April 27, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Poetry hour
Since my co-blogger is offering poems, I thought I'd post one of my favourites:
The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered
Clive James (1939- )
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I rejoice.
It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion
Beneath the yoke.
What avail him now his awards and prizes,
The praise expended upon his meticulous technique,
His individual new voice?
Knocked into the middle of next week
His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys
The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs,
The Edsels of the world of moveable type,
The bummers that no amount of hype could shift,
The unbudgeable turkeys.
Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper
Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine,
His unmistakably individual new voice
Shares the same scrapyard with a forlorn skyscraper
Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook,
His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others,
His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense,
Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots--
One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment,
And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
"My boobs will give everyone hours of fun".
Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also,
Though not to the monumental extent
In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out
To the book of my enemy,
Since in the case of my own book it will be due
To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error--
Nothing to do with merit.
But just supposing that such an event should hold
Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset
By the memory of this sweet moment.
Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.
(courtesy of About Last Night)
From the desk of Jane Galt:Excellent trade news
The WTO has ruled against US cotton subsidies, possibly opening the door to rulings against all sorts of other agricultural subsidies. This is great news for the American public, which gets to stop pouring tax dollars into wasteful agricultural subsidies--but it's even better news for the world's poor, who are locked out of the only market where they might be competitive by the high agricultural trade barriers put in place by pretty much every developed economy. In fact, the United States has pretty much the best (from a poor third world farmer's perspective) agricultural policy in the G-7. Let's hope that this is the beginning of the end for one of the last strongholds of protectionism worldwide.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Things that make you go hmmm . . .
OTTAWA - Given that the New York City police department has more officers than there are soldiers in the Canadian army, Canada should consider scrapping one or all of its army, navy or air force, says the former U.S. counter-terrorism adviser to presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Grey Lady Bites Medals
As far as I can tell, the "throwing medals" controversy serves only to confirm opinions long settled. One of my Vietnam Vet friends thinks it's a huge deal, but I consider the issue a bit aged. Kerry's current 'nuanced' description of his actions serves only to confirm the personality defects present in anyone who wants to run for President in this day and age.
Yet in the midst of this war of partisan talking points, it is worth noting that the story my co-blogger mentions in the prior post, Kerry Questions Bush Attendance in Guard in 70's, is the center column in today's Times. Perhaps tomorrow we will learn again about Ken Lay's donations to the Bush campaign?
It seems to me The Times has given up even the appearance of neutrality.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Don't go there
In my humble opinion, John Kerry is making a huge mistake going after Bush's national guard record. Bush's fitness as commander in chief isn't going to be judged by his Vietnam-era service; it's going to be judged by the three years he's just spent as commander-in-chief. If you can't find rich enough targets there, you should pick a different issue; people who think he's doing a pretty good job on national security are not going to suddenly smack their heads and go "Wait! He was a lacklustre guardsman thirty years ago--that changes everything!" Moreover, concentrating on Bush's follies in that era only focuses attention on Kerry's own--his protesting the war while still serving in the naval reserves, and of course the embarassment of his medal-throwing behaviour, and the subsequent dissembling. Kerry is embarassed by this, as who wouldn't be? But rather than explain, sensibly, that like everyone else he did some rash things in his twenties that he now regrets, which would end this pseudo-scandal in one day, he has decided to keep the spotlight on military pseudo-scandals by going after Bush. Color me unimpressed by the political acument operating here.
April 26, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Quick bites
I will be back to blogging soon . . . it's just that I sort of got promoted, but while we wait for the guy who's taking over my old job to come on board, I have to do my new job and my old job, which barely leaves time to breathe, much less blog.
But for your delectation, I offer this headline from the Wall Street Journal:
G-7 officials agreed at their weekend talks that oil prices should go down and the Chinese currency be allowed to rise
In other news, the nation's schoolchildren unanimously agreed that recess should replace arithmetic, penmanship, and social studies, and every snack period should feature unlimited ice cream and candy supplies.
Meanwhile, I offer you this quotation from Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, from which I am currently reading selections:
That kings are the servants of the people, to be obeyed, resisted, deposed, or punished, as the public conveniency may require, is the doctrine of reason and philosphy; but it is not the doctrine of Nature. Nature would teach us to sumbit to them for their own sake, to tremble and bow down before their exalted station, to regard their smile as a reward sufficient to compensate any services, and to dread their displeasure, though no other evil were to follow from it, as the severest of all mortifications. To treat them in any respect as men to reason and dispute with them upon ordinary occasions, requires such resolution, that there are few men whose magnanimity can support them in it, unless they are likewise assisted by familiarity and aquaintance.
As you can see, the version I'm reading has been cleaned up for 21st-century eyes; I imagine that the original looked something like this:
That Kings are the servants of the People, to be Obeyed, Resisted, Deposed, or Punished, as the Publick Conveniency may require, is the Doctrine of REASON and PHILOSOPHY; but it is not the Doctrine of NATURE. . . . [etc]
It makes it easier to read, of course, but one does lose a little of the flavour.
More later, I hope . . .
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Musil on a Roll
That's at least seventeen distinct items on this great matiere juridique du canard. There was no conflict of interest, at least without overall reappraisal of what kinds of actions by justices are exemplary, borderline or unacceptable (in the words of the Times). But who wants to spoil the fun at the Times?
But where a memorandum by a 9-11 Commission member becomes a central issue in the Commission's own investigation? Conflict? Conflict? That's a conflict? No, no - that's just "baggage." Don't bother the Times with such trivia. They're busy making more Duck Soup! In fact, the Times editorial policy on "conflicts of interest" looks more and more like that screenplay.
Lisez la chose entière or something like that.
[you know that post title didn't work out like I hoped]
April 25, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Taxidermist Barbie and Other Oddities
As homework, my son must find a sonnet, memorize and explain it. Together we looked through my Spenser, Donne and Wordsworth. Determined to make it a bit more fun, I googled some lighter examples of the form. Naturally, the internet is chockablock with comic sonnets. Here are some I enjoyed:
Thou art an artless, base-court apple-john,
Beslubb'ring all whose gaze thou looks upon,
Thou bootless, beatle-headed, bladder bug,
Churlishly boil-brained, clapper-clawed old slug!
Thou art so common-kissing, canker-clawed,
Dissembling, dizzy-eyed and mealy-mawed!
Thy dankish, dismal-dreaming, clotpoled ways
Are more errant, in thy unmuzzled daze,
Than any foot-licked, flea-bit flap-dragon,
Or gleeking, half-faced, hedge-pigged jothead on
A paunchy, ill-bred, loutish miscreant -
Thou ever moldwarped, spleeny sycophant!
Were thou less blind in thy bummed, venomed spleen,
Thou wouldst know very well ... it's thee I mean!
Howard Moss's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day"
Who says you're like one of the dog days?
You're nicer. And better.
Even in May, the weather can be gray,
And a summer sub-let doesn't last forever.
Sometimes the sun's too hot;
Sometimes it is not.
Who can stay young forever?
People break their necks or just drop dead!
But you? Never!
If there's just one condensed reader left
Who can figure out the abridged alphabet,
After you're dead and gone,
In this poem you'll live on!
Doughnut Sonnet No. 25 by Stephanie Scarborough
Parody of "Happy Ye Leaves!" by Edmund Spenser
Happy I leave with doughnuts in my hands
Which I will eat until my jeans are tight
And do so 'till my corpulence demands
I never, ever take another bite.
O happy day! On which I will not fight
My burning want to dine and binge and graze
On only jelly doughnuts through the night,
Licking the icing, relishing the glaze.
O happy joy! I could do this for days
Or months or years-- perhaps until I die
Which by that time my fatness will amaze,
And in a pile of crullers dead I'll lie.
I'll eat my doughnuts to please me alone,
And eat and eat 'til ev'ry doughnut's gone.
Taxidermist Barbie, by Stephanie Scarborough
She comes complete with purple plastic gloves,
A pink and shiny, glittery tool case,
A purple mounting board 'cause Barbie loves
The feel of pine as she begins to place
A severed deer head on the board-- Hey girls!
