Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Bogus flashback episode

This letter is worth re-reading three years later as we try to figure out what the candidates will do if elected.

What should we do about a repressive regime?

Option 1) Military Aid. Obviously wrong. We are providing the weapons that kill the innocent. See Israel, Turkey, Columbia, Reagan-era Iraq, etc.

Option 2) Economic Aid. Wrong. We are financially propping up the regime. See Egypt, Indonesia, etc.

Option 3) Humanitarian Aid. Still Wrong. By relieving the regime of its financial duty to feed its people, we free up their money for military uses. See Afghanistan, where the US supported the Taliban by providing $43 million in humanitarian aid in exchange for the Taliban not exporting Heroin, thus sacrificing 12 million women to the alter of the failed War on Drugs.

Option 4) Trade / Constructive Engagement. Wrong. This is merely an excuse for US corporations to profit off of the regime's repression of its own people. See China and Reagan-era South Africa.

Option 5) Economic Sanctions. Wrong. The economic sanctions in Iraq have killed 6,000 people a month for the past 11 years, or nearly 800,000 victims of US foreign policy.

Option 6) Military Attack. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! See every military conflict that the United States has every engaged in. (Caveat: There may be a possible exception for the US Civil War, which will be considered obviously justified if you are talking to any white person born in the former Confederacy.)

Option 7) The Prime Directive. Wrong. It is intolerable for the most powerful nation in history to sit by and do nothing while thousands die. It probably stems from a racist lack of concern for people of color of persons of other religions. See Rwanda, Bosnia (not to be confused with Kosovo, which falls under Option 6, above).

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Personal notes

Thanks so much to everyone who sent condolences. I want to get personal responses out, but I leave for the funeral tomorrow, and I have to get everything at work in order before I go. Please know how much I appreciated the kind words and prayers.

On a related note, I have somehow lost all the email that was sent to me between 4AM on Saturday and 6 am Monday morning. If you sent me an email on Saturday or Sunday at my "janegalt -at- janegalt" address, please send it again, as I never saw it.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Looking for hot protest action?

Don't come downtown. I walked a circuit from Ground Zero to the Stock Exchange at lunch. There's nothing going on here. Federal Hall, where somebody's protesting on any decent day has only Falun Gong and the Police. There are also five colorfully dressed people on Broadway and Liberty performing some sort of skit about asbestos. I have some pictures, but they aren't worth the bandwidth.

UPDATE: "what do we want?"

mumblemumblewatermelonrutabaga

"when do we want it?"

"Now!"

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A wrap-up

I dined last night with my co-blogger, the first time we had spoken face-to-face in about a year. She prepared a delicious meal for the assembled company, including "Jim", Tim Blair, Roger Simon, Amy Langfield, Mickey Kaus, Walter Olson, Matt Welch, Julian Sanchez and Rick Bruner and assorted spouses/partners. Unfortunately, in the middle of dinner Megan received notice (somewhat expected, I gather) of her Grandfather's passing. We cleaned up a bit and a small detachment ambled to a local watering hole.

I had a walk through Central Park on the way over and compared notes with Julian on protest activities. We both agreed that Central Park was a non-event (I have pictures to prove it). I did see several women wearing 'axis of eve' shirts, and if I never ever get flashed by this sample I will be a happy man. Ye Gawds. Where are the really good-looking people getting naked for the cause? On the other hand, if the object was to get women to talk about their genitalia, mission accomplished!. Every third tee shirt had a Bush pun. "My Bush would make a better President" is the most popular. Hey guys, try that at a party! Walk up to the nearest lady and suggest that perhaps their privates would make a good President. Or insult them by saying even their pubic region would make a better President. Or just sing Hail to the Chief!

While we're at it, why are the communists out in force? As Roger pointed out, the protests still have a retro feel. This particular movement hasn't found its own voice yet. Bush/Cheney hatred isn't enough. "U.S. out of Najeef(sic)", as I heard on the broadcast of the mock war-crimes trials Thursday night, definitely isn't enough.

Julian did tell me a funny story about passers-by mistaking "Librarians Against Bush" for "Libertarians Against Bush". He also spent much of the evening entertaining us with textmobs alerts from his cellphone - "200 at Alice Tully Hall, no arrests yet, need more people!"

Amy is starting a travel website soon, so stay tuned. Kaus professed to be convinced on the virtues of liability caps by Walter (we'll see) and Roger Simon, Walter Olson and I shared stories of Yale alums of our acquaintance who knew John Kerry personally (he was not popular, from this sampling). Welch is on for the convention, seeking 'conflict' hopefully, as relief from the tedium of Boston.

I bought a round of drinks for several of the after-party crowd, but Julian was the only one who caught on, ordering himself a $9 single malt (Lagavulin). Cokes, cranberry with seltzer and white wine for the others. Just my speed, I'm afraid.

I sometimes feel a bit of a fish out of water with the heavy duty blogger/press types, but that's a good thing. I value the growing friendships emerging from this activity. I wish Matt didn't live on the Left Coast. Perhaps Amy and I can lure him East.

Send your condolences to my good co-blogger.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Hey you, get off my lawn

I offer the following in the full knowledge that our comment threads are among the best in the blogosphere and include an unusually large proportion of polite argument. Thanks for that.

Reading about Steven Den Beste's blog fatigue I have to say I am completely sympathetic. While I enjoy our comments section most of the time, I think if I had it to do over again I might well have a blog with no comments and no listed email. If someone wants to nitpick they can bloody well get their own blog and the refers or trackbacks will be my guide.

