Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Ahem

So I'll be in LA next Friday, on my way back from Mexico. I have been asked to hold a little get-together, but stupidly can't find email addresses for any of the bloggers I know in LA, so . . .

If anyone wants to suggest a bar near the airport (our plane doesn't get in until 7:30 PM, and we leave bright 'n early the next morning), we'll be hosting a little impromptu LA blogger bash.

(By 'hosting', I mean smiling gaily at you as you walk through the door. Sadly, my travelling companion and I will no doubt be flat broke from all those little drinks with umbrellas in them, and will thus be unable to buy drinks the way we'd like to if only Uncle Buffett would leave us his money.)

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Government at Work

In the process of giving a certain percentage of my income away to charity, I made a donation of appreciated securities to The America's Fund for Afghan Children in December. for these last two months I haven't been able to talk to anyone there or get a response to several letters to accept the securities or their liquidated proceeds. Pathetic, really. I wonder how the "each child give a dollar" effort is going if I can't convince them to accept a more substantial donation?

Operation Give didn't know how to accept securities either, but they got back to me right away and we resolved it in a few days.

We all made fun of "A Thousand Points of Light", but, much like "Known Unknowns", I think it was smarter than it sounded.

UPDATE: We get results! They called back today.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More screedy libertarian goodness

Whenever I've dared to suggest that getting our congress to slap together new financial regulations just might not solve all of our corporate governance problems, I've been attacked as a radical ideologue. How could I imply that the government would do a worse job than the private market, when Enron so clearly proved otherwise?

Because, folks, we've set the fox to guard the henhouse:

LIFE AT THE TOP....I saw this story earlier today about how well senators did in the stock market but didn't pay much attention to it. Sure, they did way better than us ordinary schmoes. And yeah, they even did a lot better than top corporate executives, beating the market by 12% compared to the execs' 5%.

But who knows? Senators are probably able to hire pretty good financial planners, aren't they? Maybe it's all completely innocent. But then there was this:

The Ziobrowski study notes that the politicians' timing of transactions is uncanny. Most stocks bought by senators had shown little movement before the purchase. But after the stock was bought, it outperformed the market by 28.6 per cent on average in the following calender year.

Returns on sell transactions are equally intriguing. Stocks sold by senators performed in line with the market the year following the sale.

Uncanny indeed! Maybe somebody should bring a class action suit against the entire senate. And quickly, before they pass some kind of tort reform bill that makes it impossible....

Here's a regulation I can get behind: force everyone in the Senate and Congress to put their money in a blind trust, the way the executive branch folks do.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I am woman, hear me whine

So Naomi Wolf has been traumatised for life by the fact that after she invited him to dinner at her house, Harold Bloom put his hand on her knee.

Is this what feminism has come to? How on earth can we claim to be men's equals when we are so frail that we cannot withstand the psychic anguish of an unwanted advance?

I mean, don't get me wrong, I find these things as awkward and embarassing as the next woman. I blush. I stammer. I back away. But I might point out that this is because, post-feminism, I no longer have the moral authority to slap his hand and say, in an indignant voice, "what kind of girl do you think I am?"

What would we think of a man who said that, after a female professor (or a male one, for that matter) put a hand on his knee, he was so unutterably wounded that his grades declined? That he's been carrying the "wound" around with him for twenty years? We'd think he was a hysterical fool, that's what. Naomi Wolf does the cause of equality no favours by implying that for women, such hysteria is only natural.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Defending marriage

Well, goodness gracious. Writing our definition of marriage into the constitution -- if this isn't pinning a "kick me" sign to the backside of our grand legal tradition, I don't know what is.

That said, people who think this is going to be a big issue in this campaign need to check the dosage on their meds. I don't care what opinion polls say, we've got some hard hitting economic issues, a war on terror, a reconstruction in Iraq, a budget deficit that would make the folks down at Shopaholics Anonymous blush, and a demographic crisis coming down the pike that's going to make all the rest of those issues look like a walk in the park. People are not going to decide who to vote for based on what they do, or do not believe, about the rights of a tiny percentage of the population to wed. A couple of libertarians, maybe, but I think we libertarians all know that the majority of the population does not share our particular fixations.

Liberals might do well to observe their libertarian brethren on this score. Over and over again, one sees not merely bloggers, but Democratic pundits, arguing that some issue they find utterly compelling, like national health care, will be electoral gold. These folks generally have their finger on the pulse of the nation about as accurately as the New Coke execs. Now, I care about a lot of things that aren't terribly interesting, apparently, to my fellow voters: eliminating the corporate income tax, dismantling the Commerce department, reforming social security and medicare, and so on. But while I may make impassioned arguments that they should care, I don't let my passion delude me into believing that they do. If you ask me, the difference between conservatives and liberals right now is that the conservative base has a pretty good idea of where the rest of the American public does and does not agree with them, while the liberal base, to judge from their websites, believes that the American public is somewhere slightly to the left of Al Gore. This may explain why they spend so much time trying to convince each other that Republicans are a uniquely crafty brand of liars; with their worldview, it's the only way to explain their fellow voters increasing tendency to vote for the other side.

And people who were cheering the various court decisions, and are now screaming about this, need a consistency check. Yes, we all support gay marriage -- but a majority of your fellow citizens don't. You thought you'd found a way to end run the tedious process of cultural change by getting judges or officials who lean your way to read rights you're in favor of into the constitution. You can hardly scream "foul" when they try to get legislators who don't lean your way to write those rights right back out again.

In fact, maybe there's one good thing to come out of all this: maybe this is a good opportunity for the fans of liberal court activism to think about why their opponents might be horrified by the prospect of having contentious issues decided by having the other side's position written--or read--into the constitution.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Abortion redux

When I postulated that there were probably couples out there willing to adopt all the potential babies that are aborted in this country, I got pushback from one particularly belligerent commenter. "There are 1 million abortions in this country each year," he bellowed. "Prove that you could find 1 million people willing to adopt them!"

Well, that's easy; there are more than 1 million on the wait list to adopt now.

But what about next year?

If abortion were illegal, would we have a stable population of parents willing to adopt the children, if the mothers and fathers were willing to terminate their parental rights at birth?

