David Reid Again...

The following is my as yet (two days ticking) unanswered comment on David Reid's article about the impact of Typhoon Fanapi here in the south where I live. David's remarks appear in emboldened italics, whilst mine appear in regular typeface.

“However, the impacts of climate change are well understood. Sea levels are rising. In Taiwan there have already been changes in the temporal distribution of rainfall.”

Well first, it is one thing to measure changes in the distribution and volume of rainfall over time, but it is quite another to attribute any such measured variations to “climate change”, or more specifically, to increases in greenhouse gas emissions. If you know of no evidence to clearly support the implied connection, then perhaps in future you should consider disciplining your use of implicature with your sense of honesty.

Second, your assertion of rising sea levels is not clearly supported by anything in the links you provide; the Taipei Times article on beach erosion from March last year hedges the assertion in what should be embarassing caveats:

“…some geologists believe the situation has been exacerbated by rising sea levels — a result of global warming.”

That is not acceptable evidence. That piece cites research on beach erosion which appears far narrower in the scope of its conclusions, to wit: falling volumes of sediment deposits from rivers due to sand extraction and related infrastructure projects. Perhaps some of the papers you mention (not accessible to me) do provide clear support for the assertion of rising sea levels; if they do, perhaps you’d be good enough to supply actual quotations?

“Investments in new infrastructure can’t be made just on the basis of historical experience.”

Of course not – but mind that little qualifier “just”, for neither should historical experience be dismissed as irrelevant.

“They need to be made on the best predictions of future weather patterns resulting from climate change.”

I will allow that investment decisions must take account of possible changes in the future – that much is common sense – but there are two significant problems with that statement.

The one you will already have in mind concerns skepticism over predictions of future weather “resulting” from greenhouse gas emissions. You might balk at the sneer quote-marks there, but you surely are aware of the recent scandals concerning the IPCC and its “predictions”, not to mention earlier revelations involving other climate change research institutions. The point is that some of those wilder predictions are not to be trusted (for the moment I will pass over in silence some of the more moderate predictions).

Yet a more serious problem is that many of the relevant “predictions” to investing in new or rennovated infrastructure are not weather or climate related, but rather about human use of water. Briefly, the problem is that whilst the economics governing the distribution and nature of human use of resources like water are highly susceptible to changes (and on a large enough time scale given market innovation, unpredictable changes), infrastructure investments, at least as they are typically conceived as large scale projects that must necessarily be carried out by State agencies, are very long term, very expensive and, once completed, are sunk costs.

Let’s suppose that it is possible – right now – (and I do actually suppose this) to develop water harvesting and recycling solutions which would obviate much of the need for current sewage system design. Let us suppose further that, because of increasing politicisation of weather impacts (with them apparently being due to greenhouse gas emissions, even though the evidence for this assertion seems murky), the government decides to rennovate existing sewage infrastructure in ways consistent with its original architectural principles. Not only would this be a very expensive sunk cost (even assuming nothing goes wrong), but it would also create the unobserved cost of disincentivising market provision of alternative systems of water management, which would not only be an environmental loss, but a rather significant economic loss too.

Perhaps you might employ a little more care and thoughtfulness about your assertions on climate change and what to do about it in the future.

How Many Angles?

Vincent Y. Chao, J. Michael Cole and others at the Taipei Times report on the secret visit to Taiwan a fortnight ago of Chen Zhimin, who is the Vice Minister of Public Security in the PRC:

"According to an official account of the trip, Chen, who is also the vice chairman of the Police Association of China, was visiting to promote cross-strait cooperation between police agencies and explore possibilities for greater judicial collaboration.

The NPA statement said an agreement was reached on six points, including an increase in cross-strait police exchanges, more communication on extradition and additional cooperation on security and anti-terrorism."

Whilst I am certain I do not like the sound of that one little bit, how many angles are there here? Off the top of my head I can think of at least three: counter-intel, women trafficking and persecution of political dissidents. How many more?

Update: J.Michael Cole affirms two of those conjectures:

"The most “terrifying” angle is “anti-terrorism,” because, as Joseph Wu told me when I interviewed him, China’s definition of “terrorism” can be very wide indeed and include Tibetan/Uighur/Taiwanese/Falun Gong groups advocating the many things Beijing finds unpalatable.... Another “angle,” and I’m sure the delegation did some of this, is intelligence collection during the trip. Another recruiting."

Since the inception of my blogging and letter-writing campaign, I have argued against the use and expansion of government power from Taipei. Although it has been arguable that that government may take certain actions to prevent, or more likely delay the expansion of political power wielded by the government in Beijing, it was and remains the case that over the long term the government in Taipei represents a strategic liability: a source of concentrated political power through which the interests of CCP clients can be pursued and the people of Formosa can be re-oppressed. To think strategically about opposing the government in Beijing, it is necessary to elucidate ways of defying, opposing, circumventing and undermining the exercise of power by the government in Taipei too.

2nd Update: Turton has hold of the story.

Charles Hong...

Strange fellow. I remember him getting all pet-lipped and lost-marbled about my scorn for the Kaohsiung World Games last year...

“But Fagan should accept the fact that the World Games raised Taiwan’s international profile.”

That was his response to my challenge that there were no clearly supporting facts for that claim! Fun and games... But he more often has bombastic letters published which lambast the Ma administration's latest publicized antics as selling out the democratic sovereignty of Taiwan's government. Yet today was weird. Today he was rabbiting on, apparently apropos of nothing, about electric cars for two thirds of his letter before switching to talk about Typhoons and carbon taxes for his last two paragraphs. A precis of his reasoning:

• Electric cars are not actually good for the environment since the electricity to power them comes from carbon belching coal fired power stations.
• Gasoline cars fitted with catalytic converters are therefore superior to electric cars in that they result in fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
• However, perhaps carbon dioxide doesn't create global warming, so...
• ... carbon taxes are wrong, which when combined with the realization that...
• ... U.S. dependency on OPEC oil helps to fund the Saudis gives the stunning result...
• ... that electric cars should be free to use electricity from carbon belching coal fired power stations!