We have a few comment-terriers who only come to put their mark on our posts. They will pick some detail of the post and scoff, or pronounce how we are not qualified, or offer that 'you obviously don't understand the statistics' or 'you obviously aren't well-versed in the subject'. One wonders why they bother, until you see that these comments are designed to make the commenter feel a little better about him/herself. One of them ridiculed Jane for not having read an essay that turned out to support her argument (guess he hadn't either). I remember another series of posts where I took the time to clarify a lot of facts to satisfy commenters' objections, and our terrier finally claimed that a rhetorical flourish I used at the end of a post invalidated all the prior detail. Sometimes they check in just to climb on top of the other commenters and assert dominance.

Given the density of Steven's posts and his willingness to contradict polite 'conventional wisdom', I suspect it is one hundred times worse for him.

Many of us post in our very limited spare time and move on to something else. It should be only a small annoyance when one returns to a nitpick (relevant or not), even if it is dripping with self-serving rhetorical condescension. Mosquitoes are small and relatively harmless, but when one whines in your ear at night it can provoke a rage, or at least make you hit yourself in the head. (straighten out your metaphors, insect or canine? - Ed.)

I notice that Steven has a much higher tolerance for criticism when it is posted elsewhere. He usually links to it at the bottom of his posts. For some reason when people respond on their own blogs it just seems more conversational. (except for the occasional '-watcher' blog) Even my infamous run-in with the hysterical Justin Raimondo and his dogs of anti-war ( a 'Perfect Horror', he called me, the subject matter sailing freely over his head) didn't bother me as much. Actually, I had a lot of fun with it, and I ultimately came by my ugly-duckling pseudonym courtesy of one of his readers:

"Dare you to post [this comment] MINDLES HEDONIST DRECK"

Dare?

When you receive an email, or a comment appears on your site it just seems to demand response. A 'last word' mentality kicks in, or at least a resentment at being told what to do with your time. I have had a lengthy email correspondence with an elderly British gentleman who writes only to say how horribly screwed up everything is and demand that I cheer him up. Ultimately, I just stopped responding, refusing to supply the Dr. Pangloss he seeks. Similarly, I try not to let commenters tell me what to think and write about the next time I set aside a few moments. I'm succeeding only by not posting at all. Long ago I also stopped leaving comments on other blogs, except the occasional cheer.

On the other hand, these days I'm getting home between 9-10PM and still getting up at 5:00AM. There's more to do at work than I can possibly handle. By the end of the week I'm so sleep deprived I could get annoyed at anything.

I remember Ken Layne once blurting out "Hey you kids, get off my lawn!" in the middle of a post referencing me. I think I know what he meant.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Swift and true?

I haven't been making much out of the Swift Vets controversy, because frankly, who cares? His silver star and bronze star stories seem to have the weight of evidence on his side, and I think lying about a fellow war vet's record in order to keep him from office is a pretty scurrilous thing to do. I'm suspicious of the number of people on both sides who seem to have such crystal clear recollection of events that happened thirty years ago, when I can't even remember what I was doing last week. And who among us hasn't felt the temptation to . . . er . . . enrich a story? It's a minor and quite forgiveable sin, along the lines of leaving the toilet seat up. The problem is, Mr Kerry gave into that temptation in the press, and now his Cambodia tale seems to have caught him out, desperate flailing by Democratic journalists notwithstanding.

Moreover, I don't really care what Mr Kerry did, or did not do, when he was 24. I shudder to think about my destiny, if my career prospects in my seventh decade are to be decided based on my behaviour as a slip of a girl. To be fair, John Kerry has rather brought this on himself, by insisting that we focus on his four months in Vietnam and ignore the other 99.99% of his life. But the people who see inflating war stories -- or even involving himself with an ill-conceived protest movement with some unsavoury members -- as some unforgiveable moral failing . . . well, I think you'll have to stop reading this blog. I think I may have done both on the same day, back in college. Yes, my dears, I once was young, with the characteristic desire for dramatic importance in my life.

But I digress.

Actually, the original point of this post was that while I am horrified by neither the Swift Vets, nor their allegations (except if they're lying, which I don't have enough information to make up my mind about), I think the newest piece of news is going to hurt Kerry rather badly. A liberal friend who's been following the story closely has made much of the fact that the two people who have emerged so far after the ads were released, who are aligned with neither the Kerry campaign nor the Swift Vets, have both supported Kerry's stories. Well, now another non-aligned person has emerged, and he's delivered a rather crushing blow to the story about Kerry's purple heart. Far worse, from Kerry's point of view, is that he's a bleedin' retired admiral. As the New York Post summarizes:

Schachte said that Kerry:

* Wasn't wounded by hostile fire.

* Wasn't even under fire by the enemy.

* "Nicked" himself with a grenade launcher and "requested a Purple Heart" afterward.

If Schachte's version is accurate, Kerry would not have been eligible for the award, the first of the three Purple Hearts he received.

Max Boot's commentary in the LA Times yesterday is directly on point. Kerry is already seen as a political opportunist. The story of his service record can be neatly told to bolster that claim: he joined the navy only after his draft deferment was denied. Requested service in Vietnam in the safest gig their was, the Swift boat coastal patrol, only to have the massive bad luck of having their mandate changed to dangerous river patrols before he reported for duty. Once there, he claimed purple hearts for every scratch, and bugged out as quickly as humanly possible. He then sold out his former comrades-in-arms by accusing them of war crimes as a stepping stone to office. He is now trying to win office based on the medals he pretended to throw away when that was politically convenient. He cares about nothing except his own career.

