Shopping for an AR-15

Boston cops want to pack the semiautomatic version of the M-16 into battle on the streets of Boston. Uh, no. What a stupid idea.

The dangers are not imaginary, but the police have to go to Mumbai to justify their desire for new toys. In Columbine, the police hesitated to establish a perimeter, or so they said.

The BPD wants a weapon with a range of a five hundred meters to shoot bad guys in the city. How many 500-meter fields of fire are there in Boston? How many should anyone send a high-velocity bullet tumbling down? How many would be empty enough to have a righteous shooting?

If I were one of the targeted bad guys, I might think about jacking a cop car to get the assault rifle out of the trunk.

Better body armor would be much safer for cops and civilians.

Free market

I define market broadly as any decentralized system for allocating resources, any system that relies on many choices of many actors. Obviously, some markets are freer than others, but freedom in a market is often not proportional to its success, either in efficiency or in fairness.

In China, private choices have led to too many boys and not enough girls. This is the result of the collision of culturally driven demand, biotechnology, and entrepreneurship.

One might argue that the legal constraint of China's draconian one-child policy was the definitive source of this future problem. I don't find that credible because the very same trend is also occurring in India and South Korea, which do not have similar policies. No, those couples who selectively abort their female fetuses are mainly responding to the incentives their cultures provide for sons.

Keep this in historical perspective. The West is ahead of the East on the role of women but not that far.

In any case, markets as well as government plans have unintended consequences. The Chinese sought to solve their runaway population growth, and they did. But they got this demographic weirdness.

Scarce commodities become more valuable, but the expressions of the new value of females in China will probably take many forms. A few possibilities:

• Women will be able to choose among suitors.
• China will import women from neighboring, poor countries - Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia. Many will be used as prostitutes and discarded.
• There will be a diaspora of Chinese men. Some of them will assimilate; some will be spies.
• Homosexuality among men will be more common.
• War is likely as a response to domestic social unrest.
  

The future is always uncertain. Extra men with nothing much to lose might revolutionize Chinese politics, though I look around at recent history of hopelessness in Ireland and the Middle East, and I'm not optimistic. Still, there's no reason my crystal ball should have all the answers. Add yours in comments.

But guest workers cost less

In the seething cauldron that passes for debate about immigration, the fact that we already have a guest worker program often gets lost. Of course, I mean the H-1B visa program that permits American high tech companies to hire foreign workers.

The stated purpose of this program is to cover programmer shortages. That is complete bullshit. Many American programmers have the skills to do these jobs; they're just more expensive than a 20-something new grad of an Indian or Chinese technical university. They're also not indentured to the company that sponsors their visa.

Now, of course, American unemployment is pretty high. So, for that matter, is Indian and Chinese unemployment. The Indians I manage across a 10 1/2 hour difference are not nearly as mobile as they were a couple of years ago, when even 30% raises were no guarantee of keeping someone.

If there are too many workers now - isn't that the definition of high unemployment - you might reasonably ask why we need a guest worker program.

The answer confirms what I've been saying from the beginning: Microsoft and other large software companies want more, not fewer, H-1B visas. The reason remains the same - lower costs, not labor shortages. Now, however, there's less political cover for the bullshit.

While we were building Hummers

... Europe was serious about green jobs.

Let's see. We shipped our manufacturing jobs to China for low wages. When we couldn't provide enough high-tech guest workers, we shipped our software jobs to India and anywhere else that would take them. We put religious taboos in the way of biotech, so that's happening in Europe and Asia. Our auto industry could be down to the Big One soon.

What we did was use the borrowed proceeds of China's industriousness to inflate a real estate bubble that we used to finance consumption. We pushed investment paper at each other like so many Big Macs. Now we're truly and thoroughly screwed.

And we still can't build a passive house.

Update: Bob Herbert says it better: "Stop being stupid."

Accountability

U.S. intelligence sources warned India about an attack over water against Mumbai. The Indian authorities did a little but then stopped. We all know the consequences.

U.S. intelligence sources warned Duhbya about a less specific attack against America. He did nothing at all. We all know the consequences.

The Indian security minister resigned.

Were any of the Bushists so chastened, so responsible, so accountable that they stepped down? Yeah, that's a rhetorical question. Instead, they fired people who warned them.

Savagery

The Mumbai terrorists tortured their victims, especially the Israelis.

The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: "Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again," he said.

Yes, these animals are (were, actually) vile, nasty, bigoted, vicious war criminals. It's hard to feel bad about the response of Indian security forces:

The doctors who conducted the post mortem said ..., "Their faces were beyond recognition."

