a government Web site where activists such as myself can create an account and upload videos of polluters, YouTube-style. These could be grouped under different headings, such as smoky scooters, drivers who idle for more than three minutes, red-light runners, riders without helmets, license plates with an expired inspection sticker and every other issue that activists are trying to stamp out. Note that these are all offenses for which a person can be fined and that frequently go unpunished."

Torch Pratt, in a letter published in the Taipei Times today (emphasis added). You see it? Every other issue that activists are trying to stamp out.

Note his choice of the verb, to stamp.

That is the totalitarian impulse which George Orwell described in 1984; the government outsources its surveillance of the public... to the public themselves. Whatever Dan Bloom might say to the contrary, I'm taking Pratt at his word. No doubt he thinks such professional snitches should be paid too were there to be a lack of volunteers (although I'm not sure there would be).

I should also note that Torch Pratt has prior form. Here he is in another (this time somewhat more confused) letter published in the Taipei Times on the first of this month calling for the actual deportation of members of the TDFA (or perhaps more likely, myself - simply for expressing opinions he doesn't like):

"Taiwan’s police need to get on this case like flies on ... honey and deport these trigger-happy idiots to a country where they might feel more at home, say Mexico or Somalia."

Can the Taipei Times actually sink any lower than this? We'll see...

"Who, Whom?" Not "Rule Of Law"

2011-11-27T18:44:00.004+08:00

"The notion of hate-crime undermines the ideal (and I think is intended to undermine the ideal) of equality under the law, to the great advantage of political entrepreneurs, who see nothing in a polity or an economy but spoils to be divided in their clientele's, and therefore in their own, favour."

The excellent Theodore Dalrymple, at the Social Affairs Unit, writing in response to a Guardian report on the horrific murder of one Stuart Walker in Scotland late last month.

The notion of "hate-crime" distinguishes crimes according to motive, in particular the hatred of a given demographic group - almost always a collective "minority" of some sort. In the case of Stuart Walker, it was supposed that his vicious murder was motivated by his homosexuality. As Dalrymple correctly points out in his piece, however, this is morally irrelevant: murder is murder, regardless of whether it was motivated by the victim's membership of demographic group A, B or C - at least that is, if we are to presuppose the sanity of a Liberal political paradigm in which individual rights are not punctuated according to demographics.

From the perspective afforded by the collectivist premises of those who advocate unlimited democratic government however, a victim's demographic profile is morally relevant since that data may have implications both for the "just" allocation of administrative resources and the pursuit or maintenance of political power. Here is the likely consequence of this tacit perspective both in the press and in the administrative organs of government per se: crimes will be ranked according to the demographic (i.e. political) importance of the victim.Victims who happen to be members of favoured demographic groups will receive greater press attention than those victims who do not have quite the same pretextual demographic "status". The administration of the police and judicary may or may not show favourtism - depending on the political import of the case.

The existence of this tacit line of thought in the press and the administrative organs of government alone is sufficient to refute their claims to that old "rule of law" canard. As long as Taiwanese society is dominated by a very poorly limited State, there can never be any "rule of law"; there can be only a more or less benign or more or less malignant application of Lenin's "Who, Whom?" principle.

And so it is this that must be borne in mind in reading about the case of a certain "Taiwan Teacher" (a U.S. citizen whom I have met previously, though I forget his real name) up in Hualien who was viciously assaulted by a gang of Taiwanese youths earlier this month. Perhaps the police will eventually catch them and the case will go to court. Perhaps not. Either way, I doubt the Taiwanese press will take an interest - why? Who cares? It has no great political implication for either the pan-green or pan-blue political establishment. If it were a gang of foreigners beating up a Taiwanese on the other hand, then that almost certainly would get the attention of the Taiwanese press.

This is why I made the point that, living here as foreigners, we have to be very careful and must not be so complacent with our own safety as to merely assume that we are protected either by the friendliness and good will of 99% of Taiwan's people, or Taiwan's supposed "rule of law".

Mr 1% is always out there, and either side of the green-blue political establishment has no great interest in what happens to a mere foreigner - unless he has political or, shall we say, "underground" connections.

March Of The Imbeciles

2011-11-27T13:47:00.003+08:00

"Obama Democrats demagogue about the need to balance spending cuts with tax hikes. Republicans predictably respond that they were willing to compromise. When you are $15 trillion in debt, a debate over whether we should borrow another $6 trillion or another $5 trillion is not an exercise in compromise. It is an exercise in insanity."

Andrew McCarthy on why the Republicans deserve nothing but contempt.

No further comment necessary.

More, More, More...

2011-11-27T00:26:00.011+08:00

Mark Steyn hits the right note yesterday:

"When it comes to spending and the size of government, only the Democrats are officially panting orgasmically, “More More More, How do you like it?”..."

The goal is unlimited, technocratic administration of society - total politicization. That is what the Left want; aside from a few outcast Marxists here and there, they have long since betrayed the Liberal paradigm of a free society in which government intervention is to be considered an evil, if perhaps a sometimes necessary evil. To them, government interventions are blessings from on high to be hoped and prayed for.

To the mainstream Left of today, there is no social problem that cannot be "solved" by the mere application of force paid for with other people's money. To leave such problems to the market or civil society is considered akin to leaving them to chance and chaos. People have to be forced into doing what the Left want - for their own good - and so all attempts to solve problems must be "coordinated" from above by government. They actually think they are doing good to people at the very moment they violate their rights.

And they simply can't get enough of doing this.