I don't say that that is an accurate story of his service, mind you. But it is one that his opponents can plausibly tell, because the facts in it are broadly true. And it gets much, much worse if he, as is becoming more credible, claimed a purple heart he wasn't entitled to, and then turned around and used the "three hearts" rule to get out of the service. The story then goes from mere opportunism to fraud. A mild and understandable fraud, to be sure, and if he hadn't made his war record so central, one that I'm pretty sure the voters would overlook, given the war record of his opponent and predecessor. But if he indeed did lie to get a medal, it's a lie that he's actively continuing today. And I'm pretty sure the voters won't like that very much.

Update: The plot thickens.

Update II: Tom Maguire says he's not quite as non-partisan as he's making out.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

War for Oil

This view is available from the PATH station at Ground Zero.

Here's a detail:

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Stop the world, I want to get off

Profanity is too weak. No, no, I can't describe it. You'll have to see for yourself.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I Heart Surowiecki

James Surowiecki, guest-blogging at Marginal Revolution, on the Google IPO and the IPO price setting process, which for the past fifteen years, at least, has involved a level of insider collusion that would make a horse-race-fixer blush:

But the offering was also a success for another reason, which is that it forced institutional investors to compete, for once, on a level playing field. The problem with the current IPO system isn't just that companies end up leaving billions of dollars on the table when they go public, but that select mutual-fund and hedge-fund managers (as well as well-connected individuals) are handed what amounts to free money. In a traditional IPO, the investment bank underwriting the offering controls the allocation of shares. In the late 1990s in particular, that allocation process became a way of doling out favors and securing future business. For instance, if you were a mutual-fund manager who funneled a lot of trades through an investment bank -- or who agreed to do so -- then you were more likely to get a hefty allocation of IPO shares.

This made money managers look a lot smarter than they were -- even if you set the bubble aside, there are lots of fund managers whose returns from the late nineties need an asterisk next to them -- and it wrecked the price-setting process, since there was no real attempt to let the price reflect the real demand for a stock. It also sabotaged one of the best things about capital markets, which is that in theory they aggregate the opinions of anyone with enough capital and enough risk tolerance to participate, and not just the opinions of those with the right connections. (There should be no velvet ropes in capital markets: if you can pay, you can play.) Google turned all this around: the only way to get shares in the Dutch auction was to do the valuation work and make a reasonable bid. The traditional IPO relies on the power of cronyism. Google's IPO, flawed as it was, relied on the power of markets. Bad for the Street, good for everyone else.

Mr Surowiecki, you may guest blog for us any time.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Marriage minded

I've been doing a lot of research on poverty and inequality recently, and one of the major factors behind both turns out to be having kids out of wedlock.

{Note: I so do not want to hear from liberals calling me judgemental, or a "closet social conservative" for using the term "out of wedlock". I have no moral feelings about whehter other people marry, or not. I myself am not married, and do not feel that this is a moral failing on my part. I am interested in the social question of the results, not the moral question of whether one should, or should not, reproduce without the aid of a long-term committment from both parties. I use the terms "out of wedlock" and "failure to marry" because they are succinct, not because I think that women who have children without first marrying the fathers are jezebels who should be ridden out of town on a rail. 'Kay?}

In a world of two-income families, single-income families are, ceteris paribus, going to tend to fall lower down on the earnings scale. And when the role of bread-winner and primary care-giver are combined in a single person, the effect is vastly more powerful, because properly caring for children makes it much more difficult to succeed at a full time job.

{Yes, my liberal interlocutors, even in places with marvelous state-provided day care, because state-provided day care centers, like the private kind, will not take in a child who is sick, out of the very reasonable fear that they will infect the other children. Having only one parent, instead of two, simply makes it harder to deal with the recurrent crises that seem to my, non parenting, eyes, to be the principle feature of parenthood.}

Single-parent families also seem to predispose the children towards poverty, and other problems. Having only one biological parent in the house is correlated with problems no matter what your income level, but of course it is worse if you are poor, and lack the financial and social resources to help your kids weather their problems. And you are much more likely to be poor if you are never married (and thus probably get little in the way of child support) than if you were married, and are now divorced or widowed.

Thus, Bush's marriage promotion initiative, which I confess, I was much more skeptical about before I did the research and saw just how powerful an effect having kids out of wedlock has on the lives of both mothers and children. To cite just one statistic, a Brookings report estimates that if families currently in poverty got married before they had children, it would cut the poverty rate from 13% to 9.5%. Welfare benefits would have to more than triple before they could achieve a similar reduction. I still don't think that the marriage promotion initiative is going to work, but I appreciate the motive more than I did.

But many of the women heading single households would love to get married -- it's just that there don't seem to be any very good candidates. I recently read an advance copy of Jason DeParle's absolutely stunning book American Dream, which follows three women through the welfare system, and then out of it as welfare reform took place. I highly recommend it to every one of my readers: it's a beautifully nuanced account of the lives of women in the welfare system. Of all the surprising observations in the book, this was perhaps the most heart-rending: at the age of 35, not one of the three women had ever been to a wedding.

