Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So it looks like the

So it looks like the Torch is going to drop out of the New Jersey Senate race.

Democrats are getting slightly hysterical, because it's not clear that it's legal to replace him after the primary. It would be nice if they could pull a Jean Carnahan -- run Torricelli on the tacit understanding that after he is elected, he will resign and the governor will appoint a replacement -- but they can't, because the governor gets to appoint a replacement, and the governor of New Jersey is a Republican. They're in a nasty, nasty spot. If Torricelli runs, he's going to lose; if he doesn't, whoever replaces him will probably lose anyway, with only a month to campaign.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be talking about suing to keep him on the ballot. I can see why they want to, but they shouldn't. This is more important than control of the Senate; this is about saying that neither party supports putting a Senator in office who takes bribes. The Democrats dropped the ball on this one, to their eternal shame. Now the Republicans have an opportunity to do the right thing, and forestall any risk that a man who takes bribes might end up in our legislature.

Update
Oops, governor of New Jersey is a Democrat. I was flashing back to Whitman. Hmmm. This opens up new possible strategies.

Update II A reader sends in the applicable law:

§ 19:13-20. Vacancy procedure

In the event of a vacancy, howsoever caused, among candidates nominated at primaries, which vacancy shall occur not later than the 51st day before the general election, or in the event of inability to select a candidate because of a tie vote at such primary, a candidate shall be selected in the following manner:

a. (1) In the case of an office to be filled by the voters of the entire State, the candidate shall be selected by the State committee of the political party wherein such vacancy has occurred.

(2) In the case of an office to be filled by the voters of a single and entire county, the candidate shall be selected by the county committee in such county of the political party wherein such vacancy has occurred.

(3) In the case of an office to be filled by the voters of a portion of the State comprising all or part of two or more counties, the candidate shall be selected by those members of the county committees of the party wherein the vacancy has occurred who represent those portions of the respective counties which are comprised in the district from which the candidate is to be elected.

(4) In the case of an office to be filled by the voters of a portion of a single county, the candidate shall be selected by those members of the county committee of the party wherein the vacancy has occurred who represent those portions of the county which are comprised in the district from which the candidate is to be elected.

At any meeting held for the selection of a candidate under this subsection, a majority of the persons eligible to vote thereat shall be required to be present for the conduct of any business, and no person shall be entitled to vote at that meeting who is appointed to the State committee or county committee after the seventh day preceding the date of the meeting.

In the case of a meeting held to select a candidate for other than a Statewide office, the chairman of the meeting shall be chosen by majority vote of the persons present and entitled to vote thereat. The chairman so chosen may propose rules to govern the determination of credentials and the procedures under which the meeting shall be conducted, and those rules shall be adopted upon a majority vote of the persons entitled to vote upon the selection. If a majority vote is not obtained for those rules, the delegates shall determine credentials and conduct the business of the meeting under such other rules as may be adopted by a majority vote. All contested votes taken at the selection meeting shall be by secret ballot.

b. (1) Whenever in accordance with subsection a. of this section members of two or more county committees are empowered to select a candidate to fill a vacancy, it shall be the responsibility of the chairmen of said county committees, acting jointly not later in any case than the seventh day following the occurrence of the vacancy, to give notice to each of the members of their respective committees who are so empowered of the date, time and place of the meeting at which the selection will be made, that meeting to be held at least one day following the date on which the notice is given.

(2) Whenever in accordance with the provisions of subsection a. of this section members of a county committee are empowered to select a candidate to fill a vacancy, it shall be the responsibility of the chairman of such county committee, not later in any case than the seventh day following the occurrence of the vacancy, to give notice to each of the members of the committee who are so empowered of the date, time and place of the meeting at which the selection will be made, that meeting to be held at least one day following the date on which the notice is given.

(3) A county committee chairman or chairmen who call a meeting pursuant to paragraph (1) or (2) of this subsection shall not be entitled to vote upon the selection of a candidate at such meeting unless he or they are so entitled pursuant to subsection a.

(4) Whenever in accordance with the provisions of subsection a. of this section the State committee of a political party is empowered to select a candidate to fill a vacancy, it shall be the responsibility of the chairman of that State committee to give notice to each of the members of the committee of the date, time and place of the meeting at which the selection will be made, that meeting to be held at least one day following the date on which the notice is given.

c. Whenever a selection is to be made pursuant to this section to fill a vacancy resulting from inability to select a candidate because of a tie vote at a primary election, the selection shall be made from among those who have thus received the same number of votes at the primary.

d. A selection made pursuant to this section shall be made not later than the 48th day preceding the date of the general election, and a statement of such selection shall be filed with the Secretary of State or the appropriate county clerk, as the case may be, not later than said 48th day, and in the following manner:

(1) A selection made by a State committee of political party shall be certified to the Secretary of State by the State chairman of the political party.

(2) A selection made by a county committee of a political party, or a portion of the members thereof, shall be certified to the county clerk of the county by the county chairman of such political party; except that when such selection is of a candidate for the Senate or General Assembly or the United States House of Representatives the county chairman shall certify the selection to the State chairman of such political party, who shall certify the same to the Secretary of State.

(3) A selection made by members of two or more county committees of a political party acting jointly shall be certified by the chairmen of said committees, acting jointly, to the State chairman of such political party, who shall certify the same to the Secretary of State.

e. A statement filed pursuant to subsection d. of this section shall state the residence and post office address of the person so selected, and shall certify that the person so selected is qualified under the laws of this State to be a candidate for such office, and is a member of the political party filling the vacancy. Accompanying the statement the person endorsed therein shall file a certificate stating that he is qualified under the laws of this State to be a candidate for the office mentioned in the statement, that he consents to stand as a candidate at the ensuing general election and that he is a member of the political party named in said statement, and further that he is not a member of, or identified with, any other political party or any political organization espousing the cause of candidates of any other political party, to which shall be annexed the oath of allegiance prescribed in R.S. 41:1-1 duly taken and subscribed by him before an officer authorized to take oaths in this State. The person so selected shall be the candidate of the party for such office at the ensuing general election.

HISTORY: L. 1988, c. 126, s. 1.

LexisNexis (TM) Notes:

CASE NOTES

1. Purpose of N.J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20(e) is to prevent a person whose party affiliations are unclear from assuming elective office under a party banner; such restriction is enforceable, assuming its constitutionality; challenge to the constitutionality of § 19:13-20(e) is merited. Mays v. Penza, 430 A.2d 1140, 1980 N.J. Super. LEXIS 791 (Oct. 28, 1980).

2. Where the county clerk rejected a candidate's petition as being defective because it had been faxed, and the candidate amended his petition and filed it personally, the candidate was entitled to have his name placed on the ballot; the amended petition was filed before the 48th day preceding the primary, within three days of his filing of the original in accordance with N.J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20, and before he received a notice of defect. Madden v. Hegadorn, 565 A.2d 725, 1989 N.J. Super. LEXIS 364 (May 3, 1989).

3. Where one political party and its candidate filed suit to disqualify a candidate of another party from participating in the general election for failure to comply with requirements of N. J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20(d), the trial court dismissed the suit as moot because the election had been held and the vote resulted in a tie; accordingly, under N. J. Stat. Ann. 40A:16-16, the office was vacant and the trial court had no authority to declare a winner. Mays v. Penza, 430 A.2d 1145, 1981 N.J. Super. LEXIS 609 (Jan. 12, 1981).

4. County clerk fulfilled her duty by accepting a candidate's certification as a candidate under N.J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20(e); clerk had no power to rule the candidate off the ballot due to a failure to comply with requirements of residency as that issue should have been determined by a court. Mays v. Penza, 430 A.2d 1140, 1980 N.J. Super. LEXIS 791 (Oct. 28, 1980).

5. Purpose of N.J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20(e) is to prevent a person whose party affiliations are unclear from assuming elective office under a party banner; such restriction is enforceable, assuming its constitutionality; challenge to the constitutionality of § 19:13-20(e) is merited. Mays v. Penza, 430 A.2d 1140, 1980 N.J. Super. LEXIS 791 (Oct. 28, 1980).

6. Pursuant to former N.J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20, the county committee had the power to fill a vacancy caused by the death of a candidate 36 days before the general election, so long as it made and filed its selection with the clerk 34 days or more before the general election. Kilmurray v. Gilfert, 91 A.2d 865, 1952 N.J. LEXIS 259 (Oct. 20, 1952).

7. Where a "write-in" candidate nominated in a primary election failed to file a certificate of acceptance, a vacancy of the nomination was created, and the county committee was permitted to fill the vacancy. Fiscella v. Nulton, 92 A.2d 103, 1952 N.J. Super. LEXIS 738 (Oct. 16, 1952).

8. Where nominee died 36 days before the general election and a political committee filed notice of its selection of a replacement candidate 34 days before the general election, the replacement nomination was timely, and the statute requiring 37-day (now 51 days) notice were merely directory in nature. Kilmurray v. Gilfert, 91 A.2d 859, 1952 N.J. Super. LEXIS 727 (Oct. 15, 1952).

9. N.J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20 unconstitutionally regulated elections so as to deny or impair the rights of electors and effectively granted a party committee the right to nominate a person to fill a vacancy and then, in turn, deprived it of the right to nominate someone who may have previously been a member of another political party. Gansz v. Johnson, 75 A.2d 831, 1950 N.J. Super. LEXIS 629 (Oct. 13, 1950).

10. Pursuant to N.J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20, the county committee was without authority to designate a candidate where no one had been nominated at the primary, and therefore a vacancy did not exist to give the county committee authority to make such designation. Cleveland v. Woolley, 68 A.2d 666, 1949 N.J. Super. LEXIS 725 (Oct. 11, 1949).

11. Complaint by candidate against election officials, which sought his selection as the Republican party's candidate, was properly dismissed where his rival was still eligible to stand for election in his party even though he had accepted nomination of the Democratic party; rejecting the contention that, by accepting the "write-in" Democratic nomination the candidate had identified himself with that party and would, therefore, be unable to sign the required certificate, the superior court held that the statute required that the certificate accompany the statement of the selection, but did not purport to obligate the candidate to execute the certificate until after the selection had been made. Brower v. Gray, 68 A.2d 553, 1949 N.J. Super. LEXIS 637 (Sept. 30, 1949).

12. Where one political party and its candidate filed suit to disqualify a candidate of another party from participating in the general election for failure to comply with requirements of N. J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20(d), the trial court dismissed the suit as moot because the election had been held and the vote resulted in a tie; accordingly, under N. J. Stat. Ann. 40A:16-16, the office was vacant and the trial court had no authority to declare a winner. Mays v. Penza, 430 A.2d 1145, 1981 N.J. Super. LEXIS 609 (Jan. 12, 1981).

13. Candidate for a party nomination for member of state legislature was not entitled to nomination where a vacancy was created in the nomination by the death of his opponent prior to the election, and the opponent still received more votes than the candidate did; the deceased candidate's nomination was not null and void but, rather, created a vacancy to have been filled in the manner pursuant to N.J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20. Petition of Keogh-Dwyer, 256 A.2d 314, 1969 N.J. Super. LEXIS 486 (Aug. 6, 1969).

14. N.J. Stat. Ann. § 19:13-20 unconstitutionally regulated elections so as to deny or impair the rights of electors andeffectively granted a party committee the right to nominate a person to fill a vacancy and then, in turn, deprived it of the right to nominate someone who may have previously been a member of another political party. Gansz v. Johnson, 75 A.2d 831, 1950 N.J. Super. LEXIS 629 (Oct. 13, 1950).

15. Complaint by candidate against election officials, which sought his selection as the Republican party's candidate, was properly dismissed where his rival was still eligible to stand for election in his party even though he had accepted nomination of the Democratic party; rejecting the contention that, by accepting the "write-in" Democratic nomination the candidate had identified himself with that party and would, therefore, be unable to sign the required certificate, the superior court held that the statute required that the certificate accompany the statement of the selection, but did not purport to obligate the candidate to execute the certificate until after the selection had been made. Brower v. Gray, 68 A.2d 553, 1949 N.J. Super. LEXIS 637 (Sept. 30, 1949).

Update III On Fox News, they're reporting that the statute is unambiguous: candidates can't be replaced less than 51 days before the election, which would have been September 16. Whee! More electoral fun and games! Maybe repealing the 17th Amendment isn't such a bad idea.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More brilliance from Lileks: But

More brilliance from Lileks:

But the Castro-worship just fascinates me. Why? Some applaud the way he thumbs his nose at the US, which always strikes a certain crowd as the hallmark of integrity; if you wrap your derision in the big red flag you’ll always have a claque of bootlickers eager to excuse whatever you do. (The enemy of my enemy is my President for Life.) The usual gang of collectivists admire the way he organizes society from the top down to the city block, because they love power; they love force; they have a romantic attachment to anyone who uses the cudgel to hasten the arrival of heaven on earth. My favorite defense, though, is “free health care” and “literacy.”

Take the second one first. There’s no excuse for not being literate in America. Oh, we could impose literacy on the illiterate here, but it wouldn’t be pretty. We could make English proficiency a requirement for jobs, institute nationwide standards for graduation that mandated a high degree of literacy - and made the students' fulfillment of those standards a criterion for advancement in the educational establishment.

Let us pause to cogitate how well that would go over.

Health care: supposedly, it’s universal; supposedly, it’s high quality. Egalitarian. (muffled laugh.) Ask yourself this. You’re poor. You have a heart attack. Do you want to be in Havana or New York? Which phone system summons the EMTs faster? Which emergency response team is better equipped? Which hospital is better staffed with highly-paid doctors who have come from all over the world to work here?

Somehow I suspect that a heart attack in Havana at 3 AM means bundling Uncle Raul into your block captain’s ‘57 Belair and hoping it doesn’t break down before you get to the hospital.

But let’s assume that health care in Cuba is the equal of health care in America. If this is the reason to admire Cuba, then this is what some American citizens believe is more important than anything else. Free health care. They will give up elections, the free press, the freedom to travel, the freedom to dissent, the freedom to own a personal computer, for heaven’s sake - they’ve been banned for personal use. But for some, all of those freedoms are negotiable. They’ll give it all up for free health care. That’s their price.

Interesting.

Indeed.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The real scandal about the

The real scandal about the poet laureate of New Jersey's nasty poem is that it's terrible. Of course, even Shakespeare had his off days. But I wrote better poetry than that when I was in ninth grade. And I write dreadful poetry.

(Link via Jim Henley)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Nuclear Deterrance, Part II: The

Nuclear Deterrance, Part II: The Principle of Overwhelming Force
In Part I, we discussed the idea of walling off potential avenues of escalation. Now it's time to talk about why we chose Mutually Assured Destruction rather than, say, Mutually Assured Heavy Damage.

[Editor's Note: No, I am not a professional expert on defense policy. I'm giving you the broad principles here, not the "In 1962, the Soviet placement of an armored brigade near the Turkish border was widely seen as a signalling mechanism to convey their distrust of the protocols signed at the NATO meeting the previous month. . . ", on which I am not qualified to comment]

If you grew up in the 80's, as I did, you spent a good portion of your childhood waiting to be evaporated in a worldwide nuclear conflagration. This is especially true if your teachers were CND types who believed that MAD was the worst idea since the Barry Manilow comeback tour.

But there is a reason that the system was designed with overwhelming force, rather than limited response. It has to do with the nature of nuclear escalation. Nuclear use, especially before the advent of tactical nuclear weapons, was so shocking in its kill power, its destruction, and (importantly), its public horror, that the kind of arithmetic response (you hit me, I hit you 50% harder, and so on), was hard to sustain. I can't say this enough: deterrance is not tit for tat. I've already had five or six people email me with objections based on their analysis of nuclear deterrance as a tit for tat scenario, or comparing it to conventional military deterrance, which is not how it works. With a nuclear Iraq, the "Saddaam has been deterred" argument is meaningless, because the whole structure of deterrance changes.

Let's look at tit for tat. If you've ever seen small children playing, you've seen it at work. One child takes the other child's shovel. Outraged, the owner of the shovel pushes the thief. The thief is outraged -- he pushed me! -- and hits the shovel owner. Shovel owner is outraged -- he started it! -- and kicks his opponent. After a couple of rounds of this, the shovel is returned to its rightful owner, and the two children sit glaring at each other on either side of the sandbox.

The problem is that because of the overwhelming nature of even limited nuclear use, this pattern would be catastrophic once nukes were involved. If Russia nuked, say, Peoria, and we took out three of their cities, and then they hit New York. . . well, by the time we reached the standoff, there might not be much left to stand on.

As I pointed out in part one, the principle of overwhelming force was designed to prevent this sort of escalation. In order to do that, it had to make entering on any avenue that might lead to escalation just as unthinkable as suddenly lobbing your nuclear arsenal over the Bering Straits to see what would happen.

It also sharply reduced the incentive to gamble on borderline activities. Russia invades Canada; do we plaster them with nukes, or try to wage a conventional response? Would we use a limited nuclear response that might make it worth their while anyway? (This was, after all, the nation that killed 25,000 people to build a steel plant, 20,000,000 to collectivize the farms.) Overwhelming force didn't just make it unthinkable to risk borderline activities; it also meant that any leader who ordered such an action was guaranteed die in the resulting conflagration.

But overwhelming force truly meant overwhelming. If the Soviets, or we, had launched a single nuclear weapon, the orders were to launch a sufficient portion of our arsenal to bomb them flat. Not take out a single city for show. Literally, bomb them back to the stone age.

And there we are back to Iraq again. Not only is it unlikely that we would launch a nuclear strike on Iraq in the event of an invasion of their neighbors; it is unthinkable that we would respond with overwhelming force. Even if Saddaam did the worst and nuked Israel, would we really be willing to incinerate the entire population of Iraq in retaliation? That's what overwhelming force would mean. Yet, if you don't use overwhelming force, there is a high probability that Saddaam might survive. One of the reasons that we didn't take him out in the Gulf War was that it turned out he had two dozen or so body doubles, of which five or so were trained to impersonate him perfectly. We have no idea where he is, so we can't just nuke his headquarters.

So the first part of Cold War nuclear deterrance -- walling off potential avenues of escalation -- is unlikely in Iraq. A second important feature, overwhelming force, is also absent. Next we'll talk about credible threats.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Mchelle Cottle thinks that Noelle

Mchelle Cottle thinks that Noelle Bush deserves the media attention she's getting because of her family's stance on national drug policy.

Oh, delightful. May I assume that Al Gore jr.'s penchant for driving drunk and smoking pot will get the same amount of press?

But that's a cheap shot. The real problem with this is that Noelle doesn't make drug policy. She's a screwed up woman in her twenties, not a legislator. It's obscene to argue that she deserves to dry out in a spotlight.

It's common to say that celebrity children deserve the spotlight because they get special treatment. But there's no evidence that this is so. Cottle admits that she probably isn't treated much differently from any other rich offender, but then tries to argue that "in California, she might already be on her way to jail for life". Um, no. Not if she were rich, not if she were poor. People in treatment centers who are caught with drugs sometimes get kicked out, which might end their parole, but they don't get prosecuted for possession of crack. And it's hard to argue that her actions took place in the public spotlight, since the only reason we know about it is that another patient violated her confidentiality and called the papers. She's getting special treatment, all right.

The children of our politicians do not deserve to have their private tragedies on the front page. Unless you think it's all right for other people to publicize your mistakes based on what your parents do for a living, the decent thing to do is to keep mum.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Investment banks are in trouble.

Investment banks are in trouble.

Now, when I was recruiting for I-Banking, we were told that investment banking was pretty much a winner regardless of the market. If stocks went up, they did IPO's; if they went down, companies would be acquiring suddenly-cheaper targets, and there would be plenty of M&A work. Either way, the banks would win. What's even funnier is that the vice presidents and associates feeding us this line actually believed it.

And it sounds plausible. Unfortunately, like many plausible-sounding things, it had a hidden weakness. In this case, it was the great controversy in accounting known as Pooling of Interests Accounting. It's so controversial that they're thinking of eliminating it all together, which sparks the kind of argument that makes accounting types get red in the face and scream at each other, and aren't you glad you don't hang out with people like that?

There are two ways you can account for an acquisition on your balance sheet: pooling, or purchase. In the more conservative Purchase method, you basically take all the assets off the balance sheet of the company being bought and transfer them onto the balance sheet of the purchaser. Meanwhile, you take the money or stocks or what have you that was paid to the shareholders off the purchaser's balance sheet, and presto! you're done.

Well, not quite. Because in financial statements, most assets are recorded at their Historical Cost, otherwise known as What You Paid For Them. Thus your father's Sandy Koufax Rookie Baseball Card would be carried on the family balance sheet at 10 cents.

In these inflationary times, investment bankers have to go through all the assets of the company you're buying and figure out what they're actually worth, rather than what it says on the balance sheet. The price paid for the company will thus be higher, often much higher, than what the financial statements show, which is called the company's book value.

If the merger is accounted for as a purchase, the difference between the purchase price and the book value has to be recorded on the purchaser's balance sheet; otherwise the books don't balance. So an asset called goodwill is created. Because it is presumed to represent the value of depreciable assets, this goodwill number has to be depreciated. That is, every year, net income has to be lowered to reflect the fact that all of these assets have gotten less valuable as time goes on, through wear and tear and what have you.

[But what about the Sandy Koufax card? I hear you cry. That gets more valuable. Well, actually, I lied. Sandy Koufax cards belong to a special class of assets called "marketable securities" -- they trade on a liquid market, and thus their current value can readily be ascertained, so they are recorded on the books at their market value. I was just trying to illustrate the principal, okay?]

Companies really, really don't like having to take a goodwill charge. Which is because ignorant investors see EPS go down and run for the hills. So they try very, very hard to qualify for a different type of accounting treatment, known as Pooling of Interests Accounting.

In theory, a pooling of interests merger isn't about one company buying another; it's about two companies with a lot in common discovering that they were meant to be together. They throw all their worldly goods into one pot and call the new company McNikeSoft. In practice, this is a load of hooey; one company is buying the other. But that doesn't mean we can't all pretend, the way the friends of aging tycoons pretend that his eighteen year old bride is marrying him for his animal magnetism. So. Because it's not a purchase, all the assets simply transfer to the new combined entity just as they were on the balance sheet. No goodwill is recorded, so EPS doesn't take a hit. This is how almost all big mergers get done.

There's a kicker, though; in order to qualify for Pooling of Interest accounting, you can't just pull out a wad of cash and slap it on the counter. The deal has to be done with stock-for-stock: I'll trade you one of my AOL/Time Warners for two of your Time Warner certificates (and don't we wish we'd been an AOL shareholder in on that one!). Doing the kind of stock-for-stock deal that qualifies for Pooling treatment is extremely tax disadvantageous, in general, but the incentive to avoid lowering EPS with a goodwill charge is so high that CEO's are willing to shell out more of their hard-earned cash to the IRS, just to avoid a bookkeeping charge to EPS. No, I never said that private enterprise was perfect.

Thus, even though targets are now cheaper, it doesn't matter, because the potential purchaser's stock is also down. Whereas in the good old days, cash rich companies could go after targets in troubled times, now they have to sit on their hands until their stock price perks up again. About another decade, from the looks of the market on Friday.

So now you know about one of the hottest issues in accounting today, and why M&A hasn't picked up like everyone predicted it would, and also, how all those stupid deals in the late 90's got done. Now, if you go to the tool chest and get a hammer and tap yourself lightly on the forehead a few times, all this information will probably fall right back out and you'll be none the worse for the experience.

Update
Looks like today is my day for looking like an idiot. Several readers have emailed me to point out that they've eliminated pooling-of-interest accounting, and in order to pacify the Investment bankers, have allowed the goodwill to sit on the balance sheet forever, rather than depreciating like it used to.

I could weasel out of that by saying that it doesn't effect my main point, which is that the market was heavily biased towards stock-for-stock transactions during the great M&A idiot boom of the late 90's. Which is true. And in fact, I did know that they'd eliminated pooling; the fact just somehow dropped out of my head while I wrote the post. Darren Roulstone, who teaches accounting at my alma mater, sums it up nicely in an email:

Saw your piece on purchase and pooling accounting. As usual, you describe the issue succinctly with humor and charm. . . I just want to pass on an update: they (the FASB) have actually eliminated pooling-of-interest accounting. In order to do this without angry I-bankers storming Norwalk, CT with flaming torches, they also eliminated the amortization of goodwill that made so many managers wary of purchase accounting. So, firms now use purchase accounting, but goodwill can stay on the balance sheet untouched, with only periodic evaluations for impairment. (Firms continue to amortize any excess purchase price allocated to assets and liabilities other than goodwill and indefinitely lived intangibles.)

For details check out FASB statements 141 and 142. For intelligible details, see Stickney and Weil's Financial Accounting... chapter 11 of the tenth edition. (The edition that all of my current students are reluctant to buy as they just managed to pick up a really cheap ninth edition. "Class, the first thing we're going to do is talk about why that ninth edition become so cheap just as the tenth edition was adopted by the intro financial professors.")

Anyway, the main point stands; stock-for-stock means that the countercyclical aspects of M&A that they were touting were, on their face, ridiculous.

As for the commenter who wanted to know about the rest of IB . . . well, there isn't much rest. There's securities issuance, which is in the trashcan until the equities market picks up, or cash flow gets strong enough to support more long-term debt. There's structured finance and related departments. These are the fun folks who brought you Enron's 87 zillion off-balance sheet "special purpose entities" and I don't think we need to ask why they're not doing so hot. Then there are the areas which technically are not part of Investment Banking, such as sales, trading, capital markets, brokerage, research, etc. Obviously, research is undergoing some reverses. Trading is doing fine in some spots, notso-hotso in others, but the overall revenue is simply not high enough to make up for the enormous fees that are being lost in the moribund investment banking business.

[For those of you who get their entire knowledge of how the financial firms work from the summer you took "Liar's Poker" to the beach, trading isn't as lucrative as it was when the S&L's were opening their vaults to the Solomon mortgage traders and inviting them to help themselves.]

And for the multiple emailers who have written to tell me that no one cares about goodwill, because professional investors just back it out of their valuation -- well, theoretically that's true, but in practice, managers were extremely reluctant to take the charge. Everyone I knew who actually worked on such deals told me the same thing: managers were paying hefty extra taxes in order to avoid the goodwill.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the Day I

Question of the Day
I think that my anti-war interlocutors can agree with me that the last round of inspections were a dismal failure. Now that the Security Council seems intent on ensuring that we don't do anything to the inspections regime which might run the risk of making the inspections effective, what should we do now?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

This article by Ryan Lizza

This article by Ryan Lizza has a look at the complicated process of getting inspections going again. If we go by the UN playbook, just the preliminary negotiations are expected to take five months.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Before I start, let me

Before I start, let me say that I am not a professional historian. But I did possess a modicum of interest on the topic of nuclear armament/disarmament before 9/11 -- though it's not like I had much choice, because I have family members who enjoy debating defense policy over dinner, and have for decades. Hours of fun for the entire family, so to speak.

So I've been following the debates on deterrance with interest. And I think there are some major errors being made by people whose understanding of the theory of deterrance is somewhat rudimentary. And no, I'm not naming names, because frankly, I've gotten enough angry e-mail about the Care Bears post. Memo: it's a joke. Not everything I say is meant as a serious commentary on geopolitical affairs. Anyone who read that post, and the comments, and did not laugh out loud at the commenter who suggested leading the charge with the My Little Pony cavalry, needs to turn off the computer and get out more.

Anyway, there are some misconceptions that I think some of my emailers/commenters/other bloggers are falling into. Call me a straw man constructer if you like; thankfully, I don't get paid for this. Unless you hit the tip jar, of course, and don't you think it's really about time you gave a little something back to the blogosphere? But I digress.

First of all, nuclear deterrance is not a simple matter of overwhelming force in response to threat, as some people seem to believe. I'm seeing a lot of people who seem to view deterrance against the Soviet Union, or Iraq, as a "I'll play nice, but if you smack me, I'll smack you harder" scenario. That's a very simple game theory construction known as "Tit-For-Tat", and that is absolutely not what deterrance is based on. If it had been, we'd all be little piles of radioactive waste by now. Tit for tat is actually a very good structure for many kinds of multi-move games, but in a nuclear scenario, it's very bad, because the step-up from the preceding action to a nuclear response is likely to be geometric, rather than arithmetic. Arithmetic escalation of response is what makes tit-for-tat work; in geometric escalation, which it's hard to avoid with nukes, things go kablooie too quick to develop a sustainable equilibrium. The Soviet Union invades West Berlin; we use a nuke; they hurl all their nukes at us; we hurl all ours at them. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Instead, the architects of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) did something similar to what the Babylonian rabbis did in interpreting the Torah.

Did she go off her meds again? I hear you cry. No, but we are playing with the mgs until the tremors stop, thanks for asking.

No, seriously: in the interpretation of Jewish Law, there is a concept known as "building a wall around the Torah". Take, for example, the refusal to eat meat and dairy products together. The original prohibition that this is drawn from is "thou shalt not boil the kid in the milk of its mother". It's a pretty long way from there to "thou shalt not eat a cheeseburger, nay, nor even eat meat off a plate on which a slice of cheese has lain". You get there in successive steps: modern agriculture being what it is, there is a slight chance that the cream you are using in that Blanchette de Veau came from the cow that gave birth to the veal calf. Therefore, you shouldn't use it. You also shouldn't cook in a pot that has had milk in it, because some of the milk might linger in the pot, and you would be in violation of the commandment. Nor should you put cheese on a burger, because some of the milk in the cheese might get very hot and boil. . . next thing you know, you've got separate kitchens for meat and dairy. While a slapdash interpreter might have drawn the commandment very narrowly -- "It's okay as long as I don't deliberately boil the kid in the milk of its mother" -- the rabbis who defined the scope of modern Orthodoxy interpreted it very broadly, so that there was no chance of even unknowingly violating the commandment. And they ruled that you were as much in violation of the commandment if you ate a McDonalds cheeseburger as you would have been if you'd gone out and gotten milk from your cow so you could boil its calf for lunch. Thus they ensured that no one was tempted to slip.

Fascinating, you're saying, and what does this have to do with deterrance?

Well, the architects of MAD built a similar wall around nuclear use. They spelled out very clearly what actions, such as an invasion of West Berlin, would trigger overwhelming nuclear response. It was important that these actions were not themselves nuclear. Why? Because the logical response to an invasion of Berlin was not overwhelming nuclear force; it was some variation on conventional force, possibly backed up later with tactical nukes. But it was precisely that sort of escalation that the architects wanted to avoid -- inadvertently crossing a line in the sand where your opponent felt that it was necessary to make a limited nuclear response. Because once we'd had nukes used on our troops or cities in a limited fashion, the likely response, for a variety of reasons, would be all-out nuclear attack. And there goes the neighborhood.

MAD, frightening as it may seem, made nuclear use extremely unlikely, not merely because it threatened overwhelming response, but because it ensured that we never got into a pattern of escalation. It was not simply the threat, in other words; it was that any action that was likely to be the first step in an escalating conflict was itself chopped off by the threat of overwhelming force. Just as the rabbis drew the rules so widely that there was basically no possibility of getting into a situation where you were unknowingly boiling the kid in its mothers milk by saying that risking doing so was the same as actually doing so, the architects of MAD made sure that there was no possibility of getting into a situation where one side unknowingly escalated the conflict to the nuclear stage by declaring that the penalty for putting yourself at risk of doing so was the same as that for exploding a nuke. And now a light dawns, and you decide that maybe Jane isn't crazy, but just weird.

Now, what does that have to do with Iraq?

Well, this: we're not that committed to the Middle East. The equivalent to our Cold War deterrance strategy would be telling Saddaam that if he invaded his neighbors, we'd turn Iraq into glass. And that isn't true. The threat simply isn't credible. Israel might be able to credibly sustain a nuclear deterrance policy with Iraq, except that we complicate things. There are at least two nations that have the ability to tell Israel "If you nuke Iraq, we will utterly destroy you" -- us and Russia. (China may; I don't know what the range on their nuclear capability is. The other nuclear nations would not, as far as I can tell, be part of the equation). Not that we necessarily would. But it's not crystal clear that we necessarily wouldn't, either. So the combination of clear signalling, credible threat, blocked off escalation potential, and overwhelming, instant, certain response that sustained nuclear deterrance in the Soviet-American arms race cannot be re-created with a nuclear Iraq, as some people seem to believe. We almost got into a war with Russia, as it was; any scenario in which Saddaam has nukes will be much, much less stable.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So I'm reading through this

So I'm reading through this Washington Post article on cheating. And I'm horrified, because it says one survey showed that 3/4 of high school students cheat, which blows me away. I've never cheated on anything, as far as I can recall, and if my friends did, they didn't share it with me. How did we get to the point where this is possible? Students in my high school who were caught cheating were suspended or expelled -- and the reason for the disciplinary action showed up on your transcript. And the teachers knew who was cheating, because they had us for an hour and a half every day. Copious in-class writing assignments meant that students who tried to pass off someone else's work as theirs ran a high risk of the teacher picking out the ringer.