On Newt Gingrich

2011-11-25T21:41:00.002+08:00

"Gingrich is a really smart guy and..."

Commenter "Okami" at Turton's place.

My opinion? Gingrich has not, to my knowledge, had a single serious and substantive word to say about monetary reform. Gingrich has shown no ambition beyond implementing mere managerial improvements to the Left's programs. Gingrich may be lauded as an "historian", or a "raconteur", or "a really smart guy" or whatever else in the right-wing press, but this will not change the fact that Gingrich does not grasp the ethical root of the problem.

Ron Paul has a vague idea, but Ron Paul is a ridiculous, tired old man who can barely mumble his way through a list of half-forgotten libertarian talking points.

Taiwan's Perennial Problem

2011-11-24T10:53:00.005+08:00

"The key, like with all traffic rules, is enforcement. If a rule is not enforced, few people will follow it, even if it is for their own good."

The Taipei Times staff editorial today, with the perennial call for greater police enforcement of traffic rules - for your own good.

Empirical question: since Taipei City has stricter traffic rule enforcement than anywhere else in Taiwan, does it also have fewer traffic accidents (note: not fatalities) per 100,000 people than Taiwan's other major cities?

It seems to me there are two reasons why driving in Taiwan is such a problem; the first is that the most dangerous habits people have are psychological and cannot be captured by law; the second is that these habits are culturally ingrained. I have made this case before in a letter last year which the Taipei Times published. You cannot force people to pay attention to the road and think about what they are doing by threatening them with fines and such. The notion that enforcement is "the key" presupposes that accidents are primarily caused by violation of traffic rules, whereas I strongly suspect that the chief cause of accidents is psychological negligence - which would also explain those accidents in which no rules were broken.

If I am right about that, then it follows that greater enforcement of traffic rules will only reduce accidents to the extent that such enforcement coincides with reduced pyschological negligence whilst driving, e.g. if drivers are having to stop and wait at red lights, then obviously they cannot be driving negligently whilst they are so stopped.

Traffic rule enforcement would thus, at best, be a flawed proxy for getting at the real problem of psychological negligence. If increasing such enforcement would be only slightly effective, yet very costly - as I suppose it would be - then surely it makes sense to approach the problem differently via popular education and civic pressure.

Of course, that would carry the implication that the Left must re-evaluate the technocratic Statist premises from which they reflexively jump to the conclusion that all social problems must be solved by spending more money to use greater force.

To abandon that premise is to no longer be part of the Statist Left.

***

There is a conversation that can be had between small government conservatives and small government classical liberals on the one hand, and the strict constitutionalists, minarchist libertarians and anarchist libertarians on the other hand. All of these people adhere to the basic premises of Liberalism, and that conversation is about how a free society should be constituted, whether there should be a State, and what its functions and limitations ought to be and on what principles they are to be based on, or whether the free market and civil society can produce an alternative institutional architecture based solely on voluntarist principles of cooperation.

Almost the entire mainstream Left cannot be part of that conversation because to them, freedom is either not a priority value anymore, or the assumption that only a behemoth centralized State can efficiently manage society is still treated as axiomatic - in spite of all its' obvious failings - and they therefore do not understand the point of the conversation.

T-34 Trainers

2011-11-24T02:39:00.002+08:00

R.O.C. airforce trainee pilots in their T-34s on flight formation training over "Ah-Kung-tian" reservoir in Gangshan, Kaohsiung County yesterday.

AH-1W

2011-11-24T02:18:00.003+08:00

At one point, whilst driving through some small factories which frustratingly obscured my view, an OH-58D "Kiowa" passed maybe sixty or seventy feet over my head, but by the time I fished the camera out, it was well off into the distance and I could only get a few poor shots. Just five minutes later though, on the road to Guanmiao, I stopped and waited and was rewarded with this - the AH-1W ("Cobra"), which, until the AH-64D Apache Longbows arrive, is the R.O.C. Army's attack helicopter.

TH-67A

2011-11-24T02:16:00.003+08:00

Lots of R.O.C. Army helicopters out and about on training missions yesterday in the south-east of Tainan county. This is the basic pilot trainer, the TH-67, which is a military variant of the Bell 206.

Letter Against Edward Kung

2011-11-24T00:07:00.006+08:00

Sirs,

It is surely a sign of the political weakness and vulnerability of the Left that they are now reduced to transparent chicanery. Edward Kung's letter (published Thursday November 24th) is a clear example of such obvious artifice; in arguing that the U.S. government must solve its debt problem by simply cutting military spending, he betrays not simply a personal ignorance as to the broader causes of that debt (i.e. the long term absence of both monetary and fiscal restraint), but the desperation of the Left to avoid re-examining the pragmatic and technocratic premises of their Statism.

Pace Kung's desperate turn to Ron Paul-esque isolationism, consider the facts: the largest proportion of Federal government spending in the U.S. - by far - goes into social programs. The largest of these are social security and the twin health programs of medicare and medicaid. Together with non-defense discretionary spending allocated by Congress, these areas of spending comprise nearly 60% of the Federal budget, compared to the 20% allocated for defense expenditure.

Moreover, we must remember that the current U.S. government has increased the debt in a mere three years by approximately the same amount (U.S.$4 trillion) as which the previous government increased it in eight years. That was not accomplished by any increase in military spending. That was accomplished by the application of quasi-Keynesian policies. Whose voices were the loudest in advocating these policies three years ago? Those of the Left.