Jason DeParle goes more deeply into that problem in a terrific new article in the New York Times:

The evidence is on his side: mounds of social science, from the left and the right, leave little doubt that the children of single-parent families face heightened risks. Kids can overcome it, and they do all the time, but for someone growing up poor, having just one parent amounts to a double dose of disadvantage. A generation ago, the effects of family structure were the subject of much greater dispute; now several large data sets give contemporary scholars an empirical edge. ''Growing Up With a Single Parent,'' a 1994 book by the sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, remains a definitive text.

In our opinion, the evidence is quite clear: Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents' race or educational background. . . . [They] are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to have a child before age 20 and one and a half times as likely to be ''idle'' -- out of school and out of work -- in their late teens and early 20's.

They are also more likely to commit crimes. As for why kids usually benefit from having a stable father at home, there are multiple theories, and Ken seems to have mulled over them all. There's a second income that fathers generally bring and a second set of hands. There's the added stake that live-in fathers tend to feel they have in their children. There's emotional bonding. There's discipline. ''I feel like every kid should have a father in his life,'' Ken said. ''Someone to play that manly role, to give them that loud voice when they need it, to show them discipline, throw a football -- all that.'' There's also what sociologists call ''social capital,'' the network of worldly connections that fathers can bequeath. That's a role that leaves Ken particularly wistful. As a high-school linebacker with a vicious hit, he received some letters of interest from college recruiters, which fell by the wayside at home. He has never shed the sense that in another life, with the help of a father, he might have gone on to college and even the pros. Instead, a few weeks after graduating from high school, Ken started selling crack, and father-absence took a more intimate toll. Ken started feuding with his mother's boyfriend, and the boyfriend shot him in the testicles.

Ken's childhood neighborhood offers another look at the risks of fatherlessness. A stronghold of the Gangster Disciples, stocked with guns and drugs, Jeffrey Manor, in the southeastern corner of Chicago, sounds like a familiar pocket of urban poverty. But it wasn't poor: the poverty rate in Ken's census tract, 10 percent, was 2 points below the national average. Nine of 10 families owned their own homes. Indeed, the only lens through which the Manor seemed ''at risk'' was in the abundance of single-parent families. According to the 1980 census, a third of the neighborhood kids were being raised by single parents, twice the United States average. Writing in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, America's prophet of family decline, warned that a ''community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority . . . asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder . . . that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.'' That's pretty much how Ken nostalgically describes the block. ''You come to the neighborhood with your hat the wrong way, I'm kicking some butt,'' he said.

There's clearly a subculture in our society for which the marriage ethos -- the social pressure on women, and particularly on men, to get married, or be in a long term relationship that looks in all important respects very like marriage -- has been destroyed.

My own time in the inner city leaves me with some sympathy for what the Bush plan is trying to achieve. Inner-city kids want and need dads, and while marriage is no panacea (Ken's parents were married), stable marriages are the surest way to provide them. Expanding economic opportunity is clearly a big part of the solution, but probably not the answer in whole, given the hurdles to fatherhood and marriage posed by community norms. Wanting to marry only when you can do it on a tropical beach is like wanting to work only when you can start at $100,000 a year -- that is, not to want it in any meaningful sense. Even as teenagers, Jewell's and Angie's kids talk of wanting kids someday, but dismiss marriage out of hand. ''That'd be too plain -- like you'd have to see the same woman every day,'' Jewell's son Tremmell said. Angie's son DeVon, who is 16, said, ''I need some little me's''- children. But, he added, ''I just can't see myself being with one woman.'' One lesson of the 90's -- from the declines in smoking and teenage pregnancy to the plunging welfare rolls -- is that cultural signals matter, so even public-education campaigns aren't to be dismissed out of hand.

Poor women want to get married just as much as middle class women do, but the social environment they live in just doesn't seem to enable it. Marriage seems to be better for everyone, but can the institution regenerate itself? And if not, what can? Predictibly, I don't expect any government campaign to amount to much -- the government is best at writing checks, not changing people, and besides, my skin gets all crawly when the government starts telling people how to live. But what then?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Unmoderated?

So I'm googling around trying to find out what happened to Josh Marshall's teaser 'big scoop' of some time ago, and I find this comment, which I will not reprint here. Lovely- here's 'hoping', Sicko.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Double Take

The bumper stickers read:

• W '04
  
• Vote Libertarian
  
• Bill Spadea
  
• Dump Daschle
  

Needless to say you don't often find this combination, let alone on an old Volvo in my rabidly Democrat town. When I raised funds door-to-door for Greenpeace* a Volvo in the driveway was a sure $50, maybe more.

I only had a second to get this shot. Apologies for the bad focus, as well as the sloppy license obfuscation.

*Yeah, yeah. Did you know we kept 30%?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Notice

Have I mentioned that Dr Manhattan is back? And better than ever, I must say. Go Yankees!

Also, those who have been visiting my new website, Unpopular Culture took, er, a sort of unplanned hiatus. But I've made up for it by posting all the chapters I missed, and you should cruise over now to catch up if you got discouraged.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Blegging

Hey, liberal readers! A while back, there was a meme going around the liberal blogs to the effect that a ridiculous proportion of Americans think they are in the top 10% of income earners. Can someone point me to either an entry about it, or the poll itself? I'm on a tight deadline, and my undying gratitude goes out to the person who finds it for me.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

They blinded me with science

Stunning flash of insight from a scientific study:

Children who start toilet training at an older age. . . are more likely to be late toilet trainers, according to a study of nearly 400 youngsters.