I think so. I can't prove it, of course, any more than I can "prove" that the sun will rise tomorrow. But I think both are pretty likely. Here's why:

1) We wouldn't have 1 million babies to be adopted.

a) Some mothers would choose to keep the babies
b) Some mothers would get illegal abortions
c) Some abortions (5%, I think) are obtained for medical reasons, and would presumably still be obtained no matter how illegal we make other sorts of abortion
d) Many people would choose not to engage in risky sex, because the potential cost of doing so had gone up. (For those demanding proof, this paper shows that legalising abortion raised rates of STD infection--a good proxy for unprotected sex--by as much as 25%, and restricting Medicaid payments for abortion lowered the number of pregnancies in the state by at least 7%).

2) More people would be willing to adopt because:

a) As the supply of babies went up, the waiting lists would become less onerous and encouraging adoptive parents to adopt more than one child (apparently nearly impossible now)
b) Adoptive parents willing to terminate their parental rights would allay some of the major fears of potential adopters
c) A greater supply of babies would push the price down, allowing less affluent potential parents to enter the market. (No, we don't "sell babies" -- but adoptions today are generally facilitated by private agencies, which is expensive, or take place abroad, which is also very expensive, pricing all but the well-to-do out of the market)

So it's my believe--though I can't "prove" it--that if abortion were made illegal, and the parents subsequently decided to put their babies up for adoption and terminate their parental lives, good homes could be found for all the babies thus put up for adoption on a sustainable basis.

That doesn't mean, as I said in the previous post, that I think we should make abortion illegal. I was simply interested in a factual question I happened to know a little bit about; the link to abortion was pretty incidental, for me, as I'm pro-choice, but not militantly so.

But I understand why the assertion does enrage the militant wing of my side: if abortion doesn't result in millions of unwanted children being neglected or starved, that radically alters the arguments made in favour of it. There are two main wings of the argument about abortion: first, that making it illegal represents an unwarranted intrusion into a woman's body by the state (the reason I'm pro-choice), and second, that making abortion illegal makes society as a whole worse off. If someone comes along and says that rather than flooding society with unwanted children, reducing the number of abortions would enrich the lives of childless couples who are currently unable to adopt because of the tiny supply of adoptable babies, that turns abortion rights from an unambiguous good to a muddled choice between various peoples' interests--and interest groups, of whatever stripe, never like to argue that they're pursuing their own interests. It's always for the good of society that they need the laws amended in their favour.

(Just to make it crystal clear: I still favour the rights of the mother; as morally repugnant as I find abortion, I would find it even more repugnant to empower the state to force women to be brood mares for the benefit of childless couples.)

What most Americans feel about abortion is, I think, something like this: it's wrong. You shouldn't have an abortion just because you're scared to tell your parents and friends that you got knocked up, or to protect your career. You certainly shouldn't have one after the second or third month, when the fetus has a nervous system and can feel pain. The right to have sex with men you don't want to parent children with is not so compelling as to totally negate the rights of the fetus . . . but that said, life is complicated, and it's wise not to make hard-and-fast rules about complicated situations, so we'd all prefer just not to think about it. But if we had to set a rule, we'd say "unless the pregnancy is involuntary, endangers your life, or is likely to result in a fatally ill baby, you should take responsibility for who you sleep with." Really, what most Americans want is not to make abortion illegal; they want other Americans to internalise the notion that it's morally wrong to casually get pregnant and get rid of it just as casually--and then behave accordingly.

But look how far that is from the point of view of either side. NARAL can't just say "it's wrong, but it's necessary in this imperfect world"; they have to make the right to cut a fetus out of your womb with a curette into something glorious. And Operation Rescue can't just say, "look, I know it's hard, but that potential life is something pretty precious so let's figure out what you need to be able to give it birth"; they sugarcoat parenthood into a montage of blissful moment, all filmed at the golden hour, and villainise anyone who disagrees with him as Satan's henchmen.

That's why any rhetorical questions, like what would happen to the babies if they weren't aborted, can't be answered without a heavy dose of screaming. For extremists, it's too dangerous if anyone suggests that the world just might not end if they didn't get their way.

Posted by Jane Galt at 7:56 AM | Comments (60) | TrackBack

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The declining morals of the young

Are they really declining? Salon makes a good case:

Another educator talks about "the child who has a fit when she doesn't get an A, and the parents go to school and raise hell about the teacher's unfairness and the grade gets changed."

"Unfairness" is the operative word. One of the students Callahan quotes says, "The world isn't fair and sometimes to get where you want you have to sacrifice some integrity." But if the definition of "unfair" is not getting where or what you want (as opposed to what you deserve), it's no wonder integrity seems like an endangered species. If you're raised with an exaggerated notion of your own capabilities, of course you're going to think that the system is rigged when you don't qualify for the upper echelons. People of mediocre talents trying for the highest honors are always going to find the competition unbearably ferocious.

It's one of the frustrating realities of human nature that we usually want explanations from people who behave badly and they can rarely come up with ones that satisfy us. In his first interview (also for the Observer) after his dismissal from the Times, Jayson Blair offered a bizarre farrago of reasons for his actions. Although there was every sign that he got preferential treatment as a protégé of executive editor Howell Raines, Blair claimed to have been the victim of racism. Colleagues who (rightly) questioned the accuracy of his work were, he insisted, out to get him. The possibility that he just didn't have what it took never really comes up. "Was I too young?" he asked. "For a newspaper reporter's job at a great newspaper, maybe not. Was I too young for a snake pit like that? Maybe."

People who deliberately do wrong always have these sorts of excuses: They had to cheat because they never got a fair chance, their behavior was no worse than anyone else's, the need to "survive" trumps the nicer considerations of professional ethics, and so on. But such excuses don't mean those pressures don't exist at all. It's easy to ding a corporate lawyer for doing anything to make partner; it's a lot harder to condemn a Sears auto mechanic for overbilling to meet new quotas so he can keep the job that's supported his family for decades.

One tidbit I found very interesting: the article implies that moral corner-cutting has gotten worse as society has gotten more meritocratic; professionals could afford to have values when race, gender and class formed an artificial barrier to competition.

