Some comments about the fiasco surrounding huricane Katrina:


1. I wonder how much money will be raised and given out by the federal government when compared with 9-11. 10,000 may be dead. About triple the number in 9-11. Half a million to a million people may be left homeless. Very few people were left homeless by 9-11. So when very rich people lose their jobs and can’t pay their million dollar mortgages but still have considerable assets we have compassion. When poor people who have nothing left then we lack it. I thing it would putrid if we paid out more money to fewer rich people in 9-11 but less to very poor people now.

2. George Bush seemed to care more about the fact that people were looting than people were starving. Its Jean van jean from Les Miserables all over again. Conservatives have no compassion. They seemed to not 'get' the fact that when people are starving and have no roof over their heads they don’t act very normally. To expect orderly behavior in such circumstances is absurd. The reason for law and order is to allow society to survive. If there is a situation where keeping the law means you are going to die then there is no point. Conservatives seem to like law and order not for high and mighty moral and philosophical reasons but because it’s so aesthetically pleasing. Kind of like a neatly mowed lawn. And in their mind, if people die as a consequence of all this neatness - they don’t care.

3. Where are all the conservatives now? Why won’t they 'take responsibility'? They always go on and on about morality and integrity. Monica Lewinsky ruined our nation's morality. Thousands dieing and hundreds of thousands destitute before out eyes when we could alleviate their suffering - that’s ok. That’s not a lack of integrity according to these hypocrites. Makes me sick....

4. I am amazed that conservatives have lots of money to kill people and to incarcerate people but no money to save people's lives and to alleviate their suffering. Where are all the Terry Sheivo people now? Let them save all those hurricane refugees. How comes they care so much about one brain dead person but nothing about thousands or fully alive poeple. How anyone can take the pro life people seriously after Katrina, I don’t know.

4. I hope they THINK when rebuilding. If they rebuild in the same place what is to stop this happening all over again. Global warming to said to increase the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. What if we rebuild and 20 years later New Orleans gets hit directly. Then what? So perhaps the city should be built North West, far away from menacing costal waters. Otherwise this disaster could happen all over again. How about here in Columbia, La and to its West. Of course we would need to build a new highway linking I20 to I49. Yes it would involve changing zoning laws and environmental laws. But a million people are homeless. They take priority. It would give New Orleansa chance to rebuild without its old corruption. They could look around at what had worked and build a city that people want to live in and that is pleasant to live in. :)

I thought I might speculate about long term strategic threats to the United States and follow up with some predictions about what may happen. The US is so fixated on terrorism that it has forgotten that the real long term foe is China. The Pentagon just released a report saying so and many people in the IR community have been saying so for since the mid nineties.

Our relationship with China can be divided up as follows:

1. 1990 – 2000 – what I call ‘Absolute and Overwhelming Advantage’ of the USA over China. In any scenario the USA could have obliterated China in any conceivable war. The US could steamroll so fast that any war would be over in days or weeks. Total devastation for China. (I assume they will not worry about ‘collateral damage’.)

2. 2000 – 2010 – ‘General Absolute Advantage’ of the USA over China. Sure there would be casualties in a war between the two nations but it would be manageable. Maybe a few thousand dead on the US side. Maybe not even that. Total devastation for China. Such a war would last no more than 90 days.

3. 2010 – 2020 – ‘Relative Advantage’ of the US over China. The US could win in any war with China but it would be very messy and could end up lasting a long time. It might last years. China by then would have aircraft carriers which would enable it to project power well past its territory. Minimum of 50,000 dead to 100,000 to 300,000 on the US side. The US economy would suffer very greatly. The cost of winning such a war may guarantee military, economic and political weakness for decades afterwards. The Chinese could put up a good fight but would find their country devastated to the point where it would take over 100 years to recover. The US would lob every possible modern missile. The lives of civilians would not come in to calculations. All major Chinese cities would be laid waste. This would have to occur for the US to prevail.

4. 2020 – 2040 – ‘Stalemate’ - neither side could prevail. The Chinese economy by 2020 will be bigger than the USA in PPP. (I justify this below.) China will have a larger overall economy and greater manpower. The US will have greater technological capability. It will have a greater GDP per Capita (PPP) enabling it to more efficiently gain revenues. (I assume that one can get away with higher marginal taxes in richer economies.) Neither side could prevail alone. Only with allies could either side prevail. The consequences would be awful for the US, China and the world. China could take back Taiwan but the US could attack mainland China in retaliation. (In the even that China took Taiwan, the US may understand the futility of counterattacking and may instead choose to do nothing.)