It is the Left that is to blame for the U.S. debt problem, together with the inept Republican party which, as the current crop of abysmal Presidential candidates indicates, is shot through with the same pragmatic and technocratic operating premises which so animate the otherwise now rotten carcass of the Left. The debt problem is a consequence of the long term application of policies and programs originating on the Left (abetted by the fools on the Right), and this is why it is also the Left that is to blame for President Obama's failure to support Taiwan.

Why? They elected him.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Thursday 24th November 2011. Unpublished by the Taipei Times).

Paul Rahe

2011-11-23T00:56:00.004+08:00

"By behaving in the manner in which he behaved... he exposed, he pulled off the covers, of the tyrannical inclinations that lie at the heart of the administrative state - and people saw it. They saw it before their political leaders saw it."

That is Paul Rahe, of Hillsdale College and Ricochet on the historical significance of Barack Obama. And no, I do not think it is too early at all to pronounce on Obama's historical importance. That might just be the single best segment of interview I have ever seen on Peter Robinson's show.

I like Ricochet, particularly Claire Berlinski, but I will certainly have to read Paul Rahe's book.

Notice

2011-11-22T21:02:00.003+08:00

Comments from the anonymous "reporter" of the Taipei Times will hereafter be deleted as a routine matter without exception.

Criticism and reasoned argument is one thing; single comment attacks with consistent and gratuitous use of foul language are another thing entirely.

Gobi Desert Update

2011-11-20T14:25:00.009+08:00

The Reg finally got hold of the Gobi desert story last Friday, but merely trotted out the Jonathan Hill line about satellite calibration.

I'm skeptical about that primarily because, as I said in my comment at J.M.Cole's place, the "grids" strike me as an unnecessarily complicated and uneconomical way to calibrate satellite cameras. Moreover, the scale on which they are built is much larger than comparable targets in the U.S. (which doesn't prove that they aren't for satellite calibration, but merely indicates that the Chinese satellites aren't necessarily very good).

If these "grids" really were for calibrating satellite cameras, then consider: calibration would have to be achieved by focusing the cameras serially on the differently sized spandrels between the "grid-lines" - yet these spandrels are all irregularly shaped. Would it not have been simpler and easier to simply use a proper grid-like pattern?

Here are the two Gobi desert "grids" which Anna Leach at the Reg supposes are Chinese satellite camera calibration targets.

And for comparison, here is an actual U.S. satellite camera calibration target:

They are totally different in both scale and design - with the U.S. site being a few hundred feet across and of multiple targets differentiated according to a regular scale, but the Chinese "grids" being over a mile across and consisting of multiple irregularly sized, but also irregularly shaped spandrels. Why?

Perhaps the editors at the Reg will reconsider this story; I am skeptical that those "grids" are used for the purpose of satellite camera calibration. What other possible functions they actually may be designed for, I don't know. Disinformation would be one guess.

The other thing that's worth noting, as I did in my first post, is the presence of airfields. The thing to do would be to try to estimate dates for the construction of the various airfields (and planned airfields) and weapons testing ranges. One of the commenters at the Reg article - one "Volker Hett" - pointed to a Spiegel article comparing an apparently painted airfield (not pictured in my previous blog post below) in the desert to the Ching Chuan Kang airbase in Taichung. This may just be coincedence, since after all, how many different designs can an airfield runway take? Nevertheless it would be interesting to know when the extant airfields were constructed, and when their adjacent structures were last bombed (and why only those adjacent structures and not the length of the runways themselves?).

Remember: the Presidential and Legislative elections will be held in January. When were the last weapons testing drills carried out in this area? The answer to that question might have political consequences.

Through The Barbwire Of Inanities

2011-11-19T11:06:00.009+08:00

"Society should be offended that men and women, many of whom were educated to the master’s or doctoral level by taxpayer money — either at home or abroad — continue to utter such inanities."

Indeed. Here is another such recent inanity: that we consider the DPP's "piggy bank" electoral gimmick as "Taiwan's version of the Jasmine Revolution".

History 101 for the politicians, current affairs 101 for the editorial staff of the Taipei Times.

***

"The US House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs voted unanimously on Thursday to adopt two new laws to substantially boost US relations with Taiwan.
While the bills may pass the full House, they are likely to fail in the Senate where US President Barack Obama’s administration has the votes to defeat them."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I want to see a show of hands as to who among Taiwan's U.S. expats voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential election. Aside from his authorization of Osama Bin Laden's assassination, President Obama's record has to be the worst of any U.S. President in living memory: his utterly craven political cynicism is such that Paul Kane's op-ed actually frightened people, lest President Obama act on its advice.

***

"Why was the US unwilling to move forward on the Doha Round, but willing to pursue a regional free-trade agreement?"

Because, as I pointed out here on Wednesday, the TPP is not a free-trade agreement. It is a political agreement on how member states shall govern trade between peoples subject to their legal jurisdiction. Moreover, even when the question is considered in conventional terms, the obvious answer is mundane: the greater the number of member states present at the negotiations, the more difficult and time-consuming it is to reach agreements. The TPP agreement has only ten member states, yet the Doha trade talks took place under the auspices of the WTO with one hundred and fifty three members, including the world's largest member states by population (i.e. China, India and Brazil). That the U.S. government was unwilling to eliminate farm subsidies - as requested by many of the smaller member states, and also the government of India - was one reason why the talks collapsed.

"The agreement would also have provisions for intellectual-property protection and what are dubbed the social and environmental issues. In short, the TPP’s core agenda will offer the region a Doha Round-type agreement that includes the social and environmental agenda that developing economies have been resisting within the WTO."

