Here’s the problem with making huge public policy decisions based on statistical models:

The global burden of HIV has been overstated, with new surveillance data showing the number of people carrying the AIDS-causing virus is about 6.3 million lower than was estimated last year.

Improved tracking indicates for the first time that the world turned the corner on the three-decade epidemic in the late 1990s, when new infections peaked at more than 3 million a year, according to a report today by UNAIDS, which coordinates global AIDS relief efforts through the United Nations. There are 2.5 million new infections annually now, the report found.

– Bloomberg

The United Nations on Monday radically lowered years of estimates of the number of people worldwide infected by the AIDS virus, revealing that the growth of the AIDS pandemic is waning for the first time since HIV was discovered 26 years ago.

The revised figures, which were the result of much more sophisticated sampling techniques, indicate that the number of new infections peaked in 1998 and the number of deaths peaked in 2005.

The new analysis shows that the total number of people living with HIV has been gradually increasing, but at a slower rate than in the past.

Hints of those trends were present in the older estimates, but at much greater numbers.

UNAIDS estimated in a report to be issued today that about 2.5 million people will be infected with the AIDS virus, called HIV, this year — a 40% drop from the 2006 estimate.

– Los Angeles Times

It looks as if the global AIDS pandemic may not be spiraling out of control after all. Instead, the devastation is stabilizing at an unacceptably high level.

The United Nations’ AIDS-fighting agency and the World Health Organization ate a lot of crow this week for previously overestimating the number of people infected with the virus. As a result of improved methodologies, better surveillance and new understanding of the dynamics of the epidemic, they sharply reduced their estimate – to 33.2 million worldwide from 39.5 million. They now peg the number of new infections per year at 2.5 million, much lower than past estimates.

A few epidemiologists have long charged that the United Nations numbers were wrong, and possibly designed to generate more contributions to battle the disease. We see no sign of any conspiracy. And make no mistake, even with the revised estimates, the AIDS epidemic remains one of the world’s greatest scourges, requiring a strong campaign to bring it under control.

– New York Times editorial

So when we’re making critical decisions about managing the energy economy, let’s be a little bit humble about the strength of the models we use, OK?

My issues with the ‘global-warming-trumps-all-policy’ mantra are three:

* I’m not 100% on board on the anthropogenic factors as the major driver of global warming – given the presence of warming on, for instance, Mars;

* The impacts of the actions drastic enough to avert the kind of warming impacts we’re talking about are ill-thought-out and likely to be as bad – or worse – than the impacts of any plausible warming, given the very real uncertainty in the models and methodologies being used;

* I have an innate discomfort when people who hold certain core values – say the perils and problems of industrial civilization – suddenly discover yet another reason why it needs to be curtailed and argue that this one claim trumps everything.

Having said all that, I flatly support lots of policies – from wind farms off Cape Cod to raising CAFE standards, treating small trucks as cars for CAFE and safety purposes, and a petroleum tax to incent people to change their minds about decisions that have negative and few positive impacts.

I’m building a big-ass Amazon Wish List of books for Biggest Guy (for when he gets far enough through Basic Training to read them), and other than the great list on counterinsurgency on Abu Muquama’s site, I’m always looking for new stuff. So when Kings of War linked to some interesting reading on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, I clicked through to the Amazon UK link for “The Bear Went Over The Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan“. Then I cut and pasted the title and went to Amazon.com, put it in the search box … and the result I got was “Women’s Realities, Women’s Choices: An Introduction to Women’s Studies (Hunter College Women’s Studies Collective)”

There’s a lesson there, I’m just not quite sure what it is…

Well, the first thing I’m thankful for is getting to sleep in this morning!! It’s a facet of one of the many things I’m thankful for this morning: my life is pretty darn easy. I have good work, and by any sane standards my life is one of comfort and ease.

But having a life of comfort and ease wouldn’t mean much if I led it without the love of my family and friends. Just time on the sofa together.Letters from Biggest Guy, an IM from Middle Guy, or a hug from Littlest Guy. Waking up with a sleepy TG. Talking over dinner with my friends. Time in Vegas with friends, bloggers, (and bloggers who are friends!) and loved ones. This week, swapping stories about our motorcycle racing exploits and comparing sore muscles (I’m damn sore this morning, I’ll have you know).

Seriously, I have the most amazing people in my life, and many of them are people I have never met except by writing back and forth on the pages of this blog.