But that's not the point. As I was reading, I came across this truly bizarre phrase:

Even if students are caught, the consequences can be negligible. At some colleges, students who plagiarize are expelled. But a high school student caught plagiarizing may just get a zero for that particular assignment. Often, he or she will be given a chance to make it up for at least partial credit. And there's no mention of it on the all-important transcript that gets sent to colleges. At Bardstown High School in Kentucky last year, 118 seniors were caught copying and pasting from the Internet. Sometimes entire short stories were lifted. The punishment? One essay on the evils of plagiarism. No National Honor Society memberships were pulled, and one of those caught cheating remained the class valedictorian.

Plagiarism--a derivative of the Latin word for kidnapping--literally means to steal someone else's words or ideas and take credit for them. According to the rules of scholarship, if you borrow someone else's words, you put them in quotation marks. If you use someone else's idea, you acknowledge it in your essay or in a footnote, even if it came from the revisionist southern-partisan.com.

What does this mean? Are there students who believe it's okay to plagiarize as long as their source is a much-reviled regionalist journal? Do the "rules of scholarship" refer specifically to Southern Partisan magazine, or is it included in a larger category of Magazines You Might Have Thought You Don't Have to Footnote Because They're On the Wrong Side of History? And is The Nation on that list? Is the cheating epidemic we're currently undergoing centered around a failure to accurately identify the sources of potentially revisionist material? Do America's students not know how to correctly cite internet references containing hyphens?

There's no other reference to Southern Partisan in the article. It's just a random aside, appearing from nowhere, referring to nothing, making no sense.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Titter. Chuckle. Snort. Is there

Titter. Chuckle. Snort. Is there anything in the entire world more fun than a barrel of WTO protesters?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So why did Al Gore

So why did Al Gore make that speech last Thursday, which most commentators, conservative and liberal, seem to agree put the Dems between a rock and a hard place? Well, I think it's because he thinks -- correctly -- that his only hope of getting the nomination again is to run to the left.

Moderate Democrats aren't going to nominate him again; they're interested in getting power for the Democrats so that they can enact a platform only modestly different from what would be enacted under the Republicans. They aren't going to take a risk on a man who lost the Clinton legacy to Shrub; they're going to nominate someone fresh, like John Edwards. In this case, better the devil you don't know than the loser you know all too well.

It's the party faithful, who would have felt nearly as hurt by the events in Florida if Dilbert had been the party nominee, to whom Al Gore must look. They're considerably to the left of the moderates who formed his base last time. His other hope is capturing the primary votes of the dyed-in-the-wool liberals, the ones who believe that the Republicans not only lied, cheated, and stole to win the election, but also no doubt sacrificed innocent Democratic babies to their fiery god. They're angry about Florida, angry at the party leadership because we don't have national health care yet, and welfare reform is still here, and the state hasn't withered away in time for true Communism to arrive before Friends is on. And they're madder than a wet hen about the war. They're also in favor of candidates that have the same kind of broad, national appeal as Walter Mondale, but no matter; for Al Gore, it's them or nothing.

So he's going on the attack. Consistency? It doesn't matter whether he's consistent. His potential supporters don't care whether he believes what he's saying; what they care is that he goes on the record saying it. Al Gore is trying to build a Reagan-style revolution, getting grassroots support to wrest control of the party from the moderates who are setting policy now.

I can kind of see where he's coming from. The moderate Republicans of Reagan's era were substantively indistinguishable from the Democrats; it was to Nixon we looked for price controls, massive expansion of federal entitlements, and foolhardy industrial policies. I can see how he tells himself that with the moderate Democratic leadership it's exactly the same thing now.

Except. Except that Reagan was selling his platform on low taxes, something almost everyone's in favor of; and regardless of what you think of his platform, he actually had one. Al Gore's speech is full of vague platitudes rather than specific proposals. And he's staking his candidacy on criticizing a highly popular president on the subject of a highly popular war. It may get him the nomination, though I doubt it, but it will certainly cost him the election. Not to mention drive another nail into the coffin of the left wing of the Democratic party. Although to be fair, I can see how another run could unify the party like never before -- in their dislike of the man who lost them the presidency twice.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the Day: Every

Question of the Day:

Every so often I come across a historical issue which I'd thoroughly forgotten about, and rediscover, with surprise, some averted disaster. Thus did I read about FDR's attempt to pack the Supreme Court, and realize what a truly frightening thing this was. How did the Democrats make a hero of a man who basically attempted to gut the constitution in order to expand his power far beyond what the framers intended, or what he was elected for? And what would have happened if he had succeeded? Is my horror unjustified?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I remember how excited I

I remember how excited I was when I read in Time magazine or some such about the carbon-emissions-free future we could all enjoy just by switching our energy source to hydrogen fuel cells. And I remember how bone-crushingly stupid I felt when an engineer I know who enjoys travel, long walks on the beach, and making non-engineers feel bone-crushingly stupid, pointed out two things that I should have known:

1) Hydrogen is not lying around on the ground here on the planet Earth. It has to be produced. Producing this requires energy from another source. In our country, with our fear of nuclear, and our hydro supply that's far exceeded by our demand, that source is -- coal or oil.

2) Hydrogen fuel cells are widely touted as clean because all they emit is "harmless water vapor". The single largest greenhouse gas is. . . you guessed it, harmless water vapor.

Hydrogen fuel cells might help improve our efficiency a little bit, because the big turbines they use to generate the electricity to make the hydrogen are much more efficient than the internal combustion engine that powers your car. But not that much, because most of the energy from burning oil is lost as heat. . . and then more is lost in transmission to the factory. . . and more is lost in turning water or methane into hydrogen. . . and more is lost in turning the hydrogen back into water and energy. So the net effect isn't very large, the Second Law of Thermodynamics being what it is.

So here's my question: I mentioned fuel cells to one engineer, who instantly set me straight. How come none of the reporters writing breathless articles about hydrogen power can do the same?

(Link via Dave Tepper)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

This one's for all of

This one's for all of us who couldn't stay on Atkins.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the Day: What

Question of the Day: What is the evolutionary purpose of crying? Not tears, which obviously clear out the eyes, but why do we cry when we're sad? As far as I know, no other species does this.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Looks like Jessica Lange has

Looks like Jessica Lange has confused being famous with being taken seriously on matters of importance. John and Antonio have the scoop.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A reader sends a modest

A reader sends a modest proposal for Iraq:

Where are the Care Bears (tm) when we need them? Certainly the awesome power of the "Care Bear Stare" would melt even nasty Saddam's heart and turn those Al-Queda frowns upside down! I say we send a message to Care-a-lot Land and summon our fuzzy friends!

Daring? Unique? Thinking-outside-the-box? You betcha! Sure, those Mr. Macho U.S. Marines might sneer, as might the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Coast Guard, my family, and most of my co-workers. Who cares? What do they know?

Just look at all the advantages of a Care Bear-based solution:

1) Bears clad from head to toe in soft fur -- will not offend traditional Middle East sensibilities.

2) Collecting Care Bear products a rewarding hobby to fill the void caused by loss of terrorist activities.

3) Care Bears compatible with all NATO aircraft weapons mounts.

4) No one will want to be a suicide bomber when there is a visit from Birthday Bear (tm) coming up!

5) Share Bear (tm) might get those Arabs to lower the oil prices a bit.

6) Care Bears are environmentally friendly.

7) "Evil Bert" indicates that Middle Eastern Cultures open to influence by soft, fuzzy dolls.

8) Bear meat probably not Halal, preventing unfortunate misunderstandings on purpose of Care Bear deployment. (N.B.: probably best if Gentle Heart Lamb (tm) stays home)

I am disappointed with the administration for not even considering the possibility of deploying a Care Bear-based solution to the crisis. Such irresponsibility is obviously due to nasty conservatives led by Professor Cold-Heart's twin with a Texas accent.

I am even more unhappy (not mad, just very, very, very hurt) with the liberal anti-war left for ignoring the Care Bears -- the Care Bear worldview seems of a piece with the liberal worldview. An added plus -- the Care Bear Stare would soften up that Mean Republican Administration (tm)!

I look forward to you incisive commentary and keen analysis of this woefully neglected issue.

See guys, that's the kind of novel, thoughtful solution we need more of in this world. Remember -- sharing means caring.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Jesse Walker doesn't like the

Jesse Walker doesn't like the West Wing. Neither do I.

Not because it's left wing. So is pretty much every show on television, and I do watch the idiot box occasionally, and enjoy it. It's a pleasant addition to my needlepointing.

Walker hates the writing, specifically the dialogue. I hate the plot. Or perhaps a better word is the style: Sermon With A Cast.

The West Wing is Touched By An Angel for the political class. Sorkin takes the most burning issues of our day and reduces them to the kind of saccharin morals we spoon-feed fourth graders in their social studies texts. "Killing is bad." "Racism is bad." "People need help sometimes, especially if they vote Democratic." What grates on me is that Sorkin just can't bear to ever, ever give his ideological opponents a good argument, lest The Proles be misled into thinking their are actually two sides to an issue, and thus risk making a bad decision at the polls next year. Okay, I already read the Democratic position papers. The words don't suddenly vibrate with new meaning because they issue from the mouth of Rob Lowe.

The first episode I ever saw is emblematic: Bartlett takes on a woman who is clearly a doppelganger for Dr. Laura. In this scene, he just blows her away by citing all sorts of laws from Deuteronomy about various ritual sacrifices and such, which reduces her to incoherence as she attempts to explain why the laws on homosexuality apply, but the laws on sacrificing two white doves at the temple do not.

Nowhere does Sorkin reveal his native prejudices more clearly. I have heard such hilarious questioning from any number of liberals in my time, always posed to other people who are equally ignorant about any theology more complicated than the kind that comes in little books that come pre-packaged with crystals and incense sticks. The Jews have been debating these sorts of things for 5,000. The Catholics have been at it for 2,000. The fundamentalists have been giving it a good go for at least several hundred. Yet Sorkin & friends, to whom it would never actually occur to, y'know, ask someone, think that they have discovered a whole new set of questions that those ignorant rubes with the bibles were too filled with hate to even think of. Memo to Aaron: If a president had ever, ever directed that sort of inquisition to an Orthodox Jew in front of the press, what we would have seen was not His Triumphant Victory over the Narrowminded Religious Zealots, but the Presidential Ass Getting Handed to The President On a Plate, as she whipped out the eight zillion pages of talmudic debate concerning the very issues he'd brought up. But, of course, we don't actually want the opposition to be people; only cartoon villains can play opposite Superman.

Contrast this with Law and Order, which breaks liberal, but always, always makes sure that both sides have good arguments to make. Ultimately, conflicts don't always get resolved; sometimes, you have to make a judgement call between two competing values, and get an answer that truly satisfies no one. There's good reason it's the longest-running show on television.

But Gawd, it wouldn't be any less tiresome if it were libertarian. Less realistic, and there would be, no doubt, funny Pot Smoking in the Lincoln Bedroom scenes to leaven the dullness. But if it were libertarian, and still took the same smugly ignorant approach to opposing arguments, you'd find me in my living room hurling my needlepoint scissors at the television and screaming "Not all opponents of drug legalization are evil hypocrites, you evil hypocrites!"

But I digress.

It wouldn't be that hard to do a really good, still left-leaning show; get some Republicans, intelligent ones, and have them write the dialogue for the opposition. Let the opposition win once in a while. Any senior Creative Writing major ought to be able to tell you that any book where the hero never loses quickly gets tiresome.

But you know how those fundamentalists are. Can't risk letting anyone think for themselves; after all, they might get the wrong answer.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

That reminds me, a propos

That reminds me, a propos of absolutely nothing, that when the Republicans took the House in '94, apparently that gave the residents of the previous speaker's district quite a shock. Someone was telling me at dinner that a poll revealed that a majority of the people in his district thought that whoever they elected automatically because Speaker of the House. I don't know if it's true -- but I find it frightening that I don't have any difficulty at all believing that it could be true.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So now Daschle's strategy becomes

So now Daschle's strategy becomes more apparent: he's trying to delay the vote on the war.

I don't think he thought this through. First of all, he made it into a Democrat/Republican issue more explicitly than it already was. Bush said "some in the Senate care more about politics than national security", with nary a word about Democrats; Tom Daschle told the nation that it was the Democrats who were obstructing Bush, and gave a platform to remarks that otherwise, almost no one would have heard.

Now, I think that the President's remarks went too far. And I understand why Daschle was hopping mad. But the speech he made on the Senate floor was hasty and not one of his finer rhetorical moments, and he's certainly not helping himself by saying "Well, now I don't know if we can vote on this until Bush has done a full grovel," that being what he's been telling the network shows. I don't think that "sulky girlfriend" is the image that the Democratic national leadership wants to portray heading into the election.

The Democrats, it seems to me, are doing exactly what the Republicans did under Clinton. They simply cannot learn to cut their losses, abandon issues they can't win, and get on with it. I understand that Daschle is in a tough place -- Wellstone may very well lose his seat if the war comes up for a vote. I admire Wellstone's honor, and I understand what a tough spot that puts the leadership of the Democratic Party in. But hurling yourself again and again against the rampart of a president's popularity ratings, when each sortie decimates your ranks and has no visible effect on the fortress you're attacking, isn't brave. It's foolish.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The administration is saying they

The administration is saying they have proof that Iraq has links to Al Qaeda.

More and more, I'm beginning to believe that the administration is adopting a policy of letting opponents raise arguments against an action, letting them wear the argument out in the press, and then calmly releasing information that demolishes it. Each new argument thus ultimately raises the credibility of the Administration, and lowers that of its opponents. If I'm right, it's an absolutely masterly control of information, and the discipline is impressive. They don't have the Clinton administration's all-out crisis response, but they have their own strengths.

But if this is the case, why haven't said opponents taken notice?

Update God, how fast do y'all type? I no sooner post than some speed reader flies to his email account to correct me. Or try to. When will y'all learn that I am always, always right?

Correspondant Brian emails to say that he doesn't think the ties in the article are that strong. But that's not the point. The anti-war press, and some bloggers I could name, have been stating that (I'm paraphrasing): "The administration is trying to gin up support for the war with outrageous lies, like it's flimsy attempt to connect Al Qaeda to Saddaam when there is no evidence that there is any connection."

The Clinton spin machine would have been all over this like white on rice. Probably they would have demolished it, but it wouldn't have gotten a lot of press, and so righties (their presumed opposition) would be repeating the trope long after it had been discredited, while party faithful wearily dragged out the evidence with each new wing-nut.

The Bush administration, on the other hand, let it grow until it had wide currency. And now when the myth is popped, it makes a big noise that everyone notices, and not incidentally, tarnishes the reputation of everyone who said it.

Each strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. But I confess to being amazed at how politically shrewd Bush has turned out to be. I didn't expect it.

(Incidentally, anyone who defended Clinton, who then complains about Bush's media management, is off my Christmas card list. I mean it. There's ridiculous, and then there's moronic.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Clash of civilizations? This fellow

Clash of civilizations? This fellow makes a good argument.

The article was written in 1999, but this passage is utterly chilling:

The conflict between the West and the Confucian-Islamic states focuses largely, although not exclusively, on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missiles and other sophisticated means for delivering them, and the guidance, intelligence and other electronic capabilities for achieving that goal. The West promotes nonproliferation as a universal norm and nonproliferation treaties and inspections as means of realizing that norm. It also threatens a variety of sanctions against those who promote the spread of sophisticated weapons and proposes some benefits for those who do not. The attention of the West focuses, naturally, on nations that are actually or potentially hostile to the West.

The non-Western nations, on the other hand, assert their right to acquire and to deploy whatever weapons they think necessary for their security. They also have absorbed, to the full, the truth of the response of the Indian defense minister when asked what lesson he learned from the Gulf War: "Don't fight the United States unless you have nuclear weapons." Nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and missiles are viewed, probably erroneously, as the potential equalizer of superior Western conventional power. China, of course, already has nuclear weapons; Pakistan and India have the capability to deploy them. North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Algeria appear to be attempting to acquire them. A top Iranian official has declared that all Muslim states should acquire nuclear weapons, and in 1988 the president of Iran reportedly issued a directive calling for development of "offensive and defensive chemical, biological and radiological weapons."

Yes, that's what the Middle East needs -- nukes.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Steven Den Beste has a

Steven Den Beste has a post on military spending in Europe should the US pull out. He disagrees with me that German spending would rise (and since he spends a lot more time thinking about military things than I do, you should weight this accordingly). Most interesting, however, is the point he makes that much-vaunted European diplomatic efforts are becoming less effective as they lose the stick that went along with the carrot.

I've argued time and time again that both are necessary to negotiation; you may only pull one or the other out of the bag, but you need to have 'em both there. Den Beste makes a point I knew unconsciously, but not consciously: that we provided Europe's threat until the mid-nineties, and that as our interests diverged, their foreign policy has become less effective, because they couldn't back up their efforts with any sort of force projection. As he says, why is Europe pretty much irrelevant in the Middle East? Because we can put soldiers on the ground, and they can't.

(Before you send me the angry emails, think about it: why is the US involved in peacemaking in Israel and Northern Ireland, to name two places, when Europe is much closer to both countries? Recent successful European diplomacy efforts I can think of are almost solely centered around either events right in their back yard, which used American force to back up their efforts, or former colonies where they use cash to clean up the mess they left.)

In many ways it becomes more obvious that Europe needs military force of its own. Not that I think this will be enduring fun for America; it's not fun having more players with competing interests to deal with. But ultimately, I think, as Den Beste speculates, that it will make them better friends to us, and us to them.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Group Captain Mandrake has the

Group Captain Mandrake has the German point of view on our current tiff from an ardent SDP supporter.

Which brings up some of the emails I've gotten.

People have accused me of hypocritical moralism about the German elections. Listen, if they think the war in Iraq is immoral, and they can't support it, well then, they shouldn't support it. They're a sovereign nation.

But that's not what my interlocutors, particularly the German ones, really want. What they really want is for there to be no costs for refusing to support it.

Allies support each other unconditionally. At the very least, they do what Canada has done and shut up. They do not announce to the public, without consulting or even notifying their allies, that they will block assets to allied military assets in their country. They particularly do not do this for the purposes of grandstanding, when no one has requested the use of those assets.

They do not allow their ministers to compare the heads of allied states to Hitler.

We now know that we cannot trust Germany the way you trust a real ally. They made their choice; they don't want to be part of an American (Anglosphere?) bloc. That's their perfect right. But then you don't get the goodies that come from being part of the American bloc. If Germany wants to be an independant military power, it has to actually do so. We are not going to continuing paying for them to dress up and pretend.

We can argue about who made the split necessary, but ultimately it's irrelevant. The split is now there. Den Beste casts it in terms of honor, but I think of it in terms of trust. We don't trust Germany any more. Her leaders violated our trust. We can't go back to feeling the way we did before, even if we wanted to. The Germans have sent emails saying they feel the same way -- well, I'm sorry about that. But if that's really the case, you shouldn't want to be allied with us.

The funniest letters came from a slightly nutty French guy screaming that I couldn't want Germany to re-arm. The same thing applies. You felt big and powerful when you kicked the US out of the bases in your country. You wanted to stand on your own two feet, without the burden of supporting the US. Well, when push comes to shove, is the US going to protect you from a re-armed Germany? Maybe. Maybe not. Independance has costs as well as benefits.

(Not that I think Germany re-armed is Hitler III. But judging from my email, a lot of French people do.)

The world changed on September 11th for us. Germans who are saying that they're only reacting as they must should remember that we are too. I'm deeply saddened to see our relationship hurt, and I'm worried by what's happening to the world. But I can't turn back the clock, and I won't feel guilty about it. Nor do I want Germans to feel guilty about it. But I don't have much sympathy when they complain that it's really all our fault either.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day: How

Question of the day: How do you know that deterrence is working on Iraq?

I mean, it might be working in the sense that, after you jump out a 50 story window, flapping your arms works -- until you hit the ground. If he's two years away from getting a bomb, and we don't substantially change what we're doing, is that working? Will it still be "working" in two years, when he gets the bomb? And if you are sure that he does not already have nukes, why are you so sure that after he gets them, the military status quo will prevail? It's not like it did when the Soviets or the Chinese or the Israelis acquired them.

Yesterday's question has been answered, somewhat. Some people have pointed out that we will be redeploying special forces from Afghanistan, specificially, the 10th mountain, airborne assets, and special forces. Will all of these go, or some of them? Is that a foregone conclusion, or a guess?

Least satisfying were those who responded with vague quotations about needing to build up after the effort expended in Iraq. Yes, that's true, but that doesn't answer my question. The things we expended in Afghanistan that we have to rebuild, like missiles and cluster bombs, are not necessarily things that we will be using in Afghanistan going forward.

Also, Afghanistan is not synonymous with Al Qaeda. There are multiple problems in Iraq, of which Al-Qaeda/the Taliban are only one. And more and more of our victories against Al Qaeda are coming from degrading their presence in other countries, notably Pakistan, but also Western Europe and here.

I guess what I was trying to figure out was whether it is actually not possible to simultaneously sustain both operations at high efficiency levels, or if it simply more difficult/expensive. That question still hasn't been answered, although I presume the people who sent me detailed information on what units might be redeployed could answer it, if they chose.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

VodkaPundit for President! So far

VodkaPundit for President!

So far the Blogosphere nominees include Lawrence Simon and Our Fearless Leader. Maybe we should have a blogosphere debate in which the Blog party chooses it's candidate based on photogeneity and ability to deliver a speech without staring fixedly at the teleprompter.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

You knew I wouldn't be

You knew I wouldn't be able to resist weighing in on tehe Burqa, didn't you?

Aziz Poonwalla, originally picking up on my post about our ability to culturally colonize Islam, is arguing that the Burka and the Bikini are both emblems of male control over women. I can see where he's coming from, though I don't agree with it entirely.

For one thing, the amount of clothing that a culture chooses to believe is necessary for modesty is fairly arbitrary. Mohammed may have been shocked by the display of bare breasts in some of the tribes he encountered, but it's a sure thing that if it really was common, the men didn't think of it as particularly sexy. Ho, hum, breasts. No, really, I'm serious. The only reason y'all are titillated by cleavage now is that it's usually covered. I'm not saying that men wouldn't be interested in them, but if they weren't covered, they wouldn't find uncovered breasts any sexier than you find uncovered ankles.

Uncovered ankles? I'm equating breasts to ankles? Well, your Victorian ancestors were obessed with them. They had a lot better chance of getting a look at a lady's cleavage than they did at her bare ankles. Paens were written to the glimpse of ankle. Yet I bet you don't even know what your girlfriends ankles look like, unless she's sprained one recently. Fat? Thin? Bony? Your Great-Grandfather would have known.

Bikinis are sexual because they uncover what is normally covered. ANd in this climate, a good thing, too.

What Aziz is arguing for is, in my opinion, a well meaning but futile attempt to take sex out of male-female relations. I had an interesting conversation with Norah Vincent a little while ago on a similar topic: the way that NOW and other feminist groups have made enemies of the womb. Reproduction is inherently unfair, and there's nothing that can be done to make it fair . . . except giving women the same right to walk away that men have. Doing this requires them to pretend that these are equivalent activities; to argue that failing to take care of a child is morally the same as preventing it from living. In fact, NARAL and NOW, in the ultimate reductio ad absurdum, have elevated the latter choice over the former, approving abortion but disapproving guys who excercise their "right to choose" not to be a father. They've staked out some extremely precarious moral and political ground.

Aziz is, probably without knowing it, endorsing another brand of feminism, the "difference feminists". Those are the folks who set up the speech codes and sexual harassment laws in a futile attempt to excise every trace of sex from all but the narrowest spheres of human life. Can't be done. All the Burqa, or a speech code does, is bottle in a potent force that then explodes in dangerous and unforeseen ways wherever it finds a weak spot. The more you cover up, the more time men are going to devote to trying to figure out what's underneath all that fabric.

Sex is a powerfully disruptive force, and I don't think that any society can survive long without finding ways to control both sex, and its consequences. But I don't think that you can argue that there is some platonically ideal way to do so; that the set of standards you've stumbled upon is best. I certainly don't think that you can argue that you've managed to remove it entirely.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The only problem with Doug

The only problem with Doug Turnbull is that he doesn't post often enough. Well, here's an excellent piece deconstructing another simplistic type of anti-war argument.

Incidentally, Jim Henley is ribbing me about the "simplistic terms of a morality play" line in this post. Well, I never gloried in being simplistic as some Republicans did, but I also think that we're referring to two different things. A situation may be complex, and it may require sophisticated analysis, but that doesn't imply that the answer is also complex. In this case, I think it is valuable to make complex analysis, but that doesn't mean we're going to get a sophisticated answer. Ultimately, we're going to do one of three fairly simple things:

We're going to invade, or institute an inspections regime so thorough that it will constitute a military invasion.

We're going to stay with variations on the status quo: ineffective inspections, limited by the most of the same qualifications that made them ineffective last round, and sanctions.

We're going to pull back to the kind of mild interference-running we use on Iran.

Opponents will say I'm sneaky to load working inspections in there with the invasion. Well, right now that's where the UN is putting them -- off the table, to be achieved only if we bully them into it. And I've written before that a regime that would really work would involve thousands and thousands of soldiers there to support massive simultaneous inspection, and prevent the shell games and the petty degrading of our capabilities that Saddaam used so successfully last time around. And that many troops in-country will render Saddaam unable to engage in the kind of brutal repression of his people that keeps him in power. Which means he's not going to go for it. So in my mind, it's in that group. But fine, take it out; make it four. None of these are complex solutions. They are, basically: use overwhelming force to get what we want; do nothing; or give up. The kind of elegant diplomatic solutions we all wish would solve this problem only work when there are complex baskets of things that the various parties want. We want, basically, one thing: Saddaam never, ever gets WMD. This is inconsistent with Saddaam's goals, which are: continue breathing, stay in power, increase that power. He sees WMD as crucial to at least 2 of those goals. There's no horse-trading, no brilliant orchestration of competing interests to reveal a previously unthought of solution, that is going to reconcile those sets of goals. I mean, I guess we could offer to invade Iran for him if he gives up his WMD, but isn't that Sending the Wrong Message to the Children?

Vedrine was complaining that the US was seeking simplistic answers. My problem with the anti-war crowd isn't that their answers are simple; it's that their arguments are.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Excellent article by William Saletan

Excellent article by William Saletan on the differing views of human nature that animate Bush's foreign policy vs. Gore's:

The party of good will, led by Gore, believes that the behavior of foreign peoples and governments toward the United States is driven by whether they like us. If we're nice to them, they'll be nice to us. If we're mean to them, they'll be mean to us. "It is impossible to succeed against terrorism unless we have secured the continuing, sustained cooperation of many nations," Gore asserted. By angering these nations, he argued, a unilateral American attack on Iraq would jeopardize that cooperation.

Believers in good will tend to talk about foreign peoples and leaders the way you talk about friends, colleagues, or neighbors. Other nations will be friendly to us if we treat them as "equals," said Gore, but Bush treats them with "disdain." Instead of being "calmed down," they're suffering "apprehensions" about us. As Gore sees it, after Sept. 11, 2001, "We had an enormous reservoir of good will and sympathy and shared resolve all over the world. That has been squandered in a year's time and replaced with great anxiety" about American adventurism. "Look at the entire German election campaign," said Gore. "It revealed a profound and troubling change in the attitude of the German electorate toward the United States."

The party of fear, led by Bush, takes a different view. It believes that the behavior of foreign peoples and governments toward the United States is driven, as President Reagan put it, not by whether they like us, but by whether they respect us. Terrorists don't think the way your friends or colleagues do. They're "a bunch of killers," Bush declared Monday. As for our allies and potential allies, they respond more to forcefulness than to pleading. Lead, and they'll follow. Punish an upstart, and they'll fall in line. "Either you're with us or you're with the enemy," said Bush. It's "necessary to send a message to friend and foe alike that we're plenty tough, if you rouse this country." The Germans don't like us? Screw 'em. A few good slaps, and they'll come around.

I don't know if I buy the idea that this is actually what's animating their foreign policy, though I think the fundamental distinction is sound. Bush obviously draws starker rhetorical lines than he does in practice. And while I think that the Clinton administration was, disastrously, more interested in building up goodwill with Europe than in deterring nations who took restraint and amity as a sign of weakness, they did after all send troops a number of places. But rhetorically, this is certainly where they've positioned themselves.

So why do I think that Bush's view is the nearer correct?

I don't, globally. I don't think that we need to invade China to gain advantage in the region; we'll do far better trading with them. I don't think we need to arm up in Europe to ensure that the Belgian Menace is contained. But I do think that in the case of Iraq, the stick is more appropriate than the carrot. Why?

The kind of regime we're dealing with. It isn't that it's a dictatorship; so is China, or near enough. It isn't even that he's crazy; so are half the leaders in teh world, so far as I can tell, and we all seem to get by. It's that on international terms, the carrot must be predicated on an exchange of value. We give countries aid because we hope it will make them rich and they'll invent or produce stuff we want, and we'll all get richer selling stuff to each other. We trade with countries because it makes us both better off. We enter into alliances because they make both nations more secure.

Iraq has nothing to offer. Oil, of course. But the oil doesn't really seem to improve things in the Middle East. And the money we give him to buy oil buys the arms with which he threatens his neighbors, and the bounties he pays the families of suicide bombers.

Aid might alleviate some poverty at the margins, but only at the expense of sending an immense amount of money into Saddaam's personal coffers. Giving aid to dictators like him is a net destruction of value.

He might, in exchange, give up his territorial and munitions ambitions. But he isn't interested in that sort of exchange. He's interested in the sort of exchange where we give him stuff, and he pretends to give up his nasties until we get tired of listening to France whine.

The Iraqi economy is not so constituted as to develop the kind of mutual ties with the rest of the world that foster the goodwill approach. When they trade with us, it doesn't make them a prosperous nation with a broad middle class; it makes them Zimbabwe with mineral deposits. It doesn't have to be this way; there's nothing intrinsic to the Arab soul that makes this so. But it is this way currently, and until we get rid of the corrupt system that suppresses economic development, there is no way to develop the economic interdependance that makes military threat less necessary.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can someone please explain to

Can someone please explain to me what this argument that the war in Iraq will distract us from Al Qaeda is supposed to mean? What resources are we using for the hunt for Al Qaeda that will be diverted to Iraq?

And how come 90% of the people I see making this argument were arguing a year ago that we shouldn't go after Al Qaeda, at least not in any way that would actually threaten the ongoing health of OBL et. al.?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Consider my mind boggled.

Consider my mind boggled.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why we shouldn't leave Saddaam

Why we shouldn't leave Saddaam in place, Part Nine Zillion.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I've been having an ongoing

I've been having an ongoing conversation for the past couple of weeks that started in the Philadelphia Art Museum. The initial exchange was between a friend of mine, who grew up in Soviet Ukraine, about American morality.

"Americans are too black and white about everything", she said. "If you grow up in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, you see shades of gray." She was talking about cheating the government, pulling small fast ones on corporations, that sort of thing. Americans are too rigid about their ethics, was the upshot; it makes them dangerously inflexible.

And she's right. We are hyper-rigid about our ethics. But I admire the hyper-rigidity. My answer to her was that, while I am not under the impression that I could have sustained an American style ethics system under, say, Soviet Russia, nonetheless, I think it is superior to the system in use in most of the world, which I would sum up as: one set of morals for "us" (family, friends) and another set of morals for "them".

Now, of course, America does not practice this ideal perfectly. But in other parts of the world, it's not even an ideal. There are large groups of people who do not consider it "wrong" in a moral sense to kill or cheat people outside the clan. It may have unpleasant repercussions, but it's not immoral. I, on the other hand, was marched five blocks back to the store I stole the tootsie roll from to hand it back to the merchant with a tearful apology. And I know I'm not the only one this happened to.

Americans, as a group, embrace the ideal that there is one contiguous set of morals for everyone. It's not okay to steal from your employer, not even to give it to your cousin who really needs it. It's not okay to attack, rape or kill people even if they're not related to you. These things do happen, but they're not widely accepted as the norm. That's huge. That's what makes America work.