Hilarious! Hong spectacularly overlooks the fact that U.S. oil reserves are themselves rather large (potentially 134 billion barrels, or about half that of Saudi Arabia) yet many of which lie untapped because carbon dioxide is acknowledged by governments and environmental lobbyists to cause global warming (even though the evidence for this proposition is dodgy). Let's get the act of mercy out of the way: Charles... if you ever read this... if carbon dioxide emissions do not create global warming, then there is no point to having electric cars at all!

Claire Berlinski

"The difference between Thatcherism and free market economics is that when we're talking about free market economics we're talking about widgets and textbooks, we're talking about optimal economic outcomes and it's not just that; she is saying that man is an economic being who makes myriad economic choices over the course of his day... and to the degree that you are taking away his ability to choose, you are taking away his moral agency, you are taking away his free will which is how we distinguish a moral being from... this coffee cup. And it is really important to understand that this did come, it did come from a religious way of looking at mankind, as someone who is fallen but who makes choices between good and evil. Her view was a moral one, not just a technocratic one."

The moral nature of free economic exchanges is a point whose significance must never be passed over. Yet my question for Berlinski is why does she believe the religious background to Thatcher's embrace of the free market is important. I certainly don't think the connection is a necessary one, but I also think that many aspects of religion are a tactical liability in persuading others of the value of free markets over and against government.

Post script: Martin McPhillips would presumably agree with Claire Berlinski on the necessarily religious dimension to ethics. I don't get it.

Harvey Mansfield Inteview

Around the 1.30 mark in segment four of Peter Robinson's interview with Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield:

Peter Robinson: "... you have made the point that on [sic] the government department [at Harvard University] there are roughly fifty professors, and you have said about three conservatives..."
Harvey Mansfield: "Yes."
PR: "...so I put to you what you already know, which is that if there were fifty professors, and only three women, Harvard University would be all over that in a moment; if there were fifty professors and only three persons of colour, the University would be all over that because Harvard University cares about ethnic and gender diversity... but fifty professors and only three conservatives... shrug. Why doesn't the University, of course Harvard is the example we're using but what we're saying is true of University after University, why shouldn't it care most about intellectual diversity?"
HM: "Well of course it should, but it doesn't. These people all of a sudden go moral in saying oh you musn't force us to make appointments on the basis of politics, so we only choose whoever's best and if it just turns out that you've got fourty seven liberals and three conservatives... well that is... funny... but it's not really objectionable... and it isn't as if you conservatives really suffer... you're ah, your being conservative, you probably have more money than the rest of us."

More incisive commentary from Professor Mansfield straight off the mark in segment five of the same interview:

PR: "Quoting you again Harvey: "Sensitivity is today's version of the "soft despotism" that Alexis de Tocqueville worried about in democracies, and it would not have surprised him that the worst of it would be found in the halls of the intellect", let's take that one step by step - what did Tocquville mean by "soft despotism"?"
HM: "It's democratic despotism. It's a despotism which arises from the.. dangerous... what he calls individualism in modern democracy. That's when people decide that they can't do anything on their own... with other people, that they are the victim of huge historical forces that are mindless and extremely powerful, and so they react by turning to their own private lives, their families, their friends, and themselves... and let governemnt run their politics for them. So it's a kind of despotism that results... automatically.. without being intended by anybody and works through benevolent measures.. big government, or the "immense being of government" that Tocqueville refers to... is perfectly well intentioned and doesn't mean to lord it over you, but it just ends up doing that mostly because people decide to allow it to do that."

For now, I would only add, and Professor Mansfield would surely concur, that his description of big government coming about "automatically" under democratic conditions ignores the very purposeful infiltration of both government and universities by the far left (chiefly the Frankfurt school of cultural Marxism and its latter day derivatives).

Mid-Autumn Fireworks

Every year in Taiwan between September and October (according to the Chinese lunar calendar) there is a festival known as the "Moon Festival" or "Mid-Autumn Festival". According to the wikipedia entry, it goes back to the Shang Dynasty, 3000 years ago, which I believe would make it older than Samhain, the Celtic precursor to Halloween. The government in Taipei declares a one day long national holiday, and people get ready to turn themselves into barbecuing, fireworking ghouls all night long.

I have a problem with fireworks. I've always disliked Guy Fawkes night on the 5th November in England (let's all burn an effigy of the only man who entered parliament with honest intentions...) primarily because, as someone who has always looked after dogs, I dislike fireworks for the terror their noise inflicts upon dogs - and I've never really liked fireworks all that much anyway. I suppose their attraction must be a cheap form of the same mechanism behind Kant's "dynamical sublime", danger sublimated to pleasure by the safety of distance. That, however, is perhaps less true with sparklers. When they were given to the kids I was the first one to tell them to be careful not to point those things anywhere near the other children's eyes.

Anyway, I like the barbecues and the less noisy of the fireworks are OK with me, but the rest of it I don't like simply because it means I can't take my dog outside to the park.

It was filled with seemingly hundreds of teenagers and early 20s five year olds setting off fireworks.

The next day, however, I had expected the park to be a mess, but I was surprised to find it wasn't that bad and that the Uni kids had more or less tidied up after themselves, leaving behind black refuse bags full of garbage, rather than leaving it littered all over the ground.

The beach at Anping was far worse however (I don't take my camera to the beach) - there were dead fireworks and oyster shells everywhere; I could feel them under my feet six or seven yards from shore. The other thing with fireworks is that, in addition to the mess they make if not tidied up properly (and that must be an unlikely prospect in the dark), there are always some left over. So for a dog owner like me, it's not just one day of fireworks to put up with, but the next couple of days as well as the kids let off those (typically in the morning at the beach when I'm running with my dog) that they still have left over from the Mid-Autumn festival.