Oh, and it says journalists are scum. But tell us something we don't already know.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

And now for something completely different

Via the impeccably excellent About Last Night comes this interesting post on writing in a language other than your native tongue:

Bookslut links to an article about Panos Karnezis in which he talks about his choice to write in English.

Apart from the commercial advantages of being able to sell English-language fiction worldwide, there are technical reasons, too, for Karnezis' choice. "The Greek language is a bit like Spanish - more other, much more wordy. It's common to have very long sentences. As a language, Greek is more dramatic. I try to bring the Greek experience - the bathos, the pathos - into English."

Is there a tension, then, between the language and what Karnezis is writing about? "Yes, yes. It's very interesting. You can explain a man's macho attitude with one word in Greek. You can be much more specific. Here, you have to do it in a few sentences, which I find a great challenge. It's like building a wall."

For my part, I wrote in Arabic and French when I was a kid but English superseded those languages by the time I started college. When I wrote in Arabic I found it hard to keep up with the rhythm. Pick up any novel in Arabic and you'll see that a sentence can run a page or two. I needed the finality of the period, perhaps because I had been already exposed to non-Arabic punctuation from a very early age. In French I wrote mostly poetry, long pieces that were meant to sound like Lamartine or Hugo and later like Baudelaire or Verlaine. I started learning English in high school and liked the mechanics of the language and soon I was reading almost everything I could get my hands on in English. Sometimes I even read French or Arab writers in translation. After a few years English became the language I think in. Sometimes when I talk to my mom my Arabic comes out garbled, like a translation of something I'm conceptualizing in English. (There's fodder for you Sapir-Whorf people.) Some of my favorite writers are non-native speakers: Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Conrad and more recently Ha Jin and I end up re-reading them almost every year. Sometimes I wonder if language choice affects the kinds of stories I'm writing or thinking about writing. I suppose the only way to find out is to switch back and see. I certainly plan on trying that someday.

This particularly struck me for two reasons:

a) I'm a lousy writer in any language other than English (and many would argue, in English as well)

b) I've had several interesting discussions with Contributor A of Mistakes Were Made about the oft-heard statement that there are things one can only say in certain languages. Contributor A, who is among his many other talents an amateur linguist and an enormous fan of Steven Pinker's, argues that this is so much twaddle. I agree in the strong sense that there aren't words that are untranslateable--but I think it's true in the sense that it is often impossible to convey the flavour of a word, the subtle meanings and associations that a native speaker has with it, so that though you may be able to express any particular word's core meaning, the process of translation can nonetheless strip much of the meaning out of a document. Anyone who's been following Juan Cole's interesting pieces on the Zarqawi letter will see just how important this can be when you're trying to understand what the writer was saying to his audience--and what his audience heard.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Counting the costs of control

Why is it so hard for young single people to find one bedroom apartments in New York?

Because married people with children are still living in the $700 rent-stabilised one bedroom they [cough] inherited [/cough] rather than move.

And paying hundreds of dollars less for almost twice the square footage, than your humble (and humbly compensated) correspondant.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Nader's Raiders

I'd like to think of something clever to say about his candidacy, but I can't. Luckily, I'm in good company; most of the commentariat seems to be reduced to "Waaaaaaa! He's stealing our votes! Make him give them back, Mommy!" Not that they, or anyone else not self-medicating with grade Z Oaxaca ditchweed, thinks he has much chance of garnering even half the votes he got last time around. And really, that makes the whining all the more unseemly. What would you think of Republicans whining that Pat Buchanan was a big old meany hogging all the protectionist conservative votes to himself? You'd think they were a bunch of pansies, that's what. Is this the spirit that won the West, that made the world safe for democracy? "Hey, the Nazis have too many tanks! That's not fair! I'm taking my invasion and going home!" The polish army only had a couple of horses to stand against all those tanks, and they saddled up and rode out anyway. That should be an object lesson, or something. But I digress.

Because the point is, that although I'm underwhelmed by the criticisms that have been advanced against Mr Nader, I'm with his critics in the end. I hate Ralph Nader. That's a pretty strong statement, since I'm just not much of a one for hate -- it takes too much energy. I don't even hate the roommate who stole $1,000 from me and reduced me to eating top ramen in water sauce for three months, then brought me up on racial harassment charges for objecting. We're talking a short list, here.

Why do I hate him so much? Because I worked with one of his groups. That was back when I was a lady of the left, doyenne of popular protests and die-ins. I went into PennPIRG a starry-eyed idealist . . . and emerged disgusted. The PIRGs are gigantic beasts that feed on money, which it turns into . . . pretty much the same end product as any other beast. They do research, of course, but most of it seems to be done at the same high level as a freshman term paper. As far as I could tell, the majority of the money they earned was consumed by the fundraising process itself. Consider the canvassing operation, which is where they generate many or most of their members. When I was doing it, 45% of the money they took in went to the canvasser. A further sum accrued to the canvasser's field manager. Then there was the field office, which had staff and fixed costs to pay, and the cost of moving all those canvassers from place to place. Well over half of the money, possibly almost all of it, simply went to operate the field operations.

To be fair, all those members do give PIRG lobbying clout. But the people who gave us money didn't think they were giving us money to send more people into the field to get other people to give us money to send more people into the field . . . nor, based on my experience, and the experience of everyone else I've ever met who worked at one of these places, did they even think that they were giving us money to support a lobbying effort. The literature we handed out, and the spiel we delivered (not to mention the name of the group -- the Public Interest Research Group) was designed to give the impression that the money went to concrete efforts to clean up the environment and make consumer products safer, not to politicking.

And I haven't even begun on the outright lies that many or most canvassers would tell in order to part their marks from their hard-earned cash. The directors didn't directly condone it, of course . . . but if they ever made even a half-hearted attempt to prevent their employees from committing fraud, well, I must have been out that week.

And all of the Ralph Nader groups seem to work the same way, which implies that the problem isn't that PIRG was betrying the vision of Saint Ralph, folk hero of the consumer class, but rather that this seamy policy of taking advantage of the generosity of their well-intentioned donors in order to create a behemoth bureaucratic machine whose primary interest is furthering its own existance is the vision of Saint Ralph.