Really, a remarkable number of people don't cheat on their taxes, steal when they can, fiddle their expense reports, divide themselves into ethnic interest groups, or violate, in a hundred different ways, the trust our society places in them, which in other countries is available only to family members. It's an idea that's unique, I think, to Western Europe, and I think that the Puritannical values, for which we're everywhere derided, are it's purest form. And I think that that is what makes America so successful. This is what Ralph Peters meant when he said that the clan or extended family as the basic social/political unit is the kiss of death to becoming an economic superstar. A clear set of values, and the notion that those values apply to everyone, is a key part of the "Operating System" on which capitalism has to be installed.

But what about Asia, I was asked. Well, we eradicated those notions in Japan, and until recently, Britain controlled the operating environment in Hong Kong. And lo, Japan and Hong Kong are the only countries with high rates of Total Factor Productivity growth. I'll explain that concept another time; the important point is that while Japan
has massively increased the productivity of its inputs (labor and capital), other Asian "miracles" have dismal growth in this key indicator. They haven't increased the productivity of their resources; they've just raised the inputs, through extremely high rates of forced savings. As their economies mature, the return on investment will decline, and the miracle will start to look mighty soggy.

That's why the relativist morality of the sixties radicals was so destructive to the inner cities. Martin Luther King was the standard bearer of middle class blacks who wanted to live with dignity. He was standing against a racialism that hurt the interests of everyone who practiced it. After Malcolm X, however, it was Us against Them, and as usual, it was Us who got hurt. You do not build a stable middle-class environment when the leaders are telling everyone that it's okay to assault, batter, rob, or kill, as long as you do it to "them" -- and isn't that what Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are saying when they take the side of the thugs in their community against "The Man? Not that they invented this practice; my ancestors were pretty good at it themselves, and you'll note how long it took them to get out of the ghetto.

That sounds awfully paternalistic, doesn't it? Of course, it's a two way street, just as it was with the Irish; they closed in on themselves because the WASPs closed them out. But the sad thing is, it doesn't matter. You can't build a middle class society -- stable, orderly, decent, with a modicum of happiness thrown in for the majority of folks -- without those values. The Nation of Islam understands this; that's why they enforce those values within the larger community, which allows them to build a pretty high-functioning little economic community. That's why no amount of tax breaks will revitalize a high crime area; nor any amount of foreign aid build a capitalist miracle out of a society still mired in tribal wars.

So the next time someone tells you that Americans are too black and white, just remember to thank your lucky stars that it's so.

Update I've been accused of saying that blacks are immoral. No, no, no. That's not what I meant at all. I was speaking on the community level, to a breakdown of reciprocal morality. And I was speaking of the inner cities. I used Malcolm X and Martin Luther King because they're widely known; parallel processes occurred in all sorts of inner cities, including white areas. Blacks in the middle class behave pretty much like everyone else in the middle class. Poor whites in high-crime communities behave pretty much like everyone else in a high-crime area where community norm enforcement has broken down -- "Screw you, I want mine." The point about Malcom X was not that he was angry; it was that his separatist tendencies paved the way for the Black Panthers, MOVE, and other groups who, first of all, saw the poor and criminals as their target audience, and second of all, combined their ideology with the radical poverty ideology of the era that said it wasn't wrong to steal, or engage in violence, as long as it was against those richer than you, or those outside your race.

Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were born in that era. They make excuses for egregious black criminals -- but only those whose crimes are committed on whites. Sharpton not only comes within a hair's breadth of encouraging lynching, as he did with the stores in Harlem, or the motorist who accidentally killed a little black girl; he then refuses to condemn those who commit them. Both Jackson and Sharpton excused the Reginald Denny mob on the basis of race. Message: go ahead, attack people. Steal from merchants. Just not your own kind. Obviously, this message isn't played to the middle class, though it probably touches a sense of angry justice in some. It's aimed at the poor and disaffected, who form the political base of inner city leaders.

It's not just reprehensible; it's a major barrier to building a sustainable community. The inner cities have few mechanisms for capital formation; they need outside entrepreneurs to come in and provide jobs, services, and a critical mass of commerce into which local entrepreneurs can grow.

But this has nothing to do with the majority of blacks who are in the middle class, any more than a riot in South Boston has to do with me. Nor is it somehow characteristic of the black underclass. It happened in Russia. It happens in most countries in most parts of the world. After all, it was my ancestors, the Irish, who invented the race riot in America; it was they who perfected an interlocking system of family obligations that had its fullest flower in the corruption of Richard Daley. All oppressed minorities are tempted to it, understandably. In many places, the majority does it. I'm just saying that you can't build a middle class community until you abandon it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why do people keep saying

Why do people keep saying "He won't give nukes to terrorists" as if they know this for a fact? You're almost certainly middle class, probably a guy, sitting in a comfy chair somewhere in America. How the hell do you know what Saddaam will or will not do? What, are you channeling Idi Amin?

The Cold War doctrine of deterrence was intimately tied to non-proliferation, the doctrine that the anti-war crowd is explicitly abandoning. No one serious doubts that Saddaam is trying to get nukes; almost no one doubts that he has the blueprints for a bomb, and needs only fissile material. Of course, this is very, very hard to get, but it is not, as many have argued, impossible. They've caught 200 people trying to smuggle fissile material out of the former USSR; you quant types want to bet that any inspection system is catching 100% incidence? You libertarians in the crowd should go back and read what you've written about the War on Drugs before you answer that, and be prepared to explain how they are different.

Deterrence was predicated on the ability to know at all times where any offensive action was coming from. Specifically, that with only five nations in possession of nuclear weapons, you could not degrade another nation's capability with a stealth nuclear attack, because it would be immediately obvious which one or two nations could have been responsible. In fact, it would have been obvious which one it was coming from, since Chinese missiles didn't have the reach to go to the US, and while the US could have launched to Russia and China, the trajectory would have been different from a launch originating in Russia or China and targeted at the other. And Britain and France's intercontinental nuclear ability was provided by us.

Proliferation destroys that. It becomes possible to launch a plausibly deniable stealth attack. And Saddaam with a nuke means massive proliferation.

If Saddaam gets nukes, Iran will get nukes. They've been squabbling over the same damn territory since the Persians poured into Mesopotamia; neither will cede the other military advantage. If Iran gets nukes, the entire region is going to try to go nuclear. You want unstable? Try five or six Middle Eastern nations with nukes pointed at each other and Israel, all with the hope of launching a strike on a neighbor that will be taken to be from someone else. And Israel, who if attacked, will blow up all of them.

And the "Saddaam won't because of his self-interest" argument doesn't hold up. Saddaam has demonstrated that he is willing to strike at the US for spite, with an action that did nothing to advance his interest, yet would certainly result in his own demise if it were successful: his attempted assassination of President Bush. If he had succeeded in assassinating an American president, there is nothing more certain than the speed with which the US would act to remove him from power. He did it anyway. Stupid? Psychotic? Attempting to play to the folks at home? Who knows. The point is, you can't say that he wouldn't risk his regime to lash out at the US, because he did.

I frankly cannot understand why anyone is willing to argue in favor of allowing Saddaam to acquire nuclear weapons. No damage wrought by the US could begin to compare to the damage that would be done, to us and to them, by a bevy of dictatorships in the Middle East armed with primitive nukes.

Update: No, we're not abandoning non-proliferation, say correspondants; we just want to wait until we're sure. Come again? When you're sure will be when Saddaam has fissile material. You'll find out about that when it's in a bomb, pointed at civilians. Non-proliferation is, by definition, pre-emptive.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Government and The Committee Effect

Here are two shining examples of how the Committee Effect makes working with government such a pleasure. Today, the glorious state government of New Jersey is in the crosshairs:

First, the E-Z Pass system manages to send penalty notices to drivers without passes going through the E-X Pass lanes....with at least a 68% error rate. I know for a fact this is undercounted, as several of my friends get a penalty notice every time they go through one particular Turnpike exit. When they receive the notice, however, they can never get through to E-Z Pass before the due date (try it sometime). They've paid the fine so as to not make a court appearance.

Despite these gratuitous payments, the state stopped sending notices on July 15 and found that cheaper than sending them out and collecting the 32% who eventually paid, with or without cause. That explains why we didn't get any when my wife's E-Z Pass went on the fritz in mid-summer.

Moving right along, the brilliant legislative body of New Jersey has decided to pass a law confiscating idle balances in banks (known as "escheat", I believe) after three years instead of ten. The purpose was to get hold of an estimated $209 million to balance the budget. The government claims this tax in sheep's clothing is for the benefit of the account holders.

One simple problem: They forgot to allow for CDs of greater than ten year maturity, so banks are sending out notices to holders of these instruments who are then reacting with understandable outrage. Apparently the desperate lawmakers passed the law so fast they never put the wording out for comment.

Like I said, dumb as a bag of rocks.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I just realized one of

I just realized one of the things that really, really, bothers me about a lot of the anti-war arguments; it's the huge number of people who want to cast this in the simplistic terms of a morality play.

"If we take pre-emptive action against Iraq, how can we protest when others do the same?"

You're kidding, right? We are not their parents. The United States is not going to conduct its foreign policy on the level of setting a good example and hoping others follow. These are the same people who refuse to believe that over-generous welfare policies will not result in social decay because they somehow fail to apprehend the huge threat-power that enforces norm in reciprocal-morality social systems, and thus believe that you can build a working system with all carrot, no stick. Unfortunately, they also often raise their children this way, and worse, take those children to public places I frequent. But I digress.

If you are really under the impression that the reason that people listen when the US talks is our immense moral power -- well, why do you spend so much time screaming about how George Bush is just like Hitler, and if he'd just hold still while I paste on this little fake mustache, everyone would see it? Also, I'm afraid you're not quite emotionally old enough to be allowed out on the street without someone to hold your hand, much less be permitted to enter a voting booth.

"How can we risk going to war when we're not completely certain Saddaam poses a threat?"

Because the threat Saddaam potentially poses is not The Utter Destruction of the West Chipton Charity Fete's Frozen Lemonade Stand. Unfortunately, the risk is that he will seize and control a plurality of the world's oil supply by using WMD as a deterrent, or hand WMD to groups whose links cannot be directly traced back to him. And before you say that this is not true, let me point out that since you are the same person who, when a WMD attack of uncertain provenance happens on American soil, will be staunchly against launching some smack-ass on Hussein without firm proof of a connection, I find it hard to take this seriously. Since committing in advance to do exactly that is the only way to credibly deter such a handoff.

"It's wrong to enter a war without getting multilateral support".

So something that is morally wrong becomes morally right if enough mandarins appointed by third-world dictators vote okay?

"Why can't we try more diplomatic avenues?"

What do you think we've been doing for the last ten years?

"But Saddaam had legitimate grievances against the inspections -- they were spying!"

We made a deal with Saddaam: allow unfettered access of inspectors, or we invade. The agreement did not say "Except if they want to go into special, secret places like Presidential Palaces." The entire point of inspections is going into special, secret places. If Saddaam didn't like that, he was free to choose Plan B -- and whoops! He has.

"But how can we attack Iraq and leave [horrible regime of choice] in place?"

Repeat after me: other nations are not our children. We do not have to treat all of them the same so they won't know we love Australia best. Saddaam is getting taken out because Saddaam with WMD will, first of all, destabilize the Middle East far, far more than anything we do there, and second of all, make a probably successful ploy to seize control of a majority of the region's oil supplies and thereby render himself untouchable. I'm sorry it isn't Making the World Safe For Democracy, but then, the wars that were supposed to do that did not, on the evidence of the last 50 years, do a very good job. Maybe Making the World Safe From Horrible Dictators With Chemical or Nuclear Weapons is the best we can do right now.

Also, you may note that North Korea has invited us to inspect. They're not stupid. So we are setting a good example.

"How can we attack Iraq unless we're prepared to give the whole place a makeover -- more like, say, Sweden with Pita Bread?"

First of all, I'm not sure they eat pita in Iraq; all Arabs aren't alike, you racist pig. Second of all, Sweden's not doing so hot right now. And third of all, I'll say it again: we are not responsible for making sure they grow up to be solid world citizens, although if we can do it, I'm all for trying. What we are responsible for is making sure that they do not amass sufficient power to wreak havoc on their neighbors or American citizens, or both.

There are good arguments for holding back from Iraq. I, too, am worried about the shape of the world to come. But telling me that we have to conduct our foreign policy on the same set of rules as kindergarten -- well, it would be nice if we were all that civilized, and I am all for beating our swords into plowshares, but only after we've beaten the bad guys into a pulp. These arguments are just silly. For one thing, kindergarteners do not have munitions. And for another, most dictators have already learned not to eat paste.

Update Wow, record time to angry email. Listen, I am well aware that many anti-war arguments are not simplistic. I have continuing dialogue with intelligent anti-war people like Jim and Jim. We are assessing risks differently -- they rate the risks of action higher, the risks of inaction lower, than I do. Eventually, we'll know who's right. But there are people who are making these kind of simplistic arguments. I ran across one in the Fray the other day, whose prescription was -- yes, you guessed it -- ratifying Kyoto, freeing up trade, and doing an all-out grovel to the UN. These things leave me speechless. At some level, can people really believe that Atta et. al drove a plane into a building because of concerns about carbon emissions and textile tariffs?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A German in my comments

A German in my comments section informs me that Germany has sufficient military power to defend itself.

Now, I'm no expert in affaires militaires, but I don't think this can be right. It sounds to me like one of those oft-repeated tropes that few of the natives ever question, like the immutable wonderfulness of George Washington. Why do I say this? Several reasons. First of all, there is no such thing as a defensive force which cannot project across borders; if you can't interdict supply lines, cut off reinforcements, and prevent your enemy from regrouping, you can't stage a worthwhile defense, particularly if the enemy is not similarly limited. (Some nations do have hostile terrain which hostile natives can make Not Worth Conquering. Germany, however, is not among them.)

Second of all, unless the Germans have developed massively parallel defense plans, something which, to my knowlege, they lack both the technology and the technological capability to do, a crucial pieces of any defense are undoubtedly supplied by American forces, such as intelligence, air support, and supply.

And third of all, Germany currently exists in a military equilibrium. Which is to say, it's neighbors have toy armies. It has a toy army. (I mean no disrespect to the European military. But I am aware of no force in Europe which could repel a determined attack by a serious enemy. They are too small, lack key capabilities, and a large portion of their force is composed of 19 year old boys whiling away their national service.) The US presence makes it pointless to build a bigger army, since no nation in Europe is either large enough, or rich enough, to build a force that would not be simply dwarfed by the force that the US would project in the event of an attack.

Europeans, in my experience, tend to think that the extremely low level of their military spending is evidence of their moral superiority; they've evolved beyond defense. I submit that every other nation in the world, even if poor, spends a higher percentage of their GDP, and their budget, on the military. Argentina could use the spare money far more than Belgium -- why doesn't it just cut that pesky military spending? Because those Brazilian madmen are bent on World Domination? Because the government wants to maintain a steady supply of soldiers to stage coups? Because they're just not as civilized as the sophisticated elites of Portugal?

No, because they are the defense equivalent of a bubble boy. And they've been protected so long, they don't even realize how defenseless they really are.

Right now, there is no payoff to military buildup in Europe. With the US gone -- and I can certainly imagine that Schroeder's election could set off a chain reaction that results in our deciding, some years down the road, that intra-European disputes are Not Our Problem -- there is a possible payoff. And more than that; even if you are not inclined to start a war, you have to take into account the fact that your neighbors might. Remember, almost right up to WWI, everyone thought that a large-scale conflict between continental powers was impossible because of their cultural and economic ties.

You have to start spending, and not just to be prepared against your neighbor. And second, military spending has memory. Which is to say, it is hard to build a first-class military from scratch, when you need it. You need to keep pace with both technological and tactical innovations. And you need to breed leaders, from the ground up, who can fight effectively. All of this takes time, and a break can be catastrophic.

Once the first nation in Europe gets worried and ups their military spending, the others will have to follow. Of course, that would send the EU into precipitous decline.

But perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the EU has already reached an integration tipping point, and they will not arm against each other. Which only makes it a juicier target, dictating that they must arm against Russia and other near threats. Either way, the new equilibrium would be reached at a much higher level of spending. And since they are lacking in key capabilities, and have plowed their research dollars into duplicating showy US capabilities like our satellites, instead of boring conventional ones, there's going to be a lot of makeup spending to do in the near term. Spending that Europe cannot afford.

Or perhaps I just don't understand military affairs. Maybe Europe is so threat isolated, or so clever, that they can repel all threats to their sovereignty while spending less than 1/3rd what we do on defense. But I'm an economic type; I kind of believe in TANSTAAFL. So that's not the way I'm going to bet.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Dowd Virus Contagious

Paul Krugman's been sitting next to Maureen for too long and started imitating the "Poppy & Jr." thing. Go ahead, have a look. I'll wait.

Now, have a look this graph of unemployment trends from the BEA. Notice that what Krugman calls "increasingly dismal" is two full percentage points better than the peak unemployment rate a full year and a half into the recovery in late 1992. That's right, employment tends to lag in recovery as excess capacity is used up first.

Krugman fudges this by saying lots of people have "given up" looking for work. Did this not happen in other recessions? Can he back it up? We know Canada's numbers are terribly polluted by this phenomenon, but there's no case that our unmeasured unemployment is any worse now than in 1991 or any other recession. Dreck is tempted to observe that Krugman's assertions about how bad it "feels" may have to do with the massive layoffs made by Merrill Lynch in his hometown, or just the generally depressed feeling on West 43rd Street. Perhaps he and Maureen should go out for a run.

Now look at this table of macroeconomic indicators across five recessions. Scan your eye across the table. Isn't the real story is why this last recession was so mild compared to the others? Isn't it amazing that consumption actually grew? How has economic volatility been dampened so? (I have had some thoughts on this).

Krugman would rather forecast a double-dip (with qualifications - "I could be wrong") and then blast the administration about it.

Now head over to "Truth Squad", who point out that Krugman today is sharply at odds with his 1996 incarnation.

I'd be interested in your comments (more on the "real story" than Krugman, even the hard-core Dems at my company have resigned themselves to the fact that he's playing a monotonous tune in his Times Op-Ed columns). In the meantime, I'm off traveling for a week, and I'll post when I can.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Remember how Clinton turned over

Remember how Clinton turned over a "War Plan" against Al Qaeda to the Bush Administration? Turns out that the top guys from the Clinton Adminsitration deny it when they're under oath. Not, as I've said before, that I think that Clinton should have known -- but that Time piece was a credulous dictee of some farfetched spin that should have embarrassed the editors when they printed it.

On a related note, these inquiries are ridiculous. Not because I think the intelligence community is being all they can be -- I have absolutely no idea whether they're doing the best they can with what they have, or dropping the ball in the big game. But there's no context. So there were twelve pieces of intelligence about planes flying into buildings. How many other pieces of intelligence were they mixed in with? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? How credible was the threat? How many pieces of intelligence do we have suggesting that Malaysian separatists are planning to infect Denny's hamburgers with e. coli and thereby kill of an entire generation of young men who drink until the wee sma' hours?

I get the feeling that we're being presented, triumphantly, with the needles, without getting a look at the size of the haystack out of which we expect our intelligence services to pluck them.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So. The German election is

So. The German election is tomorrow. God, I hope the Christian Democrat wins.

Not because I particularly care about German politics. Even my German friends tend to fall asleep while discussing it. But because Schroeder has done irreparable damage to American/German relations. Damage that can't be fixed unless his opponent wins.

We are in the middle of a transition in foriegn policy. There's no point in whining about it. The multilateralist model is dead, at least in its current implementation; the UN's sole agenda these days seems to be whining about the US and Israel. Which is not surprising, given that it has the same structure as our Senate -- if two thirds of our senators were appointed by one or the other sort of non-representative government. And a large majority of the senators came from tiny states filled with illiterate subsitence farmers dying like flies. How anyone ever thought that this was going to be the basis for world government is beyond me.

I'm not a unilateralist, and I'm not a fan of empire. But the Europeans have spent 50 years basking in our military protection, and they've gotten increasingly belligerent. They've forgotten that you need a quid to get some pro quo. It looks like Germany is about to nominate herself to be the wake up call for Europe.

If the American voters decide that Germany aren't our friends any more -- and they're pretty mad right now -- then our troops are leaving. And that would devastate the German economy. Not just from the large amount of money we pump into various localities through our bases, but because they don't have an actual defense system that would, like, stop anyone from invading. They're supposed to serve as backup for Uncle Sam. And since they're a little behind on the military spending, they're going to have to ramp up in a big way -- 5% of GDP, say. As compared to the 1% they spend now. Which is 1% more than they can afford, with their economy on the Fritz. (Ha! Ha! Sometimes, I just crack myself up.)

Initially I thought Schroeder had some kind of make-whole-later deal with the Administration, but the buzz is that no, he's flipping us the bird, and the Administration is livid. He's just a desperate guy who's willing to completely jack over his country in order to get elected. Now, of course, he's having some help from the German voters. Who I do not fault. The US presence on their soil is a fact of nature to them, it's been around so long; just like we take for granted the fact that Canada will still be there when we wake up tomorrow. Also, they undoubtedly have many good arguments for why they are so important to the world that America would never dare abandon them. Having been both the proponent and recipient of similar arguments ("They can't lay me off. Without me, the entire computer network would come to a screeching halt in two hours"), I know how easy it is for a like minded circle of people to talk themselves up with what are usually quite good arguments, without considering how the actual decision makers will be making their decisions. In this case, the American people, who do not read much German media -- probably because it is all written in German, though we do enjoy the pictures -- are not going to consider all the no-doubt sterling arguments about Germany's strategic importance. They are going to consider the fact that the leadership of their new government just told us to go piss up a rope, and return the favor.

And though I have, on occasion, ranted about Europe, I am not saying this triumphantly, or hopefully. I am afraid of what's coming. We are undergoing a tectonic shift in the world order, and I am not at all sanguine that I will like what emerges from it. But I also understand that America cannot go on indefinitely in alliances where all the support runs one way. And that just as Schroeder is hostage to his uncontrollable voters, we are going to be hostage to ours.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Come on, guys -- left,

Come on, guys -- left, right, center, I'm sure we can all get behind political asylum for a man who's been unjustly imprisoned for five years?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Doug Turnbull has posted on

Doug Turnbull has posted on Steven Den Beste's controversial post calling for us to pull a Japan on the Middle East.

I'm not going to respond to Den Beste's post, because I haven't thought it all through yet. But I wanted to talk about Doug's analysis, which I think is thoughtful, cogent, but flawed.

Doug basically argues that if you accept Den Beste's premise -- that what he calls "Arab Traditionalism", and I would probably call "Saladin Syndrome", is fundamentally dangerous and cannot be fixed other than by stripping away many of the practices and institutions that allow it to flourish -- then you have to choose what his opponents term "Genocide", because the alternative is WMD attacks on America. Turnbull, however, rejects the idea that there is no other way to achieve it. He thinks that cultural imperialism -- the exporting of our culture via books, TV, etc. -- will work. In effect, Steven Den Beste is arguing that the culture produces murderous thugs, and therefore has to change; his left-wing opponents are arguing that that's untrue; and Doug seems to be arguing that it may be true, but they can be changed if we can just pipe Baywatch into every house.

Mmm, maybe. But that's by no means a foregone conclusion.

For one thing, you have to look at the time frame. If it works in 50 years, that doesn't do us much good. We need it to work before a terrorist group blows up more stuff here.

Second of all, our books don't get into Saudi Arabia, Iran, et al. Some of our television does, but it isn't necessarily improving their image of us. Imagine your Victorian great-grandmother getting an episode of "Friends" -- would it make her think, "Wow, those are people I want to emulate" or "Gee, those immoral monsters must be stopped!" (I'll give you a hint: my quite Victorian grandmother's church was nearly torn apart in her youth by the issue of -- I am not making this us -- square dancing.) It is a common fallacy in the West to assume that our sexual license makes our culture attractive to foreign people, because hey, we like it that way. I don't think it works that way. Most people are not so constituted as to tear off the entire mantle of their culture, throw the morality they were raised in to the wind, and party like rock stars. People like what they're raised with -- it's comfortable. That's why feminist aid workers are so often angry and hurt to find out that the majority of women in places like Afghanistan do not want to throw off the veil and turn into Gloria Steinem. It would mean abandonning the entire matrix of customs and beliefs in which they are operating comfortably, for an unknown future.

Turning into a western society would involve ripping out everything they do, and embracing an untried, and in many ways inferior, way of life. To take just one example, many Arab/Muslim cultures, social lives revolve almost entirely around the extended family, especially for women, who in many countries rarely socialize with anyone but their own families, and their husband's families when they are married. This is not compatible with the sexual license and serial monogamy of modern American society. You're asking women to give up their family and friends so that they can wear lipstick. Of course, we, who are comfortable in this way of life, consider it superior. And perhaps it is. But for someone whose lifestyle is so different, the idea of embracing it is terrifying, not liberating.

(Incidentally, I'm talking about countries like Saudi Arabia and areas of Pakistan, not countries like Lebanon, which were considerably Westernized for decades before the current trouble)

Maybe you don't buy that. Maybe you think in a couple decades all that will change, as indeed it did for your Victorian grandmother. Here's the other problem: the institutions have to be there to support it. Islam is undergoing a fundamentalist revival right now. People are getting more religious, not less. Some of that is a cultural response to hard times in their country; some of that is active government policy, or at least work by part of the government. But I think there are a large number of things that can't be fixed unless the government lets them.

The government can prevent that cultural imperialism, by controlling internet access, blocking unauthorized satellite channels, and banning books. It's not a perfect solution, but it worked pretty damn well for the Soviet Union.

The government can keep people miserable by its short-sighted, statist policies. There are basically two kinds of Middle Eastern nations: those that have oil, and those that don't. The ones that have oil keep most of their population out of the labor force, except for government jobs, and use oil to import foreign labor to do all the work. When oil revenues fall, or the population rises, they get into trouble. They have taught their young men to disdain work, and their government regulation keeps the private economy stagnant, so the result is a lot of over-educated young men with time on their hands and a declining standard of living.

The ones without oil also have a burgeoning population, which is even more miserable. They also have a complex network of horrible regulations that strangle the private sector, accompanied by massive official corruption.

Everyone agrees that economic improvement in these countries would help the situation; people getting rich are too busy to blow things up. Problem: you can't make people get rich. You can't improve their lot by trade if their high tariffs hinder trade flows (on net, countries can't export more than they import). You can't improve their lot by investment if officials steal half of it and regulate away the rest. You can't improve their lot by aid if the aid money flows into Swiss bank accounts or monumental boondoggle infrastructure projects. That's why I'm so derisive when neo-libs write nice articles saying that the real solution is trade or economic liberalization or what have you. Well, thanks, genius, now how do we bell the cat?

The government can also discourage liberalism through repression, beating people who step out of line. These aren't democracies, folks; they're not going to vote out the House of Saud if they've decided they want to wear Guess jeans and hang out at the mall. There might be a revolt. But my reading of history does not bear out the idea that people will riot for sexual freedom. Except students, but I don't recall their successfully staging a coup anywhere. Any overthrowing is likely to go in the other direction; fundamentalists who can convince their followers that God is on their side.

The government can encourage fundamentalism by giving fundamentalists money and a state media platform.

In other words, I'm not sure how cultural imperialism works without stripping away the government that prevents it. Maybe I'm wrong; I'm sure I'll get some arguments on this one. But I don't think so. The Soviet Union didn't fall because of Pepsi; it fell because it ran out of cash. Which Saudi Arabia isn't going to do any time soon.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A judge in New York

A judge in New York has just certified a class action against the big tobacco companies, who now learn, to their peril, that when you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.

From the Wall Street Journal's report (subscription only):

Judy Hong, an analyst at Goldman Sachs in New York, said Judge Weinstein "envisioned this case as a vehicle for trying to craft a national settlement of tobacco litigation."

Which is what your humble correspondant thought the tobacco settlement was supposed to be. Fortunately, no one thinks it will survive the appeals court. Of course, no one thought you'd be able to sue McDonalds for making you fat, either.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

My Fairy GodGovernment

Mark Wickens has penned this post on Googlewatch , who believe that Google should be a public utility. What a pristine example of faulty statist logic.

As all you Google-bombers know, Google is successful because it sorts returns by link popularity (Page Rank). Google has become important because this feature reflects what we want from a search engine. Those who have been sorted down resort to the backwards logic that Google is now determining who is popular rather than reflecting it. Google must be regulated and controlled, so it focuses its attention on the "right" search returns!

At which point, Google would become utterly useless, "hot" only in the sense of "stolen".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Also, while you're wandering away,

Also, while you're wandering away, you shouldn't miss Mindles H. Dreck's post on equilibrium, where he makes the obvious-yet-little-known observation that "anything that persists for a long time is an equilibrium".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Others weigh in David Garver

Others weigh in
David Garver has a really superb post in the Fray on our foreign policy. I'll be chewing on this, and weighing in, in a little while.

Paul Wright, who everyone and their cousin has already linked, but better late than never and all that, has a question we need to answer: what are we prepared to do when they find Saddaam's nasties?

And NZ Bear points out that the Israelis have been trying to find Palestinian munitions for years, with mixed success.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

All Iraq, All The Time

All Iraq, All The Time

I know some of you get sick of it when I go on these long streams on one subject. But this is how I think -- I spend a lot of time thinking about one subject, then I finish with it, decide what I really think, and move on. I'm still deciding on Iraq. You guys are bearing the brunt; I apologize. But remember, the Blogger Bash is tomorrow, so at least on Saturday there will be pictures to break the monotony. And elections are coming up fast. Just bear with me.

Any road, I came across this comment on Brink Lindsey's site, which I thought was interesting:

"I've always thought that the best argument for Saddam's fundamental irrationality is at the core of Brian's comment. If Saddam were a rational actor, and his goal was to get nuclear weapons, he would have allowed full, unfettered inspections and waited for the sanctions to be lifted. He would have then had many billions of dollars with which to buy WMDs or buy the means to develop them after the inspectors left."

This raises the question: why is Saddaam stonewalling? The commentator is completely right; it would have been smarter to bury the stuff.

I get two answers, neither of which I like: either Saddaam is close, or thinks he's close, to something very nasty -- something he thinks will force us to capitulate.

Or Saddaam's power calculus, whatever it is, is not going to allow full-bore inspections.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Lileks has another list of

Lileks has another list of reasons that he doesn't think inspections will work.

Now, I know that I am going to be accused of simply not wanting inspections; after all, I've been hawkish on Iraq for months. But the honest truth is that I didn't think inspections were on the table until recently. Initially, when I thought that they were, I was enthusiastic. Now I'm less enthusiastic, but not, thank you very much, because I think it would be fun to invade Iraq.

I just have a lot of questions that I haven't seen answered. The enthusiastically pro-inspections crowd seems to me to be proceeding on the assumption that there is some combination of inspections and sanctions that will meet what we all seem to agree is now the goal, which is preventing Saddaam from having WMD in violation of the numerous UN security resolutions saying he's not allowed to do same.

This is not, however, some law of nature that has to be so. The fact that we want inspections to work doesn't mean that they will if we just get the right regime, any more than the fact that we want markets to work means that they will provide us every last thing we hope and dream for.

Which is not to say that inspections can't work. But I have some serious concerns that I haven't seen anyone attempt to answer:

1) How will we find the stuff? Saddaam has had over three years to hide it.

2) How do we prevent shell games? The answer is massive simultaneous inspections, as far as I can tell. So massive that they would constitute a de-facto invasion. Otherwise, Saddaam will just move the stuff from place to place, as he did under the earlier regime. We would also, I think, have to helicopter marines and inspectors around in massive force just to keep Saddaam from knowing where we were going -- as Butler said, anything more than an hour outside Baghdad was a joke, because they were waiting for them

3) How do we get key people to talk to us when if they tell us anything, Saddaam will shoot them?

4) What are we prepared to do about the low level stunts that, in aggregate, degrade our capability? "I can't find the key" "The guy who knows that is not here today" "That paperwork is not ready yet" -- this was what Saddaam used to delay previous inspectors, very successfully. Are we committed to blowing up key infrastructure pieces if we can't inspect immediately?

5) How do we get around the problem of "Yes, sahib, no sahib, I don't know, sahib." Which is to say, Iraqis playing dumb and deliberately wasting our time on stupid things? Lileks gives the example of "What is that iron plate in the floor?" which, after five days of screwing around with it, turns out to be an old oil pit from a garage. We could spend a lot of time defusing toasters and such, if the Iraqis had a mind to make us. Possibly this would be against their interest. But not if it gives them time to hide other stuff. Which brings us back to my original point, which is that any really serious regime is going to look a whole lot like an invasion.

6) How long will support last after we kick down the door of the first mosque? Or the first hospital gets detonated because of Iraq's delaying tactics?