And then there's the Taoist religious parades letting off their firecrackers... but at least that tends to be over with in twenty minutes or so.

All of that might make me sound like an old woman or something, but I don't care: fireworks are for five year olds and they are a nuisance externality which I could do without, especially three or four days after the Moon Festival has finished. I just drove past - my dog with me - an old man letting them off on an otherwise quiet street corner at 11.30am this Sunday morning. Inconsiderate bastard. I'll carry water with me next time to throw on the goddamned things.

Reclaiming Environmentalism: Environmental Entrepreneurship Contra Environmental Regulation

The following letter expands somewhat on the same topic as my most recent published letter. I won't be surprised if the eds refuse to publish it given that it is essentially repetitive, but I wanted to write something in response to their printing of George the Moonbat's latest rant and I know they never dare publish anything challenging on the environment (hence "Timid" Times), and I felt that the earlier letter didn't quite make good enough use of the 500 word limit, so...

Sirs,

As the expiration date for the Kyoto protocol looms ever closer, environmentalists like George Monbiot will predictably pin much of the blame for the failure of Kyoto on the government in Beijing. They will find themselves in the position of arguing for more regulatory oversight to be imposed upon businesses by precisely one of the world's most desperate, least trustworthy and most abusive governments. Moreover, in the event of further natural disasters within the next decade, it is quite likely that the government in Beijing and its subordinate parochial departments may struggle to cope and that the human and environmental costs will be staggering.

Perhaps, however, an alternative frame of mind may afford an opportunity here for environmentalists along with human rights advocates and entrepreneurs.

The commercial development of clean, efficient and independent energy and water technologies is a relatively high-tech affair but one which entrepreneurs in Taiwan, with the wealth of high end research, development and engineering expertise here, could be well placed to successfully exploit and eventually introduce to Chinese consumers and businesses located in China at some economy of scale. Worthy of particular attention are the already developed nano-scale water filters which eradicate all known virus and bacteria particles by virtue of filtering water at the molecular level, and radioisotope batteries which generate electricity from the temperature differential across a magnetic field caused by the radiation from small and easily shielded quantities of plutonium 238.

Both of these technologies offer the possibility of sustainable, portable, cheap and network independent supply and resupply of both clean water and clean electricity.

There are however, several institutional barriers to entry into this potential market. The domestic market demand for both water and energy in Taiwan is distorted by a combination of monopoly supply, farming and manufacturing subsidies, and especially the burdening of private externalities on the list of public liabilities. Were a courageous set of politicians to attempt to reform this list so that manufacturers, farmers and domestic consumers had to deal with real prices, then the common demand for clean, efficient and independent water and energy technologies would improve significantly. Even without such political retreat, it is likely that market demand for these technologies will improve over time as more money is wasted on environmentally destructive dams and centrally-networked renewable energy sources that deliver energy on only the slightest of margins.

The commercial development of such technologies in Taiwan and their appropriately scaled introduction to market demand in China would not only be a boon for Taiwanese business, Taiwanese consumers and the environment in Taiwan, but it would also be a boon for Chinese businesses, Chinese consumers and the environment in China. Not only that, but the flowering of Taiwanese enterprises in this field would allow people in both Taiwan and China a much better recovery from natural disasters when demand for energy and clean water hits instant peaks. Such technologies would also undermine a not-insignificant arm of that routine human-rights abuser, the PRC.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Friday 24th September 2010. Published in the Taipei Times Tuesday 28th September 2010).

Oh, in case anyone is interested, here is the first part of Peter Robinson's interview with T. J. Rodgers - the founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor Corp in the U.S. - from back in April 2008. Rodgers is exactly the type of guy that young Taiwanese entrepreneurs could look up to. Here are the second, third, fourth and fifth parts to that same interview.

Update: 800+ views at the TT after less than only one day of publication is a pretty good turnup.

Spot On

"By quickly establishing the US as a demonic new enemy, Mao galvanized support for his regime. He was also able to neutralize the domestic threat still represented by hundreds of thousands of unwanted soldiers and officers from Nationalist armies that had surrendered in the final weeks of the Chinese Civil War. Feebly armed and equipped, they were fed into the meat-grinder of war in Korea.

So the intervention in Korea was rational to the degree that it served the needs of Mao and his inner circle. It was “irrational” only in the sense that it defied the rationally optimistic expectations of pundits in the West."

This comment from Don Cropper, appearing on the same page as my Yunlin County water letter, should be read as evidence for the view I have long held - any Chinese invasion of Taiwan will be done for the purpose of either maintaining or advancing the political power of the CCP (or certain factions therein) with all economic, financial and other calculations thrown out of the window. It is (one of) their last cards in the event things get desperate for them. In this light, China's military build-up itself can be read as a sign of a growing loss of confidence among the CCP in their own future.

See also J.Michael Cole's editorial piece which sparked that response. The discussion in his comments section is unfortunately very, very poor - his entertaining of such commie-vomiting entities as that Darren Taylor, for example, is just sickening. A sampling of Taylor:

"I may be wrong in thinking that most people in the Taiwanese establishment have paranoid and condescending attitudes to the CCP and mainlanders respectively, but I've yet to see much evidence to the contrary. And how could they see the positive effects of the CCP and Communism, when they've been brought up in a society constructed by the losers of the civil war?"

Bruno Walther's "Environmental Logic"

That disgusting, self-retarded eco-soviet Bruno Walther has another letter in today's Taipei Times:

"These days, pursuing economic growth for growth’s sake is becoming counterproductive for two reasons: First, logic dictates that growth simply cannot go on forever on a limited planet. Second, given the planet’s natural limits, further economic growth done the conventional way — by overusing declining resources and producing noxious wastes — increasingly undermines our ability to live happy, fulfilling lives."