5. 2040 – 2050 – ‘Relative Advantage’ of China over the US. Due to revaluation of its currency GDP per Capita in China would roughly equal that of the US. It would hold the technological advantage. It could at great cost peruse a war with the US and win. It could afford to lose more men making the absolute pain of losing many men less relatively painful. China could mount serious attacks on the US mainland.

6. 2050 – 2060??? - ‘General Absolute Advantage’ of China over the US. The USA would have to kowtow to China. Without allies all war with China will be useless. China will be the ‘first among equals’ of great powers in much the same way that Britain was in the nineteenth century. The next great power after China will be India.

Note about calculation of GDP.

According to the Pocket World in Figures by the Economist I get the following figures.

GDP PPP, $bn – USA – 10,308

GDP PPP, $bn – USA – 5,861

Currently China is growing by about 10% per annum. Even if it grows by 8% it will overtake the USA by 2020. I think it’s reasonable to assume that the average difference in rate of growth will be 5%.

Thus 5,861 * 1.05¹⁵ = 12,184.6

Even if one is much more cautious and assume an average difference in rate of growth will be 4% the Chinese economy will overtake the USA by 2020.

Thus 5,861 * 1.04¹⁵ = 10,555.3

Note that currently the difference in growth rate is currently about 6.5%.

The following article details an option when seeking covenant marriage of seeking either a clergy or a social worker. However the mere using of a social worker to prepare people for this new kind of marriage implies that a social worker can help advice people whether it’s an appropriate step. The only problem is that is a lot of psychological evidence that we are not meant to be monogamous. Some apparently some were designed not to be that way….

I would also argue that qsych has become a new religion, telling people how to live their lives and telling them what they should or should not do in quite an absolutist manor.

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Also the fact that the law equates a clergy and social worker implies a consistency in their tasks. They both advise people on right and wrong, on inappropriate and appropriate. How far this falls from real science......

It would also appear that love is quite blind.

Covenant marriages in Arkansas

Yes, I really do

Feb 10th 2005 | LITTLE ROCK
From The Economist print edition

An uxorious state governor urges his people to stay married

UNTIL death do us part: well, up to a point, anyway. On Valentine's Day, February 14th, the governor of Arkansas, Mike Huckabee, and his wife Janet will hold a party for more than a thousand couples who think that a mere “I do” amounts to minor-league marriage. The Huckabees, who have been married for 30 years, will renew their wedding vows at a mass “covenant-marriage” ceremony in a local sports arena. Other couples will sign a covenant-marriage declaration of intent which, once filed at the courthouse in the county where they live, converts ordinary marriages into a deeper commitment.

In 2001, Arkansas passed the Covenant Marriage Act. Couples who choose this path are required to agree to pre-marital counselling by a clergyman or a therapist and a two-year “cooling-off” period before a divorce can be granted. The only exceptions are the three As: abuse, abandonment or adultery. Couples hit by one of these qualify immediately for judicial separation, but still have to wait two years for a divorce.

Arkansas followed the lead of neighbouring Louisiana, the first state to enact covenant-marriage legislation, in 1997, and Arizona, which did it in 1998. Last year Iowa passed a pre-marital counselling law. Arkansas has the second-highest divorce rate in the country. Only Nevada, with its quickie divorces, beats this Bible-belt state.

Mr Huckabee is going centre-stage because he wants his state's divorce rate halved in ten years. A Southern Baptist minister turned politician, he is urging couples to think twice about marriage (hence the pre-marital counselling) and, if they do get hitched, to realise that parting is not just a matter of signing a piece of paper and dividing up the music collection. Things are not going all that fast. So far, in three years, only 600 Arkansas couples have chosen a covenant-marriage licence. The state has more than 40,000 marriages a year.

The point of covenant marriage is not to make divorce impossible (a couple can always travel to another state and do it there) but to make it harder. In a covenant marriage, a person cannot refuse counselling to save the marriage; that would be in breach of the covenant. In the past few months, many Arkansas churches have been urging their congregations to covenant their marriages, with testimonials from couples who have already accepted the tighter bond. Mr Huckabee has taken part in public- service advertisements for the Valentine's Day event, which will involve some well-known churchmen from around the country and CeCe Winans, a Grammy-award-winning gospel singer.