This is a point which deserves more emphasis; the objective of the TPP agreement is not to secure "free-trade", but rather to harmonize the terms under which the ten member states restrict and regulate trade and subsidiary matters. With the TPP agreement in place, not only can developing economies like China's be excluded from the new Pacific trade bloc, but it becomes politically more difficult for any government within this trade bloc to disentangle itself from prior legislation made under that agreement, since such legislation will have been one aspect of a the multi-lateral agreement linked to long-term tarriff reduction.

"While the economics of the TPP is important, the strategic component is even more so. This is the second leg of the US’ new “Pacific offensive,” aimed at offering nations in the region an alternative to excessive and rapidly growing dependence on a rising China."

That may be the motive behind the recent entry of the U.S. into the TPP agreement, but whether it will come to have this effect or not (or indeed, other unintended effects) is another question. The premise of this strategy is the continuation of the much hyped "rise of China". Yet the PRC is already suffering from its own self-generated problems which may yet bring it to the verge of collapse before the decade is out. For the vast majority of the Chinese people, a collapse of the Communist State would mix liberation with catastrophe. The TPP agreement may or may not help to bring about eventual collapse, but when that collapse does occur, what do we think will happen next - a new and magically democratic China rises to join the TPP under the same terms?

Rather than TPP member states trying to protect "their" people through a trade-governance agreement propagandized as a "free-trade" agreement, the governments of the Pacific area would do better to agree on a depoliticization agreement to eliminate all legislation that prohibits competition, and to eliminate or radically reduce taxes, regulations and subsidies. That would be a real free-trade agreement.

***

On The Paul Kane NYT Op-Ed

2011-11-18T13:18:00.008+08:00

Following last week's publication in the New York Times of a guest op-ed by a certain Paul Kane, there has been a flurry of enraged responses - particularly from supporters of Taiwan independence on the Left. In Taiwan itself, the Pragmatist seems to have been the first to react with follow up responses from other bloggers in Taiwan and, naturally, the people at the Taipei Times: both Washington correspondent William Lowther and deputy news editor J.M. Cole had words to say about it. Even Kane himself later tried to distance himself from his own writing in an apology piece for Foreign Policy by claiming his article was intended as "Swiftian satire". Yet at a time when the sitting U.S. President can spend almost as much money on "stimulus" in a mere three years as the last President did on wars over a decade... readers can surely be forgiven for a lack of distinguishing humour.

Although I too thought Kane's piece was bad, I nevertheless find one aspect of the affair perversely amusing.

Kane's piece called for the Obama administration to close a deal with the PRC whereby the latter would agree to a debt-forgiveness plan to the tune of U.S.$1.14 trillion and the former would renege on long-standing U.S. commitments either to defend Taiwan, or to supply Taiwan with defensive articles.

Of course, this is an utterly crass, amoral and naive utilitarian calculation. As noted above, Kane himself, in his Foreign Policy response, claimed that he had written it sardonically. This may or may not be the case; either way, it certainly made quite a few heads "explode" over here in Taiwan.

Yet what I find perversely amusing is that Kane's argument, once you subtract its' obvious crassness and apparent naivity, arises from the same collectivist-utilitarian premises that much of the Left routinely operates on - i.e. that the State must always act to protect and advance the "common good", even if it means deliberately violating the rights of individual subjects. There is no difference in the principles involved between an argument for legalized land theft in order to construct say, a factory that may benefit the wider economy, and the selling out of an entire island in order to acquire a write-off of public debt. The only differences between the two arguments are the empirical accounting of collective benefits and assessment of strategic outcomes.

Thus, many of the criticisms put to Kane have centered on just such points, e.g. the benefit to the U.S. of a $1.14 trillion write-off would be relatively small; the "naivity" of his view of PRC ambitions. Such criticisms are all valid, but they do not get to the root of the matter - they are not actually damning criticisms at all, but mere fannying about with vague calculations of interest.

Memo to the Left: Kane's is the kind of absurd conclusion to which the logic of your amoral, majoritarian Pragmatism points. Of course, it would be an irony too far to suggest that this was the real reason why Kane had his article published in the New York Times (!), so perhaps he really was just being "Swiftian"?

Strange Objects In Gobi Desert

2011-11-17T01:41:00.016+08:00

The Chinese have been busy in the Gobi Desert it seems. Wired has the best coverage of the story I've seen so far, although I got it from J.M. Cole and it was originally dropped to someone at the Telegraph (so apparently that place has not quite been taken over by the "women's interests" section yet). Apparently, people have been using Google Earth/Maps to observe what's been going on in this region of the Gobi since 2004. Here are some of the snaps I took just in the last half hour or so...

These two images above have been drawing perhaps the most attention. The first* shows one square and one rectangular configuration - both of vast proportions - seemingly carved into the desert. The second shows a neatly cicular, target-like arrangement of what seem to be shipping containers and other objects with three aircraft surrounding the centre of the arrangement. Each of the three aircraft appear to be early Mig fighters (e.g. Mig 21s) since they all have the same swept-back wing design and truncated nose - although it is difficult to be sure from the resolution.

This next image, taken at greater distance, shows three airfield-like structures. Two of them are several kilometers in length. The one to the left and the one in the centre both have the same basic, dual "runway" design whereas the smaller one to the right is a short single strip. The one to the left appears to have fallen into disuse many, many years ago; the one in the centre appears to be a replacement for it since it follows the same design and is a shiny, metallic hue. The smaller one to the right also has the same shiny metallic hue, but appears to be partially damaged by mudslides.