I’m thankful for all of it.

I’m headed out the door to drive to Northern California with a friend right now.

We’re headed to Monterey, where we’ll take the Superbike School at Laguna Seca Raceway (here’s me in the white helmet headed down the Corkscrew two years ago).

I’ll be staying with Joe & his sweetie for a day or so, and one topic will be our hopes for the blog in the coming year.

So if I don’t jump into debates, please don’t assume I’m scared away or don’t care – life is just in the way this week.

As usual, please don’t kill each other or blow stuff up while I’m away.

The IAEA report on Iran is available. You can download a copy here.

It’s short, and an interesting read.

The history of Iran’s program may remain shrouded:

8. As previously reported to the Board (GOV/2005/67, paras 14–15), the Agency was shown by Iran in January 2005 a copy of a hand-written one-page document reflecting an offer for certain components and equipment said to have been made to Iran in 1987 by a foreign intermediary. Iran stated in 2005 that this was the only remaining documentary evidence relevant to the scope and content of the 1987 offer. On 9 October 2007, the Agency was provided with a copy of the document.

Certain aspects of the document indicate that it dates from 1987. However, the originator of the document has still not been identified.

There is some positive news:

25. On 8 November 2007, the Agency received a copy of the 15-page document describing the procedures for the reduction of UF6 to uranium metal and casting it into hemispheres. Iran has reiterated that this document was received along with the P-1 centrifuge documentation in 1987. The Agency has shared this document with Pakistan, the purported country of origin, and is seeking more information. Iran stated that the reconversion unit with casting equipment mentioned in the one-page 1987 offer was not pursued with the supply network. Apart from the conversion experiments of UF4 to uranium metal at the Tehran Nuclear Research Centre (GOV/2004/60 Annex, para. 2), the Agency has seen no indication of any UF6 reconversion and casting activity in Iran. It should be noted, however, that a small UF6 to uranium metal conversion line in the Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) was declared by Iran in the design information questionnaire for the UCF (GOV/2003/75, Annex 1, para. 3). This line has not been built, as verified by the Agency’s inspectors.

The next few weeks should be very interesting:

24. On 15 September 2007, the Agency provided Iran with questions in writing in connection with the source of uranium particle contamination at the technical university and requested access to relevant documentation and to individuals, as well as to relevant equipment and locations for sampletaking. The questions were, inter alia, about the origin of the uranium particle contamination of equipment (GOV/2006/53, para. 24), the nature of the equipment, the envisioned use of the equipment and the names and roles of individuals and entities involved (including PHRC). In accordance with the work plan, Iran should provide answers to the questions and the requested access in the next few weeks.

and

26. On 15 September 2007, the Agency provided questions in writing to Iran concerning Iran’s activities involving polonium and requested access to relevant documentation, individuals and equipment. The questions were, inter alia, about the scope and objectives of the polonium-210 studies (GOV/2004/11, para. 28), whether any bismuth acquisitions from abroad had been made or attempted and whether any related theoretical or R&D studies had been carried out in Iran. In accordance with the work plan, Iran should provide answers to the questions and the requested access in the next few weeks.

and

27. On 15 September 2007, the Agency provided questions in writing to Iran concerning the Gchine Mine and requested access to relevant documentation, individuals and equipment. The questions were, inter alia, about the ownership of the mining area and mill, why activities took place at this location when suitable infrastructure was available elsewhere and why AEOI activities at the mine ceased around 1993 (GOV/2005/67, para. 26). In accordance with the work plan, Iran should provide answers to the questions and the requested access in the next few weeks.

and

28. The Agency has urged Iran to address at an early date the alleged studies concerning the conversion of uranium dioxide into UF4 (the green salt project), high explosive testing and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle (GOV/2006/15, paras 38-39). In accordance with the work plan, Iran should address this topic in the next few weeks. In the meantime, the Agency is working on arrangements for sharing with Iran documents provided by third parties related to the alleged studies.

The conclusions are interesting as well:

39. The Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has provided the Agency with access to declared nuclear material, and has provided the required nuclear material accountancy reports in connection with declared nuclear material and activities. Iran concluded a Facility Attachment for FEP. However, it should be noted that, since early 2006, the Agency has not received the type of information that Iran had previously been providing, pursuant to the Additional Protocol and as a transparency measure. As a result, the Agency’s knowledge about Iran’s current nuclear programme is diminishing.

