Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I find this logic sort of compelling:

But the Jeffords switch also serves to illustrate why the Republicans should be very careful what they wish for. Rather than serving as a harbinger of an electoral revolt against the Bush G.O.P. in 2002, the defection may actually have boosted the party’s fortunes in those midterm elections. By giving Democrats control of the Senate for half of 2001 and all of 2002, Mr. Jeffords essentially stripped them of their best political weapon: their status as a powerless minority. Maddening as it was for them, the Democrats’ minority position served to unify their disparate elements in opposition to the majority party’s agenda. Before Mr. Jeffords’ defection, with the G.O.P. in charge of the White House and the Congress, the Democrats’ prospects for 2002 seemed rosy. But control of the Senate put the Democrats on the spot and exposed the kinds of ugly fissures that simple, cohesive opposition would have glossed over. When the ballots were tallied that year, the Republicans had defied history by gaining two seats—and control of the chamber. So far this year, the Republican minority in the Senate has been possessed of a unity of purpose that they lacked in the waning days of their majority. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for instance, managed to corral almost every Republican—including some opponents of the war—behind a procedural effort to derail a vote on a resolution opposing President Bush’s troop-level increase in Iraq. That kind of vote-herding will once again become nearly impossible if Mr. Lieberman were to put the Republicans in the majority. G.O.P. Senators would be forced back onto the defensive with an American public even more restless than it was last year, and by a Democratic-led House desperate for a partisan foil.

. . . except that it implies that both parties would be better off if they never got into power, exposing all those dangerous fissures. That's probably true of the rest of us, but if I were running for office, I'd have a hard time accepting "Jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow, but never jam today".

Side note: interesting to look back to a time when jam was a much anticipated luxury, innit?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So apparently . . .

I may have a sinus infection. I was force fed Sudafed this evening, which seems to have worked really amazingly well, but I still have to miss my conference in Vancouver this weekend, because apparently flying is a no-no when you're this stuffed up.

And can I just say that the ritual humiliation of obtaining Sudafed from a drugstore sets every liberty-loving fibre of my patriotic American soul quivering for Revolution? I mean, sure, that would mean even more if I weren't already reflexively against our nation's drug laws. But still. Since I bought the stuff three weeks, ago, they've introduced another new wrinkle: now you have to go to the pharmacy counter to show your ID and sign for your frigging decongestant. Next time I get a cold, I fully expect a cavity search and several hours in the interrogation room with Vincent D'onofrio getting all crazy and refusing to let me go to the bathroom.

Another thing: I feel perfectly fine. Why would a sinus infection have absolutely no symptoms except making me sleep like Vincent D'onofrio coming off his meds?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

This is not useful. Something that would actually produce a slightly more beautiful me, that would be useful.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Does smoking make you get sick?

Matthew Yglesias is ill, and blogging about it:

As we've noted previously, I've been a bit ill for the past few days. The phrase "sick as a dog" reverberates through my head. And yet, I live with two dogs. Kriston's rat-killer and Spencer's floor-urinator and I have to say that they don't seem to get sick ever. I mean, obviously I know that dogs develop serious health problems and eventually die, but they seem relatively free of maladies like the flu or the common cold. I can even see why this might be: You tend not to see large numbers of dogs congregating in close quarters, dogs never stay out drinking later than they should for a few nights in a row and gut their immune system, dogs tend to maintain a nice, stable diet, etc. Plus dogs -- even very well-loved dogs -- don't usually get nearly the level of medical attention that we give to people so the evolutionary pressures toward general good health are more serious.

So then: Where does this phrase come from? Also, I swear to God that when I quit smoking I was promised fewer respiratory ailments. And I only rarely even had any respiratory ailments. I feel that the medical establishment has really betrayed me here

Back when I smoked, I developed a theory: if smoking is bad for me, it must be really, really bad for bacteria, which have so much less mass to protect them from the bad chemicals. I've never actually heard a convincing refutation of this . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Convince me

I'm working on something about card check, which is set to pass the House tomorrow. The arguments against abolishing secret elections are fairly self-explanatory; less so the arguments in favour. Obviously, there is an instrumental argument in favour of it, if you like unions, but there is an instrumental argument in favour of killing the neighbours and taking their stuff, too. I'm looking for a more compelling justification than unions=good.

So hit me, card-check favouring readers (and fellow bloggers). Why is this a good idea?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Hypochondria alert

Suddenly last night I couldn't keep my eyes open, even though I was in the middle of a noisy bar, and had been fine five minutes earlier. I just slept for over eighteen hours, with a couple of twenty minute breaks for checking email and drinking water. Is that really weird? Because I could totally go back to sleep right now, if I didn't have work to do.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So IronChef Blogger, in which I, in the guise of IronChef Libertarian, took on IronChef Liberal Spencer Ackerman, took place last night. Julian Sanchez, who (along with Dave Weigel and Kerry Howley) kindly lent a house for me to cook in, called it "ridiculous", an assessment as unkind as it was true. Ezra Klein reports "about 6,000 calories of saturated fat slowing down my circulatory system"--did I mention the secret ingredient was cheese? The pictures (also courtesy of the amazing Dave Weigel) are here; luckily, I look craptacular in almost all of them. In my defense, of course, I made five dishes in 90 minutes. You try doing that and having good hair.