It's Taxidermist Barbie (insert cheer-
Y music here)! She can stuff birds and squirrels
And boys and girls! Just watch her mount a deer
Head on the mounting board, get the marble
Eyes just right. Her prices can't be beat, she
Just got Taxidermist of the Year! Marvel
At her mounted birds! But unfortunately,
Despite the fact she stuffs one kickin' swan,
Taxidermist Barbie never quite caught on.
Didn't Instapundit write a post on "Vigilante Barbie" back in the day?
The Funny Sonnet Debate by Keith S. Petersen
I wrote Fred Chappell: Fred, I said, I bet
you cannot even name, nor could you write,
a sonnet that is really funny, light
enough to let us chuckle and forget
how somber sonnets are, how filled with threat --
or blight or fret or flight or sweat or fright;
that makes us dance instead, soar like a kite
on laughing breezes sonnets won't beget.
Ole Fred, he wouldn't follow where I led.
I offered my can't-do poetic chore
and he'd not say, not so, or yes, agreed,
but burbled on to other stuff instead --
which grants the point this sonnet would explore:
No sonnet seeking laughter will succeed.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Nothing New Under the Sun
PROBLEM: airport securityperforming poorly.
SOLUTION: Private sector failure? - Federalize, Public sector failure? - FUND!
.
April 24, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Loathsome words
"Incent", with 'incentivize' a close second.
Here's some interesting software designed to 'bullfight' words like this.
It also drives me crazy when people say "I would not be adverse to..."
UPDATE: I would like to prominentize a pointed comment from Occam's Beard:
"Incentivize" and "incent" are examples of "verbing," and are every bit as ugly as "hoteling." Users should be boiled in oil ("oiled?").(I know, I know, Shakespeare "verbed" a great deal, and enriched the language in so doing, but those who struggle to make subject and verb agree in number ("agreeivize," if we need a single word) are enriching the language only in an agricultural sense.)
April 22, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Cool news from Shanghai
Oh, sure, it's a government boondoggle -- but if we're going to have boondoggles, iand apparently we are, aren't these the sorts we ought to have?
(Sorry I'm not posting more -- insanely busy here at the moment.)
From the desk of Jane Galt:Random question of the day
Since I had so much success with my Catholic theology question yesterday, I'm tossing out a Jewish theology question today:
The word mitzvah is often translated loosely as "good deed". Some things that observant Jews consider to be mitzvahs, however, would not ordinarily be classified by gentiles as "good deeds", such as saying certain prayers over food.
My question is this: does the reverse hold true? Are their things that could be classied as "good deeds", but that would not be mitzvahs?
April 21, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Take Your Kid to Work (Really)
Tomorrow is take your kid to work day, formerly take your daughter to work day. Why has my company set up a bunch of activities- essentially a day care program for the kids? Call me crazy, but I don't think my sons want to spend the day in our cafeteria with a bunch of dressed-up kids they don't know being lectured by someone from HR.
The reason, of course, is that we all want to shield the innocent from the inanity of the workplace. I vote for openness. Let's give the kids a taste of today's high pressure productive workplace. Here's a draft schedule:
- 8:00 purchase and consume second cup of coffee
- 8:15 complain to colleagues about yesterday's meetings
- 8:30 purchase and drink third cup of coffee
- 8:45 surf internet
- 9:05 show up late for meeting with underlings/people from other departments
- 9:20 choose underling to ask unfair and embarassing questions
- 9:30 check Blackberry while in meeting; exchange email with another guy in the meeting
- 9:40 Idly pick up Blackberry from guy sitting next to you, send fake email to his wife ('hey hot lips, see you tonight, I've decided to try the enlargement, what are you wearing?')
- 9:45 visit several colleagues on way back from meeting; bring newspaper to bathroom; regret coffee consumption
- 10:05 wait for boss/people from other departments to show up at meeting. Make sure there aren't any women there and tell dirty joke to other peons
- 10:10 Make something up when boss wants to know what's so funny
- 10:20 answer boss' unfair and embarassing questions
- 10:30 slouch quietly in meeting staring at Day Planner trying not to be assigned as the one to 'follow up'
- 10:45 trace paper clip on meeting agenda
- 10:50 Whisper you have another meeting and bail
- 10:55 walk over to rambunctious colleagues and complain about colleague, office technology
- 11:00 return (most) messages; forward emails that look like work to someone else with 'please advise' and 'FYI' at the top, CCing senior colleagues
- 11:15 show up late for department head meeting
- 11:30 (in department head meeting) Acknowledge major threat to business without complete verbalization. Stare awkwardly at colleagues. Finally, postpone obvious action plan, assign junior staff to 'follow up' with more research 'necessary' to avoid a 'rash and risky decision'. Agree heartily that decisive action will be forthcoming once 'due diligence' complete and unscheduled future 'subgroup' meets.
- 12:00 Crisis averted! Lunchtime.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Oops, I did it again...
I listened to Air America on the way home and caught the first half hour of Majority Report. They are hitting lefty boggers hard for material - today Atrios was filling in for Garofalo.
Except, I didn't hear much from Atrios. Sam Seder fawned all over him and then just worked his way into the usual rantsand bad jokes (from memory):
'Sitting across from me is the blogger Atrios. He is behind a scrim-[to engineer] would you call that a scrim? Yes I think scrim is the right word hahaha.....anybody who thinks we don't have a Taliban-like problem in this country is out of touch'
Once again I was denied my blogger-on-the-air fix. Incidentally, the technical problems continue. Atrios' mic wasn't on in the beginning and they had trouble running a short loop of Garofalo 'joking' about the engineer's face turning "a color that is beet-like". ROTFL, I tell you.
I did learn that Atrios is maintaining such deep pseudonym cover that his 'friends and family' don't know who he is (once again, Seder tells us that, asks for a confimation and keeps blabbing). He's insta-prolific isn't he? What on earth does he tell people he's doing all the time? How does he explain the funny blogger screen on his computer? As a fellow pseudonym blogger I can tell you my friends and family know all about this.
I applaud Air America's idea of tapping the weblogging community for ideas. Now they should shut up and let them contribute because the on-air talent is only funny and entertaining in the way Plan Nine From Outer Space is funny and entertaining.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:The Draft is a Political Issue
I am close with four Vietnam vets. They disagree on many things in unpredictable ways. Three see themselves as Republicans, one a Democrat. One of the Republicans has become an 'anyone-but-Bush' partisan, two are Bush supporters and the last isn't committed. Two went through ROTC and two volunteered. One thing they agree on, they have all said to me they would never want to "serve with conscripts". They oppose the draft uniformly.
A small sample, but interesting nonetheless. Also entirely consistent with these remarks from John Weidner.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Worrying news from Iraq
From Yahoo News:
WASHINGTON - About one in every 10 members of Iraq's security forces "actually worked against" U.S. troops during the recent militia violence in Iraq, and an additional 40 percent walked off the job because of intimidation, the commander of the 1st Armored Division said Wednesday.
No snappy commentary, I'm afraid. But yes, as some readers have asked me, I am reconsidering my support for the war. A long post on that later, perhaps.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:A short sentence packed with partisan warfare goodness:
We've been looking for evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq for less time than it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose Law Firm billing records.
Couldn't we have gotten interns and Denise Rich into it?
From the desk of Jane Galt:Random question of the day
For the theologians in the audience, particularly the Catholic variety:
On the one hand, you have the Monophysite heresy, which says that Christ had a single nature, which was a mixture of the human and divine.
And on the other hand, you have the Nestorian heresy, which says that Christ had two natures, one divine and one human, bound together.
Assuming that you do, in fact, believe that Christ was God Become Man, these two heresies would seem to cover pretty much the full range of possibilities. Yet the Catholic Church rejected both of them. Can someone 'splain me, in small words, exactly what the Catholic Church then does believe, and how it differs from these two things? The description I found on the web, that Christ has two distinct natures unified in one body, doesn't exactly clear things up, since it sounds rather Nestorian to my (unbaptised) ears.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Call OSHA
Heard in the corporate cafeteria: lite jazz/muzak version of 'Take Five'...in 6/8!