40. Contrary to the decisions of the Security Council, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities, having continued the operation of PFEP and FEP. Iran has also continued the construction of the IR-40 and operation of the Heavy Water Production Plant.

41. There are two remaining major issues relevant to the scope and nature of Iran’s nuclear programme: Iran’s past and current centrifuge enrichment programme and the alleged studies. The Agency has been able to conclude that answers provided on the declared past P-1 and P-2 centrifuge programmes are consistent with its findings. The Agency will, however, continue to seek corroboration and is continuing to verify the completeness of Iran’s declarations. The Agency intends in the next few weeks to focus on the contamination issue as well as the alleged studies and other activities that could have military applications.

42. Iran has provided sufficient access to individuals and has responded in a timely manner to questions and provided clarifications and amplifications on issues raised in the context of the work plan. However, its cooperation has been reactive rather than proactive. As previously stated, Iran’s active cooperation and full transparency are indispensable for full and prompt implementation of the work plan.

43. In addition, Iran needs to continue to build confidence about the scope and nature of its present programme. Confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme requires that the Agency be able to provide assurances not only regarding declared nuclear material, but, equally importantly, regarding the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran. Although the Agency has no concrete information, other than that addressed through the work plan, about possible current undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, the Agency is not in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran without full implementation of the Additional Protocol. This is especially important in the light of Iran’s undeclared activities for almost two decades and the need to restore confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme. Therefore, the Director General again urges Iran to implement the Additional Protocol at the earliest possible date. The Director General also urges Iran to implement all the confidence building measures required by the Security Council, including the suspension of all enrichment related activities.

December will be an interesting month, I think.

You’ll notice the new button under the Winds banner. It will be there for the next week. It’s a program launched by ‘America Supports You’, a DoD-sponsored organization that attempts to engage citizens in activities supporting troop welfare and morale.

This Thanksgiving, they have set up a program to allow us to send a text message of support to the troops.

Look, you can agree or disagree with the policies and decisions that led to the war. You can believe that we need to push the war forward, keep it going, or end it and bring the troops home.

But young men and women are following orders, far from home, often in danger – and it seems incumbent on us to remind them that we care about them individually, and that we’re aware of what they are doing for us.

Grab your cell, and send a few nice words.

Update: Commenter Ian Coull nails the issue:

‘We’ go to war to preserve ‘our’ way of life. Soldiers go to war willing to die in order that some larger entity survives. Thus we find thousands of lives willingly sacrificied in order to preserve ‘civilization’ as we know it. The hypothetical question launching this thread translates into: Does ‘our way of life’ better survive the deaths of thousands of innocents, or ‘the adoption of a new social order which includes torture as a legitimate tool of our government’. I would argue the former less damaging.

…I just hate it when people write my ideas so much better than I do…

Patterico is a friend, and a smart guy, and someone who would make me cringe in fear if he were ever to prosecute me. And a wonderful husband and dad, I’m sure. I’m saying this in no small part because he took on a challenging hypothetical about torture, and I don’t think he’s a bad guy for asking the question.His hypothetical is this:

Let’s assume the following hypothetical facts are true. U.S. officials have KSM in custody. They know he planned 9/11 and therefore have a solid basis to believe he has other deadly plots in the works. They try various noncoercive techniques to learn the details of those plots. Nothing works.

They then waterboard him for two and one half minutes.

During this session KSM feels panicky and unable to breathe. Even though he can breathe, he has the sensation that he is drowning. So he gives up information – reliable information – that stops a plot involving people flying planes into buildings.

My simple question is this: based on these hypothetical facts, was the waterboarding session worth it?

He’s been getting slammed a lot for asking. He shouldn’t be, we ought to be asking the question – and the answer ought to inform us about who we are and what this country is about.

But here, I’ll disagree with Patterico, who says:

Sebastian starts by giving a clear answer to my hypo: yes. I think that is the only reasonable answer. I don’t mean to insult the people here who have answered no. I just happen to think that a “no” answer to my carefully phrased hypo reveals such an incredibly ideological mindset that I can’t relate to it. It’s 2 1/2 minutes of a mild form of torture with no lasting physical effects, performed on an undoubtedly evil terrorist and mass murderer, to obtain information certain to obtain thousands of lives. When someone says that such mild torture would be morally unjustified, that answer to me lacks common sense. And when it’s coupled with a smug self-righteous attitude, – well, I find it insufferable.