Who won? For that, you will have to wait for the Bloggingheads.tv video, to which I will post a link as soon as there is one. But I can tell you who took all the battle scars: the libertarians. First my sous-blogger Will Wilkinson was attacked by a dog, requiring a quick trip to the laundry room with some stain remover and a basket full of medical supplies; up to about two minutes to go time he was wandering around the kitchen with no pants and a slightly pained expression. Then I managed to stab myself no less than five times (the blades on my new food processor sure are sharp! And funnily enough, my knives, too.) Finally, during the cleanup phase, I got a piece of glass in my heel, requiring Julian to perform emergency surgery with a pair of tweezers and a big bottle of rubbing alchohol. Spencer, meanwhile, looked fresh as a spring daisy, which just goes to show that might does not always make right.

If my libertarian readers have ever wondered who's out there on the front lines in Washington, fighting for your beliefs, you now have an answer. The question for me and Will is, who provides our emergent, spontaneous disability pension?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Random fact of the day

The oldest financial institution in the Americas is a pawnshop on Mexico City's central square. Set up in 1775 under an edict by the Spanish crown to assist people in financial trouble, it is called Monte de Piedad, variously translated as the mountain of mercy or the mountain of pity. Pity or mercy come in the form of cash in return for valuables. Unclaimed items end up for sale in a series of glittering rooms near the main banking hall.

From The Economist's brilliant survey on Microfinance, which I have just been rereading.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A commenter on the previous post asks if I am "dating a liberal", attributing my sudden leftward tilt to this.

Short answer: No. And the last time I did date a liberal, it, if anything, drove me farther from the left. I'm contrary like that.

Longer answer: As romantic as it would be to give up meat for someone, this is crazy talk. I was a vegetarian for several years; that's why I flirt with going back to it every time I see something like this. And giving up opinions for someone else is not just crazy; it's undignified.

Even longer answer: I'm not sure what my leftward tilt is supposed to be. I assume it's several things:

1) My about face on the Iraq war, which took place sometime last year, but has been recently much blogged about

2) My green views, which have been around for longer than that, but have gotten greener as the evidence for AGW has gotten worse

3) My post on Amanda Marcotte, which was misunderstood as advocating in favour of her. Let me make it clear: I don't see anything odd or wrong with the notion that, if you are a campaigner who writes a lot of post slagging off large groups of voters, those voters will abandon you at the ballot box. And that therefore campaigns will strive to avoid having such people on their staff. But Mr Donohue is a man who has chosen being offended as a profession, which makes me ill disposed to sympathise with him. In general, I find the rhetoric at the outer edges of the blogosphere really unpleasantly vicious and personal, which is why I do not read those blogs. But I do not think that Catholics as a group are more entitled not to be called names or have their beliefs made fun of than, say, feminists. Marcotte is unbearable, but no more so than the comments sections as several large conservative blogs I could name.

4) My post about Bruce Bawer, by which I stand. I'm essentially a cultural relativist, in that I think it is not possible to evaluate whether the experience of being in another culture is good or bad. I would hate living in Saudi Arabia. But I am willing to be that most Saudi women are roughly as happy as income, interpersonal relationships, and personality permit; people are like that.

More generally, there is a tendency in some places on the right to, on the one hand, excuse slavery and the oppression of women as Bad Things We Use to Do Which Do Not Mean that America was a Fundamentally Sick Country, while at the same time evincing similar practices in the Middle East as evidence that Muslims Are Bad. These analyses are often performed with very sketchy evidence about how widespread the allegedly awful practices are; as well as attributing to Islam practices that are cultural traits, such as FGM. FGM is not muslim, it is African; and it is practiced by Christians and animists in Africa, as well as Muslims. A Coptic friend, whose family have been Egyptian Christians for just about 2000 years, recently found out that the practice only stopped a few decades ago in his family.

That is not to say that these cultural traist should be allowed to continue; I think FGM should be stamped out, because people shouldn't be able to make those kinds of permanent decisions for their children. But that doesn't mean Muslims are evil; it just means they do bad things. As do all cultures. They also do good things, like take incredibly good care of their needy family members, that Americans do not, which is why so many Muslims think that Americans Are Bad.

5) Prison rape, which I've been talking about for years, and which is appalling.

6) ???

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Robin Hanson points out some new technology:

Similar to the way posterity review could help academic incentives, a simple way to reduce bias about how we see our own lives is to collect more data on our lives. From Marginal Revolution:

MyLifeBits has also provided Bell with a new suite of tools for capturing his interactions with other people and machines. The system records his telephone calls and the programs playing on radio and television. ... stores a copy of every Web page he visits and a transcript of every instant message he sends or receives. It also records the files he opens, the songs he plays and the searches he performs. ... MyLifeBits continually uploads his location from a portable Global Positioning System device, wirelessly transmitting the information to his archive. ... SenseCam, ... automatically takes pictures when its sensors indicate that the user might want a photograph.

How many of you would want this? I wouldn't. I prefer the memories I choose to keep, and the ones I make up, over the ones I really had.

Those who prefer unbiased memories should want this. With a full record of your life, you could settle disputes about who said what when, and how often you do what.

You don't have to wait to record your full life in sound. A $200 pocket voice recorder saves 150MB of high quality audio in a twelve hour battery charge, and a $200 hard disk will store three years of audio at that rate. Of course it will be a few years until we can organize such data well.

But then what will couples and siblings have to fight about? Can America's relationships survive actually knowing what he said at cousin Emily's wedding?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

As I loll in the dread "Waiting for Friday evening drinks" late afternoon lull, it occurs to me that this is a perfect time to rile everyone up by talking about the Iraq War. Specifically, this post of Matthew Yglesias', in which he discusses Peter Beinart's partial recantation.