The image also shows some smaller, square-like structures adjacent to the top right of each of the two larger "airfields". To the top right of the older, disused "airfield" there is this bright blue square covered in what seem to be bomb craters...

To the top right of the newer "airfield" are what appears to be an approximately circular arrangement of seven, partially destroyed, hangar-like buildings, the largest three of which feature very bright blue roofing materials.

Adjacent to the central "airfield" there is also what looks something like a partially destroyed barracks...

There are several other objects visible on the google maps satellite overview of this area including what seems to be an electricity transformer station in addition to some vast, bright metallic blue structure and other interesting things. I may add more to this sometime tommorow.

Later...

Here are some of the other structures within the vicinity of those mentioned earlier. First, the large sky-blue coloured structure - perhaps some sort of vast artificial reservoir or other water containment or treatment system?

The white blocks to the right of this next image below appear to be regular and square shaped, with light reflecting from some of them which suggests they could be solar panels. As to the green and white rectangular shaped objects to the left of the image - I have no idea.

*[Later...] Speculation as to the purpose of the rectangular, "street-like" arrangements seems to focus either on their possible function for the calibration of satellite cameras, or as some sort of mock-up of a U.S. or other city.

With regard to the first conjecture, I am not in a position to say anything knowledgable but it does seem that the structure is a rather complicated and uneconomic way of achieving that aim - if the need is for a large site of known dimensions with sufficient visual contrast, then why not, for instance, simply focus on beaches? At the coast there is a naturally stark visual contrast between the sand and the sea (or the sand and nearby urban structures such as roads). If it is objected that erosion of the sand would make the beach an unreliable site, then why couldn't they simply paint the artificial wavebreakers? The conjecture may be correct that these things are for satellite camera calibration, but I'm yet to be convinced of this.

In respect of the second conjecture, the unspoken assumption that the rectangular "street-like" arrangement is to model radiation fallout in a city-centre strikes me as so unlikely as to be absurd; if the PLA were to launch a nuclear attack on a city (e.g. Taipei), then the pattern of nuclear fallout on a mere several mile scale is the last thing they'd worry about. If that tacit assumption is discarded, then it is difficult to imagine what purpose the PLA could achieve by modelling a city road map out in the desert. Taken together then, I think this conjecture has to be relegated to an implausible status.

The "TPP" Is NOT A "Free-Trade" Agreement

2011-11-16T19:01:00.009+08:00

First quote:

"US President Barack Obama announced on Saturday the framework for a vast free-trade agreement spanning the Pacific as he sought a new era of US leadership in a fast-growing region."

This is from an AFP piece published in the Taipei Times earlier this week on Monday. What's wrong with it is the now routine appellation of "free-trade agreement" to what is actually an agreement between ten governments* in the Pacific region to harmonize the terms of government intervention viz capital controls, labour laws, environmental regulations and other matters.

Second quote:

"The TPP started out in 2005 as a free-trade agreement with four signatories — Chile, New Zealand, Brunei and Singapore — with the US, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Peru joining later."

This is from today's Taipei Times editorial, which is the editorial written by a member of the editorial staff, rather than an imported piece from one of the main press agencies. Thus somebody at the Taipei Times is directly responsible for it. Again, what's wrong with this is the routine transmogrification of the adjective "free" to describe something which is not free.

To some people, it may seem like a trivial point to criticize the editors of a newspaper for one ill-chosen word. However, there are three serious implications here.

The first is that it directs attention toward a narrowly framed objective of the agreement (trade "liberalization" by means of tarriff reduction), rather than the procedural actions that will be taken in the name of that agreement. Yet it is the procedural actions to be taken that warrant critical attention, not the mere objective. The reason this is important is that because the TPP agreement provides for the reduction of tarriffs through an expanded process of multi-lateral negotitation and agreement between member states, the process of tariff reduction and other aspects of trade liberalization will likely get bogged down by political calibration (as with similar WTO-sponsored trade talks). It would be much better for the cause of freedom to see member states unilaterally dismantle barriers to trade to set an example for others to follow**.

The second point is that this TPP agreement is not merely concerned with the multi-lateral reduction of tarriffs; the broader "trade liberalization" objective encompasses an agreement to harmonize the purposes and design of government intervention in all member States. That is the behaviour of a cartel; rather than member states competing against one another to attract both foreign investment and immigration by imposing different investment, labour and environmental restrictions and regulations, both immigrants and investors will now have less of a basis on which to choose between member states rather than more of a basis on which to choose. Thus, to describe this agreement as a "free-trade" agreement is a travesty. It is an agreement toward the cartelization of governance.

The third point follows from the first two in that calling this agreement a "free trade" agreement is a linguistic bug which will tend to retard the quality of public debate. It is quite sufficient for the purposes of journalistic accuracy to refer to this type of agreement as simply an "agreement on governing trade", or, should a greater economy of words be required, a "trade governance" agreement. Inserting the superlative "free" into the description can only serve the purposes of propaganda, since it is not a "free-trade" agreement by any honest use of the concept.

Perhaps somebody else should write to the Taipei Times to correct them on this point; anything I would write to them would be both feared and loathed.

*Brunei, Chile, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Peru, Japan, Vietnam and the United States.