In between anguished howls I paused to reflect on rehearsals of my high school production of Jesus Christ Superstar:
Everything's all right yes - [beat], everything's fine
There ought to be a law...
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:A Public Service Googlebomb
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming
P.S. Here's the IP of a new comment spammer hitting recent posts: 192.114.82.184. Ban them as we did.
April 20, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Measuring health care productivity
One of the commonest arguments one hears from advocates of some sort of nationalised health care is that American health care pays more, for worse outcomes, than other countries.
The problem with this is twofold. First, some of the things we're paying for aren't related to our health care system, but to our tort system, which is much, much much more generous to potential victims than other countries, a situation that most advocates of national health care actively oppose changing. This raises costs not only for malpractice insurance, but also because of the proliferation of unnecessary tests and procedures designed to mitigate the doctor's risk of getting sued, rather than the patient's risk of getting sick. While the dollars are recorded as health care spending, no amount of change in the health care system will alter these patterns.
On the other side, many of the outcomes measured are both difficult to measure between countries, and have many non-health-care contributing factors. Take infant mortality, a commonly used statistic. Ours is rather lacklustre compared to other countries. But one reason it compares badly is the heroic efforts we make to save premature babies. No other country tries as hard to save premature babies as we do. So five-month-premature babies that in another country would be listed as stillborn, or a miscarriage, go into our statistics as infants -- and when they die, as many of them do, they hike our infant mortality statistics. One also needs to keep in mind that in a country where the government runs both the health care system, and the statistics-collection agency, there is some incentive to massage the results.
And many health care statistics are just difficult to keep. For example, Beachyhead in England, which has lovely cliffs for falling off of, or throwing yourself off of if you're so inclined, managed to cut its suicide rate in half in one year. How did it perform this amazing feat? It hired a new coroner, who declared people suicides only if he found evidence of intent. Standards for many things, such as infant mortality, can vary widely between countries, which makes direct comparisons challenging.
Especially when you're comparing, say, the United States, with the world's highest rate of obesity, with Japan, with one of the world's lowest. We could have the most efficient, fabulous health care system in the world (and many would argue that we do!) and obesity, immigration, sedentary lifestyle, and so on would still drag down our numbers.
So crude comparisons don't work. What does? Tyler Cowen, over at the ever-brilliant Marginal Revolution site, has an excellent post on this topic:
Advocates of national health insurance point out that the U.S. spends more on health care, per capita, than any other country in the world. At the same time, Americans rank only in the middle when it comes to actual health and longevity. So you might believe that we could nationalize the industry, save money, and improve our health. Think again . . .. . . The United States is more productive in all [diseases studied in Germany, the UK and the US] except for diabetes in the United Kingdom. The reasons for this result can be traced directly to the huge differences in the way the health care sector is organized and governed across these three countries.
. . . In other words, Americans pay more but get better health care in return. We die sooner because we eat too much and exercise too little, among other facts. For similar results, see this comparison of the U.S. and Japan.
. . . By the way, this essay suggests that most of the productivity benefits of health care spring from pharmaceutical consumption. Of course we lead pharmaceutical production but also pay the highest prices. It would be a disaster for the world as a whole if we tried to save money on this front with tight price controls.
The bottom line: National health insurance is unlikely to save on medical costs, unless it cuts back on treatment drastically.
Needless to say, read the whole thing.
April 19, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Second Prize: Two Garofalos
I've been listening to Air America on the way home. Until today that meant Marty Kaplan's show. Despite the billing, it sounds to me like any of the local public radio news and talk shows. It doesn't quite live up to its web promotion -
reinvents the way pop culture is covered – combining the brains of a Terry Gross, the flash of Entertainment Tonight and (occasionally) the melancholy of This American Life.
Flashy it ain't.
But tonight I came home a bit later and caught 30 minutes of Majority Report. This is truly awful radio. For starters, the New York station had Garofalo on both delay and live. Imagine a room full of college protesters saying "hubris, lies, arrogant" over and over again ('watermelon, rutabaga'). It ranked right up there with dental surgery, but it kept me awake, and I guess I just wanted to see how long they'd go. I also sort of wanted to hear Daily Kos' appearance, but I was home before he came on.
It took them 20 minutes to fix the problem. That's an eternity of bad air. Yet when they finally eliminated one of the feeds, I was amazed to find it didn't sound any better. Garofalo and Seder were spitting mad and incoherent, talked all over each other and rarely finished a thought. I guess I expected Garofolo to be funny since she was a comedian. She's not, nor is she even trying. Not even trying in the beat-a-funny-at-first-idea-to-death Al Franken way. As for nasty partisan name calling, they made Ann Coulter look like Ann Taylor. 'Howard Kurtz is a pig', 'liars, criminals, Nazis", blahblahblah.
I see others have an even stronger reaction. Some of the backers must be embarassed to be associated with this.
I've actually never listened to Limbaugh, Hannity or O'Reilly. Loyal readers know I listen to Stern and NPR. So I'm willing to believe those other guys are just as bad. So what? Two sucks don't make a sing.
Oh, look, they have a blog. As of 9:57 this evening they still haven't figured out that Ellsberg doesn't have a 'u'.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Three cheers for democracy
Anyone who's been arguing that Arab/Islamic/war-torn countries just can't do democracy just got a massive dose of disconfirming evidence: Algeria, which is only slowly emerging from a horrifying civil war, just re-elected its president (who came to power in 1999 when the other six candidates resigned before the election to protest massive fraud) in a clean election. Democratic institutions certainly aren't easy to build -- but they're not the impossibility many of the critics seem to think.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Hilarycare, Part II
I'm not really surprised that no one has blogged Hilary Clinton's piece on health care in the New York Times magazine on Sunday, because the piece doesn't say anything interesting enough to write about. Oh, one could point out that she conflates issues of insurance with issues of payment, giving example after example of people with pre-existing conditions whom insurance companies refuse to insure. Quite rightly, too, in the same way that State Farm won't write you an insurance policy for your house after it has burned down, because writing such a policy wouldn't be providing insurance, it would be providing charity. What these people with catastrophic illnesses want is not insurance, but for someone else to pay for their medical care. (And don't we all?) Their situation is undeniably tragic, but it is not a failure of the insurance market -- a real "market failure" would be if there were companies willing to write policies for risks with a 100% chance of occurring, for any premium less than the cost of paying for the treatments out of pocket.
But this is quibbling. And it seems pointless to quibble with a piece so blandly heartwarming, written in the "Mom, Baseball and Apple Pie" style of a political speech. I wonder, however, about the New York Times Magazine's decision to publish it, which rather seems to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the campaign finance laws. Ms. Clinton's piece says, in several thousand words, absolutely nothing new or interesting about the state of health care in this country. The writing style isn't particularly sparkling. So why on earth was she given this prime real estate to make what is essentially a campaign speech? Will her Republican opponent, in the Senate or the next election, be given a similarly large bloc of space to make his arguments? And if not, isn't the New York Times Company effectively donating valuable "air time" to its favoured candidate?
April 18, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Frühlingsfreude
You cannot beat this time of year. These are all visible from my front or back door. The golf course awaits.
Then again, there are blooms that turn out to be Easter detritus
April 17, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Why the move went well
Now that we are settled into our new digs and everything is working smoothly, I want to take a moment to thank Kathy Kinsley for helping us make it work. Kathy has been an invaluable and responsive resource throughout. She has a wealth of knowledge of plugins and practices that help us practice 'safe blogging'. She's put in a number of safeguards to reduce Spam and unnecessary robot traffic. In addition, posting, commenting and search response times are vastly improved.
Although I've never met Kathy face to face, in the blogosphere we go way back. Back in November 2001 she was insta-dubbed' one of the original 'Bellicose Women'.
the first AI-approved TM vendor.
April 16, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:An Unlikely White Shoe Comment Spammer
We are getting repeated nonsense spams by someone calling himself the Libertarian Kool-Aid Drinker. I have deleted 5 comments so far.
I don't want to IP ban the distinguished law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, from whence he posts.