Quick fisk: first, note his use of the verb "pursuing" without a subject; this is a common rhetorical tactic allowing the anti-individualist premise to be slipped into mind unnoticed by those ill-prepared for intellectual self-defense - it buys Walther two lines of argument for the space needed to mention only one; second, notice the variation on this tactic in the predicate of his first "reason", wherein he slips the unprepared reader the fixed wealth fallacy that economic growth is zero-sum behind a claim about finite natural resources; third, consider the enormous weight of that dual assumption that not only does waste undermine a person's ability to be happy but that that is true in the unspecified, but presumably universal, plural sense; and finally, reflect on that plural sense - is it not that very anti-individualist premise disguised earlier by his use of the passive voice but now emerging explicitly under that inconspicuous little word "our"?

Bruno Walther is so bad as to be beneath my contempt - his writing is as waywardly retarded as it is instinctively predatory - but he is not yet beneath the contempt of a great many English-speaking Taiwanese students who may read or listen to him.

Championing The Cause Of Free Markets In Water

"Economic calculation is extremely difficult because, unlike ecology, it is an art, not a science and it is fraught throughout with uncertainty an order of magnitude greater than that of analyzing the surrounding ecology, for it depends on observing, attempting to understand and taking risks on movements in the prices of relevant goods and services over time – all of which depends on the decisions of so many individuals. For this reason, any attempt at grand-scale, long term planning merely exposes the planners and their grand-scale planning further to unforeseen dangers."

That's me landing a Hayek hook in another sparring match with Turton. The argument from ethical premises is of course the heavy right hander here (basically: theft is wrong but voluntary exchange is OK), but I can tie that right hand behind my back and, even though I'm not on especially good form here, I can still knock Turton and his mates about with left-handed consequentialist jabs. That's because of how and where I stand...

Typhoon Fanapi

It looked like a bomb had gone off when I got to the local park around 9 this morning (though I have seen far worse before). Below is a (rather poorly focused) picture of my work to help clean the place up following Typhoon Fanapi; five piles of assorted tree debris from the middle left of the picture to the right, with leafy branch piles at either end and coconut bark piles in between. That should go some way to helping the city park administration to get on with cleaning up my local park a bit quicker.

These pictures were taken just after lunch as I didn't have the camera with me this morning; if I had, I might have gotten a (probably poor) shot of my dog murdering a baby (hairless) squirrel which had apparently been blown out of its cub-hole in the trees by Fanapi. Unfortunately, it was probably far too late for the squirrel by the time I noticed and I wouldn't have been able to save it anyway. A few weeks back, my little black monster nearly had a juvenile squirrel in a spot nearby. She had been sniffing around a collection of black refuse bags (almost certainly containing household waste*) that had been dumped nearby the climbing frame where I do my pull ups. After scolding her and walking off in the expectation she'd follow me, I heard a noise and turned around to see a juvenile squirrel trying to hop its way across the pavement to the safety of the nearest tree. My dog, however, was quicker - she picked the poor thing up in her jaws and flung it closer to the twelve inch ditch between pavement and park grass (and which you can see to the left of the picture above). The squirrel jumped down into the ditch and stayed there - clearly exhausted. I checked the dog and lifted the little squirrel out of the ditch (as gentle as I was, it kept biting my fingers) and delivered it into a low hanging tree branch on the other side of the park close to where I usually feed the adult squirrels my apple cores. Never saw it again.

Anyway, minor nature stories aside, it seems that although there was quite a bit of rain yesterday and some today, Tainan on the whole seems to have gotten off lightly compared to Kaohisung and Pingtung. Apparently there has been some flooding in the areas of Kaohsiung county where I used to live, but I imagine certain of my former neighbours would be fairly secure.

At where I live now in Tainan, the recently constructed wastewater channel behind my apartment building has very useful and yet so far little-used parallel byways from which I was able to get a few shots of the excess water charging through it. I don't have any dry shots for comparison, but take it from me - that water is about two or three feet deep and moving pretty fast. This is precisely the sort of grey-water that ought to be collected and recycled through modern, nano-scale filtration systems.

*This is a daily nuisance for me. The people who live in the houses adjacent to the park can only dispose of household garbage when the city refuse truck trundles along at its appointed hour (I don't know for certain but I think it's just once a day - between 3pm and 5pm - when many people are still at work). Unlike me, they do not have either recycling facilities nearby or a skip into which they can throw their black plastic refuse bags whenever it is convenient for them to do so. Their solution? Dump their garbage in the park across the street and leave it there for the park administration to pick up. My immediate problem with this is that I don't want my dog sniffing at garbage bags full of rotten chicken bones and other crap - and I'm not the only one; there are between ten and twenty dog-owners at this park on any given afternoon between 4pm and 6pm. Whenever I catch them doing it I always tell them off in Mandarin, but it doesn't seem to have any effect except temporarily scaring them. There must be a better way of dealing with this problem...

Update: actually, it seems that - as with Morakot last year - the damage is a lot worse in some areas than I otherwise guessed. I am going to drive down to Kaohsiung with my camera and have a look...

Jonathan Freedland In Lithuania

Observe the following, non-caveated header to this article by Jonathan Freedland nicked from the Guardian and reprinted in today's Taipei Times:

"The dishonest equating of Nazi and Soviet crimes must stop."

Then consider the following line:

"Even if the authorities were rigorous in maintaining a balance, and telling both stories honestly, I would still reject this “double genocide,” because the symmetry here is false."

Yet just how "false" do you suppose the symmetry of that "double genocide" was elsewhere Freedland?

Measured over more than simply a single location, isn't the immoral equivalence of the Nazi and Soviet regimes obvious? Both were gigantically Statist and it is no exaggeration or misuse of the adjective to say that both were, again in gigantic proportions, evil.

Two questions: why did Freedland write that column apparently about Lithuania, and why has it been reprinted in the Taipei Times?