7) What is our exit strategy? The answer is, we don't have one. Inspections will have to continue until Iraq has a democracy, or at least someone less nutty at the helm. The problem is, no sanctions regime can stay robust for that amount of time.

It goes back to Brink Lindsey's point, which I think is true: Iraq does not want to prove to us that it has gotten rid of WMD. Iraq's goal, almost everyone but the wing nuts can agree, is to keep us from finding their WMD, yet still having the WMD. On a related note, my personal opinion is that Saddaam believes -- IMHO correctly -- that if we find out what he's doing, it will take away all his international support.

Yes, they want not to be invaded. But that does not mean that they will not play games if they think they can get away with it. And preventing them from getting away with it would, in my estimation, require at the very least tens of thousands of American soldiers to be stationed there indefinitely.

Let's remove the PC elements. Let's pretend that Iraq is Texas. And that the governor of Texas (who is of course a Democrat), does not want us to find his hidden oil reserves. Let's also pretend that everyone in the state either supports him, or is deadly afraid of the consequences to themselves and their families if they assist inspectors in any way. Finally, let's pretend that there is no documentation on file for the last four years, and very spotty, deliberately screwed up, documentation from before that.

You're the inspector. How do you find the oil reserves? How many men would it take you to find all the oil? Every last drop? With the entire state trying to help the governor hide it? Just picture the logistics. You, and say, 300 guys, chasing oil trucks across Texas, plumbing underground reserves, with every redneck in Texas playing dumb and saying "Well, I don't know, I can't remember as we had that cave on the property last year or not."

My Aunt Fanny, you could. To find the reserves, you'd have use massive manpower to cordon off the state, moving inward, sweeping every single building you came to. Meanwhile, people start dying because the trucks you thought were oil were actually water or bleach for the hospital wards or whatever. You'd have to be prepared for people who shot back when they sensed they were about to get caught. In other words, it would be an invasion. It might cost fewer American lives; it might also cause huge casualty figures when we detonated a gas munitions dump. Either way, it is not the prim group of clever agents swashbuckling about Iraq with white gloves on, uncovering Saddaam's weapons programs through a combination of savoire faire and sheer pluck, that the "Inspection, not war" crowd seems to be envisioning. I mean, I don't know that this is what they're thinking. They may have a comprehensive roadmap, full of practical details rather than nice sounding buzzwords, as to how this would all actually work, and be effective. I just haven't seen it.

Meanwhile, I don't think inspections will work. And I think that if we can find a regime that would actually be effective, Saddaam will turn it down. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Blogger Left Speechless, no details at 11

The Madness of Queen MoDo:

Karl Rove is building a Republican empire. Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby are building an ideological empire. Dick Cheney is building a unilateral empire. And Donald Rumsfeld is building a military empire.

That's a lot of empires. This is, hands-down, the loopiest column I've ever read.

......?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

News from other parts of the A. of E.

After an initially bitter reaction to being described as part of the "Axis of Evil", North Korea has begun behaving like an aspiring former member of the club.

A few days ago Kim Jong-Il acknowledged that North Korea had kidnapped Japanese citizens and held them for decades to help train spies. He also offered an apology. It's an appalling story:

"I'd been waiting to hear some good news but what we got was the extremely disappointing news of my daughter's death," said Shigeru Yokota, whose daughter Megumi was kidnapped in 1977 when she was only 13.

They also agreed to nuclear weapons inspections and to a moratorium on ballistic missile tests, albeit not conceding all the terms requested by the U.S. administration.

There may not be an "axis" between the three identified members, but "evil" seems apt. One has to notice the recent positive developments from the two we are not preparing to attack.

Quelle simplisme indeed.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

It's the equilibrium, stupid.

Or "From Israel to Double-Taxation of Dividends in a Few Easy Paragraphs"

One of John Nash's simple but great insights into 'games with N players' is that any persistent situation you observe is an equilibrium (he was then able to derive the math describing price and quantity, for which he ultimately won a Nobel Prize). "Duh", you may say. Yet few people apply that insight to current events, essentially arguing that an equilibrium can change without, if you will, a supply or demand shift.

I heard Bill Clinton make this argument a few months ago in his standard post-presidential ($130,000) speech, citing it as the basis of political and foreign policy success. He says that people will act properly if you can "show them it is in their own interests". I'm not sure I buy that. As a boss, I can tell you that a room full of people who assert they can't figure out a simple filing system will be able to optimize their attendance to a new and complex overtime policy faster than a roomful of University of Chicago econometricians. Understanding isn't always the problem. More often you need to change the rules of the game to change behavior. Woody Brock reminded me of this yesterday.

As a first case in point examine discussion of Palestine. Those sympathetic to Israel say Israel must retaliate against barbaric suicide attacks, and buttress their argument with simple game theory and the notion of not "rewarding terrorism". At the same time, Palestinian apologists suggest that suicide bombing is the only recourse available to the Palestinians, citing the territorial incursions of Israel and its clearly superior military and economic might. Israel's sympathizers will point out, correctly, that the winning strategy for Palestinians would be passive resistance (I've made this argument). Palestinian apologists suggest, as my friend Ted does, that the Israelis should "at last understand that while they can win battles, they cannot win the war so the best thing would be to call it off."

Are both sides pursuing a sub-optimal strategy? Nash would say no, this has been going on for years, they must be pursuing optimal strategies given the game in front of them.

What are these rules that make seemingly self-destructive behavior optimal? I would argue they have everything to do with the powers around the Middle East, most of whom have a vested interest in sustaining the Israel-Palestine issue either as a distraction from their own failed regimes or their desire to ethnically cleanse the Middle East of Jews, Americans and proponents of secular governments. Hence Iran and Saudi Arabia's funding of terrorist cells in Palestine and the Iraqi awards to suicide bombers. In my view, the continuance of the Palestinian issue is entirely exogenous power politics. The cries from the Middle East that Palestine must be resolved before Iraq or other terrorist-sponsor states are truly "stasist" voices, attempting to preserve the status quo. They have put the cart before the horse, for no solution can hold without removing the pressure from other states who have an interest in perpetuating the conflict. That is why peace talks and accords have failed and might likely continue to fail. Talks and televised handshakes don't change the rules. It is the resolution or movement of other problems in the Middle East (no small order) that is most likely to cause the Palestinian issue to find a new equilibrium. Hopefully a peaceful one.

Clinton's notion that people can simply be taught to behave differently is actually pretty condescending. It starts from the assumption that people are stupid or simple, much as the common European view seems to assume that we can't expect more from Third Worlders. I'm also reminded here of the offensive term "Paleo-stinians" coming in to common usage in certain comment threads. Is there a chance we could stamp that one out?*

Dividend Taxation and Avenues for Corporate Greed

Brock discussed this summer 's purge of corporate malfeasance and avarice. Are corporate executives uniquely greedy? Or is this situation also an equilibrium? Woody suggests we did indeed arrive at an equilibrium. Believe it or not, one of the factors he cites is double taxation of dividends.

Huh?

Actually, he's got a good point. Among other things, the tax efficiency of capital gains relative to dividends brought us to a point where all management incentives centered around stock price. A rise in valuations began to set rather lofty targets for annual increases in share prices, by legitimate or illegitimate means such as stock buybacks and statement manipulation. We became a nation of price speculators.

"But Dreck", you ask, "why does that create an equilibrium where dishonesty is more likely to surface?" It has to do with 1) model uncertainty and 2) the persistency of beliefs.

Model uncertainty refers to your ability to translate market information into a true price. The more a stock's return comes in the form of a dividend, the easier it is to discount. If all of the return is dividend, you price the stock like a bond. There is very little difference between the value of a bond from one market actor to another. The more your return comes from price appreciation - particularly hoped for multiple increases (i.e. an increase in P/E), the more disparity you will find between one investor's valuation and another's. At the extremes, imagine if I asked you to set a price for a bunch of Treasury bills due in a year. Easy, right? All you need is prevailing interest rates and a calculator - bango, the bonds are priced. That's model certainty. Now value a box full of Pokemon cards (or imagine you are a 17th-Century Dutchmen pricing a box of Tulips). Well, that depends on how much pressure kids are putting on their dads for a holographic Charizard a year from now. My guess is that each of you would come up with a different formula, and have relatively low confidence in it. That's model uncertainty.

Persistency of beliefs is the observed phenomenon that people don't change their mind too fast. Our identity is wrapped up in our opinions. In the stock market it is clear that bulls are "pathological bulls" and bears are "terminal bears." Furthermore, any increasing evidence tends to increase the intensity of one's view. Persistency of beliefs creates periods of self-correlated optimism or pessimism (bull markets and bear markets; positive or negative overshoot). Persistency of beliefs says that you will believe your uncertain model more when you get some positive feedback using it. You will also ignore evidence negating your model and discount the possibility that your model's success was random (by the way, if you've made it this far in this post, you will enjoy this book).

The theory of Rational Beliefs (discussed by me here and by Mordecai Kurz here) describes a general equilibrium in which massive stock market bubbles can exist. The greater the model uncertainty, the more likely persistency of beliefs will work their magic and the more likely a valuation bubble will occur.

The higher the dividend, the lower the model uncertainty. Having connected the reduction of dividends to the bubble, Brock says:

There is nothing new about the phenomenon whereby, when the going gets good, the greedy get going. Indeed, economic theory implies this should happen: As the level of an investor’s (or CEO’s) wealth grows in good times, then the degree of his risk aversion will decrease, via the standard Arrow-Pratt theory of risk-bearing [link mine - Ed.]. As a result, risk-taking behavior increases as the bubble grows. When taking excessive risks no longer suffices to sustain the illusion of rapid profit growth, executives become tempted to turn to alternative and often illegal modes of behavior. Given this time-honored logic, there is not much new in the spasm of greed that we have been witnessing.

Fed Chairman Greenspan put the matter very well in recent Congressional testimony when he pointed out that “greed” isn’t new at all. Rather, the avenues whereby greed can be realized have opened up in many new directions....

... our financial culture and tax policies caused a transformation from a society where shareholders were rewarded with dividends into one where they are rewarded with capital gains. When combined with the increasing use of stock options to compensate management, this development made it all but irresistible for executives to engage in earnings manipulations. The temptation was heightened as equity analysts began to view earnings growth as the sole criterion of corporate excellence. What now needs to be done is to alter the rules of the game such that, in responding selfishly and greedily to the new rules, it becomes in the self-interest of corporate players not to do what they have been doing. In modern game theory terms, we must transform the rules so that the new Nash equilibrium strategies of the players will generate an outcome that is socially preferable to the old one. Are we moving in the right direction?

Perhaps the most fundamental problem of all with today’s brand of US capitalism is the triple taxation of dividends: Dividends are taxed twice, once at the corporate level and once at the personal level. Even worse, the personal tax rate on dividends is nearly twice that of the capital gains rate. Over the past two decades, this reality has caused management to focus on earnings and on share price growth to an extent unimaginable in the past. This in turn created the incentive for the deceptions discussed above. Even worse, it has turned all of us investors into de facto price speculators! Indirectly, it has forced a misuse of retained earnings for excessive share repurchases, and/or corporate investments that have all too often proven misjudged.

We predict that all this will change. As baby-boomers start to retire, they will want stable, predictable dividend payments in exchange for holding stocks. They will pressure legislators radically to reduce the taxation of dividends. And CEO’s who don’t produce growing dividends for them will be toast.

Who's Greedy? Who's not?

As I mentioned earlier, taxation of dividends is not the only contributing factor to what Woody calls our "black eye". He cites a well-rounded list of "greed" factors:

1. excessive corporate leverage (often off-balance sheet and used, in part, to buy back shares and increase earnings per share)
   
2. a "Crisis of Short-Termism", his term for the Principal-Agent problem (lack of alignment of interests) of executives motivated by options
   
3. "Preposterous expectations" of returns exceeding growth in the economy over the long run
   
4. "Dismal" fundamental analysis (that would be my industry)
   
5. "Social Security and Medicare Fantasies":

   Speaking of greed, do today’s ever more numerous gray panthers seriously believe that they have “earned” thirty years worth of retirement on the golf links, to be paid for by their grandchildren? And what about the fantasy of ever more drugs and medical services to which they are “entitled”? Did even Jeffrey Skilling possess such delusions?

   
   
6. Government Accounting Chicanery
   
7. Trial Lawyers and Juries
   

That's a pretty good list. Who says corporate executives have the market in greed cornered? Which leads Brock to his preachy conclusion:

The root point here is that there is plenty of greed to go around. Thus far, it is only in the executive suite and in the stock market that society has witnessed a comeuppance. But the adjustment process has barely gotten off the ground, and in the next one or two decades, we will witness a widespread readjustment to reality throughout society, from CEOs to the elderly to overpaid athletes and to average investors. Things have been too good for too many people for too long.

The financial markets have adjusted rapidly, which is all to the good. Now market mechanisms are coming after the rest of y'all.....

*Just because I'm arguing here that the system encouraged suicide bombers, or encouraged greed doesn't mean I won't condemn their acts as immoral. I'm just saying that under the right conditions, you get more of them - its a cause, not an excuse. A cynical view of humanity, perhaps, but not unrealistic.

So call homicide bombers (and/or those who celebrate their evil) whatever you like but don't invent a racial epithet that seems to generalize your disdain to one of the most unfortunate groups of people on the planet.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Incidentally, I don't care what

Incidentally, I don't care what any of you say; I think "Shrub" is funny. See, that's the kind of gentle political humor this country needs more of. I'm all about unity, folks. Can't we all just get along?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Andrew Sullivan takes Lawrence Wright's

Andrew Sullivan takes Lawrence Wright's amazing piece on Al-Quaeda as a savage indictment of Clinton's foreign policy. Which it is. Don't get me wrong; I think Clinton's foreign policy was disastrous for the country. But I also think we have to take a lot of the blame ourselves.

Most of us wanted to think that we didn't need the military any more. We voted for Isolationsim Lite. Clinton was the ultimate poll driven president -- if we'd wanted a strong foreign policy, we could have had it. All we had to do was ask. But the only people who cared about stuff like that were mostly the same people who wouldn't have voted for Clinton if Jesus Christ Himself had walked across the Potomac and endorsed him. The rest of us were too busy totting up our peace dividend and trying to figure out if it would stretch to cover a new stereo and a DVD player.

Two weeks before 9/11 I was having dinner with 3 people who loudly assured me that we should cut military spending to the bone in order to pay for more social programs, because now that the Cold War was over we didn't need all that useless stuff.

But defense spending is like your immune system, I argued. It sucks up a lot of resources and doesn't do anything -- until you really need it, when you want it to still be strong enough to defend you.

They were having none of it.

[I don't want to imply in any way that I was some sort of prescient commentator who knew what was coming. I didn't. I didn't expect any threat any time soon -- I just thought it would be nice to have the military around if we needed them. Plus, I love Fleet Week.]

They were America in the 90's. We were too busy buying Pets.com to worry about what those crazy foreigners were up to. And we wanted to believe that every conflict could be solved if both sides would just sit down and talk it out. If you want someone to blame -- well, I'm sure we all have a mirror handy.

Of course, after 9/11, I didn't say I told you so. I had better things to worry about. And so do we, now. Let's learn from Clinton's mistakes, instead of wasting energy placing blame.

Update: On a similar vein, I'm seeing Bill O'Reilly is trying to get an investigation of whether Clinton was outright bribed to pardon Marc Rich. Can we please move the [expletive deleted] on, folks? What are you going to do, impeach him again? I'm not sure whether it's actually even a crime to sell pardons, since the pardon is supposedly inviolate. (Lawyers who want to weigh in on an interesting academic question, rather than Clinton-bashing, I'd be interested to know the answer to that one). All this does is stir up partisan bickering at the time when we least need it. So righties -- stop poking Clinton with a stick, and maybe he'll leave you alone.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Truth in Labeling

I received my Social Security "earnings record and estimated benefits" today.

According to their estimates and assumptions, the only way I will get more money out of the system than my employer and I put in is if I retire at 70 and live past 100. Needless to say, I'd have to be Methuselah to get a return that isn't measured in basis points.

Not that most of us didn't know this already, but could we start calling this wealth redistribution instead of a savings or retirement plan? That's an Enronian statement if I ever heard one.

And don't tell me the difference is for the disability and life benefits. I can (and do) get those for much less in the private market.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Incidentally, if you haven't checked

Incidentally, if you haven't checked it out, chemist Derek Lowe has an unbelievably outstanding series on chemical warfare. Start here and scroll up.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Last post on Iraq, I

Last post on Iraq, I hope. Did Bush get caught flatfooted by Iraq's letter to the UN?

I don't think so.

Regular readers know I think he's politically pretty smart. But even if you don't, you can't genuinely believe he's that dumb.

When you put an ultimatum to someone, there are few people in the foreign policy establishment so thoroughly dimwitted as to never consider the possibility that they will agree to your demands. Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are not among the dimwits.

So why did they sound surprised? Well, I think ol' Kofi was angry as hell that Bush put him on the spot. So I think he thought it would be cute to release the letter to the media before he gave it to Bush. Which is understandable, though I think it displays that Kofi is not really bright enough to realize that he does not hold many cards here.

I've been thinking about Brink Lindsay's essay on inspections, and I'm concerned that he may be right. In economics, such incentive disaligned systems are known to break down -- can you say Arthur Anderson? And as my co-worker said "Sure, he'll agree. He has eight weeks to hide everything".

Regardless, at this juncture, I think the reaction to agreeing to inspections should be the same as the reaction to disagreeing -- massive military buildup in the region. If he agrees, it'll keep him honest. And if he doesnt -- welcome to Baghdad, GI Joe.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Now, brace yourself for the

Now, brace yourself for the inevitable comparison between Saddaam and Hitler.

Not because I'm trying to gin up support for the "Axis of Evil", but because I think it illuminates a point I was trying to make: that you have to look closely at the alternatives before you assume that you can predict what someone's "rational response" will be.

It is the cherished notion deep in the heart of many people that you can always make a deal. Which is true in the sense that sheep can agree to be led to the slaughter instead of making things difficult for the knifeman. But false in terms of real-world dilemmas. You can usually make a deal. But not always.

And now -- negotiation buzzwords.

In negotiation, your goal is what you hope to get out of the negotiation. Your needs are what you, well, need to get. Your reserve price is the lowest offer you can accept, given your exogenous constraints. The BATNA is the Best Alternative To Negotated Agreement, otherwise known as What Will Happen If You Can't Make a Deal. And the ZOPA, the Zone Of Possible Agreement, is that heavenly range of options within which all parties to the agreement are, at minimum, meeting their basic needs.

There are many people in the ideological wings of both right and left who believe that there is always a ZOPA.

But let's look at Hitler. It is customary for the postwar intellectual to look at WWII's carnage and say "But it was all so unnecessary!" Well, it could probably have been avoided -- but the points at which it was likely to have been avoided were so far back int he past that the actors who could have made those decisions had no reasonable way of foreseeing their outcomes.

The German people were suffering enormously under the reparations that were forced on them in the Versailles Treaty. You've heard about the german hyperinflation, in which people needed to truck around wheelbarrows of cash with which to buy groceries. This was largely the result of the Treaty, in which the French not only occupied most of the industrial plant of Germany, but also required that any shred of hard cash Germany got its hands on be immediately shipped to France. The Weimar Republic literally had no choice but to wildly inflate their currency.

[Interesting side note: the Laffer Curve, bane of the Democrats, was initially drafted to describe, not income taxes, but inflation, which is of course just another form of taxation. The math works out beautifully on the german hyperinflation. But I digress.]

The German people, suffering miserably, were angry about this. The French basically sniffed and said, "Who cares?" The English needed their share to pay their war debt to us, which we wouldn't forgive, because, well, if they didn't want to pay us back, they shouldn't have borrowed the money in the first place.

The Germans felt that the only way to end their suffering was to break the Versailles Treaty. And they were right. But no one was offering to help them out. They were understandably mad about this, since it seemed to them that the war had been just as much the Allies' fault as theirs.

So they elected a guy who told them they were right to be angry about the foreigners, and promised to end their misery. Chap named Adolf Hitler.

But Hitler had promised the people that they weren't going to get shoved around by any more stupid old Allies. He had to do something to prove to them that he was powerful so they wouldn't rise up against him. Like, say, remilitarizing the Rhineland.

The French could have stopped him right there by going in and kicking his ass out. But keep in mind, it had been 18 years since the war. The French people were bored of hearing about it. They wanted to focus on other things, like the economy. (Sound familiar?) There was no domestic support for pushing him back. Nor were they confident that they could succeed. I can't be totally sure, but I think this may have been the first recorded media use of the word "quagmire" regarding a proposed military operation.

At any of the abovementioned points, we could have ended it. But there was no particular reason to think it was necessary. Hindsight is 20/20.

Having restored his power, Hitler set about regaining German might. But there were things Germany needed in order to rival Britain or America. Like ports for transportation. Coal to feed the steel mills. Oil. Other resources Germany lacked.

Theoretically he could have traded for these things. Realistically, he behaved like any power-mad CEO -- he attempted a series of risky yet self-aggrandizing mergers. Austria went off smoothly. The Allies said nothing. So here goes Czechoslovakia. Nothing. Then Poland, and the Allies woke up.

Leave Poland, they said, or we declare war.

Now, the rational response, in hindsight, was probably to leave Poland. (I realize that the power disparities make this substantially asimilar to Iraq. Bear with me; I'm getting there.)

He didn't leave.

Then he declared war on Russia, which was crazy. It certainly wasn't rational; he would have been much better off fighting only on one front.

Why'd he do it? Because he was a psychotic madman who didn't understand cause and effect? Don't be stupid. He was evil, but he was also bright enough to run a country for 12 years. That's the point I'm trying to make about rationality; Saddaam may be rational, but that doesn't mean he will take the course you think is rational.

Why did Hitler break the Soviet alliance? IMHO, because he'd promised the folks at home he would make them a big empire. And he'd promised them he'd fight communists, which was hard to do while allied with the USSR. The alliance with Russia was a threat to his domestic power base. It made him look weak. And it allowed Russia to occupy strategic parts of Poland that he needed for his master plan for world domination.

The point is, that in situations like this, you have to deal with the worst case scenario. It wasn't particularly likely that, say, Germany would turn into a dictatorial empire if we didn't forgive Britain's war debts, but in fact it did. It wasn't particularly likely that remilitarization of the Rhineland would lead directly to World War, but it was a possibility, and in the end, that's what happened.

By the time the threat is obvious enough to be seen by all, solutions are costly in materiel and lives.

The other point is that you cannot count on knowing what calculations the other side is making. If you had put the choices Germany faced in front of almost any American citizen, they would probably have turned back at Poland. Certainly, they wouldn't have declared war on the USSR. Yet Hitler clearly didn't feel that way. Betting the farm on his "rationality" by, say, declaring war on Russia, would have crushed us.

So that's why I'm suspicious of upper-middle class professionals who say "Saddaam is rational, therefore he will choose to do X if we do Y". And you know this because of your extensive experience as an Iraqi dictator? His operating environment is different from yours. You do not know what he is thinking. So it is fundamentally dangerous to assume that you can predict how he will act.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm fascinated by my correspondents

I'm fascinated by my correspondents who tell me "We only care about Iraq because of the oil". But sweetie, the only reason that Iraq cares is the oil. He didn't invade Kuwait because they have better pita bread, or he didn't have enough unemployed young men sucking off his welfare system at home. In the oil rich nations of the Middle East, people are not an asset: they're more mouths to feed on the fixed stipend generated by oil production. Land is not an asset; most of it is not arable. And there's no capital plant to speak of. Wars in the Middle East are fought over two things: oil and water. Why is it okay for Saddaam to grab oil fields, but not for us to stop him?

(Yes, I've heard the "historical" argument that Kuwait is an artificial division. Umm, yes, that's true. So is Iraq, my sweet, and every other nation in the Middle East, and do we really want to make that an authorization to go starting wars with your neighbors to see how much you can grab?)

It's also not true that we only go to war over financial or strategic interest -- in whose strategic interest was Kosovo? Not anyone we care about. Yes, we stay out of Africa and Latin America, but I would actually argue that this is more do to the PC paternalism of the transnational progressivist types (we can't really expect the little brown people not to cut off their enemies hands and feet -- they don't know any better) than to our indifference.

Anyway, that's just a partial list of the amusing arguments I've heard about Iraq. Now I'm sure I'll get more. And please: Imperialist Running Dog should always be capitalized.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It is now time to

It is now time to answer the burning question which has occupied the every waking moment of my readers for days on end:

What does Jane think of the mess in Iraq?

Well, obviously, I am in favor of inspections over war. Inspections are nicer than war because fewer people get killed that way.

But.

(You knew there was a but coming, didn't you?)

My preference for inspections over war is dwarfed by my preference for getting rid of Iraq's WMD.

And on that point, I have several concerns.

The first is that, as Den Beste has pointed out, the Iraqis are already hedging. They're acting as if this is a negotiation. Luckily, we have precedent in Afghanistan to point to, and indeed, Bush is keeping to the same effective course: we are not negotiating. You accede to our demands, or we invade. The UN should be ashamed of itself for trying to negotiate on the terms of the inspections. (Other terms, I suspect, are negotiable. But I don't think that Saddaam really cares whether we demand Kuwaiti reparations or not; he wants his weapons.)

The second is that, as Brink Lindsay has argued extremely persuasively, it simply may not be possible to stage effective inspections as long as Iraq is committed to WMD. At minimum, the regime would have to be far, far different from the one imposed in the wake of the Gulf War:

Inspections must be swift; Saddaam must have no further time to continue developing we-know-not-what.

They must be comprehensive. There can be no shell games, this time; we need to flood the country with inspectors who go everywhere.

They must be backed up by instant military reprisal for failure to cooperate. Block access to a presidential palace for even a couple of hours, and we're bombing it to pieces. I don't care if Saddaam is in his skivvies with his hair up in curlers; when we knock, he'd better answer the door.

The problem is, I'm not sure that he can meet those demands.

Much of the discussion on deterrance has centered around the question of whether Saddaam is a rational actor. The problem is, the "Saddaam is rational" side has approached the analysis as if it were a schoolbook argument for rational markets in Macroeconomics 101. No one is trying to argue that Saddaam is a psychotic who does not understand the concept of cause and effect. And while he may blow things up for fun, no one serious thinks that he will blow things up for fun if he thinks that this will directly result in his own death.

This does not, however, mean that Saddaam will make the same decision that the "rational actor" proponents would if they happened to be the dictator of an oil-rich, yet thoroughly unstable, nation. Which is what many of them seem to be arguing.

That he will not willingly cause his own death does not mean that he will correctly perceive which actions will lead to this. There have been serious commentators from Bush I and Clinton administrations arguing that Saddaam does not yet seem to understand that he cannot play games with Shrub.

That he will not willingly cause his own death does not mean that he will not gamble on delaying tactics or deception giving him time to turn his busted flush into a straight. Nor does it guarantee that we will find the weapons. I was chatting with a friend last summer who pointed out that the location of the enormous Nazi secret weapons center was unknown to us until we stumbled upon it after WWII. And while people have argue that such things as power lines are hard to hide, this is only true if you care about protecting your citizens from horrible smells or explosions. If you stick them in the middle of a city and call it a tannery, it's not so hard.

And then there is the question of whether he would hand off WMD to terrorists. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't, but I'm not willing to bet on it. I think it's completely certain that if he gets a nuke, he'll invade his neighbors, and threaten to nuke Israel if we try to stop him. Talk about destabilizing the Middle East -- if you don't like America singling out Iraq now, what do you think the effect will be of forcing the US to choose between dead Israelis and dead Kuwaitis?

The biggest question I have, though, is whether we currently pose the biggest threat to him.

Saddaam, if he is largely rational, has several goals. The first is to continue breathing. The second is to stay in power. And the third is to increase that power if possible.

We are largely targeting goals two and three through invasion; though he might turn up dead in an invasion, he might get to live out his days in a not-terribly-uncomfortable jail cell.

But if his domestic enemies get him, he doesn't get to breathe any more, unless he can manage to do so through a hole in his head. And it is the immutable law of dictators that they don't live long once they are perceived to be losing power.

If we begin the inspections regime, the militarism which is holding Saddaam in power will be severely compromised. How long can he continue to live after that?

I think that probably Saddaam knows the answer to that question better than we do. But even if he doesn't, the really important question is whether Saddaam thinks he can hold onto power after serious inspections begin. Because if he doesn't, he may choose to go to war, even though that choice looks obviously insane to those of us who face our greatest daily danger when we get behind the wheel of our car to go to work.

We now know that the Taliban couldn't accede to our demands to turn over Al-Quaeda, even though it was obviously rationally insane to choose to go to war with the US rather than do so. I fear we may face something similar here.

If not, great. I'm all for inspections. But only if they achieve our goal, which is disarmament. They must not substitute for effective action.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Inconsistency? Ignore it.

I was intrigued by Glenn's response to Democrats.com's position on the private Transorbital Moon Mission. In particular this excerpt:

The TransOrbital venture could be disastrous for the globe - no scientist today could predict yet how adding mass to the moon via human infrastructure or removing mass, via mining, will impact the delicate gravitational interplay between Earth and its only satellite.

So Democrats.com is severly skeptical of predictions based on complex multivariable models even when the individual physical laws are well known? Well then, they must have a healthy skepticism of the Kyoto Accord and other radical remedies to projected global warming. After all, "no scientist can predict" the effects of an uncertain trajectory of one of several greenhouse gases on global climate. So you wouldn't want to spend a year or two's GNP on such a gamble, right? Let's see(scroll to it or search, no permalinks):

Bush is like a lead steamroller - no matter what the warning signs may be, he's gonna just keep rolling forward toward disaster. Global warming? Ignore it. Stock market plunging? Ignore it. UN unsupportive of attack plans? Ignore it.

Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.

By the way, did Bush really ignore the UN this week? Critics continue to confuse disagreement with lack of attention and consultation with seeking permission.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What the hell is wrong

What the hell is wrong with the art community? Okay, don't answer that -- I don't have the bandwith for a rant that long. But what has brought them to the point where pseudo-emotional voyeuristic swill like a statue of a naked women who has jumped off the WTC, posed at the moment her face hits the pavement, gets placed in Rockefeller Center?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Annals of innumeracy This is

Annals of innumeracy
This is not, strictly speaking, a factoid that I'm debunking. But I thought it interesting to communicate, to my numerically challenged readers, the way that I try to think about statistics when I see them.

Today I was reading Heather McDonald's polemic, The Burden of Bad Ideas. Wherein I stumbled upon a factoid that made my jaw drop: 42% of people with HIV don't tell their partners that they are infected. And of those who do not tell their partners, 42% report that they do not regularly practice safe sex.

Let's put those numbers together: 17% of people with HIV are having unprotected sex without telling their partners that they are infected.

My first reaction: that can't be true.

Not that it is numerically impossible, as many of the examples I present here are. But it is so ethically problematic that the mind revolts at the thought that it could be true. I am 100% adamantly against people having even protected sex without telling their partners. But the idea that 1 in 6 people with HIV is having unprotected sex. . . I just can't believe it.

So what are the ways in which it could not be true?

The most obvious is that it just isn't true; that it's some wildly distorted factoid pulled out by conservative activists. This was, I confess, my first instinct, but it is not true; as it turns out, the fact comes from a study published in a peer reviewed medical journal.

Not only isn't it distorted; the journalist didn't even get the math wrong. The 40% is really 40% who didn't think that their partners needed to know.

When you're trying to establish a causal relationship, there are all sorts of ways in which you can invalidate the causal link, by bringing in outside causation, reverse causation, challenging the math -- but the authors didn't try to establish causation. They're just trying to establish that 40% of people with AIDS don't tell their partners.

So what's left to examine is the data source.

Now, first of all, this comes from a survey. Surveys are notoriously unreliable. People don't tell the truth. In this case, however, that is not a helpful critique. People almost always lie to make themselves look better. The bias should be in favor of underreporting the incidence of people who have sex without telling their partners they're infected.

Then there are the questions. Now, the way that this gets reported in the media is "40% of people with AIDS don't tell the people they have sex with that they're infected". In fact, the question is more detailed (they always are, in case you're wondering; the media glosses over fine distinctions to make a better story). In this case, what they actually said was that they'd had sex with someone in the last 6 months without telling them they were infected. So actually, what the media should have said is that "40% of people with AIDS don't tell some of the people they have sex with that they're infected". However, in this case, that doesn't really make me feel better.

And finally, there's the composition of the sample. This survey was done at two hospitals in New England. So again, the media has glossed over a major point: what the story should have said was "40% of the people with AIDS who are treated at these New England hospitals say they don't tell some of the people they have sex with that they're infected."