I'm not the only one who's been disillusioned, either:

One of the bitterest lessons I learned as a young and naive liberal staffer on Capitol Hill was that the "public interest research" produced by the Nader groups was systematically fraudulent. Every time I actually got into an issue deeply enough to understand the details -- nuclear power, toxic waste, pharmaceutical regulation -- I discovered that the Naderites had no more respect for the facts than the industries they were fighting: in some cases, less.

So let's hear a little less about St. Ralph this time. Someone should ask some pointed questions about how he got to be a multimillionaire. (Hint: What happens to the royalties on the books that the underpaid Public Citizen employees write under Nader's by-line?)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Question of the day

How hard would it be to build some 34" h x 62" w bookshelves? Just something basic: a box with shelves, if you will. I'm pretty good at nailing things, and am possessed of a friend's electric drill, but am thoroughly ignorant of the finer points of carpentry.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Too good to excerpt

I was trying to pick out a good teaser from this Jim Henley piece on the institutional managerial class, but I just kept wanting to include the whole thing, so I'm just going to tell you to read it all. Ditto the Will Wilkinson post it inspired.

(Where have I been? you ask. I was covering for two people at work last week; this week, I'm still covering for one of 'em, plus I'm going on vacation next week, to sunny Mexico via Los Angeles. But I promise, I'll try to get some more material up this week.)

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Gray Lady's Modesty

The New York Times Book Review features an Ashcroft-approved image of Justice.

1. "DWL". I'm aware there are plenty of fully clad versions.
2. When this post is a week old, you should still be able to find the NYT picture here.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Abortion or adoption?

I haven't been screamed at lately, so how about a nice post on abortion to kick things off?

Actually, it's only incidentally about abortion. I was reading this CalPundit post on abortion protesters who are evidently planning to harass clinic workers by following them to social events and protesting there, complete with grisly pictures. But I don't want to talk about that. What interested me was a side debate in the comments over whether or not one of the pro-life commenters could, as he claimed "get any number of kids adopted in this country". The pro-choice side piled derision on this statement, pointing out that there are many, many children in foster care and government homes who are having a very difficult time indeed being adopted. Though I didn't see it mentioned specifically there, most liberals I know who have expressed such opinions to me couple it with a belief that it's mostly because racist white couples want nothing but a blond, blue eyed baby to build their family.

This, however, is not the case. As it happens, I was acquainted, a few years back, with a couple that was trying to adopt; the husband was a research analyst, and his conversation on the topic was, er, excruciatingly thorough. There are a number of children in the system, disproportionately minority ones, who can't get adopted. But that isn't because they're minorities; if you'll notice, many of the couples who can't adopt here end up going to China, South America, or Africa for babies. This couple was desperate for a baby; they were happy to take any or all races. But they were stymied by the system.

The primary reason most children who are eligible for adoption can't be adopted is not that they're black; it's that they're old. Most couples (I'm sure not all) seem to be pretty flexible on race, but they don't want a kid older than two or three, certainly not one older than five. Older children mean you miss a lot of magic moments, such as first steps. Older children also often have active memories of abuse, which makes them difficult to deal with. Or they've been in institutions, collecting bad habits and emotional problems from kids who mostly grew up in extremely difficult circumstances. They are not the happy, well adjusted children that we all imagine we can raise until we actually have the little hellions.

So if couples are willing to adopt any race baby, as I (and Stephen) claimed, why are there so many old kids clogging the system?

Most of those kids have families, that's why. There are vanishingly few orphans, now that we don't have typhus epidemics or combine accidents to produce them. Whether they've been taken away from abusive, addicted or criminal parents, or given up by parents who can't cope, most prime-adoption-age children in the system have a parent or relative somewhere who is blocking the child from being snatched up by some lucky couple. By the time the relative relinquishes rights (or has them terminated by a court -- something courts are very reluctant to do), the child is eight or ten, has been tossed from foster home to foster home or institution to institution, and is not a very desireable candidate for adoption.

If those minority babies were unencumbered by legal barriers to their adoption, (and racial obstacles thrown up by activists who dislike cross-race adoptions), they would almost certainly be snatched up by couples, who currently face a years-long waiting list, and a vetting process more gruelling than being confirmed to the Supreme Court.

So the commenter is probably right; if women having abortions instead carried the fetuses to term and then offered them for adoption, they could almost certainly place each and every baby, especially with our aging population of professional women whose fertility has declined.

Does that mean that we should a) make abortion illegal or b) change the laws that keep kids from being adopted until they're old enough to have acquired a host of baggage?

No. The practical reasons for abortion have been declining steadily for a century . . . an out of wedlock baby today is a minor embarassment to most women, where a century ago it was socially, professionally, and romantically the end of her life. If we're making the case on practical grounds, either we should have made abortion illegal quite some time ago, or we should keep it legal; the argument comes down in the end to a question of whether you value the mother's right to control her own body, or the fetus's right to get born, more highly. (And isn't it more than a little repulsive, anyway, to argue that we should make abortion legal because society, after all, is better off without the people we got rid of? I've even heard, distressingly often, people implying that the fetuses themselves are somehow better off, a ludicrous argument if you try to apply it to yourself or anyone you've ever met.)

And the rules that prevent babies from being adopted are intended to make it difficult for the state to snatch people's children on the grounds that it thinks some other, richer couple would make better parents . . . a philosophy which as a libertarian I wholly endorse.

But that doesn't support the pro-choice advocates' case; presumably, if the mother doesn't want the baby, she wouldn't mind terminating her rights, which would remove any barriers to adoption into a good home. There's a reason that most of the people I know who were adopted are staunchly, even rabidly pro-life.

We live in a society that still exhibits traces of racism; people do prefer children that look like them; and we do have a large class of unfortunate children, disproportionately minorities, stuck in an exceedingly lousy system. But while it's logical for people to conclude that these things are connected, in this case, it doesn't seem to be the truth.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Irony, thy name is Martha

Erbitux, the drug whose disappointing performance in clinical trials was at the heart of the ImClone scandal for which Martha Stewart is currently on trial, just won FDA approval.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The official AI editorial line on whatever Mr Kerry may or may not have done with his intern

I don't care. I don't care so much that I wish I could hit myself in the head wtih a hammer right now until all memory of this story falls out and makes room for something useful.