But it does mean that, when our fellow democracies largely oppose a war--as they did in Vietnam and Iraq--because they think we're deluding ourselves about either our capacities or our motives, they're probably right. Being a liberal, as opposed to a neoconservative, means recognizing that the United States has no monopoly on insight or righteousness. Some Iraqis might have been desperate enough to trust the United States with unconstrained power. But we shouldn't have trusted ourselves.

Call this the Condorcet doctrine. I think it has some logic to it. Obviously, it says something when the American public thinks one way on some major international issue and the public opinion in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and all of Europe thinks the other way. In particular, that was a good clue that American media and political leaders were misportraying the situation; literally all the mass publics with access to alternative opinion leadership were reaching a different conclusion.

This strikes me as rather naive on many fronts. For one thing, it's as if other countries had no agency or interests; they're like experts voting on our behaviour. But other countries opposed us in war (to the extent they did; I note that the French were the ones who got us into Vietnam, and the British et. al. were military advising right along with us until things got hairy, at which point they bugged out not because of concerns about our capabilities, but because of worries about their own soldiers getting killed) for all sorts of reasons, most of which had little to do with a reasoned assessment of our capabilities. They opposed us because nations with weak militaries do not like to see action on the part of nations with strong ones; because they had their own regional strategic interests that our invasion wrecked; because Russian opposition (for entirely strategic reasons) meant that any action would take place without the UN, further undermining an institution which somewhat empowers Europe; because of a generalised opposition to US policy in the Middle East; because a not-insignificant number of Europeans believe that anything the US does is bad; and yes, because some of them thought the war would come to a bad end. But given how these reasons overlapped, how were we supposed to pick out the last reason as the one that everyone was "voting" on? It's not as if American foriegn policy can be decided based on the fact that French people would rather that the US was less powerful.

The other question is how these Condorcet votes get allocated. The populations of Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia are not, collectively, that much bigger than the population of the US. "One country, one vote" is why the UN doesn't, essentially, work; the gap between statutory and actual power is too great.

More fundamentally, this is the problem that I was talking about when I said earlier that I had trouble teasing out principles by which I would have prospectively made a different decision about the Iraq war--i.e., not knowing either that Saddam had no WMD, or that Iraq was destined for civil war. It is not that no one suggested these possibilities; but the overwhelming number of arguments I heard involved things like the moral principle of preemption and the fact that we were going in without the imprimatur of the UN.

Personally, I do not think that Iraq would have gone any better if the UN had given its okay. The delusion that a UN security council vote would somehow have legitimated the invasion to Iraqis and the surrounding neighbours is bizarre. Would we accept an invasion of America because France, Britain, Russia, China, and, say, Saudi Arabia thought it was a swell idea? UN troops have proven useless at doing much except keeping the peace in areas that aren't particularly unpeaceful. And while the lack of UN support might be a signal that the war was a terrible idea, it might also be a signal of just how screwed up the UN power structure is. This is an organisation that can agree on only two things: Zionism is racism, and America should give everyone else a whole lot of money. Of course, if you agree with these statements, this may not seem loony--but surely there are some other principles in the world that one ought to be able to secure broad agreement on, like "African dictators ought not to drive their countries into starvation through insane economic policies".

Nor am I terribly sure that the problem was preemption. Would the civil war have been any better, or any more palatable to the Iraqis, had it come after, say, Iraq invaded Kuwait again?

Which brings me to something I was mulling the other day as I drove the dog to yet another vet appointment. Having now publicly proclaimed that I was wrong about the war, what should I do if the surge works? I would put the probability of this somewhere south of .01%. But what if it does? What if Iraq, against all odds, emerges from all this relatively stable and peaceful, with a fair-to-middling honest democratic government? I have reassessed my original position with the benefit of hindsight, which has pointed out some large cognitive errors I made. Should I then allow those observations to be coloured by further hindsight? Or should I try to burn them in now, so to speak?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Should I give up eating meat?

Animals in industrial farms suffer when they are killed, and possibly even more as they are kept. Accroding to FuturePundit, livestock are also a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions. Longtime readers know that I think everyone should make a serious moral committment to reducing their greenhouse footprint; this seems like an easy place to start. As a side effect, meat is more expensive than substitutes.

Possible counterarguments:

1) Being a vegetarian tends to make me lose weight. This makes my mother cry.
2) Milk cows and chickens kept for eggs also emit greenhouse gasses, and are arguably treated worse than animals kept for meat. Yet there is not a chance in hell that I will become a vegan.
3) One must weigh the utility of the livestock that will never be born and raised in the equation.
4) Vegetarians annoy the hell out of those who dine with them.
5) Meat is really, really tasty

Would readers like to offer me more excuses?

Not accepted: that it won't make an actual difference in global warming. Refraining from stealing won't lower the crime rate appreciably, either; nor does my refusal to illegally download MP3's actually influence outcomes in the music market. If something is morally right, one is obligated to do it even if it makes no difference to macro outcomes.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The post below also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves. My take is a little subtler than that:

1) People are often stupid
2) Bureaucrats are the same stupid people, with bad incentives.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Tyler Cowen points out that Medicare was twenty years behind private industry in covering prescription drugs. Ezra responds that that's just because the insurers and drug companies wanted it that way. Which brings up one of my perennial peeves about people advocating national health insurance or any other big programme: they point out all the ways in which public choice problems make the current system suck, and then proceed to outline their future plans as if those problems will somehow magically fall away in their system. Companies won't lobby. Voters won't demand that every stupid alternative procedure they can complain about be covered, much less react to the lack of a price signal by using more of everything. People employed in that sector won't band together to keep wages high and productivity as low as possible. Bureaucrats won't shift priorities to minimizing their own political risk, rather than maximizing the level of service provided to the public. Because it's not as if those things have happened with every single other government programme ever proposed, so why on earth would we suspect they might happen in this case?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Rachel Ray is everywhere

I'm sitting in a Borders doing a little work before I go to dinner, and next to me is a display of Rachel Ray cookbooks.