**I would argue this point from ethical principle. Whether unilateral dismantling of trade barriers would be "better" on consequentialist grounds is an open question; if an honest attempt to answer that question is to be made, it will have to go beyond the mere confirmation bias of establishment Marxists like Ha Joon Chang.

"Capitalism" As Anti-Concept

2011-11-16T17:48:00.002+08:00

Government "favouritism" toward business is a political contingency, i.e. a given business may or may not be treated "favourably" or "unfavourably" relative to some other individual or set of individuals (or another business) depending on whether there are operant political interests involved and what these political interests are.

That criticism aside, I think Long makes a reasonable case for insisting on a distinction between "capitalism" and "free-market".

However, it is important to remember that this distinction will be lost on two kinds of people: those whose minds tend to naturally fixate upon a narrow conception of consequences and those who are simply opposed to the basic principles of a free society to begin with.

Reform, Self-Critique & Reinvention

2011-11-16T16:37:00.003+08:00

"In one of the most amazing transformations in the history of civilization, a tiny East Coast community of predominantly white European Christian settlers developed a system whose natural logic of reform, self-critique, and reinvention over two centuries became the present melting pot of whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists."

Victor Davis Hanson.

The Western tendency toward self-critique is what sets us apart from other people, both culturally and psychologically. It is our one characteristic that Chinese people have most to fear from, and yet the most to gain from.

On Firearms Ownership

2011-11-12T22:13:00.020+08:00

I was recently involved in a slightly rough-and-tumble firearms debate here, chiefly with the British blogger FOARP* (the "scarlet conservative"). Since my opponents seem to have "bowed out" of that debate in their own graceless fashion, I thought I'd give a brief precis of why I am right and the firearms prohibition advocates are wrong:

The right to own firearms is no different from the right to own any other type of property.

Against this, firearms prohibition advocates will argue that private firearms ownership poses a significant exernality risk to others in society, and that therefore, government should strictly prohibit the private ownership of firearms. Notice that this counter-argument rests on two claims, the first of which is a factual claim and the second one is a contingent ethical imperative. I will first refute the factual claim, and then I will refute the imperative attached to it.

The Facts

The factual claim, that private firearms ownership poses a significant exernality risk to others, may be made on the back of three seperate sub-claims:

1) Privately owned guns are more likely to be used in committing violent crimes than they are in self-defense.

This claim requires the abstraction of aggregate statistics from context; it ignores the fact that many gun-owners live in areas with relatively low crime (whether that low crime is consequent to the private ownership of firearms is another question) so of course these gun-owners are less likely to use their guns in self-defence than say, someone living in places where the crime rate is relatively high.

2) Homicides tend to be committed by people known personally to the victim, such as friends, family or spouses.

This sub-claim is used to argue that the introduction of private firearms ownership would likely increase the homicide rate, since firearms make it physically easier to kill. This may or may not be true, since it depends on other things, particularly the sort of people who acquire guns; good people don't use firearms in situations other than self-defence or training, bad people use them to commit crimes - either of passion or of acquisition. Yet preventing bad people from acquiring firearms is not going to prevent them from committing homicides.

3) Homicides involving the use of firearms are as likely to be committed by any demographic subset of the population and that there is thus no "ideal" gun-owning subset of the population.

This claim is simply not true (which means it is either made in error, or it is a lie). The proportion of the U.S. population estimated as owning firearms is somewhere between 40% and 50%, yet the proportion of murder/manslaughter offenders using firearms is somewhere around 1% of the population. Thus most people who own firearms in the U.S. do not use them to commit murder/manslaughter. QED.

The Imperative

The imperative claimed by firearms prohibition advocates is that since (or so they wrongly suppose) private firearms ownership poses significant externality-risks to other people, government must therefore strictly prohibit or otherwise strictly control the private ownership of firearms.

The principle at work in this claim is unqualified majoritarianism: if a majority deems private firearms ownership "too" dangerous, then the government should prohibit it. The underlying premise is crude, amoral utilitarianism, i.e. that government should act for the "greater good"** on no other definition than subjective majoritarian preference. Yet this can cut both ways; if a majority regard private firearms ownership as fine, then it "ought" to be legalized. Thus, this isn't even an ethical argument against private firearms ownership per se, but rather an argument for the authority of government, and nothing more.

As an argument for the authority of government, however, it is simply amoral, majoritarian tyranny: the government ought to do whatever the majoritarian mob says it ought to do (and perhaps after they have been whipped into a fervour by some demagogue). It does not even include the usual caveats as to the rights of individuals (or, in bullshit Lefty speak "minority groups").

So far as I am aware, firearms prohibition advocates have no other specifically ethical argument for State prohibition of private firearms ownership; correct me if I am wrong.

***

All that being said however, I can certainly think of a subtler, more persuasive argument for firearms prohibition - which is that responsible and peaceful firearms ownership can only occur in places with the necessary socio-cultural prerequisites. These prerequisites would include widespread respect for the rights of the individual, including the right of private property, and the principles of free exchange, free speech and free association. Where these socio-cultural necessities are lacking or suspect, it is easier to doubt the consequentialist benefits for society of private firearms ownership. This argument is especially salient to me here in Taiwan since the broader culture elevates the importance of "face" to what I take to be ridiculous extremes - I can quite easily imagine a couple of locals shooting each other over competing claims to a girl or some other, far more trivial, loss-of-face-issue (e.g. "He called me a 白痴!").