In my own case, I keep believing the answer has to be no, it wasn’t worth it.

I’ll skip the problem that you have to torture a lot of people to find the one who has the key information. And that you can’t possibly – in advance – know that the person you are about to torture has the combination to the ticking bomb.

Because if life was TV, and you could just torture the one person who did have the combination, and be sure that torture would make them give it up, some – but not all – the objections might be put aside. But not all of them.

Let me take his hypothetical a step further, and suggest that it shouldn’t be too hard to build a helmet that could be put on someone’s head, not damaging the skin, that would – when turned on – induce incredible levels of fear – or pain – inductively, acting directly in the brain. And, having switched it off, leave the person wearing the helmet unscathed except from whatever physiological reactions they had to the perception of pain or fear.

So there would be essentially no risk of “real injury” involved.

Would using something like that be appropriate in such a case?

I’ll say a firm “no” (with one weasel path out), and take a rambling, first-draft blog post kind of walk through why I say that.

First, and foremost, because – as I’ve noted – using something like this moves us into the realm of being a fear-based society; one that rules on might and terror. The corrosive impact of that stance is what drives this, and on some level it’s the violation of the integrity of the person by depriving them of all their power over themselves, and by – I’m not finding the right description, but somehow erasing the integrity of their ‘self’. Prison doesn’t do that; even Joe Arpaio – who keeps his prisoners in tents, offers them no recreation and dresses them in pink – does not violate their integrity in the ways that I’m describing – they still make choices, have some responsibility as to their behavior.

Bluntly, I’d rater shoot someone than torture them harmlessly. I believe it’s more moral; I’m violating their ‘person-ness’ less through an act of outright violence than through one that seeks to break their ownership of themselves in the ways that torture does.

And on a basic level, you can’t have a free society in which people don’t have that sense of personal integrity – that sense that they ‘own’ their own behavior and person. Once you violate that and make it clear that someone – the state – owns you, the nature of the political relationship is irrevocably changed.

There’s a logical lacuna in my argument, which is the only weasel path that I can see – which is that KSM isn’t part of our society (polity) and as such, who cares what we do to him?

I’ll reply that a Chinese Wall (as we used to say in banking) between what we do to foreign terrorists and our own citizens is certainly going to get breached when we confront equally serious domestic ones. And we have the pesky problem of defining who, exactly is a terrorist, and who is a political opponent.

So we’re back to the idea that the foundation of our society isn’t loyalty freely given, but fear of transgressing, and fear not of social ostracism, but of the torturer and the bullet in the back of the head.

There are societies built like that.

We’re fighting them.

Becoming one of them – even with harmless ‘fake’ torture – seems like a really bad idea. And, to be blunt, we can survive violent terrorism better than we (as the society we are today) can survive doing that and becoming one of ‘those’ societies.

Having said that, let me loop around and seemingly contradict myself – in order to make this position a little clearer, I think.

I’ll start with some personal history.

As a kid, I used to race cars – on the street. It was stupid, and dangerous, and I’m damn luck I didn’t kill someone else (forget killing myself). We raced sports cars (I had a Mini Cooper S) on Mulholland, between Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon here in Los Angeles, late at night.

The police did a variety of things to stop us, and the more bitter members of the racing community hated the police, and acted out whenever they could.

One night, two of us were stopped at the side of the road, kicking tires and hanging out, when a police car pulled up, and two officer stopped and interrogated us, taking out ID and noting the details of our cars. We were separated, each taking to one officer – I was chatting amiably with mine, who was trying to lecture me on the idiocy of what I was doing, when the other officer suddenly spun the other racer around, put him on the hood of his car, thumped his head onto the hood a few times, and handcuffed him.

My officer watched me somewhat warily, and I shrugged and showed him my open hands. he told me to stand still and walked over to talk to his colleague.

They chatted with the other racer for a bit, and then uncuffed him and drove away. I walked over and asked what had happened; his nose was bleeding, and he had a welt over his eye. He was bitterly complaining about the brutality of the officer.

“I called him a fucking pig asshole…”

I laughed, which wasn’t what my friend wanted to hear.

“What did you expect him to do, dude?” I asked. I’d been taught by my African-American ‘uncles’ that it was best to be polite to someone who could shoot you and then worry mostly about the paperwork.

To this day – in the face of what would be uncontrovertibly torture by contemporary standards if done my a Marine in Baghdad – I can’t get really worked up about this.