Stand by for studies proving that people who drive fast get more speeding tickets!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Dirty Pool

I don't want to hear one more word from Democrats saying that all they really wanted in Florida was to "count every vote" unless they are willing to stridently condemn their party's current efforts to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot.

Longtime readers know that I dislike Nader, and his groups with a rare passion. Nonethless, why shouldn't he be on the ballot? Is the cost of ink so terrible that we can't afford one extra line? I do look forward, with breathless anticipation, to hearing the excuses for this behaviour that aren't some version of "We want to force people to vote for John Kerry instead of the candidate they prefer".

And yes, this behaviour would be every bit as reprehensible were it directed at Pat Buchanan, which for all I know, it is. If I had to identify the most pernicious problem affecting our political system right now, it wouldn't be activist judges or special interest money -- it would be gerrymandering, which has so effectively protected incumbents that only about 4% of House seats are actually decided by competitive elections, and I believe a quarter of those are in Iowa, where the districting law prevents gerrymandering.

It is already a crying shame the way the Republicans and Democrats have colluded to make ballot access as difficult as possible. There is simply no excuse for this blatant attempt to keep Nader from running, and I hope that honorable Democrats will say so, loud and clear.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Al-Sadr throw in the towel

According to Reuters, Al-Sadr and his followers are quitting their shrine in Najaf, and joining the political process:

Iraqi Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al- Sadr agreed that his militia should lay down their arms and quit Najaf's Imam Ali Mosque, acceding to demands from an Iraqi delegation to end an uprising in the city, Reuters reported.

A letter from the cleric's office was read out to delegates at the government-backed Iraqi National Conference in Baghdad, saying that al-Sadr had agreed to their demands to join the country's political process, Reuters said. A spokesman for al- Sadr, Sheikh Mahmoud al-Sudani confirmed the accord to Reuters.

If true, this is a HUGE coup for the administration -- the Iraqi interim administration, that is. The sense I get from talking to more knowlegeable colleagues is that the whole reason Al-Sadr keeps trying to start an uprising is that he's not really very popular, and so the only hope he has of acquiring power is through force of arms.

His giving up should give a huge boost to Allawi's interim government, which has successfully asserted the rule of law over local militias. Very importantly, they've done this without damaging the shrine in which the Sadrists were holed up, which would have enraged a large number of Shias.

There remains the possibility that he will simply try, try again in the near future. But this doesn't seem to be like the earlier confrontation, in which we left him holding a considerable amount of the territory he'd taken; this time, from what I can tell so far, he's leaving his stronghold. And the evidence suggests that his reasons for doing so are either a) he thinks he can't win a battle with the central government or b) he thinks he will be blamed for any further civilian casualties or shrine damage, rather than the government or the US. That's great news either way.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Media Notice

I'll be debating Barry Deutsch of Amptoons tonight on feminist topics ranging from the wage gap to the sacral centrality of abortion to the women's movement. We'll be appearing on The Majority Report, Janeane Garafolo's show on Air America, the liberal radio station. You can get streaming audio at their website. I'm pretty excited at the prospect of meeting Ms Garafolo, whose acting work I've admired for quite some time. We'll be on at 7:15, so tune your radios accordingly.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A word about George Farrell

It's one of the great tragedies of human life that we tend to save our best compliments for eulogies. When we're in love, at least at the beginning, we manage to override the human instinct for reticence. But with those we love longest and best, we forget to take stock of how much we love them, how much they have given us, how unique and extraordinary and, well, neat they are. Even in the moments when, for some reason or no reason at all, we are struck by the realization of the terrific power this person has in our lives, and our own gladness that we have been given this marvelous person for our mother, and not some other person who could not be other than inferior, we don't mention it. We forget. Or we are uncomfortable being sentimental. Or we simply don't know how to say what we really mean, and though we throw our arms around that wonderful specimen and exclaim "I'm so glad you're my mother!", we know even as we say it that we have not managed to communicate the grand emotions that inspired us.

I have a wonderful grandfather. I honestly don't think that there's a better one on the planet (although this may be because I never knew my paternal grandfather, who died too young of a heart attack). I may be prejudiced, but I don't think so, because everyone who knows him seems to think he's pretty wonderful too. When my mother went back to her 25th high school reunion, she found the house filled with classmates. They had come to see her, but more importantly, to see her father. They remembered, after 25 years, that he was always willing to spot them $5 worth of gas when they were short.

He owned a gas station, you see. And he earned it. He grew up on a farm during the 1920's and 1930's, and had to drop out of high school for a while to help his father keep the farm together while produce rotted unsold in the silos and milk was dumped out on the fields for want of solvent drinkers. A lot of people had to do similar things, but how many of them went back when they could? He not only graduated from high school, but became one of their star basketball players . . . even though in the harsh northern winters, he more than once had to walk eight miles in a blizzard in order to get to school so he could play. The problem with having a grandfather as wonderful as mine is that he really leaves you with no room to complain about anything that may happen in your cushy Upper West Side existance.