There was no way of identifying them," he said. Asked how, if this is the case, they knew the bodies were indeed those of the terrorists, he said: "The security forces that brought the bodies told us that those were the bodies of the terrorists," he said, adding there was no other way they could have identified the bodies.

An intelligence agency source added: "One of the terrorists was shot through either eye."

It's a sad and mirthless irony that the Islamist terrorists were defaced like the Buddhas at Bamiyan and many other ancient statues.

Savagery begat more savagery in Mumbai. Nor are our hands clean.

In Afghanistan, we did not pick out civilians for torture the way the Islamists in Mumbai did. What we did, however, was to outsource that to our surrogates on the ground, and they chose whoever they wanted for internment at Bagram or Guantánamo. But, other than by hopeless and indefinite confinement, we (probably) didn't torture the low value sources. We can be so proud that we picked our torture victims for cause, rather than randomly - or racistly (right, no anti-Muslim bigotry here!).

Then again, at Abu Ghraib, we tortured widely, including some who were obviously guilty of nothing more than petty crime. Including some for whom no guilt could be established to even a low standard. The Bushist myth is that this torture was not a matter of policy, but it's clear from the spread of techniques that the violated policy was the policy against photography. A few bad apples, my ass. But that's our rationalization.

Of course, at Guantánamo, Don Rumsfeld specifically approved escalating tortures to be used against individual prisoners. But at least he unleashed them narrowly.

Those who required more torture than that we outsourced again, bagging them and tagging them for rendition. We didn't know for sure what would happen to them. Of course, we're such innocents of the evil men can devise to break other men that we can't be held accountable for that. Which is why we had to render them to the torturers.

Our claims of national virtue in the Bushist age are very small and hang by very thin reeds of rationalization. In other more dangerous times, this was not always so. I'm not urging that all these acts have moral equivalence, but they're much closer to each other than I'm used to having to own up to.

Human beings are capable of savagery, not just some of us, but most, maybe all. I believe that I am, too. Deep inside there's a place of pain and fear that overrides sweet reason and sympathy and the morals we've been taught. That's why we have laws. Had.

That's why the least Obama can do is close Guantánamo.

Extremists need enemies

It's far from clear why Muslim terrorists attacked civilians in Mumbai, but extremists need enemies. Most of all, when under pressure, they need to share their enemies and their hatreds with the populations that they hide among.

It's easy to stir up long-standing secular and sectarian enmities between India and Pakistan. They're never far below the surface.

Even a war of words between these two nuclear powers will rally Pakistanis to all things Pakistani and all things Islamic, even terrorist organizations. That benefits all the terrorist groups that thrive on chaos.

The U.S. has enough electronic surveillance to know already where these terrorists attacked from. The NSA knows who took their calls in Waziristan. Whether we'll ever know is another question.

Apologizing for daughters

Catching up on the dead tree edition of the Boston Globe...

This story on sex selection abortion gladdens my heart. Fingers crossed, it's a start on avoiding the military diaspora of Asian males that a lack of prospects for marriage and family that might otherwise be caused by the foolishly chosen scarcity of females.

One line half-way down the column buried the lead:

[M]others would often apologize for giving birth to a girl.

I think of the day my daughter was born, and I wonder how anyone could possibly apologize or expect an apology about such an event.

Of course, before I get too happy about the news from South Korea, there on the facing page is the Globalist Quiz, which has far worse news about India's cultural and institutional discrimination against women.

The end of dowry

Sex discrimination in Asia, married with technological sex selection of fetuses, is going to have unintended consequences. In the Boston Globe:

While India has had several women in positions of power -- most notably Gandhi and her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi, who was elected to the more powerful position of prime minister in 1966 -- women still face rampant discrimination.

Many Indian families regard daughters as a liability because of a tradition requiring a bride's family to pay the groom's family a large dowry of cash and gifts. As a consequence, their education is often neglected, and many don't get adequate medical treatment when ill. If they are widowed, they are considered a burden on their children or families and face even more discrimination.

International groups also estimate that about 10 million female fetuses have been aborted in India over the last two decades as families show a widespread preference for sons.

There's already a significant surplus of males in India - and in the rest of south and east Asia. What will the future bring? A few predictions:

• Emigration - an additional reason, but not by any means the only one
• Exogamy
• The end of dowry, though probably not its reversal - there's still to much economic discrimination
• A larger supply of potential suicide bombers
• War, the last refuge of surplus males

No one can change the demographics. Is there anything anyone can do to mitigate their ill effects?