I don't mean to imply that I'm not talking about it. I work in a news office. How can you not talk about it? Kerry's inevitability just took a big fat hit, right between the eyes. But I wish we didn't have to talk about it. His wife must be devastated, assuming it's true. And why is everyone assuming it's true, anyway? Must we always assume the worst of everyone who made the mistake of getting famous?

It's mildly interesting from a sociological standpoint --are these guys all having affairs with their interns?-- but in the final analysis, who the hell cares? Not me. I'm going to go have a stiff drink and try to forget I ever heard about this. Not that I imagine my drinking companions will let me. Sigh.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Notice re. comment aging

We will be installing an overnight process (probably over the weekend) that closes comments on posts that have been up more than 7 days. That's where most of the comment spam appears as these posts have been spidered.

And yes, we use MT-Blacklist, but the new urls and IPs still get through for a while.

An example for mysql here.

next step is bulk comment-editing to prune out all the comment spam lingering about.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Dumb as a bag of hammers, part II

I haven't bothered to post on this fooforaw about the philosophy professor who thinks that there are no conservatives in academia because they're just too stupid to read the signs on registration day. I mean, oh snore. I did comment on Crooked Timber when Kieran Healy alleged that our alleged imbecility was the "parsimonious" explanation for this underrepresentation, since I can think of several equally "parsimonious" explanations along the lines of "liberals are overrepresented in academia because they are too stupid to understand the statistical likelihood of ever landing a tenure-track job". But overall, I lack the mental energy for the battle. It's just too embarassing listening to any group congratulate itself on how the only people who disagree with their self-evidently brilliant opinions are slack-jawed neanderthals unfit for human company.

(And incidentally, I congratulate most of my commenters on keeping sentences that start "liberals are . . . " out of their comments. Those who do employ such phrases . . . it would make me so happy if you would keep the discussion off their character and on their ideas, really it would.)

This, however, is by far the best thing I've read on the topic so far, too good to keep to myself:

No discrimination against conservatives at Duke. (via andrewsullivan.com). It's just that we conservatives happen to be stupider. Unfortunately, I have not noticed this goes along with any increased sense of rhythm, fondness for music, long lazy days in the sun, loose shoes or irresponsible sex. Or any too great aggressiveness, over-fondness for money, or tendency to want to split hairs in argument. Or an over-fondness for strong drink, sentimental music and poetry, having too many children and not washing them often enough. Or, for that matter, having hair that is too oily, being given to outbursts of temper, and so on and so on and so on. I guess to be able to tell what stereotypes are really true, and which are based on self-serving, narrow minded, glib, naive and foolish prejudice, you have to have the natural intellectual superiority of a person of the left. It's a good thing they don't believe in eugenics or we'd really be in trouble. Ooops. Sorry. I forgot about Planned Parenthood.

Update My conscience, in the form of Contributor A, finds the Planned Parenthood reference offensive. Though Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was in fact an advocate of eugenics, and seems to have been at least partly motivated in her work by the hopes that the teeming lower classes, particularly those filthy immigrants, would stop reproducing to the general betterment of the race, he says that Planned Parenthood is not in fact a current advocate of eugenics.

(I know that some of you will argue that they are, because of various comments various sorts of Planned Parenthood people have made about, for example, aborting babies with birth defects. Whatever your opinion on that issue, it's still a pretty far cry from the mass sterlisations, and occasionally euthanasia, advocated by the eugenics movement in the early 20th century.)

I took the statement as ironic. The original quotation was this:

"We try to hire the best, smartest people available," Brandon said of his philosophy hires. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."

As anyone who has read Volokh or a number of other bloggers knows, the professor is misquoting Mill. Mill's quote refers to members of the Conservative Party in early Victorian england, a group that in many ways corresponds as well to today's liberals as to today's conservatives, and moreover, was discussing a political party, not an ideology. The Planned Parenthood reference seemed to me to very neatly make the point that attributing the views or qualities of an institution a century ago to everyone who may share common ideological ground with that institution today is stupid.

I apologise to those who did not get this from my original post, either because I was unclear or because they had not read the various associated blog posts. I am not claiming that Planned Parenthood supports eugenics.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Looking for that very special something for that very special someone

Shameless plug alert: I'm going to plug something from one of my advertisers.

Not, however, because he's one of my advertisers. Just because his stuff is excruciatingly neat.

I was out last night with, among other people, the charming Amy Langfield, who gave me one of her business cards. It has her information on one side, and on the other a charming cartoon from Hugh McLeod.

I adore Hugh McLeod's cartoons . . . so much so, that I bought a couple for a friend on his birthday . . . and while I was shopping, couldn't resist picking up one for myself. I was just looking for a frame for it yesterday.

And yesterday I was also thinking about a post I did in last year's pre-Valentines rush about where guys should buy flowers (Calyx and Corolla, hands down -- the Jane Galt Pick of the Season is the Lipstick Red Bouquet.) I thought about doing another post this year, on chocolate or something, and then forgot to do it.

Putting the two together, I thought "I should plug Hugh!" For that ever-so-clever, lightheartedly ironic and utterly original creature in your life, why not buy a nice Hugh McLeod business card cartoon? They're adorable, hilarious, and I guarantee they don't have seven of them already sitting on the bottom of a drawer.

Just a thought. Anyway, happy Valentine's day to everyone, and if you haven't found love yet, may it find you.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Can we put an expiration date on candidate history?

Drudge is touting this quote from an old John Kerry interview:

“I’m an internationalist,” Kerry told The Crimson in 1970. “I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.”

Is this really useful? For comparison purposes, let's take a sample of some of the crap the clever and eminently sensible Jane Galt was spouting on that same day in 1970:

"Gosh, won't it be neat when I finally get conceived?"