My grandfather worked in a grocery store until he was 26--he married my grandmother on Thanksgiving because it was the only day he could get off. In 1939, the store's owner offered him the opportunity to manage a gas station he owned that was losing money. In two months, my grandfather had it turned around, by expanding its hours and offering exceptional service. In other words, he worked harder than any three men. And he treated his customers with the generosity, dignity, and integrity that characterised him in everything he did. My grandfather is incredibly strong, incredibly tough. But he is also incredibly kind, and more than kind -- he is so fundamentally good that he shines with it. Until last winter, when he had pneumonia, Christmastime always found my grandfather, well into his eighties, standing outside ringing a bell for the Salvation Army. He was such a tireless worker for the Rotary's service campaigns that the regional organisation selected him, this past year, for their lifetime achievement award. Since he bought the gas station from his boss, in 1940, he's done well for himself, but he's done far better for others, including the indescribably lucky members of his family.

I suppose this is why we don't say these things in life, because words always fail. I just can't adequately express how lucky I am to have had this man for my grandfather. In my entire life, I have never seen him say an unkind word about another human being, or do less than his absolute best at anything he ever did, from growing the raspberries that I ate by the handful, pieful, and jam-jar-full, to running a business, to raising a family. And as a friend of the family told my mother, "he doesn't know the word quit". I will spend the rest of my life trying to live up to his example, but I am afraid I don't know how anyone, especially me, ever could.

My grandfather is very sick right now. So I wanted to write this, even though I am very bad at writing about the really important things, because I hope he'll be able to read it and sense, at least, how very much I love him, and how profoundly grateful I am to him, and to whatever kind fate delivered him to me, who had done nothing to deserve such good fortune. I wish that I could make it crystal clear, so that he would know how grateful. And so that you, too, could know how wonderful he is.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It's all about oiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil

Kevin Drum has a piece on peak oil production that crystallized a niggling difficulty I've always had with environmentalists, and various other sorts of energy activists such as the "end our dependance on foreign oil" crowd -- they seem to take "We are the World" a little too literally.

When they talk about the Greenhouse effect, for example, the subtext of the conversation is that the US is the major problem, and if we seriously reduce our carbon output, the problem will be mostly licked. While the US is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases (and, not coincidentally, the largest producer of goods and services), China and India are hot on our tail, and China has a lot of nasty, carbon emitting, air polluting coal to burn. To a large extent, any cut in oil consumption by us is going to give growth a fillip in the developing world, but is not going to lessen the amount of stuff being consumed.

They also talk about alternative energy research as if we had the only research plant in the world, and the provision of federal funds is the difference between no research being done, and finding a way to turn the natural gas content in political speeches into clean, renewable energy. But the EU has more people than us, and with its ferocious energy taxes, has both countries and companies highly incented to find alternative energy sources. The result has been . . . Danish wind farms. This is not to say that more money might not make the difference, but the system is not binary, and we could well just be pouring more US money down a bottomless rathole.

Similarly, the "end our dependance on foriegn oil" crowd seem to be working on one of those simplistic economist's models they publicly deplore. In this model, there are only two countries, which we'll call Country A and Country S. Country A has a lot of money and not enough oil. Country S has a lot of oil, and not enough money. If Country A decides to stop buying Country S's oil, terrorism will stop and we can get our troops off the Arabian peninsula.

In the real world, of course, there is this global geopolitical system thing, filled with lots of trading partners and allies who don't have any oil. Even if the United States collectively decides to turn the thermostat down, carpool, and cut our consumption by 30% in order to get oil's role in our economy down to a more geopolitically manageable level, our trading partners will be just as dependant on Saudi oil as before -- more, in some cases, because our withdrawal from the market will alter the supply curve, allowing them to consume more. And as long as our trading partners, and might I add the holders of a huge portion of our debt, are dependant on Saudi oil, our fate will be nearly as tied to the Arabian peninsula as if we were importing the stuff ourselves.

Magic bullets only work in horror novels. Which our environmental policy isn't quite, yet.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Insanely cool site

Remember PEnnsylvania-6500? BUtterfield 8? When I was a kid, the older businesses in my neighbourhood (the Upper West Side), often still had their exchange names where the first two numbers of their phone numbers would be; our butcher, the incomparable Oppenheimer's Meats on 98th and Broadway, was MOnument 20246. MOnument numbers (often written MO2-0246) were liberally interspersed with UNiversity numbers; presumably these referred to Columbia and the Soldiers and Sailors monument on 91st & Riverside, although it could also have been a reference to Grant's tomb.

Everyone used to know the name of their exchange -- and if your phone number is oldish, you can too! (My family was a UNiversity family, although there were also a lot of MOnuments in my building. Back then the numbers were fairly geographically localised, but if you've gotten yours in the last fifteen years, it's probably random.) Now here's a guy who's assembled a database of the exchange names. Definitely the coolest thing I've found this week. And it's not just a list of New York exchanges -- he's apparently trying to develop a comprehensive list for the whole country. Check it out.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Holy Smokes!

I just watched Jim McGreevey's resignation speech. That was the most unexpected thing I've seen since my two-headed uncle debated free silver and triumphantly refuted himself.

I don't have any useful commentary or anything. But I can't resist pointing out that IIRC, his campaign slogan was "Straight talk".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is New York City discriminating against convention protesters?

It's possible, of course, but I don't think so.

One group of protesters wants a permit to stack 250,000 people in Central Park for a convention protest. The city has refused, saying it will cause a great deal of costly damage to the park. Protesters, understandably, think that the Bloomberg administration is trying to stifle their speech in order to benefit its Republican buddies.

Could be, but I doubt it.

For one thing, Mayor Bloomberg doesn't have any Republican buddies. He's a Democrat. The only reason he ran as a Republican is that a moderate Democrat can't make it out of the primary process in this city, which prefers its Democratic candidates a little more to the left . . . of Ho Chi Minh.