There are two things to say about this. The first is that it is not of itself a trump argument since it is still based on the collectivist "greater good" premise which would still deny to individuals the right of purchasing the most effective means to defend themselves. As an objection however, it still leaves me hungry. The second is more interesting - it is the question of whether we can identify what other actions ought to be taken in conjunction with the legalization of private firearms ownership in order to reduce the risk of any possible increase in violent crime. The low-hanging answers here are obviously things like training, ethics and licensing, but I doubt these are sufficient to overturn many decades of deeply entrenched cultural habit. A training program with a very strict ethical aspect may go some way to moderating the influence of culture, but I'm not sure this is something I'd want to bet on. Reaching somewhat higher up there are the libertarian arguments about diminishing or indeed eliminating the influence of government so as to allow a direct, market-mediated relationship between people and the local police departments that purport to serve them. By allowing the market to restructure the incentives under which police operate - focusing more on violent crime and less on minor traffic violations for instance - it may be possible to more forcefully augment the moderating effect that strict training and licensing would have on the cultural difficulties in resolving personal conflicts without resort to violence.

*I have a comment at his place on this post, which is either awaiting moderation, or which he has rejected. "Scarlet conservative", is, I think, an apt description of him.

**By "the greater good" I mean unqualified majoritarian preference, which is distinct from "the common good" and also "public goods". A "common good" is a good in which it is supposed that everybody in society places some value; typical examples include innoculation against contagious diseases and defence against invasion by foreign armies. A "public good" is one which is made available to everybody in society on a non-excludable basis; radio programs are a standard example since they can be picked up by anybody with a radio receiver. The use of the "common good" and "public good" concepts is common among free-market advocates and libertarians since they are a significant theoretical issue. The use of "greater good" arguments is common in both the Statist wings of the Left and the Right in order to justify social engineering projects such as State education, or the State prohibition of prostitution and so forth.

"Fast & Furious"

2011-11-12T21:42:00.006+08:00

"By the time Cornyn was done drawing this stark contrast between Wide Receiver and Fast & Furious, Holder was reduced to conceding, “I’m not trying to equate the two.” That is big of him given that the two cannot be equated. But the attorney general seemed fine with the effort to equate them — to make them one and the same — when it was Schumer asking the questions. Expect the effort to continue. “Bush did it” may be a tired defense, and in this instance a preposterous one, but it’s the one the Democratic base loves to hear."

Andrew McCarthy is keeping an eye on the U.S. Senate hearings on the Gunwalker scandal in which it seems that members of the Obama administration - possibly including Attorney General Eric Holder himself - are guilty of abetting criminal activity by Mexican drug cartels.

When the U.S. government smuggles firearms into the hands of foreign criminals seemingly in order to justify further gun control measures in the U.S., it only brings the amoral and utterly cynical nature of the current government into sharp relief.

For all the gutter-class conspiracy theories out there "occupying" the minds of morons in places like Zucotti Park, here is a Senate hearing on what seems to have been a real government conspiracy - which is precisely why many people on the Left will try to ignore it.

When Are "Savings" Not Savings?

2011-11-12T20:06:00.004+08:00

"Have you been following this so-called Supercommittee? They’re the new superhero group of Superfriends from the Supercongress who are going to save America from plummeting over the cliff and into the multi-trillion-dollar abyss. There’s Spender Woman (Patty Murray), Incumbent Boy (Max Baucus), Kept Man (John Kerry), and many other warriors...

...It turns out that a committee created to reduce the deficit is instead going to increase it..."

Mark Steyn measures the distant enormity of the Left's elected "intelligentsia" between his thumb and forefinger. For the answer to my question, read the whole thing.

What a spectacular evil - to be calling for increased government spending just as the country is staring bankruptcy in the face, and to be doing so under the guise of "reducing the deficit"! What a show.

The Left: from their elbows-for-brains "occupiers" in Zucotti Park, to their media operatives, their academics, all the way up to the elected officials of the Democratic party - the entire spectrum of the Left in the U.S. and the Western world today represents both the betrayal of the Enlightenment and the continual kampf of its' counter-force, the Endarkenment.

Always remember the Fabians and their stained-window with its explicit portrayal of their endorsement of force (hammers) and deception (wolf in sheep's clothing):

"Remould it nearer the heart's desire!"

These people - those of them who are not merely imbeciles - are possessed of amoral collectivist premises, and their institutional power must be drained away.

Picky (挑剔) / Little Red (小紅)

2011-11-12T14:33:00.006+08:00

My Taiwanese friends call her 小紅 (Shao Hong) - which means "little red", which is nonsensical because she is neither "little" (she weighs almost sixty pounds) nor "red" (she's black with streaks of light brown). The reason they call her 小紅 is that three years ago she used to have a red collar.

I began calling her "Picky" shortly after she first showed up in the park because, after she overcame her initial nervousness around people, she was still very fussy about food - sometimes she would eat what was offered her, but often she would not even though she clearly must have been hungry (you could see her ribs). To this day, no matter how much I try to fatten her up, she is still very lithe.

This dog is tough. She's about five or six years old I think, extremely athletic, agile and physcially confident and has almost always bossed the other dogs (though not without being checked by me). She has survived three years in that park with only occassional medical help from me and my Taiwanese friends (although food has been regular). In the last couple of times we tried to help her, I have had to carry her around on my shoulder to take her for an X-ray (we had to use a dart to render her unconscious), and I've been bitten for trying to move her leg to help the vet give her a shot. She cannot be taken willingly to the vet's, and she never leaves the park (which is good, because that reduces the chances she'll be run over on the roads).