I know folks at Debevoise. Shall I complain to them, or will you stop being an ass?
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:The Despot They Deserve?
Donald Trump, arguing that hopes for democracy in Iraq are a fantasy, heard on Howard Stern this AM (today about 6:50AM):
"Usually there's a reason a country is run a certain way."
Nice. The Iraqis apparently need a cruel, corrupt dictator with a pair of sadistic sons. I'm not sure this is what Jefferson or even Joseph de Maistre meant by 'the people get the government they deserve'.
The Media's been fawning all over this blowhard since "The Apprentice" and he has now selected his Milquetoast. Are we done?
April 15, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Purple Raines: Portrait of A Bureaucrat
I have yet to comment here on the 9/11 blame game. I appreciate my co-blogger's enthusiasm for explaining hindsight bias (and have some points to make later about the financial market example she brings up). But we don't need fancy behavioral finance terminology to explain this. What we're really seeing here is run-of-the-mill bureaucratic ass-covering consisting of lame claims of "I told you so" and phony self-aggrandizing admissions.
Bureaucracies can change slowly, but organize themselves spontaneously and unconsciously to resist major change. For that reason, extreme dysfunctions are not only perpetuated bureaucratically, they are actively preserved. (for more on committees and bureaucracies, see my prior posts here and here). Many more people recognize the major problems of the bureaucracy (e.g. not sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence) than have a practical plan as to what to do about it. Of those who both see the problem and have a plan, even fewer of those are capable of selling the appropriate people their plan and actually executing it.
So when you confront the governing committee of a bureaucracy with its biggest problem, you are not generally delivering news. At this point the bureaucratic antibodies kick in and the group will work harmoniously towards the least troublesome band-aid they can find to get out of the meeting and back to their office.
It is not enough to have written eloquent memos or requested or taken meetings. Just about every thinking member of a bureaucracy has gone on record, at some time or other, with the organization's most glaring faults. Many do it just to protect themselves - to say, after the fact, 'I told you so...'.
And then there's the flipside of blame-casting: blame acceptance. Consider the gotcha question of the press conference- "what was your worst mistake", "will you apologize (for something)?" Bush froze like a deer in the headlights knowing that he was between the two bad choices of slimily 'admitting' a virtue or something harmless, e.g. "I cared too much", "I was too hard on people" or admitting something real and having it pasted on his back in black and white concentric circles. The smarminess of the former option, which would not have bothered prior Presidents and many politicians, just isn't Bush (his myriad other communications shortcomings notwithstanding). [UPDATE: here is Bush's apology after all!]
Which brings us, suddenly and unexpectedly, to Howell Raines long, boring and ultimately slimy article in the Atlantic (only an excerpt is available on-line now). This article offers all sorts of non apologia, and does so with a lot of useless detail that gives the article a long-winded, frilly and pretentious feel. Do we really need so much atmosphere on his many boozy expense-account meetings?
The first of my two dinners with Arthur was at a quiet table in front of an indoor waterfall at Aquavit, the Scandinavian restaurant on West Fifty-Fourth street. Neither of us could have imagined that in a little more than two years, a young, relatively unknown reporter named Jayson Blair would figure prominently in the derailment of the managerial reformation for which we were laying the tracks.
It's the Scooby Doo NYT episode: I would have succeeded if it weren't for that pesky Blair kid!
....If memory serves, Arthur was working his way through his customary Grey Goose martini as we surveyed the landscape for change. I was sticking to white wine, wanting to be sharp for the moment when Arthur would be mellow enough to listen to something he might not want to hear. ....Needless to say, as Arthur and I talked over arctic char and baked cod in that starkly modern restaurant..
....It was an amiable chat over several Martinis at a quiet Greenwich Village bar...
His fishing trips?
On the Sunday morning that their story appeared [the infamous Times' Blair exegesis] I met John McPhee, the New Yorker writer, for a shad-fishing trip on the upper Delaware River. It was a foggy day. The steep river banks were painted in the first pale greens of spring. As we floated along in a McKenzie River drift boat, bald eagles flushed from the shoreline timber and flapped away downstream.
The history of his meeting rooms?
(By the way, the room on the fifteenth floor of the Times building in which we met to plot the takeover of the IHT had in the 1930s been a secret bedchamber where Arthur Hays Sulzberger had assignations with his mistress, the Hollywood starlet Madeleine Carroll)
Ultimately, all this atmospheric fluff conceals Raines hilarious concessions of responsibility. Here's what apparently passes for self-criticism:
I've since heard that some [reporters and copy editors] were afraid to speak up, and I wish I had been more sensitive to that
My indifference to the approval of individual staff members was a disabling flaw..but I'm not a person who is easy to please or eager to please.
In retrospect, I underestimated the difficulties of inculcating in others my passion for breaking stories that other news organizations had to follow, or that were so inherently interesting that no engaged reader was likely to pass them up.
and here's the old technique of posing your own 'damning' (with audible praise) question and then 'confessing':
Was I in too much of a hurry and overly reliant on my competitive instincts? Yes. Did I pay too little attention tot he cliche of Times Management -that when an executive editor sneezes, everyone else gets pneumonia? Yes.
So Raines confesses to being competitive, driven, indifferent to his own popularity, not realizing how incredibly critical and important he was and not 'inculcating' enough of his perceptive passion in others. I'm sorry, but that is the most narcissistic recitation of 'mistakes' I've ever heard.
The strongest parts of the article are his criticisms of Times work product and culture. Raines portrays a very cozy culture where too many who have achieved rank get by with too little effort, except when it comes time to defend inertia. In other words, it's a bureaucracy:
First and foremost, it is a culture that requires mass allegiance to the idea that any change, no matter how beneficial on its surface, is to be treated as a potential danger.
But I was left unsatisfied by his assessment. He provides a wealth of detail on the internal management issues he feels required attention, but much less on the customer and market side ( a balanced scorecard devotee would say he formed his internal process goals without a clear customer perspective). He certainly mentions the Times' customers, but he fails to identify a single demographic he thought the times shouldn't pursue, and his strategy for the paper can be summarized as 'be better at everything'.
If we were going to get more readers and make more money, the daily and Sunday New York Times simply had to get better.
Throughout the text of the article, virtually every non-front section is singled..er..multipled out for drastic improvement, and virtually every demographic must be courted. Circulation increases would come from the Tri-State area, the rest of the country and abroad. Immigrants and the establishment. Businesspeople and artists. Only the animal kingdom is left out.
Haines does not address the bete noir of the warbloggers, The New York Times' alleged liberal bias. He does make two passing references that provide some fresh meat for those more interested in that than his comprehensive strategy for the paper. The first is merely a matter of word choice within a description of managerial and competency changes he desired:
In their different ways, both Abe [Rosenthal] and Max [Frankel] had demonstrated that a newspaper as comprehensive as the Times had to be the product of many minds and also had to reflect the guiding sensibility of an engaged activist executive editor.
(emphasis mine). The second is more of a humorous aside:
As a group, [the Times reporters/editors] tend to be politically liberal in regard to the government's domestic policies, conservative in regard to the location of their desks, rebellious in regard to the Times' stylebook, and anarchic in regard to the paper's management.
This is pretty funny, but consistent with our bureaucracy portrait. The final bias-related disclosure comes in the form of yet another non-admission:
Another disturbing development, for which I was unprepared, was that a small enclave of neoconservative editors was making accusations of 'political correctness' in order to block stories or slant them against minorities and traditional social welfare programs.
So, not only was Raines too independent, energetic and critically important, he failed to root out the insipid and emerging neoconservative bias!
When he's not non-admitting things, Raines slips the stilleto into a lot of folks with insincere respect and affection. Here he is on Arthur Gelb, whom he describes as a "mentor" in the preceding paragraph:
Like most people who've known Arthur Gelb for a long time, I was familiar with his tirades, but I had never heard him so unhinged. In retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised that he favored what the Nixon White House used to call the 'modified limited hangout route.'[with respect to the Blair scandal] Part of Gelb's charm is his pragmatism. He was famous for insincere praise of Times staff members and had made it a main tool of his management style. He pridede himself on being the ultimate newsroom situationalist. In the series of New York Times 'irregular verbs' invented by the waggish foreign correspondent David Binder, 'to Gelb' meant 'to cling steadfastly to ever-changing principles.'