For another, the examples that protesters cite of events larger than 250,000 are all very old, the Paul Simon concert in 1981, which drew about 400,000 people, chief among them. If they had grown up here, as I did, or spent a little more time in the park, they would know that This Is Not Your Father's New York City Parks Department.

In 1981, Central Park was not as you know it today, with lush grass on the meadows, charming buildings in excellent repair, and lovely landscaped shrubbery scattered artfully along the paths. Much of infrastructure had fallen into disrepair, and there was a lot more raw dirt than grass. In the mid-to-late eighties, a major campaign was staged to reverse the decline, including fencing off large portions of re-sodded meadow to allow the grass to regrow. The Parks department got more militant about permitting large crowds to gather (aside from concerts, which I believe pay for the privilege of re-sodding, the last big gathering I can remember was Earth Day 1990). Now they're doing it over at Riverside Park -- fencing off all but a narrow strip of grass, and persecuting those who engage in shrubbery-destroying activity like letting their dogs off leash or lighting up a hibachi. Their militancy is, as far as I can tell, entirely non-partisan.

Some protesters I know have offered to "pay" for their trouble by volunteering to work in the park, but that won't fly for several reasons.

1) Most New Yorkers I know couldn't plant a fern in their windowsill without a Time-Life instruction manual and a team of landscapers

2) They neglected to raise the money to replace the damaged greenery, a not-inconsiderable expense

3) The public sector unions aren't going to let a team of handfisted amateurs take their overtime away.

I think it's fair to say that the Parks department isn't particularly interested in helping the protesters alienate middle-American tourism dollars, but neither do I think that they're particularly interested in squelching free speech. Nor do I see why the protesters have such an urgent need to destroy the shrubbery in Central Park, when they were offered several less-destructive options, including the West Side Highway, where they're likely to be seen by a lot more people than they would be in Central Park on a weekday. I was flabbergasted to see the leader of the main organiser complaining that they couldn't possibly consider it without city-provided water and shuttle busses. You know, back when I was protesting, I would have been ashamed to tell The Man that I was far too delicate to protest injustice unless He shuttled my precious tootsies to the protest site personally, and provided refreshments to boot. And now that I'm a New York City taxpayer, I find it more than a bit rich to be told that people can't possibly agree to disrupt my traffic unless I pay for the privilege.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Time for a slow dance

Hold me
Hold me
Never let me go until you've told me
Told me
What I want to know and then just hold me
Hold me
Make me tell you I'm in love with you

Thrill me
Thrill me
Walk me down the lane where shadows will be
Will be
Hiding lovers just the same as we'll be
We'll be
When you make me tell you I love you

From the desk of Jane Galt:

More economic news

A new piece of the puzzle has emerged to tell us what happened in the spring: productivity growth slowed to 2.9%.

Now, this is still a blistering rate compared to the miserable rates that prevailed between 1970 and 1995 -- the economic boom of the late 1990's was built, in part, on the fact that productivity growth had increased to a little over 2%. But it's a lot slower than what we've been seeing since 2001 -- we had one quarter where productivity grew by over 9%.

The productivity slowdown explains why jobs picked up in the spring, as people finally needed more workers to produce more output (though of course, the hiring pickup also explains the productivity slowdown, since new workers are less productive than experienced ones). If it's impacting business confidence, it also may explain why we're seeing a hiring slowdown now. Of course you don't want to take these things too far-- you can build an economics Unified Theory of Everything out of just about any variable if you strain hard enough. Still, it does make one worry about the next twelve months.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Factoid of the day

The United Kingdom, by my jackleg calculations, spent $164 billion on its 59.2 million citizens in 2003. The United States, by contrast, spent $257.6 billion on its 50.8 million Medicaid enrollees. This works out to twice as much per Medicaid enrollee as in Britain's NHS.

I know that single-payer advocates are going to pop up right about now and argue that that just goes to show how grossly inefficient the American health system is. But wait a minute. National health care advocates have been telling us that the system is going to lower costs by wringing out all the administrative costs of the current system. But if that's the case, why hasn't Medicaid done so?

Of course, covering new people might be less expensive than covering hte current ones -- certainly Medicaid has a lot of elderly people in nursing homes under its wing. But that just goes to underscore the fact that for the populations most single payer advocates are worried about covering -- the sick people who are uninsurable in the current system -- the primary drivers of costs are, um, costs, not evil corporate button pushers.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Gone with the wind

Should I be sad to hear that Canada's indigenous peoples are losing their traditional survival skills? The progressive, forward looking part of me says NO! There's something more than a little distasteful about comfortably middle class Americans who want people in other places to keep living lives that are nasty, brutish, and short, just so we can go stare at them when we're on holiday--or merely bask in the knowlege that someone, somewhere, is managing to survive on ice water and peatmoss. An Irish friend has some rather explosive words for Americans who want to turn Ireland into one big living museum so they can go there every five years and enjoy the unspoiled scenery. Let them try cooking over an open fire, with a hole in the thatched roof for a chimney, if they think it's so *$%! cute.

On the other hand, there is something sad about losing the old arctic life. Scratching a living out of the frozen north, while living in a house made out of snow -- that's pretty damn impressive. It's bittersweet, to this libertarian, to think that in another generation we'll have no one left who knows how.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Pets are people too!