With a sample like this, what you always want to know is: how well does it match the population? The population, in this use, is a statistical term, meaning all the members of the group you are trying to gather information about. In this case, that would be all the HIV positive people in the country.

[Keep in mind: I don't have access to the study, only media accounts of it that I found, all of which were fairly superficial, and also, sympathetic to teh study]

The sample is smallish. The smaller a sample is, the less likely it is to represent the population well. For example, if I am trying to find out what MBA's think about invading Iraq, and I decide to ask three of my friends and then publish the result, there is a large likelihood that the results will be off. And not just because I hang out with the MBA world's hippie fringe. Even if I picked out four people at random, one person with whacko notions, like, say, "Let's invade Iraq, take Sadaam captive, and tickle him with feathers until he repents" is going to get reported as "25% of MBA's believe we should tickle Sadaam to death". This is not, needless to say, representative of the average opinion among the broad swathe of yuppie larvae at our nation's top schools of business.

But there are many other ways in which a sample can be off. It can be chosen mainly from certain populations. For example, we've all heard that 1 in 10 people is gay. Yet this contradicts the fact that far less than 1 in 10 of, say, our relatives, or the people we grew up with, are gay. The actual number seems to be closer to 2-3% for men, less for women.

So where did the stat come from? The Kinsley report. And where did the Kinsley report come from? A sample that was heavily over-weighted with men in prison. The question that turned into "1 in 10 people is gay" was "Have you had any sexual contact with someone of the same sex in the last 10 years" or some such. Which is not the same thing as being what we think of as "gay", which is to say, mainly or exclusively attracted to members of the same sex.

I can think of many ways in which this sample could be off.

It could be disproportionately drawn from drug users, who are presumably less responsible about their behavior than people who contracted the virus from sex or a blood transfusion.

It could be disproportionately poor. Poverty is correlated with irresponsible behavior; my left/right readers can argue about which way the causal link runs.

People in New England, or the area around the hospital, could be unusually selfish.

The people surveyed might be prostitutes, who have a financial incentive not to disclose.

Obviously, the first thing I would like to know is what populations the hospitals serve. And what the population surveyed looked like, and how closely it mirrors the population of the HIV positive: income/class/race/profession/method of infection/sex/education/etc.

The point being that when you see a factoid based on a survey, you have to carefully check what was actually asked, and who was asked it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm watching one of the

I'm watching one of the med students who were arrested in Florida basically accusing the waitress who called the threat in of being a bigot.

Now, I don't think that they deserved to lose their jobs; I hope people in Miami are putting some pressure on the hospital to rethink their position. But neither do I think that the waitress, who has been tenative, retiring, and otherwise utterly unlike the kind of people who phone these sorts of things in to get attention, was lying. Those kind of nuts tend to fit a profile, which includes phoning in those sorts of threats a lot, or being down as bigoted against the ethnic group in question long before the crank report, neither of which seems to be true in her case.

My best guess is that the students noticed everyone staring at them. And probably, they'd gotten that treatment all the way down the pike, especially in the south, which is less ethnically diverse than the big city. And probably they were sick of it all. And probably they made some smartass remarks.

They don't deserve to lose their jobs. But do I feel sorry for them getting stopped and questioned? Well, let me tell you a story.

When I was in college, I dated a guy whose older brother was one of those vaguely lost recovering druggies who spends a lot of time on the couch, eating pizza and watching late-night television. This particular specimen told me a perfectly hilarious story about his first day of college, when he'd taken insufficiently cut crystal methamphetamine which kept him awake for five days. It was so funny that when I met my roommate for a cheesesteak that afternoon, I tried to repeat it.

Due to some sort of blip on the vocal cords, my voice rose to high volume just on the words "Uncut crystal meth". Whereupon I saw the large number of Philadelphia cops, just off their shifts, who filled the steak joint. And they saw me. And they watched me. And followed me outside the restaurant. And began to follow me home until I stopped and told the story to the nearest cop.

He thought it was funny. Thank God. I could have ended up in the pokey for questioning.

The point is, even though it wasn't true, I can't fault the cops. When you hear someone talking about drugs, even white bread college girls, it is not unreasonable to attempt to find out whether they are selling them.

And that's how I feel about these kids. I think they played a little joke that bit them in the ass. I think it bit them harder than is just. But I don't feel all that bad about the hours they spend explaining themselves to the police.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More on Rand Well, there

More on Rand
Well, there have been several good points made while I was away from my computer today. Arthur Silber makes a point that I think Rand's critics often overlook: she lived through the Russian Revolution. Having witnessed the horrors of communism first hand, she can be forgiven for reacting rather strongly to people she found advocating such a system in the land of the free.

Meanwhile, Norah Vincent weighs in with a typically erudite post arguing that philosophy and aesthetics cannot be reconciled -- rather, that they are diametrically opposed. Frankly, my brain is too sodden with fatigue to say anything intelligent, so I just urge you to go read it yourself.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

She's Back! An addition to

She's Back! An addition to Shiloh's many contributions, I can rest knowing that the blogosphere can deal with any pernicious healthcare reform proposals.

Shiloh and I started around the same time, and were picked up out of obscurity by the kindly Matt Welch in the very same post. I think of her as my blogging sister (I've never met).

Cheers, sis.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I don't like it when

I don't like it when intelligence assets start calling suitcase WMD the wild card in the invasion of Iraq. Maybe it's time to reconsider making my home in New York.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Those of you who believed

Those of you who believed that Hilary Clinton was telling the truth when she said she wasn't looking to run for president may now step over to your desks, get that lease you bought for the Brooklyn Bridge the last time you were in New York, and smack yourself in the head with it until your brain starts functioning again.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Bush is calling on the

Bush is calling on the Senate to maintain "Fiscal Sanity".

I'm glad someone is saying it. Not that I think it will do any good, mind you; we haven't had fiscal sanity in this country since 1913. But at least he gave it the old college try.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Mark Helprin has laid into

Mark Helprin has laid into Bush for not being hawkish enough.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Check out Samizdata's blog dictionary.

Check out Samizdata's blog dictionary.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

WABC News Radio is announcing

WABC News Radio is announcing that 3 people have been shot on the 11th floor of their building.

The announcer is cheerily discussing all the security precautions, laughing about them. She describes the situation as "sort of interesting".

There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this city when our journalists describe other people's suffering as "interesting".

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

"They want to take away our freedoms..."

Quite a response to my last post - thank you for that. As it happens, I was away for the weekend and did not see it until now (Sunday night). I should add that some of my correspondents have no one to argue (except me) that disagrees with them about anything that happened this century. Hence the occasional fish-in-a-barrel aspects of our correspondence.

Some time ago, a friend of mine was ridiculing the suggestion that the "terrorists want to deprive us of our freedom". If you allow him the luxury of phrasing it in that strawman fashion he's right. The idea that the primary goal of terrorism is to take away our freedom seems much too facile. On reflection, however, I think it is not far off the mark.

Lawrence Wright's profile of Al Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in the New Yorker (link is a profile, it is only in print right now) provides provocative anecdotes and quotations from Sayyid Qutb, who appears to be a key figure in modern radical militant islam, and Ayatollah Khomeini, undeniably a forefather of same.

Here's Khomeini on his own motivation immediately after the revolution:

Yes, we are reactionaries, and you are enlightened intellectuals: you intellectuals do not want us to go back fourteen hundred years...You, who want freedom, freedom for everythinhg, the freedom of parties, you who want all the freedoms, you intellectuals: freedom that will pave the way for the oppressor, freedom that will drag our nation to the bottom."

OK, so it's safe to say that Khomeini was anti-freedom! I think you will find the Qutb profile equally clear on this point.

I believe the major issue in Middle Eastern terrorist motivation this boils down to is the separation of church and state. In the United States we accept the moral legitimacy of our state. It is derived, in large part, from the limits we place on it in the constitution. For militant Islam, and a large part of Islam in general, there is no moral authority to a secular government - in fact no moral authority to secular power, and the United States is wildly secular (so to speak). We are the standard bearers of secular government.

In a very real way, you might say a "root cause" of our perceived illegitimacy is, in fact, our freedom. Our freedom from state-sponsored religion,which proves so attractive an alternative to the would-be subject of radical theocrats.

Bernard Lewis, in his excellent book What Went Wrong, cautions that this is a major factor, but not the only factor in the current radicalization of Islam today. Nonetheless, this is a major obstacle for those who think that we can combat terrorism by simply being better external sponsors of our own form of government. We should be better supporters of democracy, but simply doing so won't make our attackers dry up and blow away. Nor, as if it matters, would it have done so 20 years ago.

By the way, also in the New Yorker (and on-line now) is this quietly anti-idiotarian piece by Louis Menand. Here's a snippet:

Blowback, as the term is used in the literature on September 11th, is intended to carry moral weight: if you insist on tramping through other people's flower gardens, you can't complain when you get stung is the general idea. But this is true, without moral implication, of any sufficiently complex undertaking. It's like saying, If you keep building huge passenger ships, sooner or later one of them is going to hit an iceberg, or, If you keep making rockets to launch human beings into orbit, sooner or later one of them will explode. The destruction of the World Trade Center—an almost inconceivably long-odds operation in itself—was at the extreme of the imaginable consequences of supporting an Afghan resistance movement in 1979. On some level, it's just a consequence of participating in global affairs at all. This is why the notion, proposed by a number of far less severe critics of American policy than Chomsky and Roy, that September 11th was a "wake-up call" is empty. Wake up to what? The fact that the United States is involved in the affairs of other nations? If that is a problem, we are left with only two alternatives: isolationism or conquest. Anything in between is bound to produce results that Americans do not like but could not have foreseen.

No kidding. Since when is perfection (including in 20-20 hindsight) a necessary precondition to involvement in international affairs?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The New York Times reports

The New York Times reports on the mental anguish of New Jersey Dems forced to choose between voting for a crook and a Republican for Senator.

Perhaps I should be surprised -- they chose the crook.

Robert Musil has already written a good post on the dishonest way the New York Times frames the story. What got my attention was the quotes.

The Torch has basically one campaign issue: control of the senate. A vote for him is a vote for Democratic control. The voters seem to accept this without wondering why their party has nominated a man who received numerous gifts that sent the giver of those gifts to jail.

Their thoughts are just priceless.

Jessica de Koninck, a lawyer and former council member in Montclair, said that Mr. Torricelli represented her views on almost every issue, including abortion and gun control.

"I'm not finding it a difficult choice," she said. "Torricelli is not a warm and fuzzy guy, but that's not in my top criteria."

Thank you for putting our hearts to rest, Ms. de Koninck. Many of us were worried about the Torch's personal warmth, not to mention his relative hairyness to the Republican candidate. Now we know -- that shouldn't be our top criteria.

Those beknighted fools who are worried about his prediliction for taking bribes -- well, obviously they'd feel differently if they'd gone to law school.

"I've thought about it as I've read about him," said a woman in Montclair who did not want to be identified because of her job as a teacher. "I think what he did was wrong, but I can't in good conscience let the Republicans get control of the political process."

One wishes that she refrained from being identified because her ideas are thoroughly stupid, but that may be expecting too much.
And this one just leaves me speechless:

Lorraine Cryan, a clerk who lives in Elizabeth, described Mr. Torricelli as "not a person I think should be in government."

"But I will have to wait and see about other issues before casting my vote," she said.

I've said before that I think that Howell Raines is living in a bubble-universe where the only party that matters is the Democratic party, and Republicans are evil conspirators on the Darth Vader model. But this. . . did they realize how this sounds?

Do they realize that they are painting the Democratic Party as the party of corruption?

At least with Clinton, they could argue (wrongly, I think, but no matter) that it had nothing to do with his job. This guy was taking bribes. And the Democratic Party is letting them run as their last great hope for control of the Senate. Are they nuts? Do they not realize what this says to independents -- who, incidentally, make up a majority of the voters in New Jersey? "We don't care what the hell they do when they're in office, just as long as we hold onto power."

The Democratic Party has gotten into the habit of relying too heavily on its base -- not caring, in effect, what image they project to large swathes of the country that reliably go Dem. This thing is incredibly short-sghted, and the Republicans would be insane to pass up the opportunity to take a few shots. The Republicans may be lucky that they do not inspire this kind of religious devotion. Their voters, when they get mad, stay home. And as a result, when their legislators got themselves into scandals, they didn't try to defend them -- they kicked them out, double quick. Which is going to give them the ammo they need to pound the Democrats into a pulp if the Torch gets re-elected.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The post below sparked a

The post below sparked a discussion question: Will the UN endorse our action? And if not, what is the likelihood that the US will pull out of the UN in the near future? And do you think that back-channel diplomacy is using that threat to bludgeon out some compliance?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tony Adragna has a very

Tony Adragna has a very good post on multilateralism versus unilaterism. However, he makes the analogy to a fire department, which I don't think quite works:

Alas, our hero has a tragic flaw. The UN has too often allowed the principle of "pacific settlement" to blind the world body when confronted by flagrant threats to peace and security. Hiding behind the rose colored glasses of Resolutions, the diplomats have declared the fires under control and retreated to the relative security of "stability".

Yet the threats still present. Continuing the firefighting analogy: A firefighter will never leave the scene 'til every smoldering ember is quenched. Any other approach to firefighting will only have the engines back in time to face an even bigger conflagration. Time and again the UN has taken the wrong approach, or worse — as in Rwanda — not even respond[ed] at all. Certainly the "humanitarian response" — nevermind that 'twould have been much more Human to act sooner in the cause of bringing the killing to an end — was appreciated. But I keep returning to that phrase in the middle.

Rather than looking for an answer to "why not put out the fires", it's perfectly rational to take an alternate approach: I'm not waiting around for the fire dept so long as I got a hose. In other words — Screw the UN if they can't take the heat... I understand that reasoning, and find it cogent. The argument has elicited in myself a desire to go against closely held principle. I've resolved this conflict by recalling my own firefighting training — what's the first thing you do when you see a fire?

If you answer "fight the fire", then you're wrong. The first thing you do is yell Fire, Fire, Fire! Going it alone more often than not results in tragic consequences for self and neighbors. You may in the end be left to fight the fire by yourself, and if you don't step ut to the challenge you're a fool [or afraid]. But let it not be your fault that more harm was done by not sounding the alarm and seeking help. This is a fundamental in firefighting, and when there's disagreement on such basic principles the debate is significant.

Here's the problem: we're the firefighter. The rest of the "team" we're waiting for is going to spend the duration of the fire talking to the reporters, or criticizing the way we're fighting the fire even though they've never actually fought a fire themselves. Even our cherished allies are not actually providing any capability we could not provide ourselves.

The longer I think about it, the more I wonder if it is possible to possess as much power as the US and not become an empire. I'll be doing a longer post on that question soon. But even if we do not become an empire, the minimum we must achieve is to provide the leadership that the UN lacks to focus it on doing things, rather than seeking ways to destroy the power which threaten to render it impotent. In that regard, I think Bush is doing an extraordinary job. For the first time in living memory, the UN is doing something besides whine about the US. My father thinks that Bush missed a golden opportunity to walk in, explicitly condemn unilateralism, demand action -- and then point out that the single largest unilateralist out there is Saddaam. (It's true. We may be in violation of more resolutions, but they're General Assembly resolutions, which are non-binding. For comparison, my sources tell me that France is in violation of any number of such resolutions. Iraq is in violation of binding resolutions made by the Security Council.) The effect, nonetheless, is much the same: the UN has to act in order to prove it's not entirely irrelevant.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Al Barger says we don't

Al Barger says we don't need Republicans lying to us to support the war on Iraq. He's right.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Meanwhile, Arthur Silber has a

Meanwhile, Arthur Silber has a fascinating post on the individual in Objectivism which I think just captures what I was trying to say in an earlier post:

I addressed the issue of Rand's "intolerance" of people who don't accept her philosophy and/or her ethics here. I myself wouldn't characterize her philosophical attitude as intolerance at all. I think it would be more accurate to call it a laissez-faire attitude (and for the same reasons Rand advocated laissez-faire capitalism): go your own way, and think what you want. Believe whatever you like and, so long as you don't violate our rights, there's no problem. As I said before, I truly do believe it's that simple.

What I find more intriguing and suggestive in Jane's post is the last part: that perhaps Objectivism works best when it is aspirational, rather than normative. I think I understand what Jane means here (and, of course, she is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong), but I would describe it in somewhat different terms. As Chris Sciabarra points out here, Objectivism provides a broad philosophical framework, with principles each of us must then apply in the particular contexts of our individual lives. And that is precisely where I believe many of the problems arise. Having been around Objectivism and "Objectivist society," if you will, since the mid-1960s, I (and many others) can attest to the fact that there has never been a shortage of self-identified Objectivists who apply the principles of Objectivism in a mechanistic, doctrinaire, and largely unthinking manner. (This practice continues, unfortunately, in certain quarters today, on the basis of the evidence I've seen.) Such an approach is, I think, antithetical to the true spirit and meaning of Objectivism as Rand herself enunciated it. (Please note, here, that I am talking about the philosophY and not the philosophER, to borrow Chris's tremendously useful distinction.)

I still disagree that Rand was tolerant of others nursing opposing viewpoints; certainly, the tone of her novels, and some of the broadsides she fired at strayed sheep and public figures (if memory serves) indicate a certain intolerance. But of course, that is the way leaders of a successful movement almost have to be. Jesus has to cast the moneychangers out of the temple. It's for later apostles to bend the creed to the workings of everyday life. I think Objectivism is growing into a much richer and more robust philosophical movement than when it was sustained largely by Rand-worship and doctrinaire textualism. And I think that as Silber is describing it -- a calling to find your highest self -- many of us could do worse, and in fact do do worse, than to adopt it as a philosophy.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What did I tell you?

What did I tell you? We've got friends in Australia. And they're funny as hell.

For a majority of the baby boomers that make up the Western commentary elite, the 1960's were their defining moment. The first television war, large scale public protests, cultural upheaval. They were in high school when Kennedy was shot, and were radicalised by the time King went down.

Many student leaders that leapt to prominence then have remained place with a strong hand on the cultural tiller. Even to the point that many still see the world through that prism. Last week Howell Raines, the editor of the New York Times no less, used Vietnam to twice trump discomfiting questioning on The News Hour, when asked why the NYT was running a campaign against the war, instead of just reporting it. Can you imagine the scorn a young Raines would have heaped on some 60 year old in 1964, who was trying to use a 40 year old war to explain Vietnam? But that is what Raines wants to do. His credentials as an anti-Vietnam protester have somehow proofed him against irrelevancy and fogiedom.

Home-grown Australian hipsters are still trading on their fame of decades past. It’s as if they refuse to realise the world has moved on. No, Che is still glamorous, Bush is the same as Nixon, they’re all in on it together. And if they use the occasional reference to acid and The Man, it will delay the onset of Relevance Deprivation Syndrome. Here’s a thought fellas: if you have to keep reminding your audience of how cool and revolutionary you were 35 years ago, people are entitled to wonder of what use you are today.

But my question is this: what kind of thinking is the war of today creating? And how are the pensioned-off Radicals coping?

In the 60’s, Uncle Ho (shades of “Uncle Joe” Stalin) was a wrinkled, cuddly folk figure. Like an exotic little doll. Che was neither fat, nor dead. Fidel was macho. The Revolution was a foregone conclusion, and would lead to freer behaviour, looser sexual mores. Now the old icons have failed, and the new ones don’t measure up.

Now the defenders of the Movement are lining up behind crazies who are happy to bomb abortion clinics and would hunt gays for sport. Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden are not Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know. They’re just nuts. And they smell baaad.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Iraq just rejected unconditional inspection

Iraq just rejected unconditional inspection demands. The ambassador did try to hedge a little about whether they'd accept them as a last ditch effort to avoid war, but I don't think they're going to get that opportunity.

DUBAI - Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz on Friday rejected the unconditional return of U.N. arms inspectors called for by Washington.

"We do not accept President Bush's conditions," Aziz told the Dubai-based Arab satellite television station MBC in an interview being shown at 1500 GMT, footage of which was seen in advance by Reuters.

"The return of inspectors without conditions will not solve the problem...we have had a bad experience with them. Is it clever to repeat an experience that failed and did not prevent aggression?"

Alea iacta est.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It turns out that even

It turns out that even we did not suspect the depths of Al-Qaeda's inhuman pursuit of terror. Their access to WMD is much worse than we previously thought. While some have speculated that they might have gotten their hands on biological, chemical, or even nuclear weapons, not even the most pessimistic commentators suspected the awful truth: Al-Qaeda has bypassed these conventional threats and gone straight to the most inhuman, terrifying destructive weapons man has yet produced -- the business blather book.

And from there it gets still worse. They have mastered the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. They have Crossed the Chasm. They have transformed themselves into Guerilla Marketers. And now, we find that our worst fears have been realized:

Al-Qaeda is a Learning Organization.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm beginning to think that

I'm beginning to think that someone in the White House is very, very smart.

One hopes it's the president of course, though I've heard strong minority voices for Condi Rice, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. Whoever it is, I think they've confirmed my belief that the Administration has managed this crisis like a virtuoso.

I never took very seriously the complaints that Bush was flailing, because my years of watching politics have convinced me that there is some sort of natural law decreeing that every administration policy will provoke an equal number of equally vehement voices for, and against it. Especially in a war, when the demands of national security mean that the people running the war have a lot more information than the people trying to tell them how to run it. That's not to say that their decisions are necessarily right. But it means that I am unmoved by complaints that "I don't understand where he's going with all this". Thank God. A military strategy where everyone and their brother in law can chart the moves in advance is not one that I find reassuring.

The first time I suspected Bush was smarter than he looks (well, actually, it was the second time. But I can't remember what the first one was) was when he announced the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. It seemed to me that rather than displaying panic, it was a master stroke, politically speaking. He didn't say anything until the Democrats had enough rope to hang themselves -- and then he pulled the trigger. They were left without anything to say.

This looks similar to me. The Clinton team would have been out there, aggressively putting over the spin. The Bush administration was silent until everyone had decided that the complaint they were going to hang their hopes on was the abominable unilateral bent of the US. They let everyone talk themselves out and then they delivered this.

The UN performance was brilliant in so many ways. First of all, even before the speech, the obvious push for invasion forced Europe to stop pushing to ease the sanctions and let Saddaam build whatever weapons he wants as long as he buys French equipment and pays the Russians what he owes them. It brought us to a position of strength in negotiation. Whether or not you want the US to invade, it's pretty clear that the credible threat of invasion is the only thing making Saddaam offer to submit to inspections, or making Europe actually argue for uncompromising inspections. Second of all, now that it is clear that the US is going, it is fairly clear to me that Europe is indeed going to jump on the bandwagon so that their governments don't end up looking totally irrelevant. And third of all, most brilliantly, it was a "Put up or shut up" to the multilateralists.

Saddaam is in violation of about a hundred UN resolutions. And not fluffy resolutions either. Resolutions about things like stockpiling ABC weapons.

The UN can endorse the US invasion, and lose an opportunity to aggrandize its power and appease the small countries who would like to see the US brought low.

Or it can fail to endorse the invasion, and admit that its resolutions have no force. Should this occur, I don't think it's alarmist to say that we could look for the US to pull out of the UN in the not so distant future, the UN having proved itself not only anti-American, but irrelevent to boot.

I think they're going to endorse the invasion. I think they will make Saddaam an offer he can't accept -- really, truly, disarm (in which case I think Saddaam knows he would be dead in six months) or the US gets the green light. And then I think they will -- reluctantly, painfully, resentfully -- give lip service to the American cause.

Flailing? I think the Bush administration has more discipline than we've seen in the White House for a long time.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

My archives are hosed. Arrgghh!

My archives are hosed. Arrgghh! I'm working on it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I had an interesting discussion

I had an interesting discussion with Norah Vincent the other day about the future of libel law in the blogosphere; now she's blogged about it.

She took a lot of heat for her angry response to some people who accused her of plagiarism because she used four words from a song. My initial response was "These people need to get a hobby". For anyone who has been planning to level similar charges, yes, I cribbed large parts of a post below from the Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Independance, and other sources. I assume that my readers are educated enough to pick up the references. For anyone who may have been confused, let me clear it up: I did not write either the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address, though of course I wish I had.

But anyway, as Norah pointed out to me, for a professional journalist, this is a very serious charge. That accusation could easily end up with editors who will demand explanation and hurt her livelihood, especially owing to the magic of google. The people who made the accusation may not have realized this. If they did, they deserve our full censure.

We aren't always as careful as we should be. I know that I am not, although I am more careful than I was six months ago. Certainly, I don't want to shut down other peoples' freedom of expression. But when we are leveling serious charges we should have serious evidence. For some of us, it may not matter. But for the people here who make their living in the public sphere, I think that it is right that they should be able to ask that others not deliberately spread silly or false charges because of ideological disagreements. I think it is right for us to support that by not linking those charges, and thus furthering the damage, unless we think that they are fair. Norah's blast about non-professionals was taking as a smear against bloggers who are not professional journalists, when it was rather a -- justified! -- smear against people who use the unique powers of a blog to make unfounded charges that can severely harm someone's career. I do not know that the bloggers in question were malicious; I certainly hope not. But I think it behooves us all to think hard about what we say, and whether there is a fair basis for it, before we put it in out there.

But I'm interested in what others think, about the ethics and also about the future of litigation in the blogosphere. If I put up a lie that gets wide coverage, am I liable?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So I was reading Joseph

So I was reading Joseph Stiglitz's article in the Atlantic Monthly, which is not yet online, and meditating on the difference between liberal and conservative economists.

One of the interesting phenomenon I experience with this blog is when liberals who take offense to my generally free-market slant present me with some evidence that the market -- usually the financial market, but any market will do -- has produced an imperfect result. So there! they say, triumphantly, and presumably sit back with a satisfied smile to await the inevitable crisis when I, all my dreams of market purity having been swept away like so much chaff, crumble and admit that after all, the free market's not so hot.

They are generally shocked and hurt when instead I respond "Of course it doesn't always work perfectly. And your point is. . . ? "

The caricature of the free-market side is that, because we are mean and wish to keep all of our money to ourselves, and/or because we are stupid and probably racist and classist to boot, we are blinding ourselves to the down sides of markets in order to cling to the belief, which we know in our heart of hearts to be erroneous, that markets are perfect. I believe this is a fairly succinct statement of a belief that I have encountered from roseate interlocutors on a fairly regular basis.

Unfortunately for my erstwhile opponents, this is not the case. If you want to hear a great rundown of all the ways in which markets fail, there's no better place to get it than the University of Chicago Economics Department. All of the market failures my left-leaning adversaries describe have well known economic names, from the Principal-Agent problem to the Free Rider problem, to the eternal curse of negative externalities. The economic illiterate does not, in my experience, discover anything new under the sun.

At their base level, markets are merely systems. Sometimes the rules are sub-optimal, in which case Chicago economists and many others devote precious intellectual effort to figuring out what rules would be more optimal, and often charge private parties a pretty penny to help them implement these improved systems. And sometimes the results are bound to be imperfect within the limits of human interaction, and all we can do is mitigate the damage.

The difference between a free market economist and a more pro-regulation one is not that the former is a venal poltroon who is unaware that markets fail, much as the Nation and the American Prospect might wish that this were the case. The difference is that they impute to government different levels of ability to remedy these failures without introducing new, worse failures into the system. Liberal economists have a higher degree of confidence in the workings of regulation.

Now, just as National Review authors generally pretend that there ain't no such thing as a market failure, Paul Krugman generally pretends that there is no such thing as a government regulation that makes things worse. In neither case do I believe that the authors are actually under the delusion that the systems they are touting are perfect. But they feel that they have to pretend that they are perfect, so that the proles will not experience doubt and thus be led to make an incorrect choice come next election. But this is not that kind of web site. For example: lowering tax rates does not increase tax revenue, at least not at the current levels of taxation in the US. It would be very nice if that were true, but it isn't, and that's that. I am not going to pretend that it is true, or argue that it might be true, or what have you, in order to support my idealogical predisposition for lower taxes. It isn't. It is true that Democratic analyses of such matters always overstate the amount by which revenues will fall, because they make ludicrous assumptions about individual behavior, but no one is in serious doubt that the net effect will be to lower overall revenues somewhat. You may see this site arguing for tax cuts for other reasons, but the Laffer curve will not be among them.

My, that felt better. Back to liberal economists.

The reason that I was thinking about this is that Joseph Stiglitz, writing for a popular audience, is making ludicrous assumptions about the behavior of government. Partly this is because he worked for the NEA, which sets macro policy from the olympian heights of monetary policy and broad fiscal guidelines, not down in the trenches making particular regulations. Partly, I assume, it is ideological predisposition to wish that government regulations were very, very effective. And partly, I assume again, it is that Joseph Stiglitz doesn't want to worry his readers with the possibility that a government regulation, particularly one proposed by smart, well meaning Democrats, might not, y'know, work.

The topic of the rest of this post will be fractional reserve banking. Those of you who are operating heavy machinery, or who would otherwise find it unsafe to health or career to suddenly drop into a deep sleep, should stop reading now.

Joseph Stiglitz was excoriating the Bush administration for lowering the reserve requirements and therefore making the banking system less safe. But this is dumb. Lowering the reserve requirements doesn't make the banking system any safer, even though journalists think it does. But Joseph Stiglitz is not a journalist, and ought to know better.

First, let's talk about what fractional reserve banking is. Probably the best explanation of it is given by Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life, but I don't have time to watch the movie right now, so I'll have to wing it.

Basically the concept is this: when your bank takes your money in, it doesn't, contrary to popular belief, stick it in a vault where your bankers can periodically go and rub their hands, thinking of how they screwed the workers out of all this dough. They lend it out to other people, in mortgages and car loans and such. That's how they get the money to pay you the .005% annual interest they dole out.

But they can't loan out every penny you give them. If they did that, and you decided you needed to get some money out to buy your nephew a set of ginsu knives for his 18th birthday, it would be a little awkward. They'd have to go get the cash from the guy they loaned it to. But the guy they loaned it to is probably a 16 year old kid with his first car. His liquid assets consists of two bucks lunch money and the remains of the six pack he and his buddies bought last night when his parents thought he was at the library. In order to get the money, he'll have to sell the car. And no one wants to buy a 1981 Honda Civic that's been driven around by a sixteen year old. Plus all this takes time, which means you're going to miss out on the special Elvis cutting board, which is only available if you call in the next ten minutes.

So they only loan out a fraction of what you give them. The aim of bankers is to balance things exactly so that the amount of cash they have on hand at any given time is enough to meet all the demands of people who want cash around that time, without any extra left over. They want every penny possible to be out there working hard and earning interest. Of course, it's not possible to be that exact. It is therefore better to be somewhat conservative, to ensure that you have enough cash to meet unexpected demand. This is because the consequences of not having sufficient cash are horrendous: a bank run. Bank runs mean the bank goes out of business and the depositors lose everything.

This is how banking has worked since the system was invented. However, there are problems with this system. The main problem is that in good times, banks get too optimistic. They figure nothing bad has happened for years, so why worry? They start holding fewer reserves, lending more. This results in a dramatic increase in the money supply, fueling more growth. Unfortunately, if anything does go wrong, like too many loans default or a lot of depositors lose their jobs and start taking money out instead of putting it in, the bank goes bust. The result is a dramatic decrease in the money supply, dramatically curtailing growth. This phenomenon was one of the major drivers of the boom-bust cycle of the 19th century, which was much more volatile on both the upside (long periods of high growth) and the downside (6-10 year recessions).

So along comes a progressive johnnie and says, "How about the government requires banks to hold a certain amount of their capital as reserves?" The states had been doing this previously, but they weren't very aggressive about it; there are amusing stories (for non-depositors, I mean) of consortiums of banks that would ship the same vault, containing a lot of sand covered by a thin layer of gold coins, around between them just ahead of the bank examiners. The federal government, on the other hand, made it stick. Banks now have a percentage of their deposits that they must have in their vaults at all time. The government sets what that percentage is on a national basis; the percentage is called the reserve requirement.

The conventional wisdom is that this acts to simply force the banks to behave responsibly; carry the reserves they should in order to safely operate. This is how journalists treat the question, if they treat it. But this is not true.

Why? Because banks cannot dip below their reserve requirement. If they do, the government descends and starts asking nasty questions, and forces them to raise their reserves back to the requirement. So that money is, for all intents and purposes, off limits.

Think of it as if it were your budget. Say there's a federal mandate that you have to carry around 25% of your income in cash to deal with emergencies. If you drop below that number, they arrest you. Can you walk around with just that 25% in your pocket? No, because you're not allowed to drop below that 25%. You'll need to carry more than 25% in order to deal with your day-to-day expenses. Banks have to do the same thing.

