Back to Sullivan, though. After sighting some those interesting left-wing spin deflating statistics, he makes the absurd claim that the current system is "downright punitive of success."You hear this kind of thing from conservatives all the time, but it seems to demonstrate a pretty weak grasp on the concept of punishment.
If I commit a crime, the government will punish me. The idea of the punishment is to make me worse off than I was before the crime, and thereby to dissuade people from committing crimes. If punishment just consisted in reducing the scale of the benefit for having done something, then that wouldn't really be a punishment at all, it would just be, well, like a kind of tax.
Consider -- suppose I robbed a bank of $1 million and then got caught. Making me pay a fine of any sum less than $1 million would be absurd. That's why in the real world bank robbers get sent to jail..
Yglesias is lexically confused. Whether or not a punishment is successful doesn't make it any more or less of a punishment -- the death penalty is still punitive, even if it doesn't deter crime. By conflating the reward for labor (the salary) with the tax he arrives at a net profit. But Uncle Sam didn't provide the salary; someone else did. Uncle Sam is only responsible for the punitive half; the fine we pay for the privilege of working.
Effectiveness is a separate issue. Is the income tax a successful deterrent to working? Absolutely on some level. I can attest to this from my own experience. My job prior to business school involved paid overtime. I could pretty much work as many hours as I liked, so I set my own overtime "bonus". For a while I worked like a dog. But as the marginal tax rates started kicking in, my $25/hour overtime rate (a miserly flat rate set by my former employers) got less and less. After a while, I was seeing less than $12.50 of that (welcome to New York!) and at 10:00 at night, began thinking, "you know, I could be home in bed right now", which is where I forthwith took myself. Without taxes, or with lower ones, I certainly would have worked more hours than I did; it's harder to pass up $25 than $11.25, even at 11PM. Progressive income taxes affect our marginal behavior: the decisions we make about working that extra hour, making that extra sales call, etc. The more progressive, the more they tend to discourage extra work.
Of course, this is not the linear relationship that some supply-side economists would have you believe. This is because people who work are always making the tradeoff between work and sleep (which economists call "leisure", for some reason). Now leisure, as a good, is strongly prone to something known as the income effect. The income effect says that the demand for some goods changes depending on the total income of the consumer. For example, few people eat Top Ramen every night after they leave college; the income effect is negative, which is to say that as income goes up, demand for the good goes down. Leisure has a positive income effect; the more income people have, the more leisure they want to consume. Unless you're a rich heir with a sinecure at a charitable trust with a jacuzzi and a T-1, consuming more leisure means performing less work. So lowering tax rates, by raising people's incomes, causes people to work less.
Seems counterintuitive, like some goddamn hippy propaganda, doesn't it? Let's look at an example. Say you're a computer programmer making 75K per annum with heavy overtime, of which you take home perhaps $39K, give or take. That's your budget. Now say your taxes are cut and you're suddenly taking home $50K. Do you work more overtime, because it's more lucrative, or less?
Depends. Maybe you want a BMW and this will put you over the top, so you'll work more. Or maybe you want to spend time with the kids, and you can already make expenses on $40K, so you'll work less. You can see that both outcomes are definite possibilities. The point being that neither the tax-cutters nor the tax-raisers have a simple, linear argument to make about their favorite tax effect. (Note: my personal belief is that to the extent that tax cutting takes money away from silly congressional projects, it has a net positive effect on the economy even if people don't work more hours.)
So there's conflicting evidence, both theoretical and empirical, on whether taxing labor actually deters it. But the only way that you can argue that it doesn't punish it is by adopting the position that all of your income belongs to Uncle Sam, and it's only because of his generosity that you're allowed to keep any of it.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. . .
don't know if anyone has done a calculation, but it's obvious that the Bush administration has appointed a record number of corporate executives to high-level positions, often regulating or doing business with their former employers.
Translation: I have no idea whether this is true or not, but I want to say it anyway, so I'm not going to risk trying to find any numbers that might prove me wrong.
The administration clearly doesn't worry about conflicts of interest, but you don't have to posit outright corruption to wonder. For example: The secretaries of the Navy and Air Force are both lifelong defense-contractor executives. Won't they tend in the nature of things to believe that what's good for General Dynamics is good for America? Indeed, defense stocks have soared, partly because Wall Street analysts predict that profit margins on future contracts will be far higher than was considered appropriate in the past.
Presumably it would be better if Bush had picked people who have absolutely no ties to the defense community.