Or at least, so says a Canadian court.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Returned

Well, there wasn't exactly broadband where I've been for the last two weeks. I spent much of it on the vehicle pictured on the left. I have no idea what's been going on.

I did see a few interesting signs along the roads. Here are two that mark the changes Downeast over the last 300 years. Guess which one I call "The Noble Savage".

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Bush Toast-o-Meter goes to "Extra crispy"

Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad news on jobs -- the economy only created 32,000 jobs in July.

This shows that the June numbers (112,000 jobs created, against forecasts in the 250+K range) were no blip. Oh, there's a good enough chance that they'll start improving again next month -- some signs, such as factory orders, have been very strong for July, although consumer confidence has weakened along with job growth. But it's my personal opinion that this is not going to come quickly enough to save Bush. I think we in the media should start practicing saying "President Kerry".

Not, mind you, that I think that the low jobs numbers are Bush's fault, and any people trying to tell you otherwise would, in my humble opinion, be tap-dancing equally credibly to explain why the exact same job numbers were no-way-no-how the fault of the incumbent, if he happened to be a Democrat. Oh, it's legitimate to say that you didn't like the structure of his stimulus package, but any stimulus package, Democrat or Republican, would long since have worked its way through the economy had it been passed in 2002 -- the lifespan of a stimulus package being ca. 18 months, 2 years at most. This new soft patch isn't anyone's fault. But I don't suppose that makes it feel any better to the poor bastards who are out of work now.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

WordPress help

As y'all know, I'm writing my new blog in WordPress. here's my problem: I want to display the archives (and only the archives, not the main page) in reverse order, oldest to newest, so that it reads more like a book. Can someone tell me how to hack this? Thanks so much.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tee-hee!

I just found Happy Fun Pundit's little Kerry caption machine.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Odd tidbit of the day

In the course of one of the off-beat, ever-so-sophisticated conversations we are always having here at my office, we developed the need to know the name of philospher Ronald Dworkin's current girlfriend. Imagine my surprise when I found that our very own site is the third Google hit for the words "Ronald + Dworkin + Girlfriend". Right on the bleeding edge of intellectual gossip, we are.

Anyway, we can't figure out the name from Google. Do any of my readers know the name of the woman he's living with right now? Our interest is strictly curious, not prurient. ;-)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

What the $*%! has Jane been up to?

You may be wondering why I've disappeared. Well, I've been awful busy . . . a girl's gotta eat, you know. Plus I hooked up my Tivo, perfected my mastery of Rose Birnbaum Levy's surprisingly excellent cream cheese pie crust (it's only got a little cream cheese, and somehow that makes it amazingly flaky, tender and tasty), and cooked dinner for one of my oldest friends and her adorable new baby.

I've also been working on an alternative blog project, which I will now (ta-dum!) unveil here.

Many of you probably know that older books used to be released in serial form before they were compiled into novels. Writers back then must have had some serious . . . er . . . pluck, because many of them used to send off a few chapters of a serial, and commit to meeting deadlines that were horrifyingly regular and distressingly unflexible, without having the faintest idea how the whole thing was going to turn out. Now that I think of it, writing a novel that way would make a pretty cool weblog . . .

But that's not the project I'm working on. What I wanted to do was give readers a place to read novels in serial. I got the idea from a service (now defunct) that used to email me sections of a great work every day, so you could read (for example) The Arabian Nights in five-minute chunks. When the service expired, it occurred to me that something like that would make a neat idea for a weblog. With the comments feature, I thought it would be kind of cool if it eventually turned into something like an online book club. But even if not, I think it's still pretty neat to have somewhere where you can go to spend a relaxing ten minutes reading a great classic work.

And for webloggers, all it takes is a dollar and a dream . . . thanks to a friend who bought me the domain and some hosting for my (long past) birthday, I now have the weblog. Gentlemen, I give you: Unpopular Culture!

It's still kind of a work in progress. I did in in WordPress, which I don't know very well yet, but which other bloggers have spoken of highly. The dates bear no resemblance to when I posted the items, and the archives aren't quite there yet . . . but otherwise, I'm very happy with it. I know that y'all come to me for economics and political commentary, mostly, but I'm hoping that some of you might also be interested in a little good literature.

The first book I chose is A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain, which has the triple advantages of being a) literature b) accessible to the modern reader and c) hilarious. You'll make this girl very happy if you check it out.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Stop the world, I want to get off

All right -- I don't want to hear any more Californians whining about their budget problems. Not when I read in this Wall Street Journal article about E-Bay auction fraud that one of the officers investigating such fraud has been reassigned to a more high profile unit:

Mr. Fawrup's experience with Internet-auction fraud has made him a resource for other members of law enforcement. Last year, he says, a police officer in Redondo Beach, Calif., called to say that a local citizen spotted his stolen bicycle for sale on eBay. The officer wanted to know how he should pursue the thief. Mr. Fawrup's advice: Bid on the bike. The officer won the auction and arrested the seller when he went to pick up the bicycle, Mr. Fawrup says.

Come September, Mr. Fawrup will be on a new antifraud beat. He's been reassigned to a unit in Commerce, Calif., that investigates people who try to redeem empty cans, bottles and plastic from out of state. The project director of the high-tech crimes task force, Lt. Rick Craigo, says Mr. Fawrup will be replaced. But both men agree their numbers are still too few to catch most Internet evildoers. Says Mr. Fawrup: "I've been able to do so little."