Now, theoretically, of course, if everything goes to hell, the government can step in and lower the reserve requirements, freeing up cash for the banks to use. But this is where Joseph Stiglitz is imputing to a political system the kind of perfect efficiency that liberals accuse me of attributing to markets. To wit: if the economy is shaky, can the government lower the reserve requirement?

Hell, no. If the banking system is in trouble, lowering the reserve requirements is going to panic depositors, and more importantly, voters. The last thing that is going to happen is for the reserve requirements to be lowered.

(Note: I'm talking about a banking crisis, not a recession. Reserve requirements have in the past been lowered in the face of recession, though they've also been raised.)

Reserve requirements protect the Fed, by making sure that at least some assets will be available in case the bank melts down and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has to bail out the depositors. But it doesn't make the bank any less likely to melt down in the first place, which is what Stiglitz says it does. And it doesn't because while during the Clinton boom years, the public may have ignored the actions of the Treasury and the Fed, in times of crisis they pay close attention, and if you make the wrong move they can panic and make things worse, or panic and unelect your boss. Both severely constrain the ability for the government technocrats to manipulate the system.

In sum, when the liberal economist demands, "How can you say that free markets are best?". the conservative economist replies "Because we've looked at the alternative."

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Surprisingly Persuasive Oratory from the

Surprisingly Persuasive Oratory from the President today.

I watched the speech live this morning, and I thought it was excellent. Well written to embarass the U.N. into action, and well-delivered to a somewhat stunned-looking group. "what, we can actually do more than talk?" It was a speech that spoke well of multilateral action, postulating that there can and will be action. The oft-quoted part about "irrelevance" was the most confrontational part.

The U.K., Hamid Karzai, and occasionally the Kuwaitis nodded their approval from time to time. I had not realized that the Kuwait delegation sits right above the Iraqis. Do you suppose they've ever lobbed a spitball down a row, or accidentally knocked over their coffee?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Medusan in Your Head

What to do when a family member sends you the WaPo Carter editorial speaks of "resonating" and says "..even if you buy the claim that we have a cause."

I remember a moment on Star Trek when Spock has to "mind meld" with a Medusan in order to save the Universe or something. A Medusan is sort of a plasma burst that dwells ina metal box, unable to interact with the outside world (it drives people who see it mad, as opposed to turning them to stone, but you get the idea). So there is one of these vintage high-camp Spock moments where he stumbles around appreciating his senses and quoting poetry. Bones says "That's not Spock". Spock immediately restores his poker-face and says "are you surprised to learn I've read Byron, Doctor?"

"That's Spock" says Bones, relieved.

When I received this email today I reflected on the trouble I have had corresponding on politics with people who don't share our strange predilection for absorbing and commenting rapid-fire on a constant stream of opinion and information. I find that it is a bit like operating two personalities in one head.

I learned very early on that the less net-aware in the world don't really care for the way netizens correspond, let alone bloggerish discourse. It's even worse with the folks who not only don't use the internet much but don't even correspond much by email. There are many etiquette/perception pitfalls. Nonetheless, I find myself with a lot of this correspondence lately. We seem to be on the verge of war and the non-bloggers (there are apparently still a few of those) want to argue about it too.

I bet, although I have not asked, that every blogger has had the experience of a non-blogging and not-so-net-aware friend or relative sending along an editorial that is on the "idiotarian" side. Or perhaps an original work that did not impress you with the quality of its reasoning - kind of a blogger on training wheels. DId you gave it a quick fisking between the paragraphs. Of course you left out the little flourishes speculating on the personal traits the lead to such leaps of logic or oversights, but you took the basic email style of quoting and bluntly refuting each point in sequence.

People who aren't frequent emailers are are not used to having their occasional "I noticed this and sent it to everyone in my address book-thingy" spams chewed up and spat back. Actually, I remember the first correspondence I had with Steven Den Beste. When he answers your mail he always pulls it apart and deals directly with every point. It can be intimidating at first, and you don't realize that he is taking you seriously by doing so. When you respond this way, and each point is a factual or logical refutation, non-netizens feel attacked.*

They do indeed. In fact, your correspondent goes bananas. He or she takes it personally or otherwise accuses you of being over the top. Your email has the approximate effect of shitting in their inbox. "I just liked it and thought you might too - obviously you don't, so never mind" or some such insulted rejoinder.

So the next time, you merely send along a copy of someone else's view on the subject - you "trade" third party editorials. In addition to being unsatisfying, your correspondent wants to hear "your words", even though they hadn't bothered to extend the same courtesy. Apparently it's OK for the correspondent to send along Chomsky or Rall, but you can't send Andrew Sullivan or Victor Davis Hanson back. You certainly can't send a blog entry back. They won't read it, they will impugn its credibility because they haven't heard of the writer, and they often subtly accuse you of joining the lunatic fringe, as if you had sent them the Fake Moon Landing page. So your next two choices are a) ignore it or b) pretend you agree. People don't like being ignored, and I don't like pretending I agree with pablum.

At this point you realize that being a member of the Blogosphere has changed you in some way. Or perhaps expressed something that was already there. Nine times out of ten I let the stupid stuff pass in conversation. In writing, however, I dive in like a Rottweiler.

Any of you have this problem? Nah....

UPDATE: At least I don't hold up pink signs saying "I Disagree"!

* It occurs to me that this is the real reason why lawyers are good bloggers. They are trained in Law School to pull arguments apart dispassionately in this fashion, and they therefore adapt more easily to blogging.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Asparagirl wants to know what

Asparagirl wants to know what happened with the radioactive cargo ship. I want to know what happened with a couple of stories I heard yesterday. . . the building in Ohio that was evacuated, the plane (planes?) that was diverted because of the unruly passengers who locked themselves in a bathroom, the arrests in various cities. Each of them appeared briefly on the news, and then disappeared as quickly. Anyone know what happened? Or have any other stories like this? What am I not being told, and is it because they're afraid of sparking panic, or because the law or the media are afraid of looking like idiots for making a mountain out of a molehill?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Well, I could link the

Well, I could link the Salon troll, Forbidden Thougts on 9/11, which the editor describes as "puncturing orthodoxies", a task it accomplishes in much the same way the commuter in the next train seat "punctures outmoded conventions" by picking his nose and belching. Or I could link Tim Blair's "Forbidden Thoughts" piece, which doesn't puncture anything except inflated senses of self-importance.

I guess I'm just a reactionary at heart.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

All right, blogosphere, I have

All right, blogosphere, I have no idea if this story is true. Frankly, the idea that it could be makes me so sick that I can't bear thinking about it. But how about putting a full court press on the mainstream media to find out whether it is or not?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Thanks for the kind words

Thanks for the kind words about the memorial page. I'm not generally very sentimental, but. . . well, I make no excuses for my maudlin moments. Anyone still looking for the memorial page will find it here. It's also over there on the left under the new black button.

Meanwhile, in my last poetic gesture for a while, I'm going to share a poem that I particularly liked:

Optimism

At last there'll dawn the last of the long year,
Of the long year that seemed to dream no end,
Whose every dawn but turned the world more drear,
And slew some hope, or led away some friend.
Or be you dark, or buffeting, or blind,
We care not, day, but leave not death behind.

The hours that feed on war go heavy-hearted,
Death is no fare wherewith to make hearts fain.
Oh, we are sick to find that they who started
With glamour in their eyes came not again.
O day, be long and heavy if you will,
But on our hopes set not a bitter heel.

For tiny hopes like tiny flowers of Spring
Will come, though death and ruin hold the land,
Though storms may roar they may not break the wing
Of the earthed lark whose song is ever bland.
Fell year unpitiful, slow days of scorn,
Your kind shall die, and sweeter days be born.

-- A. Victor Ratcliffe

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I cried yesterday. I'm not

I cried yesterday. I'm not a weeper, generally speaking, but yesterday I wept freely.

I cried when they sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic at Shanksville. I was so glad it was the Battle Hymn, and not Amazing Grace. It's not yet time for us to focus on the next world; there's still much to be done in this one.

I cried when I saw how many people, in how many other countries, were taking time out of their days to honor our dead.

I cried when I saw a wounded eagle who had been nursed back to health by the parks service soar back into the wild.

I cried when I saw the towers hit again, and fall again, and saw the hole in New York's skyline still gaping.

I cried when I heard the victims talk about the helplessness and hopelessness of lives rudely interrupted, and when I saw the photographs of the men with eyes as blank and pitiless as the sun who thought nothing of this terrible thing they did.

I cried for the people I knew who died that day. They weren't particularly remarkable, except to those of us who knew them; not especially brilliant or good; just ordinary, decent people who were as surprised by their death as we were. I don't think I grasped the finality of their deaths until I heard their names read out loud. When people we know die we tend to think of their death in only the most personal way: their absence from our lives, and the lives of the people we know. Their death is a sad moment, something we'd like to tell them, something we wish they could see. But when a stranger read out loud the name of a boy I dated my freshman year of college, I realized: he is not just dead to me. He is dead to the world. He is gone forever. And I cried.

I wept for an America that vanished without warning at 8:46 AM on an otherwise unremarkable summer morning. It was a shallow and frivolous place, perhaps, but it was nonetheless sweet, and it will never be regained.

And now our year's mourning is over, and it's time to wipe away the tears.

Most of the people who died that day weren't heroes, any more than the thousands of people who die each day in this country in accidents not of their making are heroes; they were victims of a terrible injustice. But the dead at Shanksville have showed us that they could have been heroes, if only they'd had the chance. Given the knowlege of what they face, Americans will make the hard choices and the sacrifices required to defend themselves and their country from the barbarians at the gates. That knowlege, and opportunity, were denied the victims. So now the work of defeating the evil that did this falls to the rest of us.

We can never do enough for the families. We can't give them their loved ones back. We can't give them solace, save for the solace of knowing that we grieve for them. We can't give them vengeance. We cannot give them one million billionth of a tiny part of all that they lost a year ago. All we can give them is honor for their sacrifice, and freedom and peace for their families. And wish as hard as we do that we could restore their loved ones to them, we can give that gift to other people: to the victims of terror who have not yet been created. Even though we don't know their names, and God willing, never will, we can give them everything we wish we could give the families of the 9/11 victims.

Because they deserve our best efforts. There are those who dismiss our grief, arguing that 9/11 is nothing compared to car wrecks or cancer or typhoons. This is the sort of cold calculus that made the death camps possible. Human beings are not counted like cordwood. Whether you believe the answer is a stronger military or more foreign aid, they died in your place. To the attackers, you would have done just as well. To the enemy, it would be a blessing to see you follow them into the grave. You have an obligation to honor the memory of that sacrifice, even though -- especially because -- it was not freely chosen. We have an obligation, the same obligation we accept to get murderers off the streets so children can play there, and old ladies can get their groceries safe from harm.

That means being prepared to make the sacrifices required to deny terror a safe harbor anywhere in the world, and to secure, as the document says, the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our descendants. No one else is going to do it for us. Whether you believe in UN style multilateralism or not, US power is the only instrument capable of ensuring peace. If you believe, as I do, that we must invade Iraq, that means preparing for the financial sacrifices that will be required. It means not complaining if the price of oil goes up. It means being prepared, if it becomes necessary, to offer your services in pursuit of this war. And if you are against the war, well, you know what you think the solution is. Do it. Don't sit around talking about how much foreign aid would help; offer some. Don't sit around ranting about how horrible Ashcroft is; go to work for an organization dedicated to protecting our civil liberties. If what happened a year ago showed us anything, it is that it is not sufficient to talk about how much better things would be if only we ran the world. We have to do as much as we can in our own small way to make that happen.

I've been reading a lot of poetry over the last few days, particularly poetry from the World Wars. It is filled with an agony that I could not have comprehended one year and two days ago. I was struck particularly by one line, written by Perry McKaye on Christmas, 1915: Now is the midnight of the nations.

I think that two years ago was the golden hour of twilight when everything looks perfect, and everyone is content. A year ago the sun set. And while I don't yet think that we are at the midnight of the nations, I think that it is coming, and that it will be dark, as midnights are apt to be. But the other thing I was struck by is how well they met their darkest hours. That's why I cried at the Battle Hymn of the Republic -- because our ancestors, who stood at Lexington and Valley Forge, at Gettysburg and Antietam, at the Ardennes and Normandy and Hamburger Hill, knew, and they gave us, not a funeral dirge, but a call to arms:

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Yesterday it made me cry. Today it makes me want to meet this in the best tradition of my country. For us, the living, to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us.

That, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.

That we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

New "Open Communication Initiative"

MTZ Exclusive: I've discovered another Al Qaeda Memo to the Troops.

Turns out they are a "Learning Organization":

TO:All AL Qaeda and affiliated personnel

FROM: AL Qaeda steering committee

SUBJECT: New "Open Communication" Initiative
____________________________________________
Everything we've learned about effective organizations says -

1. you can't communicate enough - communicate, communicate and communicate some more
2. learning organizations assess their own success
3. information flows from the bottom up

We thought that the one-year anniversary of our most successful operation (up until now!!) would be a good time to give look back and do a sort of self-assessment of our organization. As you know, we also asked all of you for input, and we wanted to get back to you about what we've learned.

First of all, I want to thank all of you for your feedback. I know this has been a hard year, and many of you face daily hardships as you carry out your jihad duties. On some days, just finding a clean place to go to the bathroom can take a disproportionate share of your time. Remember folks, you can't wage a holy war without sacrifice. This is a lesson the infidels have yet to learn, but we sure know it, don't we! If you're like me, sometimes you think "sacrifice" is your middle name!

At any rate, you've been very good to get back to us, and we want to complement you on the quality of your input as well as its quantity (well - you did kill a few trees, didn't you :-) )

I want to thank "Ahmed" for this:

We feel it is important to understand the competitive threats to our organization. I've been brainstorming with colleagues about how the U.S. might create conditions hostile to our organization. In particular, if the United States-

1. Stops supporting Israel and its oppression of the whosiwatsis...Palestinians;
   
2. removes the sanctions on Iraq;
   
3. renounces its right to attack enemies building nuclear arsenals explicitly directed at the U.S. and its allies;
   
4. starts really supporting democratic regimes in the Middle East without regard to self-interest and completely without hypocrisy;
   
5. acknowledges its brutal genocide in World War II and Vietnam;
   
6. begins to recognize the authority of the U.N. and other international organizations,
   

then groups such as ours will have serious recruiting problems - they will have "drained the swamp" of "resentment, anger and frustration", from which we need to "draw support and recruits."

GOOD ONE AHMED!! Boy, I was snorting out my nose at afternoon prayer thinking about this memo, even though I hit my head hard on the head of the cave this morning and I have a horrible rash on my ...oh never mind.
Let that be a lesson to all of you - a little humour can go a long way in a tough situation. Don't think all of us in senior management are so stuffy we can't enjoy a good laugh.
Anyway, on a more serious note, Mohammed considers some of the same issues:

What is our mission anyway? Do we have a "mission statement". It's not clear to me what constitutes success for Al Qaeda. Don't get me wrong, I'm committed to the cause, but I think we need a clearer vision of just exactly where we're going.

That's great, Mo. We understand completely. Now we realize that Osama's list of demands may have seemed a bit vague. In particular, the "eighty years of humiliation" reference to the abolition of the Caliphate could have come off as...well, unrealistic. Remember, though, he is speaking to an external audience as well as you. If it seems like some of his demands would require a time machine to alter an already warped version of history, understand he's just trying to keep the infidels guessing (we actually learned this trick from the infidels themselves). For the time being, stick with independence for Palestine and U.S. troops out of the Middle East. With any luck, we'll provide more cannon fodder for additional hysterical Robert Fisk columns. Lord knows we need some more fun stuff to read up here in "the caves", and we've got plans for Ahmed that may keep him too busy to crank out the jokes.

Anyway, Mo, the steering committee has formed a working group to develop a formal mission statement. We've also invited you to join it. So we look forward to hearing a better articulation of our mission when you and the committe have wrapped up your work.

One former operative asks:

How come some of us get to go West and see strippers? Why is it that when the Koran prohibits images of people and suggests an austere and religious lifestyle we are circulating so many old video tapes of senior management partying it up? Is there a double standard at work here?

We are a little disturbed by the tone of your question. It is for the mullahs to decide when dispensation is offered, not the rank and file. We are all for empowering operatives, but we have some basic principals to which we'd like to stick. Do not expect that we will be offering dispensation for social events to non-martyrs willy-nilly. Remember, we've got a Jihad to wage here.

However, we recognize that it must have been frustrating for some of you working in support functions to see the martyrs enjoying obviously exceptional privileges. Taking a page from our brothers in Iran, we have arranged for a number of "temporary marriages" to be offered to qualifying operatives in the coming months. We intend to use them as recognition for a job well done. See! Who says we can't be progressive and fundamentalist at the same time?

Please remember one thing: While we know that the infidel temptresses can often tempt you with their evil charms (I remember a particular lap dance in the "Champagne Room" that almost put me at her mercy...) but we must ask that you not reveal details about our operations. Any further violations of that rule and we will eliminate this privilege FOR ALL OPERATIVES. And we mean it. Please see my earlier memo on this.

As for the events hosted by senior management, you must understand that while they appear like fun and games, there is important work going on here. Every penny we spend on those parties comes back to us dressed up as a nickel. We have to keep the money coming in and the videos flowing to Al Jazeera.

Finally, Ahman asks

What is the proper career path for an Al Qaeda operative? I'm an entry-level recruit, and I want to know how I can "be like Osama"!

We applaud your spirit, Ahman. I'm sure that if you work hard your career will advance. Remember, however, that the organization needs martyrs and support staff just like it needs Osama bin Ladens. Certainly, if you successfully carry out a martyr operation, you will be "like Osama" in at least a few important ways....'nuff said.

We hope you like our new "open communication initiative". In next week's memo, we will answer more of your questions, including:

• How come Allah hasn't helped us out yet?
  
• Is Yasir with us or against us?
  
• I thought we didn't like Saddam Hussein. Is this a "marriage of convenience"?
  
• Are we absolutely sure about these supposed virgins in the after-life?
  
• Where the hell is Mullah Omar?
  
• How can I get a nifty fatigue jacket and Timex watch like Osama?
  

Having doubts is natural. Please don't worry so much. Go out and have some fun, but remember, mum's the word!

Until next week.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I've gotten some interesting mail

I've gotten some interesting mail on the subject of my Ayn Rand post.

On the one hand, there were people espousing what we might term a classical Objectivist, Randian argument, such as John Venlet:

While I am not a practicing Objectivist, I do find much in Rand's writings that I admire and believe should be practiced by us falleable humans. With that in mind, I must heartily object to Jane's hypothetical above. While she, in theory, respects an individual's right to bodily integrity, she states that this integrity should be forcibly denied an individual for the good of another individual, at least in this hypothetical. Taking such a stance negates Rand's philosophy. Additionally, where then would one draw the line in regards to determining where one's inviolable rights end or begin? Wouldn't a better approach to the needle challenged, unwilling donor be a business transaction? What is the value of the man's blood? It is definitely valuable to him as it sustains him daily, it is also valuable to the child in need of this specific type of blood, or he will die. So what price must be paid? If the needle challenged owner of the blood cannot be induced monetarily or by reasoned discussion to donate, the price must be death for the child. Though this may sound harsh, it is in actuality a much lesser evil than forcibly taking something to which you have no right if the owner cannot be induced to part with it.

I sympathize with these people; they come from what I might term the "Slippery Slope" school of individualism, where even the smallest compromise in principle results in the inevitable destruction of liberty. Nonetheless, I can't endorse it; ultimately I think it would both be impractical, and result in too many dead bodies, to run a society this way, for reasons I outlined in my earlier post.

Meanwhile, Chris Sciabarra, who has written books on Rand, and whose introduction to the argument confirms my belief that I am fighting far out of my weight class, offers a nuanced view of Objectivism as separate from the life and times of Ayn Rand. It's an extremely valid point, although in my defense, I would argue that Objectivism as a philosophic movement does not seem to me to have grown fully beyond the veneration of the founder; there is still a heavy preponderance of references to her work in discussions by and about Objectivists, at least the ones I've seen. Of course, as a philisophic movement, it's quite young yet, so this isn't particularly unusual.

An interesting discussion has emerged about the extent of Rand's contempt for the common man. I'm not sure I thought of her as particularly contemptuous of the common man, although there is certainly a Nietzschean aspect to much of her literature; it's just that her philosophy didn't seem to have much place for the poor schmuck who just can't quite cut it. My impression of Rand is that she was a very, very, very smart person, and very, very intense. And like most such people, she had great difficulty tolerating those of lesser intellect who didn't agree with her. I think the fact that the great minds of her day pretty much refused to engage with her left her in a position where all the smart people she knew admired her, and agreed with her. It is not hard to see how, out of this, one develops the conviction that people who do not get on the band wagon are either idiots or evil. But that's an impression; I am nowhere near as well versed in the Annals of Ayn as my fellow conversationalists.

We all seem to agree that Ayn has an Aristotelian view of happiness and goodness as being mutually dependant. Sciabarra has a fancy greek word for it, but us plain folks don't need to learn all that gussied-up foreign palaver.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

As for this revolting piece

As for this revolting piece by Jill Stewart:

Let me be among the too-few columnists in this self-absorbed, egocentric, materialistic, pleasure-obsessed, jingoistic country of ours to cry out into the great mindless void that no, in fact, we have not changed in the year since September 11.

Moreover, since I feel so much better getting that off my chest, let me add that I am achingly weary of seeing Americans treat the tragedy as if it outstrips every other contemporary tragedy in our world, and I am irked beyond belief that the victims of September 11 and their survivors are treated with a holy sanctity not afforded to other victims and other survivors of man's horrific actions against mankind.

Indeed, I say without shame to America's ever-growing, increasingly troubling and loudly throbbing Cult of Nine Eleven, "For God sakes, get a grip!"

. . .

Can you imagine how we'd hate the Brits if we were still deeply pissed off about the Revolution? Or how awful it would be if grade-schoolers sang morbid songs about the rotting Civil War dead at Richmond?

We reject the mournful, noir world of self-pitying, self-aggrandizing, excess-testosterone tribalism. We say, let other countries wallow in that if they must. But more and more, I sniff a hint of wallowing. I hear a bit of tribal whining.

So, on September 11, I suggest that you not light a candle for the victims of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Plenty of others will do so for you."

I just walked off the site today for the last time before the anniversary. They are making preparations for the widows and orphans that Stewart finds so risible to mourn their dead, who they can never lay to rest. And I would like to sugest that on Wednesday, instead of one of those mawkish lowbrow vigils, you commemorate those dead by looking for a woman named Jill with a sullen, self-righteous expression and no candle, and pound the snot out of her.

But that would be wrong.

Besides, I've no doubt that if she opens her mouth again, plenty of others will do so for you.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is the blogosphere sexist?, ask

Is the blogosphere sexist?, ask Susanna Cornett and a bunch of other bloggers. I don't think so, but then, I'm doing all right. Hey, I'm not Instapundit, but that's because. . . well, I'm not Instapundit, I'm me. I haven't noticed any sex differences in what posts get picked up; when I write something I think is really good, usually a fair number of people link it.

It's interesting that Dawn Olsen, who stirred up the controversy, is proposing a very old feminist idea: flatten the hierarchy in the blogosphere by refusing to link the big guys. I don't think it will work, for the same reason it doesn't work for Gloria Steinem, et al; they didn't grasp the basic social science phenomenon of the distribution. Human groups do not work themselves out into nice even groups; they cluster. Someone in a network has to be in the center; someone has to be at the tail ends of every distribution. We can't all be chiefs and no Indians.

Besides, I think (my personal opinion) that viewing traffic dearth through the lens of sex is not necessarily useful for determining causation. Most bloggers have low traffic. Most bloggers don't get linked by Instapundit. Most bloggers are also (to judge from what I've seen) male. There are clearly other factors, besides sex, causing the lack of linkage.

To the extent that there is a dearth, I think it's largely because female bloggers are disproportionately represented in the life diary blog style. [Note: this is an anecdotal impression, not an Actual Fact]. It's a free choice; no one's forcing them to write that type of blog. I think they should write whatever kind of blog they want, but I'm also not surprised that the market for my news commentary is larger than the market for my commentary on what I had for breakfast. Observe comedy writers. If you want to base your schtick on the funny thing your three year old did in the bath last night, you have to be really, really good. It is a sad fact of life that most of us, including me, are not that good. Also, there are more people who have an opinion on, say, the war in Iraq that they are looking to hear someone confirmed, than have an opinion as to whether or not I should use ashes-of-roses shantung for my livingroom drapes.

I will allow that I have noticed that Instapundit does tend to link the salacious items from female bloggers. But I just can't get worked up about it. I spent four years working with an all-male engineering group, went to a business school that was only 19% female, and have spent the last year of my life on a construction site. As offenses go, dirty jokes just don't register with me any more.

Anyway, I'm just a lone blogger, not The Voice of Female Blogdom. Go read the exhaustive compilation of posts on the subject that Susanna has put together and decide for yourself.

Update I've read more posts by and about women bloggers, including a second reading of Dawn's; there seems to be some consensus behind the argument that women blog differently from men, and that it's not fair that the woman-type blogging is less popular than the male-type blogging. I think it's probably true, but I'm not sure it's useful.

For one thing, it's a constant. It's an odd truth known among grammar school teachers that you can't get little boys to read books about little girls, not even well-brought up little boys with feminist moms. They'll sit still while the teacher reads A Little Princess out loud, but they aren't interested in childhood classics like "Little House on the Prairie" or "Anne of Green Gables", even though those books surpass the inferior, boy-centered ones they choose by almost any measure. And this dichotomy holds throughout life: women read books, watch movies, etc. that are aimed at women, but not the other way around. And it is easily possible to segment one's audience to be comprised of either all women, or mostly men, by the subject matter you choose.

The school of thought that has grown up around variations on this banal observation is called "Difference Feminism". Its icon is Carol Gilligan, and it strongly resembles Victorian social norms, with day care. Women are different, more caring and thoughtful and connected than rigid, hierarchical men. Women's ways of doing things aren't properly valued. In fact, many difference feminists will tell you, women's ways are better; we should make men do things the right way.

Personal experience tells me that women are different, though I have no official opinion on the breakdown between genetics/culture in that difference. Nor do I think that one way is better than the other. I like being a woman. I like the connection I feel with my close female friends and relatives, which is different from the connection I feel with my male friends, or the one that my male friends feel with their close male friends and relatives. (I say close because I don't think there's much important difference between the way I relate to my male or female acquaintances; close friends are another matter.) Men often do things that I think are typically male, which make me very angry or irritated. But women also often do typically female things that irritate me. I can't say I think one way is metaphysically better than the other.

I also don't think that, to the extent that this is true, "women's ways of knowing" translate well into a large audience. The whole point of the difference feminists is that women base their interactions on small, intimate, consensus-based interactions. That's the very opposite of blogging, which for all its bilateral linkage, is still in most important ways a broadcast medium.

So I don't think that you can right this by simply demanding more linkage of "female" blogging. It doesn't work; did your boyfriend start enjoying watching Lifetime movies because you told him he ought to, and made him sit through 20 or so to get the taste? (All right, I like Lifetime movies. On a rainy Sunday afternoon, there's nothing like a good wife-beating story or uplifting terminal disease or triumph-of-the-human-spirit prison tale to pass the time.) Over the long run, any significant effort by Glenn to distribute his links evenly between male-type and female-type posts won't help increase the traffic of the diary-bloggers; it will decrease his traffic, as his readers lose interest.

I think that current male/female norms are broken in some major ways. And I think that, by and large, even with all the ridiculous "don't say anything or I'll sue" discrimination laws, women generally end up with the short end of the stick, though I also think that this is changing. But I also think that we've passed the time where pointing to a numerical disparity and demanding redress is the answer. What is the answer? I dunno; dialogue, I guess. Dialogue always seems to be the answer to questions like that. And I guess that's what this is. So there's my 2 cents, for what it's worth.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Volokh also explains just how

Volokh also explains just how meaningless phrases like "Enron gave X dollars to Chuck Schumer" really are.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Eugene Volokh asks how rational

Eugene Volokh asks how rational (read deterrable) Sadaam really is. His previous military endeavors don't speak well for the argument.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Arthur Silber has responded to

Arthur Silber has responded to my post on Rand with some worthwhile thoughts of his own. He fleshes out his ideas about those with compatible values with some personal examples, bringing it back to what Rand calls a "sense of life" and others might term "taste" or "aesthetic impulse"; the fundamental response you have to other people, works of art, or ideas, based upon the feeling that they are congruent with your most deeply held values. (I'm paraphrasing; I hope that Mr. Silber will forgive and correct if I am misstating). But while he does an admiral job of amplifying his beliefs about personal interaction, he glosses over what I think is the fundamental error in Rand's premises: the attempt to reduce human interaction and behavior to a rational framework. I don't think it can be done, and I think that if it could, we would be horrified by the results.

Take one of the defining values Arthur proposes:

Let's take what is perhaps a less controversial example of a difference in fundamental approach: do you consider individual rights inviolable, or do you think that sometimes it's okay to for you or some group, via the government, to make me do something that I don't want to do, even when I'm just minding my own business and not bothering anyone else?

Okay, well, let me give you a hypothetical. Say a child is dying, bleeding to death. No time to get them to a hospital; they need a transfusion now. But the child is type O Negative. A transfusion of the wrong type of blood could kill them. The equipment to perform the transfusion is available, but here's the problem: there's only one person in the immediate area with O Negative blood, and he's afraid of needles. He refuses to donate.

In theory, I respect his right to bodily integrity. In practice, I would join with all the other adults in the area and hold him down so we could take his blood.

Not that this is a particularly likely hypothetical. I submit it as an example of the ways in which it becomes difficult for human beings to build a completely consistent philosophy based on total individual integrity. Yet on the other end of the spectrum, there are the "dead babies trump common sense" arguments which are all too prevalent in our news media, particularly on the op-ed pages and news magazines. I don't endorse those either. To some extent, all ethics is situational.

Or flip the argument, and look at just how rigorously we really want others to be able to enforce their right to indivdual integrity on us. The classic libertarian phrase "Your rights end at the tip of my nose" has unsustainable applications in an industrial society. Eminent domain, for example, grows out of the fact that in a deal with a large number of sellers and a small number of buyers, such as the deals required to build, say, a courthouse or a road or a military base, the power of the remaining sellers grows with each person who sells. This positive externality is captured by the last few sellers, who can extort huge amounts from their fellow taxpayers, because of the expense of starting over, and the knowlege that wherever they start, the same thing will happen all over again. This phenomenon produces decidedly suboptimal outcomes, both economically and politically.

Or look at the environment. Of course, environmental cleanliness could be easily secured by rigorously enforcing property rights -- the right of the owner of every piece of property not to have their air or water polluted by someone else's emissions. But it's not possible to control where every drop of air and water goes after it leaves your land. Enforcement of this individualist credo would require the cessation of commerce; a single individual could shut down the entire industrial complex of the United States.

We make compromises with individual integrity in order to allow society to function. As a broad principle, I agree that we shouldn't ask others to sustain us; that need is not, as Rand says, a blank check on the universe. As a rigid heuristic I disagree that children, the disabled, or the old and infirm should be allowed to starve because they can't cut it in the market economy. And yes, I'm willing to take your money, as well as mine, to support them. I think there are certain obligations incumbent upon being an adequately wealthy member of the human race. And if it weren't for the rest of us, most of the Objectivists I know wouldn't get very far trying to carve their living out of the raw earth. Scratch that "Most Objectivists"; make that "Most people".

Silber is presenting, I think, a much more nuanced view of human relations than Rand herself did. I think it's hard to deny that Rand's work is fairly intolerant of individual choices of those choices do not involve accepting Rand's individualist ethics. Silber's post illustrates that he doesn't make such rigid distinctions. Which I think essentially agrees with what I was trying to say: Objectivism works best when it is aspirational, rather than normative, at least as regards interpersonal connections.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

This is the kind of

This is the kind of liberal that makes me so mad I could spit. My contempt is a bottomless well that springs forth ever renewed when I hear the kind of self-centered, yet thoroughly self-righteous, hypocrisy that is passing for values among a certain brand of soulless rich [expletive deleted]. There is not sufficient invective in the English language to express the depths of my revulsion for the morally bankrupt woman who wrote this letter. I think it's time to get a posse, head out to suburbia, and beat the snot out of the first Democratic Party chair we find. (Via Best of the Web)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Radley Balko has a good

Radley Balko has a good post about George Fisher's incredibly silly editorial on military recruitment in the New York Times. Fisher is in a snit because under the Republican president, the government is finally enforcing the federal funding rules: you don't let the military recruit on campus, you don't get any Federal aid:

The change is not a result of the nation's reborn patriotism in the wake of Sept. 11. It is a victory for the military, but it is not a victory we should applaud. It represents a triumph of power over principle — educational principles that are especially meaningful to law schools.