Ten of them.

She's appalling enough on television, but at least I can change the channel. Now she's invaded the bookstores. Soon I expect to see that dreadful rictus grin flashing out of car windows and following me down the street as I do my marketing.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Things that make you go hmmm . . .

Apparently, blind people want hybrid cars made noisier, so they're easier for the visually impaired to hear coming. Hybrid makers are resisting this. I was expecting an interesting article on how society should weigh the interests of the blind in noisier cars, against the interests of the rest of us in less noise pollution.

Then I saw this quote:

So far, advocacy groups' pleas for louder hybrids have failed to generate much noise in automotive circles. A spokesman for the Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers, an industry group, says he wasn't aware of the issue. "We're interested in hearing about the concerns of the blind community, and we'll work with them to ensure that they're addressed," says alliance spokesman Charles Territo.

Sev MacPete, founder of the Toyota Prius Club of San Diego, dismisses the idea that hybrids pose a safety threat. He says blind pedestrians are easy to spot because they usually have a special white cane with red tip. "And if you could say anything about hybrid drivers, they are more aware of their surroundings than other drivers," Mr. MacPete says.

I'll be more careful on the streets now that I know that those discriminating hybrid owners apparently think it's fine to drive straight at pedestrians without canes . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Red Alert

If you are in the market for a food processor in the next couple of hours, go to QVC and purchase the Kitchenaid 700 watt 12 cup with the accessories, which is currently being sold for $207. This is an oustanding price for that food processor, which is worth every penny and then some. If you're strapped for cash, you can apparently buy it on 3 payments of $69, which is weirdly, interest free financing.

Anyway, that's the food processor I have, for which I paid more, and with which I simply couldn't be happier. It's a giant monster with three work bowls, and is an integral part of my plan to crush Spencer Ackerman like a bug in our upcoming cookoff. If you're in the market, snap it up.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Daniel Drezner says he's lonely because the Pew Centre pegs him as an enterpriser, a group which consists of him and some dorky guy who owns an air-conditioning repair guy in Dubuque. Me, I just feel like an idiot: I'm an upbeat.

Upbeats express positive views about the economy, government and society. Satisfied with their own financial situation and the direction the nation is heading, these voters support George W. Bush’s leadership in economic matters more than on social or foreign policy issues. Combining highly favorable views of government with equally positive views of business and the marketplace, Upbeats believe that success is in people’s own hands, and that businesses make a positive contribution to society. This group also has a very favorable view of immigrants.

Defining Values
Very favorable views of government performance and responsiveness defines the group, along with similarly positive outlook on the role of business in society. While most support the war in Iraq, Upbeats have mixed views on foreign policy – but most favor preemptive military action against countries that threaten the U.S. Religious, but decidedly moderate in views about social and cultural issues.

If I've recently expressed positive views about the government, I apologize. The doc and I are still tweaking my meds.

I'll join the chorus of complaints about the questions: what if I believe neither that "Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return" nor that "Poor people have hard lives because government benefits don't go far enough to help them live decently"? I can pick the answer which I know it's fishing for--we don't need to increase government benefits--but I sound like I actually believe that the poor are leading soft lives of luxury down there at Cabrini Green. Also, I had to peg myself as a "moderate", when what I needed was a slot that said "My extreme views on most issues make both conservatives and liberals want to throw things. At me."

From the desk of Jane Galt:

One of the areas of foreign policy in which I do not think that George Bush has made anything appreciably worse is North Korea. Of course, this is because it doesn't actually get much worse than Crazed Dictator Worshipped As God By Millions of Starving Citizens, Who Has a Nuclear Weapons Programme. So it's not as if this actually redounds to Mr Bush's credit.

What puzzles me, actually, is the many people I know who purport to believe that Mr Bush has somehow egregiously fouled things up, here. Serious, intelligent people who I know believe this. Usually, they blame him for not sitting down to bilateral talks with North Korea. I find it impossible to grasp what this is supposed to accomplish. North Korea wants nukes so that its neighbours will be all scared of it. It wants to scare the neighbours so badly, in fact, that it diverts resources into a huge and unwieldy military machine even when food is so scarce that parts of the population are apparently forced to eat barely edible things, like each other. How is sitting around a table and talking earnestly to them supposed to assuage this desire?

It seems glaringly obvious to me that unless we invade North Korea or Iran, these countries will continue their quest to stockpile a little doomsday. It also seems glaringly obvious to me that we're not going to invade. (Note: this is a prediction you can embarass me with for years during the Iranian War.)