She does, however, like to bark at people riding bicycles or scooters through the park after dark. This is something of a problem, not because she will bite anyone - I doubt it - but because many Taiwanese people are afraid of dogs and because the younger dogs sometimes imitate her. I can check them when this happens, but I have to anticipate it happening and raise my voice before either Picky or the other dogs get carried away.

She is also a stickler for attention. She will often approach me orthogonally when I'm reading the newspaper or playing with another dog and force her nose under my elbow, or under the newspaper or try to stand in front of me so that I will stroke her back. I can only get on with what I'm doing if I pointedly ignore her for a few moments.

All the same, I cannot imagine what life at the park would be like without Picky.

Kinkaseki, Keelung

2011-11-11T02:57:00.002+08:00

大保 (Da Bao)

2011-11-11T02:31:00.002+08:00

The runt of the litter - notice the chew marks on his right ear. He has also taken sick and has been staying at the vet's for two days now.

小白 (Shiao Bai)

2011-11-10T00:21:00.003+08:00

He's been back at the park for a few days now, and I'm there three times a day to look after them. Hopefully, with all the pork and biscuits I bring with me, he'll put on a five or six pounds before winter sets in.

Knock Knock...

2011-11-09T12:10:00.000+08:00

Without Apology

2011-11-08T02:28:00.002+08:00

"Think of it [the DPP's piggy banks gimmick] as Taiwan’s version of the Jasmine Revolution or the Occupy Wall Street movement."

I have only one thing I want to say today...

The editor of the Taipei Times is an abject moron and he should be fired immediately.

November

2011-11-07T01:40:00.002+08:00

I was going to post a picture of Shiao Bai now that he is better and back at the park, but I don't have a good one yet. I'll try and take a good one tommorow or Tuesday. Instead, this is a picture of his brother taken on Sunday morning (the 6th).

我努力可是需要努力更多

2011-11-06T00:14:00.003+08:00

"我感到很遺憾，因為對於這些人來說，他們可能會覺得台灣是非常糟糕且不值得拜訪的國家。我喜歡你的部落格，因為你是為自己而寫，就算你批評台灣，但你也提出了很好的建議，並且真心希望台灣可以更好。"

致謝您"台灣人". 很的置評讓我很自豪.

Approximate translation...

"I like your blog because you write/be yourself and even though you criticize Taiwan, you have yet made very good constructive suggestions in a sincere desire for Taiwan to improve."

Thank you "Taiwan Person". Your comment is very gratifying.

Pride

2011-11-05T00:29:00.003+08:00

上弦月

2011-11-04T03:40:00.001+08:00

Intersect

2011-11-03T01:20:00.004+08:00

Ochre Rain

2011-11-02T01:23:00.003+08:00

True Colours

2011-11-01T01:45:00.003+08:00

燕子

2011-10-31T02:08:00.002+08:00

山上區變電站

2011-10-30T13:34:00.001+08:00

Substrate Penetration

2011-10-29T18:19:00.013+08:00

Evanescence

2011-10-28T10:59:00.001+08:00

煞車, 操舵 則 加油

"Darkest Of Night, With The Moon Shining Bright..."

Preceptor

2nd GE Prototype

蛇鷹

Ferguson On Hitchens

Scavenging Is Not Salvaging

Baihe Reservoir (白河水庫)

Of Course, She Is The Better Photographer...

The Elision Of Nescience

Limelight

Persistent Pilot Error

On "Neoliberalism"

Syllogism

Wushantou Recursion

Financial Spandrels

On The Remaining GOP Candidates In Florida

Weather Changes

"Beyond Belief"

Against Turton & Navarro

"All Creatures Great & Small..."

"It Really Is That Simple..."

Language & Principles

"Anticipating The End Of The Year..."

Betting On Data Vs Modelling

On The 2012 Election Results

Channel News Asia Interview

"You Have To Pay For Everything, But Some Things Are For Free..."

"Let Me Tell You About My Qualifications..."

A Singularly Important Casualty Of U.S. Defense Cuts

The Rot & The Rat

Agongdian Reservoir (阿公店 水庫)

Like Eating Steak With A Wooden Spoon...

Criminal World

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 10

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 9

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 8

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 7

A Question On Hitchens

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 6

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 5

Parsing The GOP Candidates

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 4

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 3

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 2

Milton Friedman's "Free To Choose": Part 1

"And I Challenge You To Produce One..."

A Second Iranian "Accident"?

小白 ("Shao Bai") After Surgery

Animal Protection 2

I, Heathen

"Science Is The Belief In The Ignorance Of The Experts"

"Looks Like We're In For Nasty Weather..."

Iranian Accident Or "Accident"?

Dellingpole In The Wall Street Journal

Mörner & Monbiot

Climategate 2.0

The Warp Of Electoral Politics

AH-1W

Flora Faun

OH-58D

Non-Negotiable

Old Wine In New Bottles

"Who, Whom?" Not "Rule Of Law"

March Of The Imbeciles

More, More, More...

On Newt Gingrich

Taiwan's Perennial Problem

T-34 Trainers

AH-1W

TH-67A

Letter Against Edward Kung

Paul Rahe

Notice

Gobi Desert Update

Through The Barbwire Of Inanities

On The Paul Kane NYT Op-Ed

Strange Objects In Gobi Desert

The "TPP" Is NOT A "Free-Trade" Agreement

"Capitalism" As Anti-Concept

煞車, 操舵則加油

Agongdian Reservoir (阿公店水庫)

山上區變電站