For more than a decade, Harvard Law School had resisted demands by military recruiters to interview students through the school's career placement office. Almost all American law schools — including Stanford, where I teach — took the same stance. They did so not because law professors or law students are unpatriotic, but because the military rejects qualified students who wish to serve if they are openly lesbian, gay or bisexual. For the last several years, however, the military has increased pressure on law schools to allow them to recruit on campus. Now that Harvard has succumbed, other schools are likely to follow.

. . .

So why have Harvard and other American law schools changed their policy? The reason, almost everywhere, is money.

In 2000 the Department of Defense issued regulations reinterpreting federal law. The regulations say that if any part of a university denies access to military recruiters, the entire university will lose an array of federal funds. In May, the Air Force informed Harvard it was no longer content to be invited to campus by students. It demanded that the school allow military recruiters to use the school's career placement office.

Today any law school that chooses to hold firm against discrimination threatens the financial stability of the entire university. At Harvard the dean of the law school said the university was in danger of losing over $300 million in federal funds if the law school did not cooperate. The dean of the University of Southern California's law school said the school's policy, now revoked, could have cost the university between $300 million and $500 million. Across the country, those law schools that have not yet abandoned their policies face similar consequences.

Boo-hoo. The Harvard students aren't going to get hundreds of millions of dollars of my tax money? How come Fisher isn't upset about the naked excercise of power involved in taking hundreds of millions of other people's money and handing it to a university devoted to the service of the most privileged elite on the planet?

Sorry. . . sometimes the libertarian side just takes over and I can't control it. You all saw The Shining, right? Same thing, without the axe.

I think my father had the best solution to this whole brouhaha. The money benefits society, you say, by providing research etc? Fine. Don't withhold the money. Withhold the jobs.

If your school does not allow one branch of the government to recruit on campus, no branch of the government will be allowed to recruit on campus.

Let the Physics department keep their money. Let's see how long Stanford Law maintains its anti-discrimination policy when its students become ineligible for Federal clerkships.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Patrick Sullivan sends along a

Patrick Sullivan sends along a fascinating interview with Barbara Branden, the wife of the man with whom Ayn Rand commenced an affair that was sanctioned by both spouses. I think it illuminates what I was saying about the unrealistically, and simplistically, rigid framework into which Rand attempted to fit messy human relations:

Q: Why did you agree to the affair?

Barbara: For a host of very complex reasons which involved my psychology and life-experiences and convictions. But I can say that there were two fundamental reasons why I agreed. I felt considerable guilt toward Nathaniel, because I did not feel the sexual-romantic love for him that I believed I ought to.

In that respect I believed I was not the wife he should have had. I thought that if he could find fulfillment with Ayn in the areas in which I had failed him, I could not deny him that fulfillment. Further, I loved Ayn deeply, and I had been aware, from the first evening I met her, that she had suffered terribly in her romantic life. Over the years, I had come to see this with still greater clarity as she talked with me about Leo, her first love who did not return her passion, as I came to see that in her relationship with Frank she was and had to be the aggressor.

At social occasions, I would see Ayn surrounded by fascinated men who were eager to speak with her, but who, it was apparent, did not see her as a woman but only as a mind. Given her view of romance, her view of what love should be, this had to be terribly painful to her. And then writing Atlas, projecting so vividly what she thought romantic love could and should be, made the lack of it in her own life an even greater source of anguish.

And so I thought: How can I refuse her the experience she has always longed for and never had? Of course, it did not turn out to be the experience she wanted, as it could not be.

Q: Why not?

Barbara: For many reasons. Nathan was a boy; he was twenty-three years old. It was not possible for so young a man — especially a man torn by his love for his wife — to give her what she wanted. He was not John Galt. He could not be. Ayn would surely have known that had she not been blinded by her own unfulfilled needs and blinded to the fact that she was smashing the lives of the three people she loved most. And above all, she was smashing her own life. I criticize her for her blindness — and I also feel great compassion for her.

Q: Do you think she viewed the men in her life as almost Platonic abstractions, as if she didn't really see the person there a lot of times?

Barbara: Most definitely. She talked about Frank and about Nathaniel as if they were the heroes in her novels, men of the same stature as those she wrote about. It was evident that she needed to convince herself of this, to convince herself that she could not and did not love two men who were less than her heroes.

Q: Do you think Frank O'Connor was in love with her?

Barbara: I have no doubt that he loved her and was bound to her by profound psychological and emotional ties, just as I loved and was bound to Nathan. I learned, during those years, that there can be powerful factors holding two people together that have little to do with romantic love. Certainly, Frank deeply respected Ayn, admired her, and understood, at least in emotional terms, the nature and importance of her struggle and her goals. Did he love her passionately? I don't think so.

Q: Did Rand ever think that you and Frank were sacrificing yourselves?

Barbara: Not ever, not for a moment. She had convinced herself that what Frank and I were doing, what we were accepting, was wholly rational.

Q: Do you think the two of you were sacrificing yourselves?

Barbara: Of course. I did not see it that way at the time, but it's no longer quite real to me why I didn't, why I didn't understand what I was doing to myself. I know the reasons why I accepted the affair, but I can scarcely understand that they seemed like valid reasons at the time.

Of course, you have to take this with a grain of salt; this is, after all, the wronged spouse speaking, and she's made herself quite famous writing a biography of Rand that included her account of the affair. But it rings true to me, based on what else I know of Rand's life.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Suman Palit offers a stirring

Suman Palit offers a stirring explanation of why it is not a good idea for other nations to demand that the US become more engaged in the world: if we wake up from our shopping-induced stupor, it will not be to engage upon your terms.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

In the fifth part of

In the fifth part of his continuing series on the War on Terror, Robert Wright presents an argument that is at once tantalizing nuanced and disappointingly shallow. He makes a compelling argument that the economic despair of educated, intelligent young men unable to find employment in the sclerotic, over-regulated economies of their home countries is what turned men like Mohammed Atta from pious, ordinary men into terrorists:

A basic law of nature is that young males will seek status and recognition through locally available channels. The object of the game is to make those channels lead to contentment and, ideally, productive engagement with the world. Atta's Egyptian channels didn't. In Germany, he encountered an open and vibrant society, but the cultural barriers proved forbidding. In fact, the encounter may have only fed his inchoate bitterness. Years after he left for Germany an old friend from Egypt ran into him; the friend, according to Time magazine, gathered that Atta "had made few German friends" and was "depressed about not having a career or a family back home."

To say that the juxtaposition of Atta's economically stagnant home and the vibrant but culturally alien West may have fueled his radicalism is to endorse a part of Bernard Lewis' message. Resentment of Western superiority—economic, technological, military—is central to his explanation of Islamic discontent.

But Lewis is saying something more, and on this some of the policy implications hinge. He's saying that people who grow up in these relatively poor Muslim nations aren't just resentful, they are resentful on behalf of their religion. That's why, in Lewis' view, we face "a clash of civilizations." (Yes, he beat Samuel Huntington to that phrase—it's a subhead in his 1990 Atlantic Monthly piece.) And that's why there's little we can do about the problem—it's rooted in deepest cultural memory.

Is this true? It's true ­that the terrorists had come to identify deeply with Islam—and a particularly austere version of it—by the time they became terrorists. But it's equally clear that they didn't all start out with that intense identification. So far as anyone can tell, Atta, though already devout, didn't become radically Islamic until he went to Germany. What seems to have happened is that personal resentments and frustrations, themselves products of economic and political forces, latched on to radical Islam as a congenial, affirming ideology, one that made the West a useful scapegoat. Religious ideas aren't passed down through the generations inexorably, from one passive brain to another; in each generation they can be rejected, embraced, or amended, depending on how they mesh with people's socially conditioned needs.

This isn't to say that Islam isn't in any sense part of the terrorism problem. Obviously, had radical Islam not been in the air, Atta would have found some other, presumably less lethal, outlet for his frustrations; he might even have vented them productively, by assimilating into the West, rather than attack it.

This is, as Wright admits, an essentially Marxist argument: that the economics shape the religion into the particularly virulent form that breeds terrorism:

Still, it is wrong, and unduly depressing, to see the problem as being Islam in some large historical sense—to trace the origins of 9/11 all the way back to morally primitive Quranic passages that have supposedly poisoned the minds of men ever since the seventh century AD. The Holy Bible has passages every bit as morally primitive as anything in the Quran. (I've assembled a small sample.) The history of Islam, like the history of Christianity, is a history of people in some times and places focusing on morally primitive scriptures and people in other times and places focusing on loftier scriptures. Islam attained its economic and technological dominance during the Middle Ages in part by focusing on the loftier ones, extending a tolerance to Christians and Jews that, at the time, was on the cutting edge of intercultural understanding.

If we want to know why people's interpretations of their own religious doctrines vary so much from decade to decade, we have to look at what is going on in the world around them. In the case of modern radical Islam, we find no shortage of explanations, ranging from economic stagnation to political repression to an American foreign policy that over the past few decades has paid roughly zero attention to Muslim opinion (unless you count the opinion of Muslims who happened to be in charge of armies or oil wells). What we don't find is any sense in which religion is an exogenous variable, an autonomous force that floats above the social landscape and, generation after generation, mysteriously bends the minds of men to its will. (Is that last sentence a caricature of Bernard Lewis' opinion? Well, yes. Click here for my more nuanced characterization and a corresponding critique.)

The view I'm advancing is, broadly speaking, a Marxist view—that religious beliefs are largely a function of underlying economic and political circumstances, as mediated by psychology. It's also a hopeful view. Because it means we don't have to figure out how to "change Islam"—a disconcertingly amorphous task, and one that would probably backfire.

On the individual, and even phenomenal level, this is compelling. But on a systemic level, Wright is committing the same error he attributes to his opponents. Just as Islam is not exogenous to the organic entity that is a nation, neither, except for short periods, is economics. The problem with Egypt is not that there's something about all that sand that makes them uncompetitive; it's that it's economy is moribund, destroyed by state repression and a culture that places a low status on work. Political and cultural factors are both vital to an economy's success, just as the economy in turn informs the politcs and the culture; southern Italians fare much worse than northern Italians, even though the political system is the same, while the USSR took functioning, vibrant economies and destroyed them. In Egypt's case, part of the economic picture is the cultural effects of Islam. And while critics say that that's not "Islam" in some Platonic sense, that's irrelevant. As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, a Jew in 15th Century Spain didn't really much care whether the Inquisition was in line with the preachings of Jesus; what was important was how practicing Christians right then and there were interpreting those teachings. Similarly, it is irrelevant whether or not the problem is Arabian Islam or Islamic Arabia; the point is that there are interlocking structures of government and culture that prevent the economy from taking off.

And that is where Wright really falls down. Because while his prescription -- "Improve the economy" -- is obviously a good one, it's not like it hasn't occurred to anyone else. The problem is, how do we bell the cat? And Wright's answer is a shallow rehash of DLC policy prescriptions that is both glib and completely impractical:

Policy Prescription No. 6: Draw Islamic nations—and for that matter all nations—into the web of global capitalism.

This would have several benefits: 1) It would give young men an outlet for economic ambition, diverting them from radical pursuits. 2) It would give young men an outlet for political ambition by abetting pluralism; after all, global capitalism brings modern information technologies that are powerful tools of political expression and of interest-group formation. 3) It would expand person-to-person contact with the West in a natural, enduring way; when it comes to nurturing multicultural tolerance, there's nothing like doing a mutually profitable deal with a foreigner. 4) It would expand the number of affluent Muslims who, by virtue of dependence on trade, have a stake in preserving world order against terrorist disruption, and in nourishing their country's reputation as a stable place for foreign investment.

Okay, great. How do we do all this?

Policy Prescription No. 7: Emphasize trade at least as heavily as aid in fighting the kind of economic deprivation that breeds terrorism.

I'm a free marketeer; I'm all ears. But all Wright does is repeat platitudes from his last confab at Brookings:

Still, if economic modernization is your goal, trade works more reliably than aid. As economists Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner showed years ago, developing nations with the most open, least protectionist economies—the nations most plugged in to the global economy—grow the fastest.

Yes, thank you Robert, we all love trade. But what are these countries going to trade with us?. This is the sum total of Wright's ideas on that:

Yet the West makes it hard for poor nations to fully plug in. Heavily subsidized agriculture in the United States and Europe stifles what is an important sector in virtually every developing country. (Egypt pretty much invented cotton farming, but the world won't give its cotton farmers a fair shake.) Heavily protected textile markets also hurt lots of poor nations. In general, according to the World Bank, economically advanced nations levy tariffs against developing nations that are four times as high as the tariffs they levy against other advanced countries.

That's fabulous. The problem is, to take his lone example, agricultural trade is not the path to wealth in a country that crams its entire population into a narrow strip eight miles wide on either side of a river; not when that population is already bursting the seams of the infrastructure, and growing fast. The oil rich states pretty much produce -- well, nothing except oil, and it's not improving their economy. Trade is not going to help countries that don't manufacture or grow anything to sell, which pretty much describes the entire Middle East except Israel. Hell, Egypt is the shining star of the region, economically -- because of the tourist trade, not its incredible cotton industry.

Wright does admit that trade might not be a cure-all:

Trade is no cure-all. Many Latin American countries that embraced market economics, while seeing real growth, have also seen rising income inequality (though the commonly repeated claim that, as nations globalize, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer," seems to be, strictly speaking, a myth). We have a lot to learn about easing developing nations along the path to modernity, as do the developing nations themselves.

Still, whatever the shortcomings of capitalist development, you didn't see any Brazilian hijackers on Sept. 11. Latin American economies by and large provide economic opportunities for a would-be Mohamed Atta. And if they fail, and enough people get economically frustrated, there are democratic outlets for rage; their leaders are held in power by the ballot box, not by repression and an unholy alliance with the United States.

Mmm. And trade is going to fix that little political problem how? It's going to deregulate the economy, dismantle the crony systems, the poor property protections that are rampant in Islamic nations, free the flow of information from rigid state control, make the sick to walk and the blind to see and the dead to rise again on the third day . . . how? It's just another magic word, like "Root Causes". Root causes are fine, as far as they go -- everything must, after all, have a cause, and it's good to know what it is so you can prevent it in the future, but just saying "Root Causes" or "Trade" doesn't tell us how we get there from here.

Wright also drops the ball on his chief "Islam is not the problem" argument:

Of course, there's always the possibility that the key difference between Brazil and Saudi Arabia is religion, not economics or politics. This explanation might be favored by those who put a Lewisesque emphasis on the power of religious doctrine. But if the problem is Islam per se, then how do you explain Turkey? It's a Muslim nation, but in terms of exporting terrorists it ranks down around Brazil (even if one does come across the occasional Turkish terrorist). Maybe the explanation is that in terms of economic vibrancy and political freedom Turkey also ranks closer to Brazil than to Saudi Arabia (though Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who nearly a century ago put Turkey on the path to modernity and showed that the character of a nation's religion can change sharply within a generation, used a top-down, statist approach to get the ball rolling). This explanation could also apply to the 150 million Muslims in India, who by and large are much less sympathetic to radical Islam than nearby Pakistani Muslims; India is a paradise of economic and political liberty compared to Pakistan.

Umm. . . Turkey vigorously represses its religious Muslim cultural and political organizations; many have argued that that's the reason it's made the progress it has. Turkey is rather the poster child for the "stamp out Islam and you'll get rid of the economic and political problems" side than the reverse.

[Note: I am not endorsing this argument either. Just pointing out that it's a dumb example, 'kay?]

As I was reading this, I thought that I was being unfair; perhaps Wright had recognized the weakness in his argument for trade, but because the subject is so large, was going to give it it's own section. Nope. Here's the preview of tomorrow:

All this suggests that abetting globalization, and its natural concomitants of economic and political liberty, is a big part of any successful war on terrorism. Unfortunately, globalization also has some terrorism-abetting properties, a subject we'll address in the next installment.

Here that? It's the DLC: "The answer is trade, silly. Now that we've answered that question, tomorrow we'll talk about how free trade is good, but not without a lot of laws to make sure it doesn't get out of hand."

It's not that I disagree with Wright about trade; I'm all for it. But I'd like to get some idea of how we might actually encourage it, other than the obvious answer: invade, get rid of the kleptocrats, and install a middling honest client government. Because frankly, I don't see another answer than that. And it's not an answer I like.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Simply outstanding piece on the

Simply outstanding piece on the morality of terrorism from Jim Henley, in commemoration of the barbaric slaughter that happened at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The PR flacks at GM

The PR flacks at GM and Ford have been getting a lot of mileage out of saying that the automakers "Saved the Economy" by offering 0% financing in the wake of 9-11. And there's a good argument to be made that they did, in fact, prevent a demand-side implosion by getting consumer spending going again. But this article argues convincingly that in a deflationary environment, lowering effective interest rates isn't doing anyone any favors.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

There's a fascinating argument about

There's a fascinating argument about the nature of Randian individualism going on between Norah Vincent and some folks over at Light of Reason, a new Objectivist blog.

Now, I'm not an Objectivist. My current handle is the result of a snap decision made upon entering the New York Times message boards some seven years ago, and was chosen more for the purposes of pissing off some under-educated name-calling liberal trolls than because of any allegiance to Ms. Rand. On the other hand, I find some aspects of her philosophy quite compelling, and I've read pretty much all of her work, as well as a fair number of books and articles about her, so I suppose that qualifies me to weigh in. And besides, when have I ever let ignorance stop me before?

Norah's opening item was customarily interesting and erudite:

Of course, because I must quibble a little, I draw your attention to this portion of the LOR manifesto—a part of Rand’s philosophy with which I’ve always been uncomfortable, but one with which (I’m perfectly willing to admit) I may also be insufficiently familiar to fully understand. I hereby invite explanatory replies from the folks at LOR and elsewhere. Here’s the definition they give:

Individualism: the recognition that every human being is an end in himself, and that his own happiness should be the highest, and most moral, purpose of his own life; the acknowledgment that reason can only be exercised individually, and independently; the knowledge that other people -- whether they are spouses, partners, friends or colleagues -- are an incomparable and irreplaceable blessing in our lives, but only when they are freely chosen, and when their values and goals match our own.

I couldn’t agree more heartily with the first clause of LOR’s definition: “every human being is an end in himself.” This resonates with me on several levels. First, because of its deeply humanist tenor, reinforcing the notion of the inherent dignity and irreducible complexity of every human being in the eyes of God. Second, because it echoes the moral spirit of Kant’s categorical imperative to treat each man as an end, never as a means.

It’s the next part that brings me up short: “his own happiness should be the highest, and most moral purpose of his own life.” The famous credo of selfishness, and a sentiment that I find bothersomely incompatible with Kant.

First of all, in my book, happiness is not in itself moral, unless you mean it in the Aristotelian sense –i.e. that the states of happiness and goodness are inseparable in man, or, to put it another way, man is so constituted that he can only be made happy by pursuing “the good.” Somehow, though, I don’t think that’s how she means it. Again, correct me here Randians, if you will.

The second problem is this: to make happiness the highest moral purpose of one’s life seems to me to turn Kant’s prescription on its head. It amounts to little short of an encouragement precisely to treat one’s fellow human beings as means rather than ends, for only in treating them as means, as subservients to one’s own well-being, can one ensure one’s happiness. That is, of course, unless we are (as I said above) talking about an Aristotelian man who cannot be made happy by doing ill to others.

The last line of the definition seems to put the kibosh on that interpretation, however: “other people are . . . a blessing in our lives only when . . . their values and goals match our own.”

And LOR's reply:

You are correct in assuming that I (and others) would disagree with certain of your statements and interpretations about Objectivism.

I will note two quick points, though: first, happiness as the ultimate moral purpose and goal is subordinated to reason in Rand's philosophy -- that is, happiness ought to be, and has to be, defined by a rational standard (life, or in her phrase, man's life qua man -- in short, as the rational animal), and in pursuit of rationally justifiable goals. More to be said about that point, obviously.

Second, the famous "oath" that the major hero in Atlas Shrugged takes is this: "I swear--by my life and my love of it--that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." In other words, in Rand's view, using a proper morality of rational self-interest, no one should be, or needs to be, sacrificed to anyone.

It is not uncommon for people to view Rand's approach as endorsing making others into means for our ends -- but, in fact, her entire philosophy is diametrically opposed to that view, and she was absolute in her view that no one's individual rights should ever be violated, for the pursuit of any alleged "good," whether that "good" be individual or collective (i.e., for the benefit of society in general).
In that sense, you could say (in a loose way) that Rand was talking about Aristotelian man, who cannot be made happy by doing ill to others.

I think that Rand was quite Aristotelian in her conception of goodness and happiness as being inextricably intertwined. It is a combination that many, including me, find unsatisfying, particularly as it informs her political and social theories.

To use an example from her writing, take the relationship between Dagny Taggart, Ayn Rand's tall, slender, omnicompetent heroine (hmmmm. . . . ), and her three lovers: Francisco D'Anconia, the aristocrat; Hank Rearden, the earthy meritocrat, and John Galt, the heroic archetype. She moves from D'Anconia to Rearden to Galt, each time progressing up the chain of her values until she stops at the ultimate expression of her love, John Galt. Now, the other two consider her to be the ultimate woman, and as they would never, in true Randian fashion, settle for second best, they simply gracefully relinquish her to Galt and settle down to a life of celibacy without so much as a murmur. D'Anconia makes a lovely speech about how much better it all is than living a lie, and that is that.

All very well, and I think I can agree in some Platonic sense that it is better to be alone than to be together with someone who wishes they were elsewhere, but I can't say that I have seen this graceful model in operation anywhere where actual human beings were involved, and when Ayn Rand tried to put it into action with Nathanial Brandenburg it didn't, y'know, work.

Which is not even the point. The point is that while for a Rand hero it may be better to live a hard truth than an easy lie, there are many people who would be happier living the easy lie.

But they're not really happy, says the Objectivist.

Well, that's nice, but if saying that someone's happiness should be their highest value relies on you to define what makes them happy, it doesn't look an awful lot different from your average philosophical system based around people being good, with the philosopher defining what it means to be good. And then we're right back at the question the philosopher was trying to answer in the first place: what should man be doing with his short years, and why?

The circular nature of Rand's answer makes it extremely unsatisfying. Because the Objectivist philosophy relies so heavily on the premise that two peoples' desires can't really come into open conflict, it has to postulate that people can't be truly happy unless they're also respecting other people's right to happiness. But this is a flawed premise; it relies on people internalizing a number of external values about what should make them happy, and then declares that once you have internalized them, your desires can't truly be in conflict, because no good person would, for example, want their spouse to sacrifice a greater love in order to pretend to love them. When said spouse leaves them, in reality, it's what's best for both of them. Many readers probably heard this speech from Mom or Dad before they took off for a singles condo with its own yoga room and EST support group.

But the radical notion of Objectivism is precisely that each person is their own referent -- their own end, as Vincent writes. Add in a whole list of rules that you have to follow before your happiness becomes worthy of respect invalidates this referent and makes Rand just another in a long line of people offering up an externally referent moral scheme, this one geared (loosely speaking) to Truth. But the truth is that even were her scheme the ideal one (and I've come to believe that there's no such thing as a coherent, fully consistent personal philosophy), a large number of humans will be unwilling or unable to adopt it, which makes it fully unworkable as a political, and especially a social, system.

I actually admire Rand's rigor; while not even she lived up to her expectations, it is nice that someone in the 20th century thought it worthwhile to ask that people set themselves heroic expectations and then constantly strive to achieve them. We may not always be fully consistent in our beliefs, but we can all do better at policing ourselves not to fudge on things that we know, really, deep down, are wrong. Yes, you with the magazine under your arm that the supermarket checkout girl didn't see: take it out and pay for it. Is the price of a magazine worth abandonning your ideals? I've never understood people who thought that it was okay to lie, cheat, and steal as long as the amounts are small enough; it seems to me worse, rather than better, to sell one's honor for so small a price. Which is not to let off the hook people who will turn around and drive five miles back to McDonalds if they accidentally got an extra burger, but think nothing of cheating on their taxes or padding their expense account for thousands of dollars, who rationalize that what they do isn't really cheating or stealing because it's just the government or a corporation. But of course there is no such thing as stealing from "The Government" or "A Corporation"; you are stealing from the shareholders, or your fellow taxpayers, and don't tell me that it's okay because you're a taxpayer too; you can take out the .000005 cents you saved yourself and hand the rest back to the IRS, if it makes you feel better.

But I'm not hungry. Would I steal to feed a child? Certainly. Would I kill a man to take his food if I were starving? How could I possibly know? I've never been hungry, except for temporarily or by choice. The point is, that while I am not desperate, I do have choices, and I can try to make the best ones even when it is not apparently to my advantage, because it is right. And this I admire in Rand very much; her heroes are all people who do right no matter what the cost.

But I've wandered off the topic, which was individualism.

Any road, Rand's philosophy never really came to terms with the existance of individuals who chose not to embrace her philosophy, which is particularly curious because her value system is so rigorous, and so reliant on self-discipline rather than threat-discipline, that it is guaranteed that most people will be both unable and unwilling to adopt it. In some ways it was more compatible as a philosophy for nation-states, where peaceful commerce or non-interaction backed by the threat of war are the main permissible frameworks, than to individuals, who demand much more from each other than consumer goods or silence. Which is why a phrase like "other people -- whether they are spouses, partners, friends or colleagues -- are an incomparable and irreplaceable blessing in our lives, but only when they are freely chosen, and when their values and goals match our own" just doesn't sit quite right. I don't know anyone whose values and goals are the same as mine. Some are a close match in most important ways. Others are far away. And sure, I think it would be nice to find people like that. But on the other hand, there's something -- well, something inhuman about a group of people whose goals and values are all the same. Surely, after the 20th century, we've had enough of seeking that, even in our circle of friends. But Rand's philosophy does demand just that, because otherwise the mechanistic social interactions begin to break down amid the friction of non-standard parts.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What is the deal with

What is the deal with Scott Ritter? Every time I see a comparison of what the guy was saying in 1997 and the radical about-face he did a year later, I'm flummoxed. As this fine example by Tony Adragna shows, his statements don't represent a slow change in his views; they're a radical about-face. He flatly contradicts things he said while he was in Iraq. And he doesn't even offer a good explanation. He just says "No, I was wrong, Sadaam wasn't preventing us from disarming him." No explanation for why he thought that Sadaam was doing so in 1995, or why he changed his mind; just "I was wrong", and another round of the party line from Baghdad.

Which raises uncomfortable questions.

There is the possibility that I have missed the cogent explanations that Ritter has given of his new position. I haven't seen it, but I don't actually read every article ever written, though I know that my erudition and insightful commentary may have led some readers to believe that this is the case.

Then there is the possibility that Ritter is an idiot, and changes his opinions the way I change lip gloss. I've known enough people to be afflicted by this syndrome not to rule it out entirely, but it seems unlikely.

And then there is the possibility that Ritter is lying, either for personal gain, having been bought by Baghdad or one of the countries or companies that wants to do business with Iraq; or because someone is blackmailing him, probably with a nasty personal secret he can't afford to have revealed, or, possible but unlikely, with harm to himself or his family. I think this possibility the most likely one, and the completely unconvincing character of his assertions makes me suspect that it is blackmail, rather than renumeration, that is his motivation.

I don't mean this as slander. These are speculations, based only on my assessment of what he's said, not on any knowlege of wrongdoing on my part. And I would welcome evidence that I am wrong, that Scott Ritter's stand is a principled one. But until I get such evidence, I remain utterly unconvinced by arguments about the war on Iraq that rely on his statements as a source.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Ouch. That's gotta hurt.

Ouch. That's gotta hurt.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Either my readers are worried

Either my readers are worried about my soul, or I just got my first non-commercial spam:

You are Loved

I want you to know that there is someone who loves you very
much. That's important to know in the " dog eat dog world "
in which we live. We spend our lives trying to earn love and
respect and somehow we never seem to " measure up ". It's
wonderful to be loved without reservation, without having to
earn it. We are loved , not because we are good, not because
we have lived up to expectations, and not because we've
tried to live a good life, but we are loved just like we
are...faults and all. God has put a high value on our lives
in that He gave His son to die on a cross to pay the penalty
for all our sins. He has a very high purpose for yor life!

After 42 years of struggling with the meaning of life and
what the purpose of my life should be, I met a man named
Jesus and He changed my life. It has been wonderful to be
loved unconditionally and to finally realize the meaning
of life itself.I'm writing you to share this love and to
let you know that you are a very special person in the sight
of God. He only wants good for you and wants to help you in
all of your trials.

The Holy Bible tells us in the book of Romans, chapter 3
verse 23, " For all have sinned , and come short of the
glory of God". Romans 6:23 reads " For the wages of sin is
death ; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus
Christ our Lord". Romans 10: 9-10 goes on to read, " Because
if you confess the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart
that God has raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved.
For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with
the mouth one confesses unto salvation".

If you haven't already experienced His love, you can by praying
this simple prayer and by believing in your heart that He has
answered it to the fullest. " Father, I come to you as a
sinner. I repent and ask you to forgive my sin and to come into
my heart and take control of my life. Fill me with your Holy
Spirit and enable me to be the person that you want me to be.
Please use me to help others and help me to realize and fulfill
the purpose for my life. Thank you Jesus for dying to pay the penalty
for my sin. I accept your sacrifice for my salvation. Enable
me by the power of your Holy Spirit to live a life that will be
pleasing to you. Amen ".

If this letter has inconvenienced you or offended you in any
way, I apologize.

God Bless You.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Okay, in response to the

Okay, in response to the emails, let me state that I think that the Swedes are a fine nation with fine people. Some of my best friends are Swedes. Though I may not agree with their choices, as a nation, in welfare policies and culinary consumption, I firmly support their right to national self determination.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More on Swedes So 1

More on Swedes

So 1 in 6 working age Swedes is on government-paid sick leave -- curious, considering how much we keep hearing about the benefits of full national health insurance. Not so curious considering that apparently, said Swedes consider stressful working conditions a legitimate reason for going out sick. But here's the money quote, from a nurse who went on the poor-health dole for two months because she was burned out:

"The wheels are spinning too quickly," said Anna Eriksson . . . "The working environment simply has become tougher. You have to do twice the work you did before."

Could that be because all your co-workers are out on sick leave?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Summer Games Well, summer's over,

Summer Games

Well, summer's over, but I've still got some good questions.

These days, we often read that America's military power is historically unique. Never before has a nation been so much more powerful than all the other nations in the world combined.

So here's the question: how much more powerful? What percentage of the world could we conquer and hold, assuming we went from the holdings with the highest benefit/cost ratio (value of holding/cost of conquering and holding) towards the lowest? What would we conquer? And how much of it could we hold onto for a longish (100+ years, Imperial type conquest) time?

And if the number is large, the matching question? Why haven't we? Why is a nation that could kick the butts of a largish portion of the planet and grind them under our boot if we so desired, so unanxious to build an empire? And what other nation in the history of the planet could have built so much military power, and refrained from using it?

Or are we using it? Are we transitioning to a more traditional sort of Pax Americana? And if so, is it because we have to in order to make ourselves secure from the envious, or because so much power concentrated in one place inevitably gets used?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Annals of Innumeracy I came

Annals of Innumeracy
I came across this treasure on Instapundit, from a Swedish editorial that attempted to debunk a study by a conservative Swedish think tank showing that African American household income is higher than the median Swedish household income. The original editorial is in Swedish, so the caveat is that it may have been mistranslated -- the only thing I know how to say in Swedish is lagom -- but here's a gem from the translation sent by an Instapundit reader:

Conclusion: 40% of the population earns just 1% of what the remaining 60% is earning! No wonder the median income is high. This is why, the author argues, it's not correct to say that the poorest segments in Sweden have lost out compared to their American counterparts.

Let's think about that.

According to FreeLunch, a terrific free economic stats site, in 2000 total personal income in the US was about $9 trillion. The total work force was around 140 million. These numbers are rough, but they'll do for illustration.

Now let's build an equation to describe the author's claims. 60% of the population, say the authors, have a very high share of national personal income, a sum we'll call X.

The remaining 40% have a much lower share of that income. In fact, it's so low, it's only 1% of the share held by the other 60%: .01X.

Those two figures have to add up to the total income of all people in the country: X + .01X = 1.01X = $9,000,000,000,000

Therefore, the share of income held by the 60%, X = $9,000,000,000,000/1.01 = $8,910,891,089,108.91. This works out to a tidy average take of $106,082 for our aristocratic majority.