Okay, so let's roll forward to a more lucid time, ca. 1991:

It becomes clear, when we examine the motives and behavior of the military-industrial complex in sustaining this cycle of fear and consumption, that there can be no accomodation with a 'defense' industry as long as it remains an 'industry'. Within the Capitalist framework, the military inevitably becomes a tool for the economic elite to maintain its position of privilege. It is a prime driver of the falsely unified consciousness of the 'American Way of Life'. We cannot hope to build an actual 'defense industry' within the capitalist state, because such an industry cannot defend us from our most dangerous enemy: the artificial separation of Americans from the class interests which would otherwise drive them to create a more equitable society. The 'peace' which we have experienced intermittently through the last four decades is in fact the most despicable sort of war, a stealthy, steady war on the potential to finally build a healthy society. Antiwar activists who have come out of the woodwork to protest now that George Bush has finally brought the war into the open are, possibly unawares, footsoldiers in the service of the war machine; by protesting 'war' now, they help to perpetuate the illusion that there is a peaceful state, 'normal', to which we can return if only we will stop this invasion. "No Blood for Oil"? It is too little, too late. We need "No Peace Unto the Wicked".

From this, we learn several things:

1) Views held a long time ago are not necessarily good predictors of views held now.

2) You should not write a diary if, like most people, you cannot get over your fixation with how good it will sound to your biographer--particularly if you are going to undergo a change in your political outlook.

3) It is time to throw my old papers out. No one is ever going to write a biography of me, and if they did, I wouldn't want them reading my turgid adolescent prose--believe it or not, that was among some of the better writing to be found in my diaries. An obsession with quotation marks (combined with a very hazy grasp of how this indespensible tool of the socialist tract writer is correctly employed) was the least of my worries.

I have similar feelings about the blogger obsession with George Bush's attendance, or non-attendance, at five National Guard drills in the summer of 1973. Trying to use 35-year old pecadilloes as campaign material seems likely to strike most people as petty gossip that reflects worse on the speaker than its putative target. What would you think of a job interviewer who wanted to discuss how many times you ate paste in the fourth grade?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A Stiff Dose of Schadenfreude

Dr Atkins was obese and suffering from heart disease. His doctor says it wasn't due to his diet.

Personally, I have no medical opinion. But I think that when a diet guru has heart and weight trouble, it's okay for the rest of us to gloat. A little, anyway. Especially since it didn't ultimately kill him.

If you don't remember my brief saga with Atkins, click through and take a gander.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

How dumb is our president?

One of the reasons that I've never bought the "George Bush has a room temperature IQ" argument is that the guy has an MBA from Harvard. (While his opponent, supposed by his supporters to be some sort of wonkish genius, flunked out of Divinity School.) Say what you want about MBA's -- and I'm hardly going to argue that you need to be Einstein to get one, since I provide such glaring evidence to the contrary -- you can't be the total idiot that many of Mr Bush's detractors argue he is, and walk out that door with a diploma. Humanities types who think that getting a degree in business--or for that matter, being the CEO of a Fortune 500 company--is a little like falling off a log, only better compensated, are invited to come over and peruse some of my finance and accounting texts, and then place cash bets as to whether they can pass my old exams without studying. I'm not saying that makes the man a genius -- but you'd better be damn sure that you could replicate his academic achievements before you start denigrating his intelligence.

Business school was, in many ways, a wonderful place for me to learn. Not to learn accounting and so on, although I did manage a passing familiarity with those subjects. But to learn how many things go into being a successful CEO, or CFO, or HR manager--and how many of those talents I lacked. Will always lack. I'm far too deliberative, too shy (no, really), insufficiently detail-oriented, and needful of variety in my work, among other things, to be a good CEO.

Many, perhaps most, CEO's have IQ's substantially lower than mine, lack my verbal fluency, are disinterested in academic research and discussion, and couldn't write their Aunt Susie a decent thank you note. So? They're also better at running their companies than I am. They don't have to do any of those things; they can pay people for that. What they need is strategic vision, competitive instincts, extraordinary leadership skills, and a deep enough understanding of what happens in all their departments to bring all those disparate groups together as one entity moving in one direction. Most importantly, he needs to be able to make decisions, often instantly, that amount to betting his company's future on an uncertain outcome. That's an idealized version, of course, and many CEO's, even if they're good, arent' worth the extravagent pay packages they weasel out of compliant boards. And of course more than a few are outright disasters. I'm not trying to write an Ode to the American CEO -- I'm just pointing out that, on average, they have a lot of talents which make them a lot better at their job than I would be.

There's an assumption among the humanities types I run with that lacking the particular things that make you good at being a journalist, a professor, or an analyst, such as interest in academic research and discussions, good research skills, a good prose style and a quick tongue, are what make you good at any important job, and especially a president's job. But Jimmy Carter had a PhD and he was a hopeless ditherer. Harry Truman was not particularly bright, and he desegregated the damn military. Leadership is not an academic excercise.

(I'll point out, now, in a turnabout-is-fair-play way, that there's an assumption among many of the MBA's I hang out with that the things that made them good at business school -- mathematical ability, organization and detail-orientation, competitive instinct and an unflagging willingness to jump through seemingly pointless hoops in order to get ahead -- are what make you a good leader, and in some cases, a good person. This is also silly.)

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is this essay from one of Bush's contemporaries at Harvard, arguing many of the same things, only of course much better. He goes a little over the top, singing the praises of HBS and George W. Bush . . . but he nonetheless makes a pretty good case that the critics who claim that Mr Bush is a hopeless incompetent are at best, engaging in some wishful thinking.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why didn't he give the president hell?

Kevin Drum is pointing out that the Tim Russert Bush interview was a softball because it had no unpredictible questions. He compares it unfavourably to Russert's interview of Dean two weeks earlier. But there's a better comparison to make. Let's think back to the interviews Clinton gave, in which he was asked tough, unscripted questions that caught him off guard . . .

Your brow is furrowed. Which interview would that be, exactly?

That would be the one he didn't give. All of Clinton's interviews were full of scripted, pseudo-tough questions to which he delivered pre-memorized answers. His delivery was a lot better, but the underlying format was the same. Spin, spin, spin . . . A conservative would argue that he got slightly more favourable treatment, and in a couple of cases I do recall questions like "A lot of people have said that these perjury allegations are a hit job by right-wing extremists determined to take down your presidency so that you can't do any more of your heroic work for the American people. What do you think about that?" But perhaps I'm misremembering. The main point is that no matter who the president is, he doesn't do interviews unless he's got full approval over the questions.