But there's a further question. Many of the business executives recently appointed to government positions first entered the private sector after prior careers in the Reagan and Bush I administrations. As Sebastian Mallaby put it in The Washington Post, they are "political types dressed up in corporate clothing: people who got hired by business because they knew government, then hired by government on the theory that they knew business." (Dick Cheney is the quintessential example.) So are they really good businessmen, or are they just crony capitalists, men who have lived by their connections?
Which would be different from the Clinton administration, or any other administration in living memory, because. . .
Consider the case of Thomas White, secretary of the Army, a former general who became a top Enron executive in 1990.
Oh, goody, I get to say "Enron" and "Bush" together again! I like the way that sounds!
His behavior in office has raised eyebrows. He did not follow the rules about disposing of stock options; he and his wife are alleged to have taken a military jet to Aspen on personal business; and he sold $12 million of Enron stock shortly before the company's implosion, though he says that no inside information was conveyed in the 70-plus phone conversations he had with his former colleagues. But this stuff — which would have led to multiple investigations had he been a Clinton appointee — is actually secondary.
He sold that stock because he was supposed to divest it as a condition of becoming Secretary of the Army. Last month he was being investigated for holding onto Enron assets too long.
The really important information about Mr. White is that the enterprise he ran, Enron Energy Services, was a fraud — a money-losing operation dressed up to appear highly profitable through deceptive accounting. It is possible though implausible that Mr. White was duped by his subordinates, that he honestly thought that he was doing a great job. But that only makes him a fool rather than a knave.
Stories about Mr. White's questionable behavior at his current job have emerged only recently, but it has been apparent for months that he was a Potemkin executive: all facade, with nothing behind it. Given that he was hired for his supposed business skills, this means that he is like a surgeon general who turns out never to have finished medical school.
So he's not just psychic; now he's clairvoyant?
So why does this administration, which is waving the flag so hard its arms must hurt, leave the Army — the Army! — in the hands of a man who is, at best, a poseur?
One theory I've heard is that Mr. White can't be fired: that there are facts about the administration's relationship with Enron that it doesn't want to come out, and that Mr. White knows where the bodies are buried.
My preferred explanation, however, is that Mr. White has been protected by the administration's infallibility complex. In case you haven't noticed, this administration never, ever admits making a mistake; even when it makes a policy U-turn, it tries to rewrite history to pretend that everything is still going according to plan. One recent example involved foreign aid. First the administration came out with a miserly proposal; faced with outrage from the rest of the world, it doubled its offer. But it claimed, to an incredulous press corps, that there had been no change in plan, that the proposal had simply been badly presented.
If Mr. White is forced to leave, however, it would be hard to deny that in hiring him for his supposed business skills the administration was suckered, in much the same way that Enron's investors were suckered. And so he remains.
It's not hard to see why the administration hired Mr. White: on paper, his qualifications looked pretty good. But the fact that he is still in place is very bad news. Maybe there are some dark secrets here; or maybe it's just arrogance and lack of moral courage. Either way, this is no way to run an army — or the country.
Or maybe they haven't fired him -- oh, I dunno -- because they don't have all the evidence yet and unlike other administrations I could name, they don't throw people over the side to save themselves every time there's a whiff of trouble. You pick which explanation you like best; Krugman doesn't know why he hasn't been fired any more than I do. But I doubt it's because Bush doesn't want to admit he was fooled; that's a hell of a lot better than letting people think he wasn't
The first objective, newsy article on blogging I've seen in a mainstream paper comes from The Irish Times.
Blogging has also embraced the innately interactive qualities of the internet that many professional media websites have failed to capture. While magazine and newspaper editors adapt awkwardly to a closer relationship with their readers, blog writers frequently incorporate readers' comments.
"The newspaper is a lecture. The Web is a conversation," says James Lileks, both a blogger and a Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist.
Similarly, the links among blogs create a dynamic environment in which a posting on one website leads another blogger to write and then another - and back and forth. For readers, the effect can be dizzying and exciting.
While most bloggers comment on news reported elsewhere, some do their own reporting. They can tell the world as fast as they can type what a corporate executive or politician has said. Even wire service reporters cannot beat them because the former must file copy to a news desk before it is published.
Yet the veracity of Web logs has still to be established. To the extent that bloggers report news, should they be trusted to the same degree as - or more, or less than - the traditional media? Readers will have to decide.