Yeesh. Is that damning with faint praise or praising with faint damn? Here he is on his 'great friend' Arthur Sulzberger (remember he aired the family's history of 'assignations' and described Sulzberger's tippling habits earlier):
I had to tip my hat to Arthur when he broke the family pattern of timiditiy on critical acquisitions
As well as I know Arthur and as fond as I am of Punch,it took me a long time to figure out that they share the super-frugality one finds in families with multigenerational wealth.
Another half-dozen reporters and editors get more severe treatment (for crying in the newsroom, drinking, etc.) . Although they aren't named, enough information is surely available for Times insiders and media buffs to figure out who he's talking about.
Finally, under the 'miscellany' heading, here's another poor choice of phrases:
To catch a terrorist, you have to think like a terrorist. To catch and hold a newspaper reader, you have to think about what makes a reader buy a paper as a matter of necessity.
I'd forgive this awkward (and no doubt unintentional) analogy more easily if he had gone on to deliver an analysis of newspaper reader's ideas of indispensable content. Instead he merely asserts the Times' failure in this regard and goes on to dish more internal dirt.
If this article had spent more time analyzing the customer perspective of the Times' failures and successes it would have been much more interesting. Unfortunately, the bizarre non-admissions, the detailed descriptions of insider politics at the Times (which may interest others more) and Raines' proclivity for giving it to his former colleagues and 'friends' in the neck are just too distracting.
Raines is the less exceptional bureaucrat described at the beginning of this post. He recognized and decried the bureaucracy's problems, but appears to have had few actionable, market-oriented plans as to what needed to be done beyond remaking its internal workings in his image. Instead we have public blame-casting and narcissism disguised as confessions. For those who feel the 'public trust' of the Times was damaged under Raines' watch, this non-apologia must be as unsatisfactory as a bag of day-old popcorn.
See also Clay Waters and Timothy Burke on the same subject.
April 14, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:A lot of hot air?
Drudge is reporting that Air America has gone off the air in LA and Chicago, allegedly because they bounced checks to the station owner.
This seems unlikely to me--they're supposed to be pretty well funded, after all. More likely is the explanation I heard from a dedicated liberal, which is that the stations they were playing on were owned by a company in bankruptcy, which had no legal authority to contract with them. So conservatives shouldn't get on the gloat box too soon. It could prove embarassing . . .
Update From what I understand, Air America stopped payment on their checks during a dispute about "double dipping" -- charging two customers for the same time. Many liberal commenters are arguing that they had a perfect right to do so, as they did. They seem not to have understood, however, that when an adversary can take catastrophic measures, it is often wise, if not just, to avoid antagonising them . . .
April 13, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Click
Darn that Robert Samuelson, he went and said what I've been trying to say, only better:
One truth is that government often operates by crisis. People do hard things only when forced by events. A superb example is the aging of baby boomers. As is well known, the over-65 population will double between now and 2030. With Social Security, Medicare and other retiree programs representing about two-fifths of the federal budget, this aging threatens huge spending increases, big tax increases, larger deficits, or -- to minimize those problems -- significant cuts in retiree benefits or other spending. Faced with these realities, what have successive presidents and Congresses done? Absolutely nothing. Here's the connection with terrorism: Even when problems are widely understood, pragmatic politicians avoid unpopular measures. In this they usually reflect public opinion. Everyone knows baby boomers will strain future budgets, yet there's no clamor for corrective policies. We lapse into willful ignorance, hoping -- against evidence and logic -- that what we suspect must happen somehow won't. So it was with terrorism, though with more excuses. The facts there weren't well known (the terrorists weren't telling us their plans). Ordinary Americans and foreign policy "experts" alike didn't grasp the threat or what might be done to oppose it. Only Sept. 11 awakened us.Until recently this common-sense appraisal seemed to describe the prevailing views of the public, the media and most politicians. Clarke changed that. The resulting controversy rests on the unstated notion that if the Bush administration had only taken his advice more seriously, it might somehow have prevented Sept. 11. This is a fiction, but it's a fiction that must be maintained, because if it isn't, then Clarke's criticisms -- and their political overtones -- lose much of their practical relevance. So we get Hollywood-on-the-Potomac. Politicians and the media engage in sanctioned make-believe. They splice together memos and meetings and, by silence and innuendo, suggest that Sept. 11 was preventable. Therefore, someone's to blame.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Question and answer period
I have a question for those who are busy castigating the administration of their choice for 9/11:
In retrospect, it is blindingly obvious that the stockmarket was in a massive bubble. All the information was there. Looking back, we can even pick out signs that it was bound to start crashing shortly after January 1, 2000, as companies scaled back the massive technology infrastructure investments that had been driven by Y2K. It was obvious that as soon as companies began to report their 1Q2000 earnings, the bubble was going to deflate. It was also widely known that the Fed had massively increased liquidity in the runup to Y2K because they were afraid that fears of the bug, or ordinary millenial hysteria, could touch off a bank run. As soon as they turned off the tap, and infrastructure investment bobbled, the unsustainable P/Es were bound to collapse. Anyone could have seen it.So why didn't you? You had all the information you needed. Articles were being written on all of these factors. Many of you work in the technology industry, and knew that companies had pushed forward several years worth of IT spending to meet the 1/1/2000 deadline--and that, therefore, the spending which was driving the astronomical prices of technology companies was going to collapse immediately after the date passed. So how come you didn't use that information to make a fortune? Jus how incompetent are you at managing your finances?
By now, I assume you are sputtering. I'm data mining, you will say; it's a lot easier to trace the events in March 2000 to the Y2K phenomenon when you have the benefit of hindsight to tell you what happened. Plus, while it's true that you had all this information, you also had a ton of other information telling you different things; picking out the threads that turned out to be relevant is nearly impossible prospectively, as opposed to retrospectively. Also, there have been lots of infrastructure booms, liquidity increases, and public scares that didn't lead to a meltdown in the stockmarket. How the hell were you supposed to know?
And what could you have done about it if you did know? You might have known, in general, that the market was in a bubble. Most people in the financial community did know it was a bubble; they just didn't know when it was going to pop, which is why most of them lost their shirts along with most of us. The cost of taking action too soon could be catastrophic; one gent of my acquaintance went short in the market three years in a row. He made a fortune the fourth year, but the first three nearly drove him into bankruptcy. Besides, there were outside constraints on your investment; your 401(k) had limited mutual fund offerings, and your spouse would have killed you if you'd put all your holdings into cash. You didn't fail to make a killing in the market because you're an idiot; it's just that things always look a lot more obvious in hindsight than they were at the time. It's ridiculous to accuse you of being stupid or incompetent just because you didn't act with perfect foresight.
Why, yes it is ridiculous. But all too human. It's a phenomenon known as Hindsight bias, well studied in psychology and behavioural finance. Robert Schiller has an excellent quote on the subject in his book, Irrational Exuberance:
The reason for overconfidence may also have to do with hindsight bias, a tendency to think that one would have known actual events were coming before they happened, had one been present then or had reason to pay attention. Hindsight bias encourages a view of the world as more predictable than it really is.
Investors who succumb to hindsight bias, or managers who manage by it--or voters who vote on it--get significantly worse outcomes than those who fight it; it leaves them prone to making mistakes, because they put too great a faith in their powers of judgement.
By now, I imagine you can see where I'm going with this.
Pointing to a non-specific memo received by the White House, which said that Al-Qaeda meant to attack something in America, sometime, and saying that George Bush or his appointees could therefore have stopped the attack, is ludicrous. First of all, you don't know how many other pieces of information the administration was inundated with, from which you are expecting them to have picked this one as the single item most worthy of action. Second of all, it's not clear whether any action could have stopped the attack at that late date; the much vaunted capture of the Millenium Bomber was the result of a suspicious customs inspector looking for drugs, not some master plan on the part of the Clinton administration. And third of all, both administrations were working under outside constraints, both institutional and political, that would have prevented them from taking the kind of action that we now urge.