A Commercial Opportunity To Produce Improved Water Collection, Recycling & Delivery Systems?

Professor Wen Jet-chau 溫志超, of Yunlin University of Science and Technology has a remarkable letter in today's Taipei Times - and which I notice has got Turton rubbing himself into a sweat over. Professor Wen's conclusion:

"Industries that use a lot of water need to be properly regulated, in practice as well as in words. In this way, a balance can gradually be found between availability and demand for water. This goal can only be achieved through the coordinated efforts of central and local governments."

It is remarkable that a person apparently dedicated to the study of the geological and economic aspects to the problems of land subsidence and overuse of groundwater in Yunlin County can attribute only political causes to these problems and only political solutions to them. Professor Wen invites discussion of the general problem in the following way:

"I propose three main points for discussion with regard to Yunlin’s land subsidence problem. First, the demand for water resources in Yunlin County seriously outweighs the supply. As the shortage continues to worsen, the problem of excessive extraction of underground water refuses to go away. Second, industrial development keeps taking water from other users, causing farmers and fish farmers to bore their own wells to draw groundwater. Third, there is a question of whether we need a policy that would enforce the sealing off of wells."

My submission to any such discussion would be that, as Professor Wen's phrasing itself reveals, this is properly understood as an economic problem, and not a political problem. The right questions to ask are technological and financial with an eye to the enterprise of producing water-recycling, aquifer-recharging and rainwater-harvesting equipment to market demand such that the sealing off of groundwater wells would become little more than a nuisance issue rather than one of substantial economic import. The positive externalities of such enterprises, were they to succeed, would go beyond the greater efficiency of water conservation necessary to managing the problem of land subsidence; Professor Wen himself points the way:

"Under this irrigation system, there are two crop periods each year. Considering the available water resources, rice cultivation in Yunlin County should be confined to the second crop. Since that crop coincides with the rainy season, there should be no water shortage. Why, then, do we still have this problem of excessive groundwater extraction? The trouble is that, in order to make more money, farmers plant rice in the first crop period, from February to June. Since there is no surface water available at that time, the only way farmers can irrigate their paddy fields is by using groundwater drawn from wells that they bore themselves."

Consider the possible financial benefits to Yunlin farmers of having sufficient irrigation water of sufficient quality to provide for two rice crops per year instead of one. Professor Wen's phrasing "...in order to make more money..." should be properly placed in its rightful context of the attempt by these farmers to secure values necessary not only to staying alive but to making the conditions of life around them better.

This should really be written up as a letter...


Sirs,

It is remarkable that Professor Wen Jet-chau 溫志超, of Yunlin University of Science and Technology, who is apparently dedicated to the study of the geological and economic aspects to the problems of land subsidence and overuse of groundwater in Yunlin County, can attribute only political causes to these problems and only political solutions to them.

My submission to the discussion invited by the Professor in his Saturday 18th September editorial would be that his is precisely the wrong conclusion to draw. The cases of land subsidence and overuse of groundwater in Yunlin are properly understood as an economic problem, rather than a political problem. The right questions to ask are technological and financial with an eye to the enterprise of producing water-recycling, aquifer-recharging and rainwater-harvesting equipment to market demand such that the sealing off of groundwater wells would become little more than a nuisance issue rather than one of substantial economic import. Such equipment is apparently already used successfully in the midwest area of the U.S. and technological improvement in this field is ongoing with the commercial development of better filtering technologies for use in water recycling equipment. The positive externalities of such enterprises, were they to be brought to bear successfully in Yunlin County, would go way beyond the greater efficiency of water conservation necessary to managing the problem of land subsidence. Consider the possible financial benefits to Yunlin farmers of having sufficient irrigation water of sufficient quality to provide for two rice crops per year instead of one. Professor Wen's characterization of the Yunlin farmers as trying to get away with this "...in order to make more money..." should be properly placed in its rightful context of the attempt by these farmers to secure values necessary not only to staying alive but to making the conditions of life around them better.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan

(Sent Saturday 18th September 2010. Published in the Taipei Times Thursday 23rd September 2010).

Whose Energy Solutions?

"The most promising involved massive increases in R&D funding for green energy technologies and geo-engineering. I spent a good part of last year and most of this year advocating for this sensible approach to solving global warming, which is "one of the chief concerns facing the world today," as I said in an Aug. 31 interview with the Guardian, the British newspaper. What happened next was startling..."

Bjorn Lomborg reminisces on his most recent mistreatment at the hands of the dishonest Left. Unlike Lomborg however, I think far too much attention is routinely paid to the question of which energy sources - gas, oil, nuclear, solar, wave, geo, wind - should be used more and which should be used less. Far too little attention is paid by producers within the energy industries and consumers of energy alike to the question of whether the production and delivery of energy should continue to be dependent on centralized, grossly inefficient networks subject to varying degrees of State control and incompetence. Why is this? The economic realization of multitudinous and independent production of energy - whatever the source - would be something of an insurance policy in the event of any large scale political collapse.

The Rejection Of Religious Presumptions

"Those who wish that there would be no mosques in America have already lost the argument: Globalization, no less than the promise of American liberty, mandates that the United States will have a Muslim population of some size. The only question, then, is what kind, or rather kinds, of Islam it will follow. There's an excellent chance of a healthy pluralist outcome, but it's very unlikely that this can happen unless, as with their predecessors on these shores, Muslims are compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are exclusive to themselves. The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization. Those who pretend that we can skip this stage in the present case are deluding themselves and asking for trouble not just in the future but in the immediate present."

That's Hitchens on the Western need to demand that Muslims become Westernized, and he is entirely right to stake out that argument; the free exercise of religion must not contradict the basic maxims of Western civilization, particularly the tolerance of others and diverging opinions, the impulse toward criticism and the instinctive respect for the inalienable rights of the individual.