I try never to say anything that is false; if I do, I correct it when it's pointed out. Hopefully, y'all trust that even when I disagree with you, I'm at least being honest.
So I'm taking an exam tomorrow (not a business school exam -- yes, I really did graduate) and I told one of the women at the office to "hold your thumbs for me". She looked at me as if I'd just grown another head. None of the other people in the office had ever heard of the practice (like crossing your fingers, except you hold your thumbs instead -- for luck) either. It seems to me I must have picked it up somewhere, but for the life of me, I can't figure out where. So if you've heard of the practice and it's regional or cultural or something, drop me a mail or use the comments box to let me know where the heck I got it from!
Well, except for Conrad Burns, who was the only senator to vote against a bill authorizing a lot of money and a standard system to clean up voting in federal elections so we don't have to live through another 2000. Among the key provisions:
¶If a person wants to vote but is not on the official list of eligible voters, the person must be allowed to cast a provisional ballot. The ballot would be counted if state or local officials confirmed that the person was eligible.
¶Voting places must be accessible to people with disabilities. Disabled voters, including those who are blind, must be allowed to cast secret ballots.
¶A new federal agency would be a clearinghouse for information on election technology and would set the maximum "error rates" for equipment used in counting ballots.
¶Before casting their ballots, voters must have some way to verify their selections, to change their ballots and to correct any errors.
But Jane, I hear you cry, I thought you were a libertarian! Well, yes, I am, but that doesn't mean that I think government is free. And there are some areas, like voting, where the government has to set the rules because otherwise, well, who will? Choose-your-own-adventure type systems just won't cut it in the new millenium. So I'm glad we're getting rid of those ridiculous punch-card machines and setting some guidelines, because I think in this age of increasingly precise campaigning, we may need them sooner than later.
Welcome to Joe Katzman over at Winds of Change who's starting off strong with a piece on the economics of suicide bombing. Of course, he has to use some fudges, like estimating the reward as a percentage of GDP rather than by PPP (Purchasing Power Parity, which tries to compare per-capita income by measuring how much it would cost to purchase the same basket of goods in different countries) because as far as I'm aware, such figures aren't available. Anyway, a good read, and I encourage you to go over and check it out.
One of the holy grails of finance is finding a compensation package that will overcome what’s known as the agency problem.
The agency problem is the fancy economic term for what most of us already knew intuitively; what benefits the stockholders doesn’t necessarily benefit management. For example, I can think of many executives I’ve worked with on “re-engineering” projects, who, if they wanted to be honest about what would make their department work better, would “re-engineer” themselves right out the door and let somebody competent take over. Somehow, however, it was always one of their minions, usually one they didn’t like too well, who was found to be superfluous. There are all sorts of ways in which this agency problem affects managers actions to the detriment of their shareholders, but one of the most widely known is in compensation.
If you know anyone in corporate sales, you probably already know of the hilarious shenanigans in which the sales force engages in order to meet their quotas. The purchasing manager at my old job was good for 10K or so of thoroughly bogus orders at the end of the month or the quarter to help our sales reps meet their quotas; in return they gave us a little extra off our regular purchases. These orders were invariably cancelled, after a decent interval, due to the whims of our fictitious clients. None of this was good for the companies for whom these sales reps worked; it benefited only the sales force.
But trying to prevent these gymnastics has proved futile. Change the quota from orders to sales and they’ll ship the stuff out and have it “returned”, incurring shipping charges both ways; change sales to “final sales” and they’ll leave, because no one’s willing to have their income that dependant on the whims of people they don’t know. This applies even more to executives, who have much more power to manipulate matters so that they keep their job.
Now, being say, the CFO, is inherently riskier than being a clerk in accounting. It may not seem like it, but really, at the lowest level of a corporation, all you have to do in many jobs is show up on time and breathe. Even the most incompetent CFO gets made responsible for a lot of stuff, some of it out of his control, and not all of which can be blamed on his subordinates. If enough things go wrong, he’ll be fired. This is why most senior executives spend so little of their time doing anything that looks like work to the clerks in accounting, and so much of their time sucking up to the board.
So executives do anything in their power to minimize that risk. Often, this makes them unwilling to make risky but high-expected value choices, because a bad bet could cost them their jobs. At other times, such as when the company is on the rocks, it makes them prone to shoot the moon on highly speculative ventures because, what the hell, they’re going to lose their job anyway, so why not plunge all the firm’s assets into that deep-sea titanium mining venture and hope they strike it rich? Entire consultancies, like Stern Stewart, have evolved around various metrics for structuring compensation so that the managers either get rich with the shareholders, or go down with the ship.