My friend and I were idiots for being who we were. He was a bigger idiot for thinking he could act like an ass. My cop friends talk about this, wistfully, as ‘street justice’ and point out that today they often only have the choice of arresting someone or walking away – and that they wish there were some intermediate actions like this that they could mete out.

I’m fully aware of the risks of allowing this.

Sometimes a bloody nose is a useful teaching aid. And sometimes it’s torture.

But…in reality, the police officer didn’t remove my fellow racer’s ‘person-ness’, his agency – he reacted to it, and set boundaries around it for certain. The deliberation of “if you don’t do X, we will do Y and there is nothing you can do about it” was missing. The cop treated my friend as a person – while in Patterico’s example, KSM is simply a piece of talking meat.

And to an extent, that – more than anything is the point I’m trying to make. Not treating KSM with kid gloves isn’t torture. Reacting to abuse or bad behavior from him – even sometimes violence – isn’t torture.

Calmly sitting him down and saying you’ll put him into excruciating pain unless he talks to you is. Because you are denying him his ownership of himself, in some moral way.

A society that readily accepts torture reduces those who live in it to meat. It dehumanizes them. It dehumanizes those who do it. And it makes the societies in which those nonhumans live something other than the kind of human society we want to live in.

I’ll make another pass at this over the weekend, and try and clarify things, as well as bringing in the notion of historical contingency…but this ought to trigger some interesting discussion.

Zagat is posting the best snark on its site, under “outtakes”:

“Take a look at the staff on the way in … that’s the last you’ll see of them.”

“Other than having gone to hell in a handbasket, everything is just like it was before the sale.”

…go read the rest…

The Senate is voting on funding the war – again – and the Democratic leadership is pushing hard to fund conditional on withdrawal.

Senator Lieberman has a response that puts it better than I could:

Over the past nine months, American forces have begun to achieve the kind of progress in Iraq that, until recently, few in Washington would have dared to imagine might be possible.

Working together with our increasingly capable Iraqi allies, U.S. troops under the command of General David Petraeus have routed al Qaeda in Iraq from its safe havens in Anbar province and Baghdad — delivering what could well prove to be the most significant defeat for Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network since it was driven from Afghanistan in late 2001.

As al Qaeda has been beaten into retreat in Iraq, security conditions across the country have begun to improve. Iraqi civilian casualties are dramatically down. IED attacks have plummeted, while mortar and rocket attacks are at an unprecedented twenty-one month low. The number of U.S. soldiers killed in action has fallen for five straight months and is now at the lowest level in nearly two years. And as a result, U.S. commanders on the ground have begun a drawdown in the number of U.S. forces in Iraq.

According to the BBC just this weekend: ‘All across Baghdad… streets are springing back to life. Shops and restaurants which closed down are back in business. People walk in crowded streets in the evening, when just a few months ago they would have been huddled behind locked doors in their homes. Everybody agrees that things are much better.’

Unfortunately, congressional opponents of the war have responded to the growing evidence of progress in Iraq not with gratitude or relief, but with unrelenting opposition to a policy that is now clearly working.

Even as evidence has mounted that General Petraeus’ new counterinsurgency strategy is succeeding, anti-war advocates in Congress have remained emotionally invested in a narrative of retreat and defeat in Iraq — reluctant to acknowledge the reality of progress there.

Rather than supporting General Petraeus and our troops in the field, anti-war advocates in Congress are instead struggling to deny or disparage their achievements — and are now acting, once again, to hold hostage the funding our troops desperately need and to order a retreat by a date certain and regardless of what is happening on the ground.

It bears emphasizing that none of the progress we see today in Iraq would have happened, had these same anti-war activists prevailed in their earlier attempts this year to derail General Petraeus’ strategy.

In fact, throughout the past nine months, anti-war advocates in Congress have confidently and repeatedly predicted that General Petraeus’ strategy would fail, and that the war in Iraq was ‘lost.’

It is now clear they were wrong.

Rather than another ill-advised, misguided attempt to cut off the funding for our troops in the field, it is time for anti-war forces to admit that the surge is working and stop their futile legislative harassments.

It is deeply irresponsible for anti-war forces in Congress to hold hostage the funds that our men and women in uniform need to continue their successful efforts. Congress should support our troops in Iraq, not undermine their heroic achievements by imposing a formula for failure.