So what do we get out of the negotiations, other than a way for earnest people who believe in diplomacy to get the same emotionally loaded, adrenalin-soaked thrill that the rest of us got out of being on the Prom Committee? Sure, it looks like we're doing something, at least until it turns out that surprise! they kept their nuclear programme after all. I suppose that's worth some votes, so I understand what the politicians get out of it. But what I don't understand is why there are so many people around me, not connected with the government, who profess to believe that this agreement with North Korea is some sort of breakthrough, or that jawing with Iran will do much besides make our jaws tired.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

You know what I hate about Aaron Haspel? I mean, aside from the fact that in Texas Hold 'Em, he always makes me pay to see the flop? I hate the fact that he doesn't write enough. Use this space to mercilessly ridicule him until he is driven back to blogging from sheer shame. I mean, really, Aaron . . . last full post in early January?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Open Thread: Favourite Poem

Last night I was reminded of Howl, which I loved in college and hadn't read for years:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene- ment roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

It's worn well, very well, especially considering my general fixation on nihilist schlock at the time. Allen Ginsberg was an actual genius, I now remember.

This is not my favourite poem; probably that would be Musee des Beaux Artes, by Auden:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

or else Ode to Melancholy, by Keats:

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty - Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

. . . which was the first poem I ever loved. But I was so charmed by the poems offered in response to my posting of W.B. Yeats "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven" (Winner of the prestigious Jane Award for Love Poetry in Blank Verse") that I thought I'd ask you: what's your favourite poem?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Oh, gosh. A few emails indicate that the impression I gave with the last post is that I am sitting at home in front of the Lifetime Network, breaking into the cooking sherry and the Mallowmars while mourning my lost loves. I am not sad about Valentine's Day. Not mourning lost loves. And I hate Mallowmars. If you want to feel sorry for me, thinking of me trying to say something brilliant and original about Ben Bernanke's testimony today.

However, I think you should know that Valentine's Day apparently abets child slavery, as one reader thoughtfully pointed out.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I've never had a great Valentine's Day. Those of you in the audience who have dated me may be sitting up right now in a startled fashion, but I don't mean that you failed me, darlings. It's just that the whole thing has a certain kabuki aspect. I knew you were going to buy me an overpriced dinner and flowers, just like every other couple in the country, because the failure to do so would somehow mean we don't care. Indeed, no matter what was done, up to and including amazing proposals involving rose petals and a skywriter, it would have had a somewhat scripted feel. Maybe that's why the best Valentine's Day I ever had was the one where my date was two hours late, so we missed our dinner reservation and spent two hours wandering around a very cold Manhattan looking for somewhere to eat, finally landing in an out-of-the-way French place in the Theater District named, I kid you not, "Pierre au Tunnel".

I had a lot of fine Valentine's Days . . . adequate Valentine's Days . . . nice Valentine's Days . . . but never a great Valentine's Day. The great days were the ones where there was some spontaneous overflowing of romantic emotion, not mandated by the calendar or anything else. In fact, as far as I can tell, almost no couple ever has a really romantic Valentine's Day. We didn't fail Valentine's Day, darlings . . . Valentine's Day landed on us.

So today I got an email from Zipcar, ordering me to broaden this whole looooooove thing. Give a friend a ride from work, tell someone you care, that sort of thing. Well, I'm working from home today, and all my friends are being lamely not on IM, like they have jobs or something. So I'm telling you guys. Thanks for reading me. I heart you all.

Have a great Valentine's Day.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A couple of things for your perusal:

Henry Farrell and I go head to head on Bloggingheads.tv. Conclusion: I look funny. And can't stop playing with my hair.

Over at Free Exchange, we've got a post on the cost of Valentine's Day. Basically: everything you're expected to buy (like roses) spikes in price, so if you can persuade your sweetheart, you should look for substitutes.

One absolutely free poem with which to impress your sweetheart:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

-- Yeats

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Anecdotal evidence for child marriage in America

From one of my old favourites, By the Shores of Silver Lake, a sequel to Little House on the Prairie:

In no time at all, they reached the homesteader's claim shanty.

It was a tiny room, boarded up-and-down, and its roof sloped all one way, so that it looked like half of a little house. It was not as big as the wheat stacks beside it, where men were threshing wheat with a noisy, chaff-puffing machine. The homesteader's wife came out to the buggy, lugging the basket of washing. Her face and arms and her bare feet were as brown as leather from teh sun. Her hair straggled uncombed and her limp dress was faded and not clean.

"You must excuse the way I look," she said. "My girl was married yesterday, and here come the threshers this morning, and this wash to do. I been hustling since before sun-up, and here's the day's work hardly started and my girl not here any more to help me."

"Do you mean Lizzie got married?" Lena asked.

"Yes, Lizzie got married yesterday," Lizzie's mother said proudly. "Her pa says thirteen's pretty young, but she's got her a good man and I say it's better to settle down young. I was married young myself."

Her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, wrote a book called Old Home Town, based on her experiences growing up in Missouri in the late 19th century. In it she similarly describes several girls married before the age of sixteen, in one case to a much older man.

From Christy, a similarly lightly fictionalised account of a woman's real experiences as a teacher in Appalachia at the turn of the 20th century:

I was wishing that I felt easier about Ruby Mae's decision, made while I was in Asheville, to marry Will Beck. She was still not quite fifteen, Will only sixteen. From the plateau of amy almost twenty years, it seemed to me that these child marriages were no good, that the girls caught in them never had a chance. They were worn out with having babies and drudgery by their middle twenties; usually they were grandmothers by their early thirties. And since they were rushing at the pretense of being grown up when they were scarecely out of childhood, they could bring so little to marriage. As Granny Barclay had once commented, "Green apples don't have much flavor."