One of the original ideas was the bonus, predicated on performance. Of course, you can’t just say “performance”; you have to give a metric, or a combination of them, that dictates what performance is. And there’s the rub. They tried all sorts of things. If revenue growth was used, you got revenue growth – but much of that revenue was unprofitable, as the executives slashed margins to move product. Tell them to cut costs, and they’d stop making stuff to sell. Tell them they had to improve net income, and games were played with the financial statements to maximize net income.
So what became popular? Stock price. Seemed perfect; put the bulk of an executive’s compensation in company stock, and watch those incentives align!
Well, not quite.
First of all, notice that all those managers made out like bandits in the recent bull market, even though they probably contributed little to its root causes, such as good monetary policy and the conviction of the American public that they’d finally found a sure thing. (Although probably a lot of them helped found their company’s 401K, so perhaps we should give them some of the credit.)
Second of all, stock prices are. . . ahem. . . not immune to manipulation. No! I hear your stricken cry, Tell me it isn’t so, Jane! Say it ain’t so! But I’m afraid I cannot, my little chickadees. Stock prices do not represent some platonic ideal of the actual, true, total current and future value of the company; they represent the market’s idea of that value, which is something very different. Thus, they can be manipulated.
If you’ve wondered why all the Enron executives seemed to have such outsized amounts of stock given in consideration for doing nothing but sitting in meetings all day talking about what a great company Enron was, this is why. And if you’ve wondered why they played all those games with the company’s income, this is also why.
Share price is determined in large part by analysts. Analysts like certain things in certain types of companies. In Enron’s case, they liked things like rapid growth, both in asset base and earnings. They liked them a lot. So much, in fact, that the executives knew that unless they continued to produce this growth, the next time the analysts went up on the mountain where God delivers the share prices to them on stone tablets, the burning bush would deliver a punishing verdict that would send Enron’s stock price, and hence the executives’ incomes, falling.
Now, the first time they fudged the numebrs, it probably seemed innocuous; just smoothing out a little dip this quarter. The problem is, the more quarters the rising income went on, the more the analysts grew to expect it, and the worse the punishment if they failed to deliver. Thus the ever-expanding web of deception that has now ensnared us all in a gray future of mediocre returns and endless congressional hearings on exciting topics like foreign earnings deductions. But I digress.
We’re now seeing more and more such items hit the headlines; Xerox is the latest perp, and the charges are a predictable mélange of little accounting fudges here and there which together conspired to wildly misrepresent the state of the company’s earnings. Which brings up two interesting points.
The first is that economists and financial wizards got it wrong. The best minds of a generation convinced themselves, to some extent, that the law of unintended consequences would not apply to something as obvious as stock-based compensation. It’s a healthy reminder that no matter how good an economic idea seems, we should always try to figure out how we’d manipulate the system, if it were us.
The second is that it’s easy for us all to say that we wouldn’t have done the same thing in the place of those Enron executives. And from the safety of my little closet on the Upper West Side that’s an easy call; no one’s yet offered me hundreds of millions worth of stock for ranting at you guys all week. But try to think of it another way: if you could have half your income taken away unless you delivered a growing number of whatever it is you make, be it computer programs or payroll reports, every single quarter, you’d be pretty desperate to make that number grow, wouldn’t you? When you hit the natural limits of your ability to produce those programs or reports, and it was a choice between lying to the bean counters or telling your wife to cancel that vacation to the Bahamas and plan on spending the week re-painting the house, it might not be so hard to convince yourself that a little fudging, just this once, wouldn’t hurt.
So it’s back to the drawing board on executive compensation. Which is the beauty of capitalism, really. We got it wrong this time. It may take us a few more tries to get it right. But we don’t expect to set up the perfect system once and for all; capitalism is just the system for finding the perfect system. So when something goes wrong, the almost-instant response is “we’re working on it”.
Update Paul Orwin had an excellent post a few weeks ago on another angle of the whole Enron scandal, upon which I touched lightly: analysts expectations for growth. In particular, he talks about the difference between exponential and linear growth, and the trouble that arises when analysts' expectations of the former run into the more likely actuality of the latter. (Note: Paul posted this in the comments, but some of you don't read the comments, and you really should check it out. g is a magical thing.