Why does he get that softball treatment? VRWC? Liberal bias? Nothing so grand. Supply and demand.

The President doesn't have to cater to the media. He gets plenty of media coverage anyway, standing on runways looking presidential, delivering presidential speeches in various impressive fora, presidentially signing bills into law. He is followed around by a flock of people determined to chart his every move. For him, media interviews are very much a seller's market -- he gives them only on his terms.

Dean, on the other hand, needs all the free media he can get. Even if that means actually taking a pop quiz he doesn't have the answer key for on national television. So Dean gets tough questions, and Bush doesn't.

I watched the Bush performance and I thought it was okay. Not inspiring, but I didn't expect it--and I'm not convinced that the measure of a president is how well he looks on television. Especially now that I've done some TV work. Verbal fluency is a good measure of how verbally fluent you are, not how smart or competent, or how well you make decisions. It is the conceit of academics and journalists that the one talent they all have in spades is the one that is absolutely necessary for any important job. And how would we feel if the NCAA started telling us you couldn't be a sports journalist unless you can run a 4-minute mile?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

No peace unto the wicked

I can tell it's tax season. How can I tell? Because of the number of people coming here via searches on "retained earnings", "individual dividend taxation", "accelerated depreciation allowance", and so on.

Apologies to those who thought they had found a haven of tax advice in this cold, cruel world. Sadly, your proprietors pay taxes just like anyone else. Only more so, because this one of us is (partly) self-employed, which, tax-wise, is just hours of fun for the entire family. You will have to turn elsewhere for help on your tax problems. But please, go forth knowing that we feel your pain.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

When self interest isn't in the public interest

Back when I worked in the technology industry, the overwhelming majority of my coworkers were free traders. They had all the standard arguments down to a well-rehearsed patter: factory workers had no "right" to a high paying job, it was best for everyone in the long run, creative destruction was the engine of economic growth, and so on.

Then came outsourcing.

Suddenly, those same people who had been rabid free-trade advocates were outraged. Sure, trade is good, but this is entirely different. America wasn't outsourcing some lame-o metalpressing jobs. It was outsourcing highly paid, highly skilled programming work. How the hell could they compete with a guy in India making $5 an hour? And their jobs weren't like regular jobs; they were much more important. If America outsourced programming jobs, it was patently obvious that soon we'd have no jobs left and the whole country would be reduced to returning beverage cans for the $0.05 deposit in order to scrape up enough money to buy a Happy Meal.

Now I'm a journalist. Journalists, like my previous colleagues in technology, are far more pro-trade than your average American, particularly in the policy/finance/business circuits clustered in New York and Washington. This is because, it has been speculated, journalists don't have to worry about their job getting outsourced to India.

Until now, anyway. Daniel Drezner reports that Reuters is planning to do just that. My colleagues, and myself, will now have the opportunity to prove their free trade bona fides by standing foursquare behind this decision.

Oh, hear that hollow laugh.

Well, as a committed free trader, I know that the only thing we can do when faced with competition from abroad is to improve our competitive advantage. I could try to improve my productivity, but that takes work. So instead I need to improve my fame. Y'all need to start emailing every one of your friends and letting them know about this blog. Pigeonhole your boss. Worry your doctor. Write fawning letters to your local paper, demanding that I be given a column.

Remember, you're not doing it for me. You're doing it for free trade, and America.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Einstein was mistaken; but he was not wrong.

I recommend these two posts from The Belmont Club.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Somatose

You may have noticed the server has slowed to a crawl. This is not just because we have 3000 posts and 25,000 comments on a shared server.

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From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Perhaps Jacques-u-mentary

Apparently, Michael Moore's new krokumentary claims that "the typical citizen has almost no chance of encountering terrorists." Having been in the World Trade Center a few hours before both attacks I am either not a typical citizen or an example of misleading vividness.

I'm surprised at how many people seem to have forgotten 1993. But for a few feet of placement or a bit more explosive it might have claimed more lives than 9-11(no time to get out). Did we take comfort in the stupidity of the refund-seeking terrorist?

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste (in the coments) thinks 1993 was far from achieving structural failure.

I couldn't argue the physics of creating structural failure in the WTC. I do recall an engineer speculating that if the bombing had taken a corner of the exterior it might have brought the structure down.

One thing you are missing, however. The explosion did kill 30 people by asphyxiation and/or trampling. You wouldn't have to make the building fall to kill many more in a fire originating from the lowest floors.

Images from that day are pretty vivid in my mind. Of course that day we could actually see the victims as they emerged.

And for those in the comments endorsing Moore's attempt at statistical sense: I'm sort of surprised to see this acceptance of his argument, even from the usual suspects. First, I'm not sure how any statistician can say we have a reasonable sample of terrorist activity from which to extrapolate. Second, the number of people who might be affected by a terrorist act is a function of severity, not just frequency (and it is very difficult to understand the population risks of high-severity low frequency events). Third, as 'pixy misa' points out in the comments, we have a group of people actively planning to maximize severity -fatalities, that is. 2001 was orders of magnitude more severe than 1993. Fourth, as has been discussed in the comments, death is far from the only effect of terrorism. 1993 gave some of us a brief sense of what is possible, 2001 made clearer what is possible. There is a reason we are all engaged in furious discussion about WMDs. This is not healthcare. Backward-looking statistics are poor predictors of the risk of terrorism or the benefits of a strategy to contain it and therefore Moore's comment is useless. Besides, if Moore is so unworried about terrorism, why is he backing the candidate who claims it wouldn't have happened on his watch?

Oh - it also seems some people already know what the targets are! What a relief. Y'all steer clear now.

Upon reflection, the post was more interesting without me clarifying that bit about extrapolating past terrorism frequency (which I thought was obvious - why on earth are we all talking about WMD's?). I was temporarily distracted by miserable pedants. I resolve once more not to let it happen again.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

O mihi praeteritos referat si Iuppiter annos

In tenth grade my approach to schoolwork changed. Prior to high school, I never had to try very hard to do well. My Latin teacher (Let's call him "Mr. C.") demanded much more. I remember being called on in class after at least two hours struggling through sixty or seventy lines of The Aeneid the prior night. My translation failed to meet his standards yet again and he warned me that I was in danger of a "squared grade" (a designation of inadequate effort). It was an immensely frustrating time for me, but looking back I appreciate the challenge he posed. He taught me Latin for two years and Greek for one. I never felt I had quite satisfied him. While some teachers beat up students to inflate their own importance, I never doubted that Mr. C.'s motive was my own improvement.