Then too, all of us at the mission had hoped that Ruby Mae would get more schooling. Since my first visit with her parents, we had succeeded in bringing about a reconciliation between the girl and her stepfather. But that had turned out to be a mixed blessing because about a month before school was out, Ruby Mae had gone back home to live. There during the summer she had more freedom for Will's courting. All too easily she had fallen back into mountain patterns where it was the accepted custom for a girl to get married when she should still be skipping around, climbing trees, catching lightning bugs, pumping high in a homemade swing, and playing elves and fairies in a cool glen.

Apparently it was still acceptable fifty years later; Loretta Lynn married a local bootlegger at the age of thirteen.

In Gone With the Wind, based on the experiences of Margaret Mitchell's grandmother, the average age of marriage of the female characters is something slightly under sixteen. Oh, and "the Wilkeses always marry their cousins".

Child marriage may not have been the norm in America in the 19th century, but it clearly wasn't too rare, because it's featured in some of the most popular historical novels based on real experiences. And I don't know how common it is in Islamic countries, either. Even if it's common in Muslim Europe--and I don't know that this is the case--this may be because parents are pushing their children into early marriages to protect them from the surrounding culture, not because this is the usual course of events back home. Do we really have good statistics on the average age of first marriage in Pakistani villages?

I am under the impression that in many western places, average age of first marriage has more to do with poverty and the supply of land than culture; it's primitive birth control. In Ireland, it rose sharply with the abolition of primogeniture, and fell again after the Famine, when the ratio of mouths to acres decreased.

Certainly marital rape was enthusiastically endorsed until pretty recently, and the tradition of forcing an unwilling bride, then holding up the bloody sheet as proof of virginity, seems at least as well anecdotally supported in the West as it is in the Middle East.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I confess, I didn't really care for Bruce Bawer's book, While Europe Slept. It took an interesting question ("How should a liberal society react when people with illiberal bedrock beliefs begin assembling political power"?) and turned it into a jeremiad against Islam. He doesn't really grapple with the deep question, and such answers as he hints at--abridge their freedom of speech, kick them out, or forcibly reeducate them--tend to make him sound less interested in preserving the liberal order than in staging "Muslims v. gays: celebrity death match". I certainly agree with his point that Europe should change its welfare and other policies to make it difficult to resist assimilation, but I find him troublingly close to saying that Europe should change its criminal law in order to make it impossible to do so.

Nonetheless, I mostly enjoyed his whomping of Dinesh D'souza, who by now is surely old enough to know better. But this caught my eye:

D’Souza (who says he is Catholic) invites us to “imagine how American culture looks and feels to someone who has been raised in a traditional society… where homosexuality is taboo and against the law…. One can only imagine the Muslim reaction to televised scenes of homosexual men exchanging marriage vows in San Francisco and Boston.” Let it be recalled that D’Souza is referring here to a “traditional society” in which girls of 13 or 14 are routinely forced to marry their cousins, and in which the groom, if his conjugal attentions are resisted on the wedding night, is encouraged by his new in-laws to take his bride by force.

This describes, of course, every Western society too, up until 100-200 years ago. So why are we different now? Economic change? Technological change (notably birth control)? Something else? Talk amongst yourselves . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Ezra hits one of my buttons:

The crime this man committed for us to throw him into a jail where we know he'll be brutally assaulted, raped, and possibly contract a terminal immune system disease? Drinking and driving.

We spend a fair amount of time talking about detainee treatment and Guantanamo. But there is no greater, or more common, human rights abuses in America than those occurring in our overcrowded, constantly expanding, jails.

I can't improve on what I wrote about this before, so I'll just recycle:

I do not believe the state is morally allowed to do that which individuals are not morally allowed to do; I do not believe that prison sentences should have "off label" uses; and I think that if you are willing for the state to impose a sentence in your name, you should be willing to carry it out. I am not willing to execute a prisoner, or to rape one. Therefore, I don't authorise the state to do things for me. Nor do I want those tasks delegated to some fiendish thug in order to give myself plausible moral deniability.

If you do think that rape is an appropriate punishment for securities law violations, then you should say so. You should pressure your representatives to write these penalties into law. And when volunteers are needed to carry out the sentence, you should be willing to put your name in the hat.

And how, how, my heart cries, can people who profess to be shocked and disgusted by the Bush administration's endorsement of waterboarding suspected terrorists, suddenly enamoured of rape and crippling beatings when the victims are disgraced CEO's?

That was written about the people who were having fun trading sneering jokes about Jeff Skilling getting sodomized in prison. But I'll expand it further: I do not think that there is any crime for which the appropriate punishment is rape.

I'm a pretty patriotic type. Yet when I think about how many of my fellow citizens apparently (to judge from the jokes--and the indifference) think that having someone sexually brutalised is a valid response to crime, I feel a sick shame.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Yet another reason to be against the death penalty

The state screws that up, too.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

You know what's really fun?

Going to see jazz with an economist who harshes on the alto saxophonist for not grasping spontaneous order.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Good question

Scott Adams asks:

Have you ever wondered why great musicians can’t keep cranking out hits every year? Consider Neal Diamond, for example. He wrote and recorded some of the greatest songs ever. But then the hits stopped coming, despite the fact that his talent probably improved with experience.

He’s not alone. That’s the normal pattern. Most musicians have their time, and then it’s over. How do you explain it?

Lots of great artists such as the Rolling Stones continue to draw huge crowds. But they don’t produce number one hits anymore. And the most popular songs in their concerts are the hits from the past. Do the Rolling Stones have less talent than they did when they were in their twenties? It seems unlikely.

Leaving aside the Neal Diamond thing, it's a good point. It's also true of physicists, mathemeticians, many novelists, and most poets. Call it the "lump of creativity" problem. That's why I'm holding off writing my great novel until at least my fifties.