Sorry I haven't blogged today, but it's been busy here at the ranch. So the only thing I have to put up today is a bit from a dead tree Newsweek article that I can't seem to find online. Seems there's a Princeton professor who thinks that oil production will peak between 2004 and 2008, a conclusion he reaches using a controversial combination of statistics and geology. This method correctly predicted the US production peak in teh 1970's, though it's not clear whether this was luck or legit.
So what happens if it's true? Well, of course, the price of oil goes up. (Duh!) In the short run. The only country currently producing less than they can pump (according to Newsweek) is Saudi Arabia, so there's not a lot of slack in the supply.
But we'll adjust. We'll conserve, we'll rely more heavily on alternative sources, and as we use them more, the price will drop. Perhaps not to the price of hydrocarbons; I don't know what the numbers are. If we don't adjust quickly enough, we'll take a hit in productivity.
But you know what? Our parents and grandparents lived relatively fulfilled lives with a lot less GDP than we have now. I'm not saying it won't hurt, and I'm certainly not one of those "let's go live in the trees" idiots. But if production does start to fall, it will be a gradual process, enough to give the economy time to slowly adjust to a less-hydrocarbon intense system. Far less jarring than a Kyoto or similar; a slow, steady, price increase that pushes us into different energy sources as the rising price of oil makes them cost-efficient. Anyway, there's not much point worrying about it -- other than in the "hey, what can we invent that would help us use less oil" sense. Moping won't help, and doesn't quite seem called for on the evidence anyway.
This article by John Scalzi compares blogger traffic unfavorably to print's wider audience:
So: My personal site: 3,000 readers at best. My other work: 1,000,000 readers, for a ratio of 1 to 333 (I don't include my corporate work in this, since I have no way of tracking how many people see that). My site is going to have become a lot more popular before it even begins to rival my reach in conventional online and offline media. Or, to present another perspective on the matter: My recent "I Hate Your Politics" column was avidly linked to on blogs and other sites, even "charting" on MIT's Blogdex for a few days. Total visits over two weeks: 10,000 or so. One of the people who read it was the editor of the Willamette Week alt-newsweekly ,who bought it to reprint in his paper. Total readership: 85,000. Eight times as many people will be exposed to it in print than saw it on the Web in two weeks. And so it goes with others. Sullivan crows about the potential of 'blogs, but does so in Wired (circ: 500,000). His presence on the Web is dwarfed by his reach in the New York Times and the other places he writes to make scratch. Joshua Micha Marshall, one of the few liberal 'bloggers with any popularity, gets vastly more readers every time he's published in Salon or the New York Post. James Lileks immensely popular site's readership is dwarfed by the public for his "Backfence" column in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Their reasons for writing on the Web are their own -- but it's not because they were looking for a larger audience than what they already had.
Well, sure, if you count my flipping past the Style page on the way to the business section being 'exposed' to it. I don't read the articles; I don't even read the headlines. Occasionally I pass a page number as I whizz past. This is exposure only in the EPA sense, where you've been 'exposed' to a substance if you once rode on a subway train next to someone who worked at a plant where it was used thirty years ago and might therefore have a molecule or two on his clothes.
When someone comes to my blog, it's because they're looking to read something I have to say. Either they sought the site out, or they followed a link that interests them. Either, way, they're actually reading something I wrote. How many Salon readers read my article on Microsoft? Probably a fair number; certainly more than read my blog. But you can't count their whole circulation as my audience.
Update Scalzi writes to say that he addressed this in his next day's piece, which I didn't have time to read.
But I should note that I wasn't trying to negate his point about readership; there's no doubt that a piece in a mainstream source gets more eyeballs than this one. Rather, I was trying to refine it, to point out that there are questions of both quantity and quality in trying to compare the two numbers.
If this is true, Janet Reno has about as much chance of winning Florida as I have of catching a ride on the next space shuttle: Elian Gonzalez's father may have requested asylum and been turned down.
So here's a thought, though it's a little far-out: the teenage girl suicide bombers may be the death knell for the Palestinian people.
Why? The mathematics of biology. A population can afford to lose a large number of its men without sacrificing its overall growth rate; other men step in to take up any slack, whether through polygamy, serial monogamy, or rampant immorality. But women can only have so many babies. And the younger they go, the more it hurts.
Now, of course, the Palestinian's current problem is not too few babies (although there's some evidence that they're hoping to win, in part, by out-breeding the Israelis). And the suicide girls may not be large enough in number to make a difference. Nonetheless, for a war that relies in large part on large numbers of willing cannon fodder, putting women in front of those cannons is a losing proposition.