Contra State Education

Sirs,

Although your reporting on developments at the Ministry Of Education can never come a moment too soon, isn't it somewhat late for opposition legislators and academics to criticize the Ministry Of Education's most recent proposal for another history course revision?

Consider even today, before this terrible "brainwashing" occurs, how many Taiwanese students know that large scale Chinese settlement in Taiwan was initiated by the Dutch? How many Taiwanese students today can list the significant scientific, technological, economic or cultural achievements of Taiwanese people under Qing rule from 1683 until 1860? How many Taiwanese students today are aware of the historical importance of Taiwan to the development of plastics during the mid-1800s? How many Taiwanese students today are aware that Qing governor Liu Ming-chuan had to rely on British and German chief engineers for the construction of Taiwan's first railway - engineers whom, it must be said, the governor himself regarded as "foreign devils" and whose contracts he refused to honor? How many Taiwanese students today are aware how much of Taiwan's modernization from the 1970s onward was made possible by the cooperation of Taiwanese people with "foreign devils" rather than with "the vast and rich culture" of the People's Republic Of Mass Murder, Thought Control, Bribery, Slave Camps, Extortion & Theft?

I submit that this entire dispute over who gets to teach what in the classroom is akin to an unseemly scramble around the lip of the cauldron. None of these quick-handed people have any rightful business fondling the door handle to a classroom.

The solution to this problem is to free the education market from State control. With the free availability of an untold wealth of information and expertise online, the entire premise of a school as a physical location in which "teachers" impart "knowledge" to students has been undercut. What this episode reveals is that the school is now, more obviously so than at any previous point in history, fast becoming nothing more than a naked tool of political thought control, chiseling away at the minds of Taiwanese children.

The freedom of homeschooling, private schools for Chinese, English and Mathematics, and private, for-profit institutes of higher learning and examination are the rightful alternatives to this disgraceful sham.

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent Thursday 16th September 2010. Unpublished by the Taipei Times).

Note for regular readers: I deleted the post on Rawson below because I simply cannot stand the sight of it; I find it demeaning to even think about that treacherous oaf and his Chinese hook-ups up in Taipei. I will get around to him good and proper eventually.

Criticizing Fractional Reserve Banking Criticism

Samizdata back to its best: an absorbing thread on the merits of the Cobden Center's proposal, in the form of a Ten Minute Bill pushed by Douglass Carswell MP and Steve Baker MP, for reform of commercial banking practices in the UK. Understood in a narrow context, the problem lies not simply with public ignorance on the legal status of their deposits in the event of a bank run, a la Northern Rock in 2007, but with the government backing for deposit insurance. Laird owns the thread; choice quote:

"...there's nothing stopping banks today from essentially holding their customers' cash in safekeeping (for which a fee would be charged) rather than in a deposit account. It's not done because there's no market for it; the customers don't want that service. And who can blame them, when the government is guaranteeing the safety of deposits? The heavy hand of government is 99.999% of the problem. Eliminate that, and let the market work, and the problem would be solved. Even with fractional reserve banking."

Exposure

"He was just incredibly creepy, and for me it was like watching Nosferatu fondling holy relics with eight-inch fingernails."

Ha! Martin McPhillips on the stage presence of President Obama during the September 11th anniversary last weekend. I can't speak for Martin, but what creeps me out about Obama is his specific policies tending toward the ratcheting up of government power against freedom at home with the depreciation of government power against freedom abroad. This President - this man of the left - is acting against freedom everywhere.

Taiwanese History & Education

"In accordance with the draft, the ministry plans to have high school students take one semester of Taiwanese history, one-and-a-half semesters of Chinese history and one-and-a-half semesters on world history in their first and second years. If passed, the new curriculum could come into force in 2012. At present, high school students spend one semester on Taiwanese history, another semester on Chinese history and two semesters on world history."

Yet even now, before this terrible "brainwashing" occurs, how many Taiwanese students know that large scale Chinese settlement in Taiwan was initiated by the Dutch? How many Taiwanese students can list the significant scientific, technological, economic or cultural achievements of Taiwanese people under Qing rule from 1683 until 1860? How many Taiwanese students are aware of the historical importance of Taiwan to the development of plastics (and thereby photography) due to the international trade in camphor during the mid-1800s? How many Taiwanese students are aware that the first railway in Taiwan - from Tamsui to Keelung - was constructed under the engineering expertise of the British and Germans and that it was completed in spite of the insane demands of Qing governor Liu Ming-chuan and not because of them?

In sum, how many Taiwanese students are aware just how much of Taiwan's progress is owed to contact with the philosophical, ethical, scientific and technological enlightenment of the world by western culture and how little of Taiwan's progress is owed to the ingrained influence of Chinese culture?

My own sense is that the general malaise of historical ignorance, whilst certainly not specific to Taiwan, is nonetheless already rife here. Next April for example, the Tainan City Government is planning to celebrate the arrival of Zheng Cheng-gong in 1661 who, they will mistakenly claim, "took back" Taiwan from the (evil) red-headed foreigners. Actually the arrival of Zheng Cheng-gong marked the beginning of a near two hundred year endarkenment of Taiwan as the Chinese cut the island off from contact with the ongoing enlightenment of the world over the western horizon.

The answer to this "brainwashing" is not to fight over what gets taught in schools, where attendance by students is compulsory, but to fight against the very compulsion itself. Taiwanese parents should be free to decide what to teach their children, when, where and how. In addition to fighting against State control of schools, colleges and universities, preserving the intellectual and historical resources for a future, free Taiwan is of the utmost importance. Yet on the question of how many Taiwanese parents understand this point, never mind actually want freedom in education for their kids, I have doubts even here.