Here's the less interesting musical question I was pondering last night: on their third album, how come Hem put all the songs that suck at the beginning? I almost stopped listening by song four, which would have been a mistake.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Huh?

Brad DeLong goes postal on Mike Allen over . . . Barack Obama's name:

Two minutes of Googling would have told Mike Allen that "barack" is both a Swahili word meaning "blessed by God" and an Arabic word meaning "blessed." There's been lots of trade between Swahili-speaking East Africa and the Arabic-speaking Middle East for millennia. That "barack" is a word in both languages is part of the same process by which the largest Swahili-speaking port in the world has a pure Arabic name--Dar es Salaam, meaning "House of Peace."

But Allen doesn't tell his readers any of this, does he?

And this "exotic, multicultural name" business... "Barack" is so exotic and multicultural that five million Americans are supposed to say it at sundown every Friday night... the same word b•r•k in a Hebrew rather than an Arabic accent: "baruch"

Admittedly the piece he links isn't particularly stunning, but is he serious in suggesting that "Barack" is not, in America, an exotic and multicultural name? I'm under the impression that "Aoife" "Ingemar" and "Achikam" constitute exotic and multicultural names, even though there are many more Americans of Irish, Swedish, and Jewish descent than there are whose parents spoke Arabic or hailed from Kenya. All you need for an exotic, multicultural name is one that is common in some other country, but not in America. Heck, "Nigel" might qualify.

It's too early in the season for this. People are going to write fatuous columns pointing out potential weaknesses in potential candidates, even silly, column-stretching ones. If we all get upset about this sort of thing now, how will we have any energy left to rip each other's throats out with our bare keyboards in November 2008?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Comment of the week

From fishbane:

I think you're suffering from the "lump of vitriol" fallacy. The amount of vitriol is not a fixed quantity - in fact, any surplus that goes unused is wasted.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Wow

There really is a fine line between genius and insanity.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Funniest thing I've read all week

Via Ross, this profile of Jeffrey Hart, apparently a conservative former professor of English from Dartmouth:

“Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism,” Hart explains. “Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative. My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar's on the rocks, or both."

I suppose if you're going to drink Dewars, the only decent thing to do is numb your tastebuds with a lot of ice . . .

From the desk of Jane Galt:

So I gather that we now all have to weigh in on The Marcotte Affair. Ross Douthat thinks this stuff really does matter, a point he makes with rather terrifying eloquence:

. . . in the bureaucratic details of what gets funded and how, which regulations get written and which ones don't, and so forth, each side's extremists get to have their day in the sun. So while Amanda Marcotte isn't going to be running the Department of Health and Human Services, there's still a real sense in which every Presidential election offer a choice between empowering the Marcottes of the world and empowering, say, people who think that Michelle Malkin is the voice of sweet reason on detainee policy. It's a choice between Joycelyn Elders and David Hager, if you will. Liberals have become very good at calling attention to this reality, and turnabout is only fair play.

Nonetheless, I'm afraid that I, like Julian, will be much happier not living in a world in which every stupid thing one ever said on one's blog generates pseudooutrage from political opponents trying to cleanse the marketplace of ideas, preferably by getting one fired and evicted. And I have been mulling Ampersand's thoughts on the matter:

What the right is doing here is attempting to shift the Overton Window of Political Possibilities. The “window” is the space of acceptable ideas for political discourse. So, for instance, right now being either pro-choice or pro-life falls inside the window; it is mainstream and acceptable to hold either view. But being (say) pro-Nazi falls outside that window; being pro-Nazi means that you’ll get fired from political campaigns, because your views are that far outside of the window of accepted political views.

Should criticizing (and even making fun of) the political positions of the Catholic church, the Pope, and the conservative Christian movement be “within the window” of acceptable views? Or should criticizing the Pope — even on perfectly true grounds, such as pointing out that he supports pro-life and anti-gay policies — be outside the window of what it’s politically acceptable to say and to criticize?

I think this captures the essence of the argument, although I'm not sure that Amp is right about this being an attempt to shift it; my admittedly limited knowlege of Non-Coastal-Elite-America indicates that in most of the country, slagging off the Pope, or indeed making fun of religion qua religion, is mostly verboten.

This collided with Ross's followup post in my mind to open up the question: to what extent is it reasonable to object to peoples' beliefs simply because they have some component of religious motivation?

In practice, of course, almost everyone only actually objects to religiously motivated beliefs they disagree with; the civil rights movement, and the abolitionists, are well regarded by everyone even though they were sustained by religious beliefs that most modern liberals and libertarians would find frankly nuts (and no, my little chickadees, I do not buy the argument that they were involved with churches simply as a matter of convenience. Listen to Martin Luther King's speeches and then come back and tell me he was not a religious nut on a crusade. Or just savour the Battle Hymn of the Republic, showcasing the abolitionist revenge fantasies of radical reformer Julia Ward Howe.)

But accepting that a little bit of hypocrisy is the price of building a political system out of human beings, is it reasonable for atheist/agnostic types to add an extra special layer of dislike to ideas that are held for religious reasons? People hold ideas for all sorts of reasons that are not, to me, obviously more attractive than plucking them out of the sacred book that has guided your culture for several thousand years. The basic theorems of your religion have at least stood the test of time, unlike Angelina Jolie's oeuvre. Sure, maybe God doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean His pronouncements must be stupider than Alec Baldwin's, or your college roommate with delusions of Derrida.