I'm not sure why I even bother to post these things anymore, since it's not like I have anything to say that hasn't already been said. . . but a suicide bomber just blew up a bus, killing eight. It seems to me that the suicide bombers are trying to torpedo any chance of a US brokered peace. And it seems to me that they are not very realistic about what the Israelis will do without the US brokering. I think that they believe that "pack up and move to Orange County" is a more likely response than "forcibly move all the Palestinians out of the West Bank". And I think they're wrong.
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The latest Paul Krugman column is a prime example of what I love about Professor Krugman.
Yes, you heard me right. In many ways, Krugman is a most loveable economist. His column embodies the finest of them. Despite my issues with the slanted economics of his recent New York Times columns, I still think he is perhaps the greatest popular economics writer of our era, although Michael Lewis makes that contest a close finish. (Notice: both Democrats. Live from the WTC is a non-partisan institution. Speaking of which, what the hell is Grover Norquist thinking? But I digress.)
He begins with a punchy lead that gets the blood racing:
In 1973 an Arab embargo sent oil prices soaring, and a global recession followed. In 1979 the Iranian revolution provoked a second surge in oil prices, and another global recession.
Are we now at risk of a third oil crisis? I wish I could say no, but I can't.
He moves quickly to a clear, interesting explanation of what happens, and prefaces his opinion about the still-mysterious events of 1979 with an admission that, hey, it’s just his opinion:
Economists have never reached a consensus about what happened in 1979, but my interpretation is that it was similar to the recent California electricity crisis. In both cases the key was the combination of a tight market and demand that wasn't very responsive to price. Under those circumstances, individual producers — power companies in California, oil-producing countries in 1979 — have a lot of market power. That is, it is in each producer's interest to cut back production to drive prices higher. The result is a price surge, even though there is no real capacity shortage.
I take slight issue with this interpretation. My father, who do to his connections to both the heavy construction industry and the EPA, has more than a passing interest in the subject, tells me that the real constraints on the system were plants that, economist suspicions aside, really did have to go down for scheduled maintenance. They went down during hours when usage was slack (and hence prices lower) because the alternative was going down when usage was peaking, and disaster would have ensued. He tells me that the other major price pressure came from the fact that so much of the power was flowing from British Columbian hydro-power, and if California hadn’t paid those prices, BC would have taken their power and gone home. Not a popular topic of discussion for those who wish to blame the crisis on deregulation, because of course the US government has no power to do anything about the rapacious profiteers over at BC Hydro (BC monkey, where are you?), so screaming about it won’t do the activists any good. I don’t have any way to independently verify this, except by my faith in my father’s veracity. (My father is also, I might add, a Democrat. Jane Galt was what you might term “a bi-partisan effort”.)
Now, normally I would take strenuous issue with his central assertion, which he returns to throughout the rest of the column: that you can actually reach an equilibrium where individual producers cut back to push the price up. Remember the free rider problem? The problem with cartels is that there’s always the incentive to cheat, producing a little more to “free ride” off everyone else’s production restraints. Unless there’s a highly disciplined central market maker whose production is so great as to swamp the price effects of extra production by other producers, this quickly reduces the effectiveness of the cartel. It’s something OPEC has been fighting its entire existence, which, IMHO, is the reason we’re not currently paying $10 a gallon. (Okay, one of the reasons; fuel efficiency and US Marine Corps efficiency being the other main ones.)
However, in this case, Paul Krugman has pre-empted a heavy attack of the snits by stating up front that this is his opinion. I have a different one, which I happen to think is correct. But his theory isn’t wing-nut wrong; time and/or more rigorous analysis than is afforded by a couple of column inches will prove which of us is correct.
Anyway, I highly recommend it, as it’s chock full of interesting ideas. They may not be right, of course, but they’re well argued and ample food for thought to last you until Friday.
Palestinians just killed 13 Israeli soldiers in an ambush. At least they're fighting soldiers now, instead of toddlers. We shall have to wait to see whether this strengthens or weakens Israeli resolve.
The Boston Globe is alleging that Israeli soldiers shot one of their reporters, despite the fact that he was clearly labeled as a journalist. Though the reporter didn't actually see who shot him, he says that Israelis were the only ones in the area with guns.
Now, I know that there have been times when most of us would like to shoot a Globe reporter. Nonetheless, if this is true, Israel's going to have some 'splaining to do.