You're Bill Clinton in Autumn of 1998. Tell me, specifically, what you would have done to take out Bin Laden, and how you would have persuaded Congress, the military, and the American public to back your plan. Give especial attention to your public relations strategy for responding to members of the Republican congress accusing you of a "Wag the dog" strategy. You must also include your mechanism for the execution or imprisonment of a large number of militants against whom there is insufficient evidence to bring a court case.
You're George Bush in August 2001. Tell me, specifically, what you would have done based on that memo, that would have a reasonable chance of apprehending the hijackers. "Put the government on alert" is glaringly insufficient. The memo says that Al Qaeda may want to hijack an airplane to secure the release of militants, or that it may aim to make some sort of attack in Washington. Given that you do not know which of these, if either, is true, nor when, where, or how the attack will come; given that the "chatter" to which opponents of Mr Bush like to refer has more often not presaged an attack (as we have seen with the numerous "Orange Alerts" and so forth); and given that any measures you take will be expensive and anger some subset of the population, what do you do? If your answers include, with astonishing foresight, such unprecedented things as strip searching passengers on domestic flights or ordering pilots not to open cockpit doors even after hijackers have begun killing passengers, please explain which of the tens of thousands of domestic flights taking off in the United States each day you plan to target; where you will get the extra personnel to do so; how you will respond when the ACLU and the airlines get a preliminary injunction against you for flagrantly violating passengers' civil rights; how you plan to sell the massive delays to the millions of angry passengers; what you are going to do about the inevitable Democratic charges of racial profiling; and how long you plan to keep this up, given that you have no idea whether an attack is due this week, this year, or at all? You must also include a section explaining what you are going to do about the North Korea expert shouting in your ear that you really need to pay attention to this intelligence saying that crazy Cousin Kim may have nukes.
In short, unless you're the kind of genius who manages your own small affairs with 20/20 foresight, this sort of blame game strikes me as pure partisan grandstanding. And if we cannot remove the taint of partisanship from the 9/11 commission, at least we can expect better of ourselves, and our commentariat, than to crassly exploit those tragic events for electoral advantage. Some things are just more important than scoring a win for the team.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Partisan finger-pointing
The problem with trying to mine any of this for partisan advantage is that it always redounds as well to the guy you're trying to protect.
Take, for example, the fact that we clearly have too few troops in Iraq.
Now, this raises serious questions about the decision to invade. It also raises serious questions about Don Rumsfeld's much publicized attempt to revolutionise the military: clearly, he's right that we can conquer a whole lot of territory with a light, highly mobile force, but what good does that do if we can't hold it? Furthermore, the reluctance of the White House to recognize this and react is troubling.
Unfortunately for Democrats, these also reinforce the questions about Clinton era successes.
Clinton's sole success in reducing spending, contrary to the beliefs held by most Democrats, lay in the steep decline in spending on the military. When we quickly took Iraq, there was a fair amount of cackling from Democrats who were sick of hearing about this. "Looks like the Clinton army did pretty well, eh?"
Er . . . yes and no.
Yes, it can take territory; no it can't hold it. The best estimate floating around on the strength needed to occupy a country seems to be 20 troops for every 1,000 people, which would imply a force size of about 500,000.
We don't have it. Our forces our stretched to the breaking point mounting a force less than 1/3rd of that size.
What does that mean? It means that rather than fighting in two theaters, our forces can't hold one smallish, poorish country for long enough to hold elections. Saddam's behavior may have been rational; he rightly figured that we couldn't take his country. He may only have been wrong in assuming that we realized this.
And this wasn't part of some grand multilateral strategy either; the numbers the UN is talking about bringing us range from 5,000-25,000 according to the estimates I've seen; a drop in the bucket.
We are the world's policemen, like it or not. And the department is apparently grossly understaffed.
So you can use this as a club against Bush and his foreign policy; or you can use it against not only Clinton's foreign policy, but his alleged committment to deficit reduction. But these sorts of arguments miss the point, which is that these guys are doing what we want them to. We wanted them to tell us we could have it all: small military, and high security. Like the other things we want from politicians, such as higher spending and lower taxes, greater personal freedom and tighter communities, less police and more safety, and so on, this turned out not to be possible. And while it's fine to yell at politicians who tell us that these things are possible, we also need to yell at ourselves, who won't vote for them unless they do.
From the desk of Jane Galt:McCain for Veep?
This speculation by Democrats is sad and desperate. Guys, wake up: he's pro-life. Considering the party won't even let most pro-lifers on the platform at the conventions, how likely do you think it would be for them to let one on the ticket?
April 12, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:More good news from Iraq
I'm very heartened by this as well: Marines find traces of suicide squads. (Via Outside the Beltway)
Why should that be heartening?
Because it indicates two things. One, there's probably a substantial foreign element here, which means we haven't, as many commentators have implied, lost the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.
Two, this has been in the works for a long time. And that's good news. If this were a spontaneous uprising, we'd be faced with a high probability that this was the beginning of more, and worse, disorder, as an already enraged population responded to our response, and so on ad infinitum. If it's a co-ordinated, foriegn-funded operation scheduled long in advance for the anniversary of our invasion, on the other hand, it becomes rather more likely that we're looking at the last ditch effort of reactionary forces and neighbouring states trying to keep our eyes off what their governments are up to.
That does not, of course, mean that it isn't desperately serious. As Stephen Gale, the terrorism expert from whom I took a class in college, pointed out, one of the main goals of terrorism is to provoke reprisals against the population, thereby turning them against the government. The fact that this may not be a popular uprising doesn't mean we couldn't turn it into one by injudicious action.
From the desk of Jane Galt:It's not all bad news on Iraq
The Pentagon has finally decided to increase our troop strength in Iraq. Now if we can just take a more realistic look at that June 30th deadline . . .
April 11, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Misheard in the Echo Chamber
Yesterday I turned on the news and caught a short item about tourism in Antarctica. The piece concluded with a quote attributed to a "leading scientist" bemoaning the increased tourism and saying (approximately) "we have two choices; we can bury our heads in the sand and do nothing, or we can take every possible measure to protect it".
Some scientist, I thought, a false dichotomy if I ever heard one.
So I googled up the topic today, and found the AP story that must be at the root of this. Happily, it's a tour operator who said it, not a "scientist", and the wording is less dramatic:
But David Bowen of Toronto-based GAP Adventures say tourism is unstoppable."People are going to travel to Antarctica, there's no doubt about it," he said. "We have two choices: we can put our heads in the sand and forget about it because it could damage the place, or we can go there and do the best we can at preserving it."
It's funny how a story like this kind of makes the rounds. I remember seeing similar stories on multiple networks simultaneously. There's no reason to cover it at that particular moment, but everyone does. Do TV news reporters pull this stuff off AP to fill 15 seconds?
It's much less amusing that the quote was mangled and misattributed.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:I'm back
Nice to go away and move into a new speedier home!
At any rate, I had a terrific break and will be back at it after the Easter Eggs are all found.
April 10, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Notes from Washington
As readers of some other blogs know, I'm at a seminar in Washington DC this weekend, and so my blogging will continue to be light until tomorrow.
It also means I missed Condoleezza Rice's testimony. From the fact that the results are exactly what I expected--the conservatives think she was on fire, while the liberals think she was an abject failure--I infer that she did just fine, although not spectacularly so.
Nonetheless, I have an opinion to offer you. That is, after all, what Jane Galt's readers expect from her: opinions, whether or not she has any facts to base them on! And Jane Galt is going to provide just that, because that's the sort of chick she is. Jane Galt does not let down her audience just because her hotel's CNN feed is on the fritz! That's not the sort of quality Jane Galt has come to stand for.
My opinion is this: I am disturbed by the tenor of these hearings, and the way in which they will be accepted. Not because the politicians and career civil servants are trying to dodge the blame, while hopefully allowing it to land on someone in the other party--that is what happens in any sort of thing like this. Nor even because Richard Clarke seems to have latched onto the commission for some good old-fashioned score settling. But rather, because everyone, conservative and liberal and Democrat and Republican, seems to be assuming that there is some answer they will find that will tell them how we could have averted 9/11.