Nathan Novak

"Michael Fagan’s response (Letters, Sept. 11, page 8) to my article (“Who won China’s war on fascism?” Sept. 8, page 8) allows me a further opportunity to explain the article’s content...First, the article was not an exercise in political theory. Its dual purpose was to bring back into question the actual role the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) played in China’s war of resistance against Japan and to compare certain characteristics of fascism to aspects of China’s contemporary socioeconomic and sociopolitical environment."

I was not especially interested in Nathan Novak's article itself other than as a convenient point of departure for my own, written with an end quite perpendicular to his. Today's letter appears to be sort of a response to my most recent letter in as much as I am named and amusingly corrected as to his purposes at the beginning. It was not his purposes I had had in mind but my own. Just what he thinks of himself is no direct concern of mine, though the rest of his letter does give me the creeps...

"Another feature of fascism not mentioned in my article also applies to China’s contemporary socioeconomic and sociopolitical situation: social Darwinism.... Fascism makes use of social Darwinism in a cruder way: Typically fascism substitutes racial superiority for class struggle as the key driving force behind social change."

... and here's why: I will not trust anyone who throws around phrases like "social Darwinism" in the absence of any clearly specified conceptual boundaries. Now I may be right in supposing that what he means is something like an amoral tribal contest, but my objection would be that Novak may not use "social" as a synonym for "tribal" since the former integrates a much broader range of referents than the latter; trade among members of different tribes, for example, may be "social". I could pedanticate further, but the point is that this apparently illegitimate expropriation of terms may serve to promote the collectivist premise in which all social relations among individuals are forcibly sublimated beneath collective boundaries. Now that may indeed be the way in which the CCP, or indeed the KMT thinks but why is it that Novak seems so intent on highlighting this premise?

"Anyone who believes feelings of cultural superiority are much different from feelings of racial superiority should go to a Chinese newspaper’s Web site and check out readers’ comments."

Cultural superiority is a very real category of judgement relative to human survival and flourishing as a standard. "Racial superiority" on the other hand, is a nonsense. The two are very, very different and to conflate them is to do a disservice to the future pursuit of all that is admirable in Western, and indeed, Chinese culture. And I, for one, have not the slightest interest in the comments sewers of some rag in China.

"It appears that the CCP would argue that Uighur, Mongolian, Tibetan and Taiwanese are all subsets of the Han Chinese population. Although this umbrella definition does allow a little wiggle room for ethnic minorities, it ensures these groups cannot establish any form of identity outside of the Chinese umbrella. The dominant group defines the identities of other groups. Is this not a form of racial supremacy?"

Whether that question is addressed to me or not, I reject the premise itself; "racial supremacy" is an absurd nonsense - all Novak has shown is that some arbitrarily tagged groups of people are having their way with other arbitrarily tagged groups of people; yet that is a consequence of the abuse of State power - whether fascist, communist, or indeed, democratic. The "racial supremacy" nonsense may be being promoted by the CCP, but that's no reason for Novak, or indeed, the Taipei Times to give it the oxygen of publicity without a thorough denunciation.

And one last thing: I detest seeing my name in print anywhere near the phrase "racial superiority".

The Transvaluation Of An American Sublime

1966 - 1971

2001 - ????.

Michael Scanlon

"Cai said that “he hoped China would push for cultural change, meet the needs of the market, help upgrade his country’s tastes and resist culture that was mediocre, hollow and vulgar.”

We all know what Cai means by this last phrase. Resisting culture that is “mediocre,” “hollow” and “vulgar” means squelching the voices of political dissidents — be they Han Chinese, Uighur or Tibetan.

Cai himself is nothing but a third-rater; a mediocre, hollow, vulgar bureaucrat who knows naught about culture, and who “achieved” his post through bootlicking and toadyism."

That's Michael Scanlon of Connecticut writing in the Taipei Times. I would only add to Scanlon's missive that the importance of acquiring network independence in utilities (water, electricity and fuel) and effectively encrypting communications will grow with each passing year for the foreseeable future though this is not, of itself, a solution.

An Unlikely Pivot?

Sirs,

Further to Nathan Novak's identification of Chinese political economy as fascist due to the heavy involvement of the CCP within the firms of strategically important industries, it is understandable that President Ma's signing of the ECFA accord was widely seen among supporters of Taiwanese freedom as a mistaken, if not disingenuous, attempt to diffuse the very real threat to Taiwanese freedom posed by that very salient aspect of Chinese fascism - Chinese nationalism.

Yet I would suggest that Novak's point about the economic and financial aspect of fascism, and on which I myself have written before, may itself be one on which any successful defense of Taiwanese freedom will pivot.

Allow me to delineate the context for this hypothesis. The looming sovereign debt crises in the U.S. and the E.U. together with worries about the continuing viability of the Federal Reserve dollar mean that the greater part of serious economic activity in China is more, not less, vulnerable to economic shocks such as that experienced two years ago in 2008. In addition, large Taiwanese electronics firms, in spite of their wealth of engineering assets, continue to strain their eyes in the hope that they can maintain their tight profit margins with the flogging of high end electronic goods such as televisions and smart phones. A further problem in both China and Taiwan is that of natural disasters - a problem which is compounded by government incompetence at satisfying the immediate and urgent spike in demand for utilities.

Should a group of Taiwanese entrepreneurs put themselves in a position to tap some of those engineering assets from the larger firms in order to produce small and network-independent solutions to the universal problems of procuring clean water and acquiring reliable electricity, then they may find themselves in a position of much greater strategic import than simply offering relief to poor people hit by disaster. It takes only a little vision to see how the commercial development of nano-scale water filters or of radioisotope thermoelectric batteries for example could render obsolete the old idea of centralized utility networks under effective State control. And it takes only a little more vision to see very much farther than that.

Not only might the potential market demand for such products far exceed that of luxuries like smart phones and monitor screens, but alongside an even more severe global economic meltdown, such enterprises could help the Chinese people themselves to begin to put that government in Beijing and many of its despicable corporate hang-ons out of business for good.