Oh, but the other 40%. They only get 1% of that, or $1,061 apiece.

Now, they might be saying something different: that the 60% have an average wage of X, while the 40% have an average wage of .01X. But the numbers it yields aren't significantly different: $106,433 for the top 60%, $1,064 for the bottom 40%. So we'll stick with the first numbers.

Given that the authors of the same Op-Ed apparently argue that there are no apartments in the entire United States for under $500 a month (news to my friends in Philly and Upstate New York), the 40% must be suffering indeed. Yet, they do not die off despite their 3rd world income. So somewhere in the United States, 40% of our population is apparently supporting itself on what the other 60% pays for dry cleaning. Why haven't I ever met any of these people? Clearly, they are not in New York, where the poorer half can be seen with cell phones and Starbucks in hand, luxuries that would pretty much entirely consume their tiny incomes were they members of that unfortunate 40%.

Of course, that doesn't mean everyone in the 40% gets $1,061. Some of them might be doing quite well. 1% of them might be earning 30K while the rest make their living returning beverage containers for the deposit.

Of course, the Op-Ed article says that the average family would only be able to last for 3 days if their primary wage earner lost their job or got sick. I'm not saying that there's no one in the country in this situation, but as far as I can tell, 100% of Americans have credit cards with ridiculous limits. 3 days? Listen up, Sweden, American style capitalism isn't that efficient. Even for us, 3 days to get your landlord to evict you, Visa to refuse to let you buy some groceries, the utilities to cut you off and the hospitals to turn you away is just too aggressive a deadline. For one thing, the hospitals aren't legally allowed to turn you away, and for another, the utilities are government monopolies -- it takes them months to get around to noticing you haven't paid your bill. You might only be able to last 3 days on your Blockbuster rentals, but there's always some idiot independant video store that'll let you rent 80's movies.

Now, I'm sure that they worked some sort of wizardry to obtain that number, involving our lack of access to state subsidized medical care or 18 weeks of annual vacation or no guaranteed supply of pickled herring, and I realize my numbers are somewhat ham-fisted, but nonetheless. A little elementary common sense is in order when you look at numbers like this. Yet I've no doubt that any number of Swedes are even now reading those numbers, opening up their government herring box, and thanking God that they don't have to get up at 5 am to hunt through the garbage cans at the Ritz for empty Coke cans.

Update
The Swede has said there's a translation problem (I'm reproducing the email from Instapundit's Update):

I mistakenly excluded missed one sentence in the translation of the article, which is why McArdle might have misunderstood. It goes as follows, and should
explain the "gem" that she included in her article:

"Average US income, not median this time around, in 1997 and distributed along income groups (adjusted to 1998-dollars) :

The 1% in the top: $869 000, The following 59%: $64 000, The remaining 40% $13 700."

Then comes the conclusion (the "gem") that I translated:

"Conclusion: 40% of the population earns just 1% of what the remaining 60% is earning! No wonder the median income is high. This is why, the author argues,
it's not correct to say that the poorest segments in Sweden have lost out compared to their American counterparts."

This still doesn't make any sense. Apparently he's saying that the author added the $869,000 to the $64,000 to get $933,000, of which he says $13,700. But this is wrong two ways. First of all, $13,700 is not 1% of $933,000; it's a little under 1.5%. Which might look little, given my hamfisted earlier machinations, but it reduced the number by 33%, which is a large error.

And second of all, it's totally retarded. You can't add those numbers together; you have to weight them:

(1/60)(869,000) + (59/60)(64,000) = $14,483 + $62,933 = $77,416, of which $13,700 is 17.7%.

There remains the possibility that there's a mistranslation, but I don't think so; the Swede (that's how he's signing himself in my comments, 'kay?) has checked himself twice, and he didn't correct it, only added another part. And someone who speaks Danish, which is supposed to be close enough for translating these sorts of documents, confirms that the author's math is -- ahem -- non-traditional; the discussion can be found in my comments section. The author also apparently argues that very high top incomes raise the median, which is silly; high top incomes raise the mean, but the median -- the middle number in the distribution -- is unaffected by how far away the tails of the distribution are. For the distributions {99 100 101} and {1 100 1,000,000,000,000}, the median in both cases is 100.

The bottom line is that the Op-Ed writer seems to be fairly innumerate, and not only committing the ordinary sins of innumeracy -- accidentally mangling numbers they don't understand as they pass them along -- but actually creating horrible numbers on their own initiative. This is the sort of thing we must stamp out; there is only room for so many number-manglers in the world before the system starts to break down, and I'm all of them.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

According to the New York

According to the New York Press, lawsuit verdicts are down in New York City. I've heard this too, and I've heard that there's a very interesting explanation.

Prior to the mid-1990's, if you had a job, it was very easy to get off jury duty in New York City. Doctors, lawyers, mothers, professionals, the self-employed -- everyone who wanted to could find an exemption that fit him (or her). The people left on juries came largely from a few groups: civil servants, who get paid for their time on jury duty, and who, let's face it, are rarely linchpin employees; the unemployed; and people on welfare, disability, or retirement These people are a plaintiff's lawyer's dream: they have a lot of time, little money, and almost none of them pay significant taxes or insurance premiums. They tend to view lawsuits as the lottery, returning verdicts based on the plaintiff's need, rather than the defendant's fault. The few retirees from upper income brackets could be bounced from the panel with peremptory challenges by the plaintiff's attorney. March a poor family in front of them, pitted against a big, mean insurance company, hospital, or other corporation, and . . . well, you can guess the rest.

Problem was, with 2/3 of the jury pool getting exempted, it was becoming impossible to staff juries. Cases were actually falling behind because of lags in getting jurors from the pool. So they re-wrote the exemptions, making it very, very tough to get off a jury. Believe me, I've been there, pulled off a major project for which I was the project manager to sit in an overfilled room without recourse to cell phone. If you've just given birth, don't speak English, or have a fatal illness, you can be excused. Otherwise, you too are going to find yourself in the same room, trying to work over the din of five hundred other angry New Yorkers complaining about jury duty. And judges are tough. I almost found myself in a jury pool for a nine month trial despite the fact that I had read extensively about the case and had actually met several of the defendants. The judge, who had instructed the previous candidate to cancel her vacation plans and make other arrangements at work, quizzed me for ten tough minutes to ascertain that I had actually read about the case and wasn't lying.

The result is a radically different jury composition. The people handing out verdicts now have jobs, mortgages, insurance policies, and hefty tax bills. They are more likely to have the education to understand complex technical or medical issues. (I'm not saying that they're rocket scientists now. But the pools before the early 90's were very poorly educated. Ask a high school dropout to rule as to what a doctor should have done in surgery? How could he possibly know?) And they're much more likely to see lawsuits as a tool for administering just compensation, rather than free-lance socialism. This is cocktail party chitchat, not a confirmed number, but one of the people who was telling me about this said that jury verdicts have dropped by more than half in New York City since the change -- the place has gone from a plaintiff's paradise to an unpopular venue.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It looks like the New

It looks like the New York Blogger women are going to have to get some game on for the Blogger Bash on September 20th, after the display by the London bloggers at their bash. Asparagirl, Orchid, I'm looking at you.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Weapons of Mass Discomfort

I guess Chuck Schumer is going to have to come out in favor of a war on Iraq:

Sen. Charles Schumer, the senior Democrat from New York, said that Congress would unite behind the president on Iraq, but only if he presented convincing evidence that Baghdad is developing weapons of mass destruction.

"If the President makes a compelling case that allowing Saddam Hussein ( news - web sites) to continue to try to develop weapons of mass destruction that could really hurt us, I think you'll find that Congress -- both Republicans and Democrats -- will unite behind him," he told reporters.

As opposed to those WMDs that can't really hurt us? It seems to me that this part of the case has already been made.

In other news, Robert Byrd decided not to come to New York (it does seem cooler than I thought it would be today):

"I believe Congress ought to be here -- working. There is work to be done here," said Byrd, noting it still has 13 must-pass spending bills to deal with to keep the government running for the new fiscal year starting Oct. 1. "There is work to be done here."

Rumour has it Mayor Bloomberg offended the pompadoured prince of pork by rejecting his request to rename Wall Street "Byrd Boulevard" and laughing uproariously at the "Mayor BloomByrd" suggestion.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Lockdown

Because of the special session of congress going on down the street, we are cooped up in our building, allowed to neither go outside nor can anyone other than uniformed police and Feds get near our entrances.

I wouldn't mind so much but for the fact that the last time we were cooped up like this was 9/11 itself. At least I can see out the window this time.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So I've been looking into

So I've been looking into the "High fat diets cause heart disease" "No they don't -- high carb diets do!" "You're wrong!" "No, you're wrong!" "You're a big fat doody-head" "Well, my Daddy can beat up your daddy!" arguments.

Best article is here. And it's just what we didn't want to hear: no, fat isn't that harmful -- but saturated fat, the kind in steak, cheese, and butter, is.

No, carbs aren't the devil, but chowing on potatoes and white bread all day isn't good for you either.

In other words, lean meat, whole grains, and lots and lots of veggies and fruit. This from the author of the Harvard study that people have been touting as "establishing no link between fat intake and heart disease". It's the same old boring, less tasty diet we've all been trying to avoid by cutting out the carbs or the meat or what have you. Yes, Atkins may lower your cholesterol. But its long term weight-loss outcomes are no better than any restrictive diet; some people stay on it, but most people don't, and then they gain the weight back. And the cholesterol lowering effects seem to be related to the weight loss, not the fat metabolism. Of course, if that's the only way you can lose weight, and you can stick with it, then it's a lot better than chowing on eight pounds of pasta a night. But it's not a magic bullet. Any more than the Dean Ornish "Extremely Healthy But Impossible for All But the Tastebud-Deprived" diet is a magic bullet.

This is just not the diet any of us wanted to hear was good for us -- not meat and potatoes men, nor sweet-toothed gals. That's probably why almost everyone is looking for a restrictive diet that allows them their favorite foods, instead of biting the bullet and seeking moderation. Trying to adopt this guy's diet would have half of my friends up on their chair screaming "Flopsy! Mopsy! Cottontail! Time for supper" and the other half begging to be taken to the nearest Olive Garden. It tells us we have to moderate the best tasting parts of our diet: the succulent red meat, the roasted chicken tender with fat, the pasta and bread and luscious, saturated-fat-and-sugar-nirvana of the dessert menu.

There are in-betweens. I hate brown rice. But I like converted rice, which has more fiber and nutrients than "white" rice. I hate couscous. But I like lentil-barley soup. Just as you don't have to give up all meat to cut down on your saturated fats, you don't have to start looking for recipes for millet to improve your carb-picture. You can go pretty far just by limiting yourself to, say, white bread, pasta or potatoes only once a day.

I know, I know. Moderation. Snore. But remember this: if you go on Atkins, or Ornish, or any of the other highly restricted diets, and you lose weight, and you can't stick with it, recent advances in our knowlege about the hormones that regulate appetite indicate that you'll almost inevitably gain back more than you lost. So baby steps beat springing forward and then falling back.

And one thing I have learned from all this: a medium rare buffalo meat burger is not only low in fat and high in protein, but also damn tasty.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Did Atkins die of heart

Did Atkins die of heart diseas? No, he's alive. And the heart disease isn't dietary or hereditary; it's due to an infection.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

John Ellis, who writes some

John Ellis, who writes some of the savviest, invective free political commentary in the blogosphere, has some good thoughts on why the Cuomo campaign collapsed.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Atkins, Day Four You know

Atkins, Day Four
You know that things are getting desperate when you find yourself tempted to eat out of the dog's dish.

Due to my mother's undiagnosed obsessive/compulsive issues, my dog is on a natural food diet. The dog gets pasta and rice every day, while I stare forlornly at his bowl. Last night, when I was putting the pasta in, I actually found myself considering stealing a few rotini for myself. How the mighty have fallen.

I may not be on this diet much longer. One of my kidneys has started to hurt. Probably it's just psychosomatic. But why the hell am I going to risk kidney failure to lose five pounds? I mean, there are many women in New York who would have their kidneys removed and go on dialysis for the rest of their life if they thought it would get them any closer to their goal of having the same profile as a paper doll. But I have better things to worry about. Anyway, I don't want to go back to my college weight; I looked like a toothpick with a lot of hair.

So I went in with a calorie counter to analyze the last three day's meals. Except for yesterday, when I ate three meat-and-cheese laden meals (cheese omelette and bacon for breakfast, roast turkey, mozzarella, a buffalo wing, and some salad for lunch; buffalo burger with a slice of cheddar and mushrooms, and more salad, for dinner) I've been eating about 300 fewer calories than on a vegetarian diet. Yesterday I ate probably 300 calories more -- my ability to accurately estimate my calorie count is hampered by my inability to figure out how many ounces are in one slice of cheese. I've been figuring 2-3 ounces per meal, which could be high or low.

I am firmly in the camp with the researchers who say people lose weight on Atkins because they're eating less. Yesterday I really poured it on and ended up at under 2,000 calories. For someone who's 30 pounds or more overweight, that translates into automatic weight loss. I on the other hand already often clocked in under 2,000 calories, so I'm not sure how much good it does. And that was really stuffing myself. I'm sure there are people out there who can put a 3/4 pound of burger on a plate with three slices of cheese and a couple lettuce leaves and really dig in, but how many of those can there be?

The other thing I'm noticing is that it's expensive as hell. I'm spending $20 a day on food. Now, of course, I'd be spending less if I packed my meals. But how much less? Buffalo meat isn't cheap. Vegetarianism is much more economical.

Oh, and there's the monotony. Meat, meat, meat. How many kinds of meat are there? I'm trying to rotate them. Today's tuna day. That, and lamb, are all I have left. Of course there are other meats, but it's not convenient for me to start grilling my own swordfish, I hate almost all other fish, and I can't afford shrimp or lobster.

It's beef, that's what. Beef and bacon. My dairy farmer relatives would be pleased, except that they can't imagine a meal without potatoes. But frankly, I never want to see a piece of either again. The funny thing is that, bagels aside, what I really miss are my vegetables. Lentils. Soft, ripe, tomatoes. Peaches. Apples. Melon. Mushroom curry. Big buckets of salad. Maybe I just wasn't meant to be a carnivore.

It's certainly been an interesting experiment. But unless my kidneys feel better by midday, it's me for a bagel and a bucket of salad. Any medical professionals out there who can advise?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Eugene Volokh's reply to Robert

Eugene Volokh's reply to Robert Wright invokes Game Theory using evolution's terminology:

Finally, I think that Wright, who has written a good deal about evolution, is missing a basic evolutionary analogy. He talks about how "the attitude of the world's Muslims toward America matters," and that this should influence what we do with regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but why doesn't he ask about "the attitude of the world's Jews"? Why doesn't he worry that alienating some Jews, who might hate us for condemning what they see as their rightful attempts to settle Judea and Samaria, will lead them to commit terrorist acts against us?

Well, it's because Jews these days don't do such things. Too bad for them, then; since we're not afraid of them, we don't have to worry as much about their views. More broadly, too bad under Wright's scheme for all those who are generally less violent; we won't much adjust our policies to take their desires into account. But good for those who are more violent.

So the brutes end up having a competitive advantage over the nice guys (or, to be precise, more of one than they had before). Either the nice guys will turn brutish, or the nice guys will be overrun by the brutes, and it is the brutes, not the nice guys, who will reproduce their brutal culture of terrorist threat. Evolution will help the fittest survive -- except in the policy structure that Wright recommends, the fittest (the ones whose interests we'll treat with the most concern) are the ones who are the most likely spawning grounds of terrorists.

Of course, critics would argue that Israel commits all kinds of terrorist violence (Exhibit A), and they have shown the willingness to use military force preemptively in the territories, Iraq (thank God they did) and Lebanon.

Terrorists understand, however, that Israel and all Western powers are reluctant to go to war, have little desire to conquer territories not currently under their control, and bend over backwards to avoid civilian deaths in retaliatory action. Which is why they endorse targeting Jewish and American civilians but scream bloody murder to the foreign press about accidental civilian deaths from operations against militants on their home turf.

What Volokh describes correctly is a threat power imbalance. Terrorists use our restraint and desire for self-preservation against us.

In the past when I pointed this out, readers assumed it was an argument for abandoning restraint, as if I implied that doing so was optimal. There is no ideal solution. It is simply a paradox that appeasement begets more violence.

UPDATE: Incidentally, it strikes me that a non-violent policy by Palestinians would be optimally effective in the singular goal offorcing an Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, while an unconstrained willingness to use retaliatory force might work for Western powers in the singular goal of reducing terrorism against us. Interesting.

Of course, if they'd run a Gandhian campaign they would have won decades ago. But how long would they have to forego bombing bar mitzvahs and seders before that kind of approach would have credibility now?

- Instapundit

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Atkins, Day 3 I don't

Atkins, Day 3
I don't understand why people say they're not hungry. I'm hungry all the time.

Menu so far:

Tuesday:
Cheese omelette
Bacon

Veal chop with mustard cream sauce
Large salad

Wednesday:
Roast beef
Lettuce
Provolone
Egg

Barbeque chicken, two pieces
Salad

Two stalks of celery with 1-2 tablespoons cream cheese

Thursday
Mushroom omelette with cheese
Bacon

Thankfully, the nausea and stomach cramps have started to abate somewhat. I find it's better if you put a little carb into each meal; all-protein meals make me sick.

I've started to notice things. First, that I'm amazingly hungry when I eat. I find myself stripping the bones and pursuing every last lettuce leaf. I've never found lettuce so appealing before. I mean, I like it and all. But now it's the best part of the meal.

Second of all, even though my food is prepared with more fat, I don't know how much more fat I'm getting. Take the cream sauce. Normally, if I ate such a thing, it would come with lovely bread with which to mop it up. Now I end up with large pools of salad dressing and cream sauce on my plate, where it has run off my lettuce leaves and meat.

Third, I don't get full. My vegetarian diet had a lot more bulk. I go to my meals hungry and leave a little less hungry. Presumably, I could eat four pieces of chicken instead of two, but that's a lot of chicken to eat. My hunger levels are steadier, but also unfortunately omnipresent. Perhaps they'll get better as my stomach shrinks.

Fourth, I'm losing a hell of a lot of water. I don't think I'm losing any fat, though. I've started weighing myself, and was five pounds tubbier than I thought. We'll see what happens day by day.

Fifth, I think I'm eating more calories than before. But I'll have to go in with a calorie counter to be sure.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I just ran across this

I just ran across this exceedingly stupid article on Cuba via Benjamin Kepple. A sample:

Its neighbour had spent the first 60 years of the 20th century running Cuba as a semi-detached state – and a source of cheap sugar, sex and salsa. No more Mr Nice President: when Castro started to implement reforms, and laid the foundations for vast improvements in health and education, the White House turned nasty. Its incumbents filled the remainder of the century with a spite that played into the hands of the man the Americans sought to destroy.

That's right, it wasn't the cozying up to our Cold War enemies, nor even the decision to allow the Soviet Union to move missiles onto their territory so they could be pointed at us; no, it was the vaccination programmes and the building of the Ernesto Guevara Primary School in Havana that pushed us over the edge.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Economist lays out, in

The Economist lays out, in simple lucid terms, why the housing bubble eventually has to stop inflating:

The truth is that house prices, like equities, cannot for long outpace the growth of nominal incomes. In the long run, the ratio of house prices to earnings is thus the best guide to their sustainable value. And in Britain, America and some other rich countries, that ratio is now at or near record levels. That does not mean that house prices are sure to collapse; but it makes it highly unlikely that they will go on rising as fast as they have been.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can Republicans sue their way

Can Republicans sue their way into the Ivory Tower? Probably not; the 1964 Civil RIghts Act doesn't cover political affiliation. But there is one interesting area the author didn't explore: evangelical Christians. I've heard more than one scuttlebutt story about Christians who were zapped from an academic position because of their religious beliefs, and they are covered, especially at colleges that get Federal money, which is to say all of them.

The author also points out that conservatives don't actually need to win the lawsuits. The prospect of explaining, in public, to the taxpayers and alumni who fund them, why conservative viewpoints are unnecessary and indeed, unwanted, on campus would (will, if the administrations have any sense, which is of course not always the case) bring about an immediate sea change in hiring practices.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Something's wrong with Blogger. .

Something's wrong with Blogger. . . there's a delay in my posts, and they have the wrong time on them. Oh, joy. Yes, I know I should move to another program, but I move around too much for that. Sigh. Well, y'all are missing some great posts.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tee-hee! Missed this part: "But

Tee-hee! Missed this part: "But a majority of Americans, 52 per cent, think that the US should remain the only world superpower, while 65 per cent of Europeans said that the European Union should become a superpower similar to the US. Only 33 per cent of Americans agreed."

The Europeans seem to think that becoming a superpower is like getting elected prom-queen; if you want it badly enough, and suck up sufficiently to all the little people whom you would never, ever let in your house, you can wear the crown. Guys, this one's not subject to a UN vote. If you want to be a superpower, you're going to need at least one of two things: a world class economy, or a world class military. Economically, you're structurally unable to compete with the US, and as the Economist points out this week, your demographics only make this worse. And militarily? Titter. Snort. No, really, stop it, it hurts when I laugh that hard.

I realize that you had a third plan, which was to develop multilateral institutions that you would dominate, and which would succeed in crippling the US's superiority. However, you should have learned something from watching our movies: neither the hero nor the villain is going to succeed with plans based on their opponent acting in blind disregard to self-interest. Okay, I know it worked for Hitler, but let's be frank: he wasn't playing against the varsity.

I think it's fine if Europe wants to be a superpower. Go get rich or powerful, and I'll be happy to vote the US off the field. But if the secret plan rests on our actively cooperating in our own demise. . . well, then, you'd better have a hell of a recipe for ex-lax brownies.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

55% of Europeans think that

55% of Europeans think that America was "partly to blame" for the Al Quaeda attacks.

In related news, 100% of Americans think that Europe was "entirely to blame" for World Wars I, II, the Holocaust, and Communist atrocities in the former Soviet Union and associated territories. 99.8% of Americans think that "The next time Europeans get themselves in any kind of trouble that requires US intervention, they can k*** my a**". And 89% of Americans think that "If those same Europeans are against invading Iraq, then it's time to put Sadaam in a whole world of hurt."

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So Dave Winer thinks that

So Dave Winer thinks that in five years every member of congress will have a weblog. Oh, I don't think so. In fact, I think that any member who seriously tries to start a weblog will blow up, and quick.

The point of weblogs is their off-the-cuff nature, their unscripted, up-to-the-minute commentary. Politicians do not do unscripted, up to the minute commentary, and with good reason. I do not have several thousand motivated readers seeking out-of-context quotes or unfortunate phrasings with which to get me fired come next November's electoral performance review. And if I take a position which subsequently turns out to be wrong, I just say "oops, called that one badly" and move on. Politicians can't do that. Any position they take attracts the attention of highly motivated interest groups, and if they renege on that position, however mildly, those interest groups become highly motivated to get them unelected.

Any politician's blog would have to be vetted by the Committee For Making Sure the Congressman Doesn't Say Anything He'll Regret. By the time a post actually gets through this process, it will either be utterly banal ("The Taliban is killing puppies for illustrative purposes. Let me go firmly on the record as against the killing of puppies. If re-elected, I promise to do something about the deaths of cute little fuzzy puppies everywhere.") or hopelessly out of date. Congress might develop this sort of weblog. But then it wouldn't be a real weblog. It would be an extension of the congressman's website.

There are exceptions. Jim Traficant would make an interesting blogger, since clearly he doesn't care what the hell comes out of his mouth, and neither do his constituents. I can imagine Barney Frank with a blog; the Democrats will keep on nominating him, and it's not like his constituents are going to vote for a (eew!) Republican. But mostly, they'll avoid any sort of lively, timely commentary like the plague. And really, that's probably a blessing.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Atkins, Day 2 Well, I

Atkins, Day 2
Well, I can certainly understand why people lose weight. I'm hungry, but I can't face the prospect of another round of eggs and bacon. Last night's veal chop with mustard cream sauce and salad were delicious. But I'm already tired of eggs, and it's only day two. By day five, I'm afraid I'll be too tired of it to eat anything at all.

I'm also afraid of another round with yesterday's horrific stomach cramps. I don't think it's a good idea to eat eggs, bacon, and cheese with nothng else; at least, my stomach didn't seem to enjoy it. Today I think I'll have some mushrooms in my eggs. Or I can just wait for lunch and have some roast beef. I haven't decided yet.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Looks like we're shipping tanks

Looks like we're shipping tanks to the Gulf. I think there's very little doubt at this point that we're going after Sadaam, and probably this fall.

I also think there's very little doubt that if it goes to congress, it will pass. Not because our reps necessarily support it. But the vulnerable Democrats, from the South and Midwest (Michigan the obvious exception) are not going to go on record as against the war, no way no how. New England, New York, and the West Coast will vote against. But everyone else will line up behind Bush out of a keen sense of survival, if nothing else.

I further think there will be more casualties than in the first Gulf War. (Which brings up an interesting point -- what do we call this one? Gulf II?) But I don't think we're talking "Quagmire". First of all, there's no Iraqi equivalent of the NVA. Second of all, there's no financial equivalent of China or Russia -- the Saudis aren't that stupid. Third of all, militarily he's in worse shape now than he was then, although he does of course have the advantage of experience, and time to plan around incompetent commanders and defections on a massive scale. And fourth of all, it's a highly fragmented tribal country currently ruled with an iron fist. I think that at the first signs that Sadaam is going to lose, his people will start losing their enthusiasm for guarding him with their bodies. History loves a winner, and historically, populations ruled by nuthatch dictators generally sell out to the conquerors as soon as the outcome becomes obvious.

In fact, I think that if we want to get any good patriotic war songs out of this we'd better start writing them now, because we won't have much time after the balloon goes up.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Final post on diet, for

Final post on diet, for those who aren't thoroughly sick of the subject.

Ultimately, the main point that I wanted to make about the Taubes article is that Taubes was taking two trends -- the increase in our national consumption of carbohydrates, and the increase in obesity nationwide -- and saying that since they were both rising at the same time, the one must be causing the other. This is the worst sort of statistical nonsense unless it's backed up by solid regression analysis, and not only did Taubes fail to do any sort of real analysis, but also, the data he was looking at yielded a simpler answer, one with more scientific evidence to back it up -- according to the FDA, we didn't just increase our carbohydrate intake, we increased the number of calories we consume. There's no need to posit some conspiracy of pigheaded doctors Refusing to See the Light, although of course that makes a better story; we were eating more than we expended. Surprise! We got fatter.

So what do I think is the culprit? Well, Taubes might be surprised to find that I agree with him -- we ate too much sugar. 30 pounds more per person, per year. But I don't think it's because the government told us to, although it might have been because that's what we wanted to hear.

But actually, there's an even more interesting explanation than that. It has to do with the revolution in portion sizes we've undergone since the 1950's. Consider that, according to Fast Food Nation, in the 1950's the average fast food soft drink was eight ounces. Eght ounces! Hardly enough for a modern American to wet his throat. McDonalds sold hamburgers, cheesburgers, and the equivalent of today's small fries. And your typical family going out for dinner had one burger, one eight ounce soft drink or milk shake, and a small fries. How many of you ordered that daintily the last time you went out for some fast food?

A look through the 1950 Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook is instructive. It's filled with ways to economize, substituting bread and noodles and cheese for meat, making cakes that don't use expensive butter or eggs, dressing up horrible processed things with tomato sauce or pimientos to make them palatable. When was the last time you ate oatmeal because you couldn't afford the eggs? We didn't get scammed into getting fat; we got rich.

We also got marketing savvy. The revolution in portion sizes that we've undergone is not merely a function of better production efficiency or richer consumers; it's also a product of what we've learned about human consumption patterns since then.

Back in the 1970's, Pepsi wanted to study peoples' beverage consumption patterns in order to figure out how better to market their product. To that end, they gave some families an unlimited supply of Pepsi to see how much, and what, they would drink.

What they found was astounding. It didn't matter how much soda they gave them; they drank it all. They kept increasing the weekly ration, and the families kept pouring whatever they sent them straight down their gullets.

Out of this revelation was born the two liter bottle. And the Big Gulp. And the supersize. Remember, almost none of a fast food processors cost stems from the ingredients; most of it comes from the real estate, the advertising, and the labor. If they can get you to pay more money by selling you a huge portion, most of the extra money you give them is pure profit. Thus the proliferation of leviathan meals across the land. And not merely in fast food restaurants. Unless you're at a really top of the line restaurant, the kind most Americans can't afford to enter, the average restaurant portion is 2-3 times the size of a healthy meal. And as a nation, we're eating out more than ever.

But don't get too busy blaming the fast food companies. We're the ones opening our gullets and shoving a pound of french fries down there. The only reason they can sell it to us is that we're buying it. And don't give me that hogwash about how people don't know that it's bad for them. My grandmother's high school health class textbook says nary a word about calories, but she can tell you what makes you fat -- big, heavy meals, and lots of sweets. Those people on the street toting an extra hundred pounds or so did not spring from some primeval glade where the innocent natives were unaware of the relationship between the food you consume and the weight you gain; they came from the same culture you and I did, where everyone is well aware that if you eat too much, it shows. They may not have wanted to believe this. They may have denied it. Or they may have temporarily forgotten it for the purposes of consuming a Supersize Big Mac Meal (1600 calories and twice your fat RDA if you order it with a regular coke. And thank you, Dr. Atkins, but the carbs aren't the culprit -- well over half the calories in that meal come from fat.) But they weren't innocent victims of the lying, rapacious food processors who duped them into believing that a chocolate shake had the same health properties as a stick of celery.

The real question is why the Europeans aren't getting fat. After all, people everywhere like consuming soda. And it's not like the marketers there aren't aware of this phenomenon -- they sell 2 liter bottles everywhere now. But restaurant portions in Europe are tiny compared to those sold here. And you can get on a bus without getting whacked every three seconds by someone's spare tire.

Part of the answer is that they're poorer. They don't just eat less; they excercise more; outside of the cities (and New Yorkers, too, are skinnier than their country cousins), no one walks anywhere any more. I was in the Philadelphia suburbs this weekend, and I walked five minutes to the convenience store rather than go to the trouble of getting into my car. From the looks I got, you would have thought I was skipping along the roadway in a Dorothy costume singing the Liebestod aria from Tristan and Isolde.

Part of the answer is that agricultural subsidies there bias shelf space towards natural foods, and who wants to drink two liters of milk while watching the World Cup?

And part of the answer is that they are getting fatter. The British Isles are close to passing us in the Millenial Obesity Challenge. And portion sizes there are exploding. With the proles lining up twenty-deep at Mickey D's, can Europe be far behind?

So I think that Taubes was engaging in the same kind of wishful thinking we all do when we're dieting. We want there to be a magic bullet, an easy answer -- something other than "eat less, move more". But getting the nations on Atkins isn't the answer. As long as we are a sedentary nation with an overstuffed diet, we'll continue to expand.

What is the answer? Child, if I knew that, I wouldn't be running this blog. I'd be off making my fortune in the weight loss business. But for a start, how about turning off the computer, getting out of your chair, and walking around for a little while?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Meanwhile, don't forget that Blogger

Meanwhile, don't forget that Blogger Bash III is coming up fast! All those who want to see the results of this dieting can come out and view the fat cells live and in person. Everyone else can just come for the drinks and scintillating conversation.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Atkins, Day One Eggs, bacon,

Atkins, Day One
Eggs, bacon, and cheese for breakfast. I feel horrible. Not diet-horrible, as in hungry, but unhealthy, "What the hell is going on in my stomach?" horrible. Obviously, some of this is psychological. I have eaten breakfasts without carbohydrates before. But I don't think all of it is. After four hours, breakfast is still sitting in my stomach like a lead balloon, sullen and immobile. No wonder people lose weight on this diet; the mere idea of eating anything else is utterly revolting, especially if it is another meal like the one I had this morning.

I have decided to limit myself to two meals a day. I think I can face an omelette without toast around mid-morning, but frankly, I'm afraid of using up all my salad greens (3 cups, max) at lunch and having nothing for dinner but a big hunk of meat. If I limit myself to eating twice a day, I won't have to face the prospect of an enormous hunk of protein towering menacingly over an otherwise empty plate.

I'm still trying to figure out why people find it easier to go Atkins than veggie. Vegetarians have a large world of available foods; Atkins followers have -- meat-o-rama, three times a day. But then, as Grandmother is fond of saying, differences of opinion are what makes horse races and marriages.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Phew! My high school made

Phew! My high school made the list of the top 100 feeder schools for Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. We're number 89, but that's not what's important. What's important is that we made the list. I'm going to go right out and buy a Princeton beanie to celebrate.