The problem in general with commissions is that they find what they are tasked to look for. If you appoint a government commission on fairy rings, they'll do their damndest to dig one up, because after all, fairy rings are the reason we're all assembled in this big, important looking room with the columns and the picture of George Washington. That's the first problem I have with this thing.
The second problem is that we are all seeking some reassurance that we can somehow prevent all this stuff in the future. Everyone is very earnestly asking "What changes do we need to make so that our intelligence doesn't (for example) tell us Iraq has WMD, or not tell us that Al-Qaeda's about to attack us?" Almost no one seems prepared to accept the possibility that the answer is "None. Intelligence just sucks." The energy expended trying to blame this failure on someone--George Tenet, Louis Freeh, Condoleezza Rice, or whoever--goes beyond mere regular partisan bashing. It seems to me to express an underlying conviction that of course someone could have stopped this--it's only a question of who. For the commission, especially, it's an unacceptable answer; they simply cannot turn to a frightened American public and tell them that it's really too bad, but we live in a scary world.
That's not even asking about the potential tradeoffs between costs and benefits. I'm rather more of a purist about civil rights issues, and so on, than most of the American public, so probably this resonates more with me than most, but consider the problem of container shipping. Container shipping revolutionized logistics, allowing goods to be transported faster and more efficiently, minimizing loss, and eliminating an entire job description (stevedores). We could not get rid of it and return to the old days of manually unpacking goods from ships, and repacking them on ground transport, without immense economic loss. Nor can we feasibly decide not to trade overseas. Yet there is a considerably higher-than-zero chance that something horrible--a massive bomb, a crate of anthrax, a suitcase nuke--will be brought into the United States this way. There is simply no way to avoid it without massive cost. And government logic dictates that we will not impose a massive upfront cost to minimize a merely probable threat.
This particularly bothers me as people seek to pin partisan blame on Clinton or Bush for this thing. Yes, Clinton's foreign policy undoubtedly contributed--in the same way that Bush's would have, if the attack had come on 9/11/2002, instead of 9/11/2001. But there was no political will to do anything more than he did, and conservatives now attacking him would have gone ballistic if he'd, say, rolled into Afghanistan with tanks in 1999.
Ultimately, I think there's a lot of hindsight bias operating here. One of the fascinating things I learned in business school was the myriad ways that people systematically delude themselves into thinking that htey understand the universe better than they do . . . and one of the biggest ways they do that is by assuming, after the fact, that they could have correctly predicted outcomes. For example, if you take two similar groups and ask one group to predict the outcome of an event, and tell the other group what the outcome was, and then ask them whether or not they think they could have correctly predicted it, the latter group almost invariably says they could have predicted it. This apparently happens even when the event was fairly random--and those claiming unique perception can generally come up with some pretty fancy explanations as to how they would have know.
Clinton didn't know. Bush didn't know. We didn't know. And the uncomfortable possibility remains that there are more events that we not only don't know about--but can't know about. Deluding ourselves otherwise isn't helping. And if it causes us to take costly, fruitless measures to reassure ourselves, it could actively hurt us.
April 8, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:The Meme of the Day in the left half of the Blogosphere is that Condoleeza Rice is obviously a total moron because she allegedly made some minor errors about Czech history in a book on Soviet military expansion.
James Joyner points out that it's not quite such a slam dunk:
Kevin Drum excerpts a review* from a leading history journal of Condi Rice's The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948-1983: Uncertain Allegiance (Princeton University Press, 1984). He summarizes the review:
Problems distinguishing facts from propaganda. Too quick to pass judgment without adequate knowledge. Failure to properly assess sources who have an obvious axe to grind. Ignorance of regional history.Does any of this sound familiar?
I would note that this particular book was not only picked up by a major academic press but was a revised version of her doctoral dissertation, which was by definition vetted by a panel of subject matter experts. I'm sure there were flaws in it--there always are--but it was almost certainly well researched.
Reviews in academic journals tend to be rather brutal, as they're usually aimed at showing how clever the reviewer is. This is likely to be even more true when the reviewer is a Czechoslovakian historian reviewing the work of a political scientist studying the Soviet Union. Given that the review is nineteen years old, it's rather hard to find out what the credentials of Josef Kalvoda are, other than that he was a Czech national who was a 60-year-old history professor at Saint Joseph College and he had at least two books to his credit, both on Czechoslovakia. Interestingly, criticisms quite similar to the ones he made of Rice's book are leveled in an otherwise glowing review of one of Kalvoda's books.
Ogged concludes, "Will someone please admit it? Condoleezza Rice is a moron. She's in way over her head and it shows." Whether she’s doing a good job as National Security Advisor is an open question that's fairly difficult to judge at this stage, given how little we actually know of the process. Rice's high intelligence is rather well documented, however.
I'd also point out that from what I know, reviews in academic journals outside of your discipline are likely to be especially brutal, because there's no need for collegiality--a history professor isn't worried about what a political science professor could do to his career.
This has more personal application for me: I think my aunt was Condoleeza's advisor on that dissertation. Aunt Cathy is no moron, and I'll fight anyone who says different. She's also pretty damn knowlegeable about eastern european military matters. And she's sure as hell no Republican shill--she's a loyal Democrat who served in Clinton's defense department.
(Where did I go wrong? You may be asking. It's the family scandal, I'm afraid.)
April 7, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Finally, some fiscal responsibility
Senator Kerry has promised that, if elected, he will impose spending caps-- except on health care, education, security, and Social Security.
These items compose something like 90% of the Federal budget.
In other news, in order to help pay down my student loans, I am halting all new spending except on food, shelter, clothing, and recreation. I will increase spending on those, partially paid for by increasing my employer's taxes, partially paid for by closing my eyes and saying "I do believe in balanced budgets" three times while tapping my heels together and visualising Tinkerbell. Unless, of course, I need to get re-elected to the position of me, in which case, well, hello Mastercard.
From the desk of Jane Galt:Who controls our health care?
Evil corporations! say liberals. Faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats! say conservatives. No one, say the frightened patients, despairing of finding that Holy Grail: all the health care we want, at no cost to us.
Trent McBride wrote an interesting post, pointing out that in some sense, health care in America already is largely nationalised. His calculations, which involve counting as an implicit public expenditure the regulatory burden imposed by government, will make some people very unhappy -- largely the same people who get angry when analysts point out that the costs pharmaceutical companies consider when they are assessing potential research projects include their opportunity cost. But whether or not you agree with his treatment of the regulatory cost as an implicit expenditure (I do, though I get that weird, wiggly, non-intuitive feeling as I do so), he's almost certainly right that the government, whether through direct expenditure or regulation, accounts for more than 50% of the medical expenditures in this country.
Not so fast, says Sasha Volokh:
When I think nationalization, I think not only of who pays but also of who controls. For instance, suppose the government stopped providing public schooling (where it controls the curriculum) but paid for all private schooling through generous vouchers (where the private providers would control the curriculum). By Trent's definition, that's still a perfectly nationalized system, but voucher advocates would characterize that as a free-market alternative, since government curriculum would have dropped from 100% to 0%.Back to health care: I gather (I'm not that well informed on this issue, but I do gather) that the health-care nationalization argument goes something like this: the government currently pays a lot for health care, but unfortunately, people still get to make their own (reimbursed) decisions, and so, understandably -- and as anyone with a sense of markets and incentives should understand -- they're profligate with our public funds. We're in this uncomfortable no-man's-land of partial regulation, where cash-flow rights and control rights are separated (think banking insurance), and that can be the worst of all possible worlds.