Perhaps in considering a fresh perspective such as this, the opponents of ECFA may yet find it a help to the defense of Taiwanese freedom rather than a hindrance - and this quite irrespective of the intentions of the KMT. If only they could remove those anti-capitalist cataracts from their eyes....

Yours freely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Thursday September 9th 2010. Published in the Taipei Times Saturday 11th September 2010).

Good work on the editing this time (except the switch from "freedom" to "sovereignty" - nobody may presume my authority delegated to any hive, democratically constituted or not; this stuff is important and if you can't keep it straight, then I will not be answerable to words that are not my own).

So-Called "Rule Of Law"

It's an interesting thing; a trope with a circuit encompassing the entire distance between right and left. Yet the use of the term by those on the side of mere earthlings like me is a mistake twice over; firstly, the phrase "rule of law" is a slippery and untrustworthy grip on two conceptual apices: the coherence of a body of law and consistency of application; secondly, its corruption by hive-minded democrats hinders any acceleration on the individualist premise.

Legal recognition of a right to private property will, when contradicted by a legal provision for democratically sanctioned theft, eventually degrade into incoherence. The unstable mixture of individualist and collectivist principles needs only friction to degrade and eventually ruin the productive power of individuals to drive a society forward.

It is not difficult to simply state that you are in favour of (at least one) body of law cohering around immutable, individualist principles and applied with institutionalized integrity to those same principles. Only a little application of thought to my choice of words was needed to cast a more penetrating light than that time-worn and slippery "rule of law" soundshite.

.... File that under Choice Of Language & Clarity Of Thought.

Penetration

This J.Michael Cole editorial from the Taipei Times is headed:

"Invading Taiwan through investment."

Good work.

Mark Rawson

I am not responsible for the despicable Mark Rawson's fear and loathing at having his socialist premises attacked, nor am I responsible for his consequent and deliberate conflation of what is cultural and ethical with what is ethnic. His psychological need to slander is entirely his personal problem and I take no interest in that now - except to point out that my appropriation of Lenin's "Who, Whom?" is a better fit to his thinly veiled threat than is his "rule of law" which he himself would see corrupted simply to try to intimidate me. Ain't gonna happen.

Update: Turton makes a point with a prima facie similarity to my "invasion" comment... "Well, language is an important part of the long-term KMT colonization program, so it is important to keep track of its ins and outs."... except the difference being that Turton does seem to be actually talking about people physically moving to Taiwan, whereas my letter pointed to the transvaluation of individualist principles on the fulcrum of Chinese collectivism.

On Rawson himself, I may yet consider my options...

On The Tragedy Of The Commons

Glenn Beck's "non-political rally" at the Lincoln Monument over the weekend was, in my view, simply tragic. The problem in the U.S. is not a slide in religious influence over moral sentiments and political action (contra Martin McPhillips), but the continuous and effectively unchecked growth of government and - being both cause and consequence - the progressive debasement of individual freedom and all its corollaries. It is tragic because U.S. conservatives endorse a thorough scaling back of government whilst yet undermining the very principles of individualism that alone could make that possible, by for example, electing Republican members of Congress who then sanction all manner of government interventions in society. Hitchens predictably trotters up beside Glenn Beck's leg to mark the wider territory of the Tea Party movement with his anti-theist lant, and his persistent use of "white" to modify his every description of the subject gives off a stink; the wider Tea Party movement was supposedly motivated by both excessive and punitive taxation, not any supposed decline in the demographic or political influence of a "white majority" still less yet a decline in popular acceptance of Christianity. Yet there's the charge, and in view of the "non-political" bullshit about the rally (i.e. the absence of Freedom from the foreground where it should have been), it wouldn't surprise me to see some of it stick among the irredeemable fools on the left. The other thing to bear in mind is that it isn't just the U.S. left who are going to make that dangerous charge or act on it. There is an international dimension to the implications of developments in domestic U.S. politics licensed by the pre-eminent position of the U.S. within the current international order.

I don't believe the attendees to the "Restoring Honor" rally were motivated on anything like such despicable grounds of racial difference (though that will be the inevitable attack from the left). They did fail, however, to make that event a stand for the essential American idea; the not merely "non-political", but fervently anti-political idea of Freedom.

As for the Congressional elections in November... whatever happens I know this much: the Republicans might have some electoral success, but their baggage holds them down and prevents them from standing up for freedom. The Democrats meanwhile have always fought for more democratic handles to hold (and the state encrusted privileges they bring) over and against the principles of individual freedom, which they have always regarded as secondary to their principles of violent social engineering, whenever they didn't disregard them entirely.

The Persistence Of The Climategate Scandal

"Climategate may finally be living up to its name. If you recall, it wasn’t the burglary or use of funding that led to the impeachment of Nixon, but the cover-up. Now, ominously, three inquiries into [the Climategate] affair have raised more questions than there were before."

That's Andrew Orlowski back in July this year reporting here and here on Parliamentary dissatisfaction with the Oxburgh and Russell reports. A brief summary:

1) The remit for the Oxburgh report did not include any assessment of the CRU's actual science and was dismissed by MPs as a whitewash (hence the commission of the Russell enquiry).

2) The Russell enquiry farcically concluded that the CRU's work on temperature records was replicable despite CRU's own admission that the relevant data for conducting any such replication was missing or otherwise unavailable (i.e. the source code was such a mess it was unreadable).

3) Reasons as to why particular emails were deleted by CRU staff were left unaddressed by the Russell report.

4) The Russell enquiry did not fully stipulate to the Commons Select Committee's demand for independence in how the process was handled; there was a very narrow choice of witnesses and witness testimony was taken without public scrutiny.

I'll bet this is going to resurface in a very ugly way sometime next year as the global economic crisis worsens considerably and it becomes even clearer to even more large firms and governments that the IPCC proposed mechanisms for dealing with "climate change" are, at the very least, ridiculously unrealistic.