Years later, starting out in my career, I ran into Mr. C. with one of the senior executives of my company. He described me to my new colleague as "one of my best students". I nearly fainted.

This morning, relaxing with the Sunday Magazine, I turned the page and received a jolt I hadn't felt in decades. There he is, front and center at a Kerry rally (wearing his customary bowtie).

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why I fear the regulatory instincts of the left more than the right

Not because I'd fancy living in a theocracy, thank you very much, however much my grandparents may have enjoyed learning scripture verses in school. But it's a lot easier for the left to get its hand on my wallet than for the right to get its hands on my soul. Even when the religious right does seem to be making substantial progress, it always turns out to be a tempest in a teapot, as witness the latest contretemps: after state officials weathered a flood of criticism from parents and teachers, evolution is back in the Georgia state curriculum. Now try getting rid of a social program that doesn't work, or a piece of environmental legislation that prevents one case of cancer for every $1,000,000,000,000 we spend.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Gloating is such an ugly emotion . . .

And yet so very enjoyable. This Weekly Standard piece by Jonathan Last is a perfect example of the new term my co-worker has coined: Deanenfreude.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

From the Intoxicaption contest at Stephen's

AND THEN I'LL THROW A HALIBUT! AND A TUNA! AND SOME RED SNAPPER! AND A BUNCH OF MINNOWS! AND THEN I'M GONNA GET A WHOLE BASKET FULL OF FLOUNDERS AND THROW THEM IN WASHINTON D.C.!

YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAGH!

UPDATE: Stephen agrees with my choice.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A British correspondent CC'd me

A British correspondent CC'd me on his letter to the Times of London regarding Lord Hutton and the Beeb:

Innocent bystanders must have found it profoundly hilarious that the media should have been so outraged by the good Lord who so calmly shot their fox. It is, of course, unutterably scandalous that journalists should not attack public figures based on inaccurate reporting of anonymous sources and when found out, to fail to verify their reporting and apologize. As for the BBC, that its journalists should not be not be watched over by vigilant editors must mean that it is only by sheer good luck that it has not laid itself open many times to slander suits. For the BBC now to complain of "bullying" is rich when one considers how it has behaved in the past. But then, on present form, the Director General never knew a few years ago that the BBC was merrily selling in Europe decoders that it knew it would render obsolete in about a year.

It seems the scandal was merely the the last straw that breaks the laden camel’s back.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Welcome to the Federal Department of Parental Justice

The Canadian Supreme Court, which presumably has nothing better to do, has just outlawed spanking in most circumstances:

[The law] exempts from criminal sanction only minor corrective force of a transitory and trifling nature. On the basis of current expert consensus, it does not apply to corporal punishment of children under two or teenagers. . . . Discipline by the use of objects or blows or slaps to the head is unreasonable."

The article further reveals that there are apparently professionals who spend time meditating on the question of whether the hand, or an implement such as a wooden spoon, should be used to spank your wayward child.

Personally, I'm a spanking agnostic. I have difficulty imagining hitting my children, but this may well be because I have no children. And while my parents, who made a point of reading the latest in child psychology studies, firmly believed that the principles thus obtained were best applied to the base of the spine with a sharp smack, I have, as yet, shown no marked tendency to turn into a serial killer. Even though they were not averse to the use of "objects or blows to the head", however unreasonable.

But whether or not spanking is good for children, I find it very hard indeed to imagine that this is a matter with which the federal government of a modern industrial state needs to involve itself. Not unless they're going to really get involved -- like sending someone to pick up the damn yardstick and chase your children around the house when you get tired.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

And remember guys, practice Safe Jihad - watch out for the Muslims!

Wretchard points out that certain reactions to the Hajj stampede are patronizing, and Instapundit notes that this is less about religion than inept authoritarian bureaucracy. As usual, these two demonstrate that criticism or support may inappropriately lump together religious, cultural and governmental influences on this disaster.

However, may we judge a religion by the words of its senior religious leaders, even as they 'denounce terrorism'?*

Delivering a sermon yesterday to two million pilgrims, Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Sheik said there were those who claim to be ”mujahedeen,” or holy warriors, but were shedding Muslim blood and destabilising the nation.

“Is it holy war to shed Muslim blood? Is it holy war to shed the blood of non-Muslims given sanctuary in Muslim lands? Is it holy war to destroy the possession of Muslims,” he said, adding that their actions gave enemies an excuse to criticise Muslim nations.

Terrorism is wrong because it might hurt Muslims?** Because it gives "enemies an excuse to criticise Muslim nations?" This is the best the Sheik can do?

If this passes as supportable moderation with our policy makers we're just not getting value for our money.

*(Catholics in the back please sit down)

**Oh, sorry, also 'non-Muslims in Muslim lands'. What a relief.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Nothing worse than an ex-drunk department

The New Yorker has taken a certain confessional tone recently. First, David Denby came out with a book about his unhealthy internet stock-trading obsession. An obsession reached by way of an internet porn addiction, we learn. (more in his Fresh Air Interview last night)

Now Katha Pollitt confesses that she was so annoyed with her ex-lover that she became a webstalker. In the course of her article (not on-line), she reveals enough details to make available the identities of her ex-lover and his new girlfriend. Reading this I began to hum something from the '80s.

When a business partner tells you they are "just simple country folk", hold on to your wallet. When a pundit confesses passage through some dark obsession, get ready for a lecture. Will we be hearing how Ms. Pollitt and Mr. Denby have come to understand and rise above the illness that is afflicting society as a whole? Will they have something to tell us about ourselves? Stay tuned...

I should say I know one recovering alcoholic very well and he has never once used his own personal nightmares as a lectern. But hey, if you went through some monomania about stocks, porn or ex-boyfriends, preach away, right?