That's a valid point, to the extent that those arguing for national health care are indeed arguing that the reason that we need to nationalise health care is in order to re-align payment with control. Some may indeed be arguing that, but in my experience, in the United States, that is a tiny minority. Most people in the US who are arguing in favour of national health care are arguing for it in the name of covering the uninsured or underinsured, particularly those who are very sick. A significant portion of the costs of the very sick uninsured are expected to be covered not by reducing their insurance utilization--the free market is, if these advocates are to be believed, already doing a very fine job of this already--but by forcing the healthy uninsured to pay thousands of dollars of insurance premiums into the national pool in order to cover those who are sick.
National health advocates do talk a great deal about controlling costs, but rarely do they advocate doing so through rationing care. This is tactically smart, because it seems extraordinarily unlikely that they will ever sell the American public with slogans like "Vote for national health care. . . . because eighty year olds don't need new hips."
The advocates expect cost savings to come from three places:
1) Using the bargaining clout of a single large entity, combined with implied threats to break patents in the case of medical and pharmaceutical technology, to force suppliers to charge less.
2) Using preventative care to reduce medical costs, especially for chronic illness
3) Reduced administrative overhead
Long time readers of this blog will know that I am suspicious of the ability of these measures to substantially reduce costs without also substantially reducing the quality of care. But that's a separate issue. The important point is that while it would indeed be valid to question whether our current health system meets the standard of majority government control under a system in which the primary, or a primary, goal/feature of the national health care system being discussed is the government's control over resource allocation, that is not the case in America's single-payer debate. The goal of single payer advocates (at least, the expressed goal of single payer advocates) is not to give the government control over the revenue stream in order to ration care more efficiently; on the contrary, a major talking point is that it will alleviate much of the rationing that is allegedly currently taking place. In other words, one of the main reasons that we are to endorse single payer is that it will further divide the choice to consume health care from the responsibility to pay for it.
The purpose of giving the government control over both the revenue and payment streams in health care is rather to leverage its monopoly power in three ways: increasing the size of its market by forcing healthy people to buy insurance they don't want; decreasing supplier costs through monopsony power; and decreasing average costs by spreading fixed administrative overhead over a larger pool.
The question then remains: if control of the payment stream is not related to resource allocation, but to monopoly power, does the government exert control over at least 50% of the market today? I'm hard pressed to answer no. The government directly pays for roughly 45% of the health services consumed in the market today. But it exerts control over another large segment, through regulations such as those forbidding hospitals to deny free care to emergency patients, and an increasing number of rules governing what insurance companies must cover, and what prices they may charge for doing so. I think if we look at the extent to which the government determines the prices in health insurance markets, we must conclude that we live in a system that is more nationalised than not.
So the next time someone asks you what you think of American free-market health care, you might try telling them you think it would be a very good idea.
April 6, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:Welcome to Asymmetrical Information's new home
Sometime during the night, we hope that the DNS will go through, and you'll be redirected here, to our new home.
It should be faster than the old home, not just because we've got more server capacity, but also because it turns out that some nasty old comment spams were hog-tying the database, which may have been responsible for the ridiculous length of comment times. (Our posting response wasn't so hot either, if it makes you feel any better.) Over 2,000 comment spams, about 10% of the total number of comments, were deleted during the changeover. I can't tell you what inchoate rage fills my breast as I quote you this statistic.
Anyway, welcome to our new home, and thanks to the brilliant technological whiz who made it all possible . . .
April 3, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:Announcement
As you know, we are running 5X our alloted bandwidth and the comment response has become atrocious. I have arranged to move Janegalt over to a server that will be"semi-dedicated" to us. Sometime this week our url will be pointed there, and you should see some serious improvements in response time. Among other things, we will be archiving 2001-2003 in a separate database and adding some other fine tuning. I am working with an old blogosphere friend on this and look forward to telling you about how great they are.
Also, I have reduced the "comment sunset" period to 7 days from 30. Posts over a week old won't accept comments.
Frankly, posting and rebuilding changes had become such a drag that we had all but stopped. I look forward to enjoying working with the blog again.
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:This just in - I disagree with Puritans
From an interesting article at Common-Place about Puritans and Marriage.
The outcry against gay marriage rests on the assumption that marriage is a "natural" institution rooted in timeless religious and cultural practices. But President Bush and his supporters have got their history wrong, at least with respect to religion, government, and marriage in Massachusetts. The Puritan colonists who founded Massachusetts might not have welcomed same-sex households, but they were not afraid to use the power of government to redefine marriage. And they surely would have agreed with today's gay-marriage advocates that the state and its concern for fairness, not the church and its concern for sanctity, should govern the social rules for joining two people in perpetual union.
Well, score one more Puritan/Dreck disagreement, I think marriage isn't the state's business at all.
Also check out the article about Early American Erotica:
It is certainly understandable that Winterthur would want to avoid potentially offending a visitor, but such precautions pose a conundrum for the serious researcher: if one does not know about the existence of pornographic artifacts, how does one find them?Here's what the fuss is about. Keep the women under armed guard. (and don't miss the "wheel of Dildos" - what would Vanna think of that?)
April 2, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:On the other hand
There are ample reasons to worry about the prospects for democracy in Iraq, without bringing in racialist theories. This excellent post by Henry Farrell covers a big one: countries whose economies are driven by commodity wealth have a hard time building democratic institutions, particularly if that commodity is oil.
Terry Karl, whose book, The Paradox of Plenty is one of the classic treatments of the problem, talks about how oil-producing states are bedevilled byan exceptionally close linkage between economic and political power, developing networks of complicity based on the classic exchange between the right to rule and the right to make money.These problems are likely to be even worse when petroleum exploitation coincides with state-building. The state has a strong incentive to use petrodollars to buy off potentially troublesome social actors, creating unhealthy mutual dependencies and Olsonian economic and political stagnation. Institutions tend to be weak and poorly enforced: the state doesn't need to make itself accountable to its citizens, because it doesn't rely on them for its revenues.
From this perspective, the outlook for Iraqi democracy is very poor indeed.
Does this mean that democracy in Iraq is doomed? Of course not. But I'd say if we want the Iraqis to have a good shot at it, we need to be doing more than we are, or currently plan to.
April 1, 2004
From the desk of Jane Galt:The logic of the mob
So below, I wrote a post arguing that it's silly to posit, from the Fallujah incident, that Fallujah can't become democratic, because otherwise Democratic groups have been prone at various times and places to mob violence, usually because some group, itself in a vulnerable position, correctly perceived that its interests were being challenged by some other group--and decided to take out its rage on whatever vulnerable members of that other group were around.
Amazingly, people took issue not merely to argue that Fallujah was a dysfunctional zone, but the laughably ahistorical premise that because there aren't currently any democracies in the Middle East, that means that arabs, as a group, are somehow unfit for democracy.
Pardon me for a moment--words fail me.
Such statements are the logic of the mob--demonising others, about whom you know nothing, based on their group membership. Those workers weren't killed because they were dangerous to Fallujah, or hurting its residents; they were there to build up its infrastructure. They were killed because the mob looked not at who they were, but what group they belonged to.
It's stupid. And in this case, it's ludicrously arrogant, and ignorant. There are ample historical reasons why there are few democracies in the Middle East and Africa; we don't need to posit that their citizens are culturally, or as one commenter suggested genetically, inferior.
Democracy is historically rare; it is especially rare in countries that are poor, or whose wealth comes from commodities, one of which is the case in pretty much every country throughout Africa and the Middle East. Corruption is historically common everywhere, and America has had more than her fair share of it. Mobs have been found in every society everywhere, including modern America. Who the $@#! do we think we are, proclaiming that this is some special sickness in other places, other peoples? Americans who are smugly certain of this postulated superiority should note that in the last part of America to be occupied, the privileged minority formed the Ku Klux Klan to institutionalise its mob.
Such thinking should be anathema to conservatives, who aresupposed to look at individuals, not groups. In the words of Margaret Thatcher, "there is no society; there are individuals, and families".
What happened in Fallujah is horrifying, and cries out for justice. But it cries out for justice precisely because that mob in Fallujah was composed of people, just like us, who should be expected not to do evil things, but do anyway sometimes, because that is the human condition. And it is horrifying in part because if America were invaded (even by a relatively benevolent occupier), it is more likely than not that we would see hungry, frightened mobs doing much the same thing.