Many Arkansas couples will share chocolates and champagne on Monday, and profess their love with furry teddy bears. Others will get into a church bus to go to the Huckabees' celebration and sign a legal document. Less romantic, maybe, but probably longer-lasting.

I am currently compiling a list of evidence that psychology as it is practiced as opposed to how it is taught is very much tied up with morality.

As opposed to being a discipline purely interested in curing and ameliorating mental illness it seems very interested in the morality of those it treats. This sometimes directly conflicts with its core mission. Sometimes it only indirectly conflicts.

So let me begin. Here is my first example. It’s an article from the BBC.

French test 'chemical castration'

By John Laurenson
Paris

Doctors in France have started giving chemical treatment to 48 repeat sex offenders to see if it will stop them attacking again.

All the men, who have finished prison terms for sex crimes, are volunteers. The government hopes the treatment, which is already available in Sweden, Germany, Denmark and the US will help stem the increase in sex crimes. The number of people sent to prison in France for sex offences has multiplied by seven over the past 20 years.

Now almost a quarter of male detainees in French jails - or 8,200 people - are sex offenders and nearly three-quarters of those have raped children. The statistics are so bad, the government had to do something.

Injections

French Justice Minister, Dominic Perben, told French radio that experimenting with chemical treatment to curb sex crime had never been tried in France before. But he said if it works it could, like psychological treatment, be something sex offenders are forced to undergo in the future.

We'll only really start to make progress against sex crime when we find out what's going on in the heads of different categories of sex offender

Isabelle Le Bourgeois,
psychologist

The minister says injections of the prostate cancer drug leuproreline and the breast cancer tablet cyproterone dampen the sex drive and inhibit erections. The effect wears off when the treatmentstops so this is not "chemical castration" but, to usethe minister's phrase, "a chemical straightjacket". Madelaine Perret, vice-president of the Paris section of the prisoner help organisation Farapej, says she has met a number of sex offenders during her 15 years as a prison visitor and is not surprised that some might volunteer for treatment.

"One prisoner I used to visit said to me 'Madame, you can't imagine the strength of the impulse that some of us men feel to get close to little boys and commit acts that are completely forbidden'.

"He said he was glad to have been arrested and happy to be in prison. Because there were no young boys, there was no temptation and so it was in prison that he felt free.

"He was down for a long sentence but was frightened about offending again when he was finally released.

"He said 'I want treatment! I want them to put a stop to these impulses that push me, in spite of myself, to commit what I know are crimes!'"

Understanding

Some psychologists, though, are worried about the experiment.

The knowledge that chemical treatment exists might make some offenders think they are less responsible for their behaviour, reasoning that if you can take drugs to stop it, the sexual assault of children becomes less a vile act of evil men and more the result of a medical condition.

The psychologist and Catholic prison chaplain, Isabelle Le Bourgeois, has another objection. She says emphasis should be placed on trying to understand and treat the psychological disorder behind paedophile crime.

"It only became an offence a very short time ago as victims dared speak up about the damage it caused them and people woke up to how serious it was," she said.

"And because it's so recent, there hasn't been proper psychological analysis of the mechanisms at work. We'll only really start to make progress against sex crime when we find out what's going on in the heads of different categories of sex offender."

These past few months have seen a series of paedophile rape trials in France. These crimes, related in awful detail, have outraged public opinion and left it eager for action. But there is a malaise. While chemicals might succeed in stopping paedophiles using their bodies to re-offend, nothing is being done to reform the paedophile imprisoned in his mind.

Story from BBC NEWS:

(The italics are mine.)

Now what precisely does the fact that some offenders might ‘think they are less responsible for their behavior, reasoning that if you can take drugs to stop it, the sexual assault of children becomes less a vile act of evil men and more the result of a medical condition’ have any bearing. So bloody what?

Now these reasoning offenders might just be reasoning correctly. Hmmmmm…… my my my…. Maybe as the article details they have an urge so strong that it does not correspond to quite anything that the rest of us might have. Thus they may truly be less responsible? And even if false what does it matter what they might reason? Because, they are unnaturally obsessed with some pursuit of morality. You argue that maybe they are worried about deleterious behavior such an attitude may engender. Well I argue that in part it is just a puritanical moralizing thing. And I intend to present hundreds of sources of evidence to back that up. So stay tuned……