Given how weirdly secular peoples' beliefs cluster, it's hard to reject the beliefs of, say, southern evangelicals just because they come wrapped up in a package along with belief in burning bushes, virgin births and resurrection of the dead. You could say that the beliefs of devout Christians are some sort of uniquely bad cluster, but that just begs the question, bringing us back to the fact that you disagree with them, rather than the fact that they are religious.

More convincing would be an argument that religious ideas are somehow uniquely impervious to reason. Is this true? From the fact that I almost never change anyone's mind (and nor does any other pundit I can identify) on any contentious issue, I infer that almost all beliefs are impervious to reason, religious or not. How much less rational could religious people be than my average neighbour on the Upper West Side?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Just one thing

So as a result of your holiday generosity, I have a little money to play with on Amazon. And the most pressing current need is the rehabilitation of my music collection, which was tragically destroyed during the move between grad school and New York.

The question of the evening, then, is: if you could put just one album in my music collection, what would it be? Any album, any genre . . . okay, not R&B. Or polka music. But anything else. What should I be listening to?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Economist breaks new ground

The Economist is trying an experiment that I think breaks new ground on the web: we're putting all the Letters to the Editor we get, except those that, say, advocate for the Fourth Reich, on a blog as they come in. I think you'll be surprised at how interesting it is, and the letters are sparking a lively debate among readers. I mean, on what other blog is the top debate over the map of Macedonia?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Point and click

Henry Farrell posts a nice little quotation:

No one in his right mind would choose to study and write about tax expenditures (better known as tax loopholes) knowing in advance that it entailed a ten year commitment. Investigating the ins and outs of the byzantine U.S. tax code is simply not its own reward, which is why many people pay lawyers and accountants good money to do it for them. If someone were going to study tax expenditures for longer than a day or two, he or she would need to come upon the topic by accident. Over time, that someone might develop a curious affection for tax expenditures, much as one does for a stray dog or cat that keeps hanging around the house. Even then, one would have to remind oneself constantly that studying tax expenditures was not the ultimate goal, but a means of saying something interesting about a larger issue, like U.S. social policy. At least that has been my experience.

I feel just the same way about bankruptcy.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Sob

Today I did something I don't usually do--I bought a real, live newspaper to read on the train. There is one nice thing about a newspaper: you skim, and things catch your eye. Which is how I learned that possibly my favourite living artist, Peter Doig, just fetched a record $10 million for his White Canoe. (Actually, the $10m went to the Saatchi gallery, which sold it. But it makes all his other work worth more.)

This is not my favourite of his paintings; though I shift around a bit on that, I generally always come back to Concrete Cabin, which is still, mercifully, in the Saatchi Gallery, where I have occasional visitation rights. But I think it is now safe to say that I will never, ever own one of his paintings. And since he hasn't even licensed decent sized reproductions, as far as I can tell, I'm stuck with postcards. And thinking up excuses why my employer should send me to London.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Diane Von Furstenburg weasels to the FT on the subject of superskinny models.

FT: You’re also a representative of your industry, and recently in particular there’s been a lot of concern about how the fashion industry has been encouraging extreme thinness among girls and also models. Do you think what they’ve done in Madrid is the right thing to do?

Von Furstenberg: I think that to raise that issue, I think it was the best thing. I think it’s great. I think that to raise the issue and to talk about it is great.

The idea of a model should be a little bit deglamourised, because people think being a model is so glamorous and this and that.

So I think that’s great, I think that just the fact that it was raised has allowed people to talk about it in schools, and around dining room tables, because eating disorders is a very serious disease. It is not a disease that can be…

The fashion world is not responsible for that disease, it’s much deeper than that. But because we are in the world of image, and image-making, and we do have models, I think it’s very important that we are sensitive to that. And just by being sensitive to that, and just the fact that the press talks about it now, I think it’s great.

I think the press is also very responsible for having glamourised the models: “Be like a model,” “Be thin like a model,” you know, all the diets and …

But I think hopefully with all that has happened, the pendulum will go the other way.

FT: And what about the Madrid idea of having actual rules for models?

Von Furstenberg: I think that we shouldn’t use models under 16. There are things that should be done.

But it’s all about the body and the morphology. Usually the very successful models are the girls who when they were teenagers were the odd people at school, they said: “Who is that? She’s so tall.” Usually it’s got to do with length more than it has to do with weight.

So I think that it’s very important that the agents know that they should have… that if somebody’s not healthy, they should try to get a certificate from a doctor. Things like that.

I think we should promote health as beauty, for sure. Should we go put women against the wall and start measuring their body fat? Everybody is completely different, so…

Being the dedicated contrarian I am, I feel like I could mount a half-way convincing case against the current crusade for models whose weights are closer to those attainable by average women.

For one thing, anorexia is a terrible disease, but its full-blown form isn't actually all that common. Very, very few women die of it, or its more disgusting cousin, bulimia. And while many women--including, I freely admit, me--flirt with eating disorders in high school and/or college, most of them, including, again, me, grow out of it naturally. Girls in high school and college are emotional train wrecks; if they weren't starving themselves, they'd probably be doing something else equally stupid and dangerous, like . . . oh, I don't know, drinking enough alcohol to kill a moderately-sized pony. As I recall, at one point in high school I was subsisting on a daily diet of one apple (granny smith), a corn muffin, and a bowl of Special K. Sure, I ate the cereal with whole milk, and it was a large muffin, but that can't have been too many calories. And yet despite the occasional tendency to forget to eat when I am busy or upset, I am today a robust creature without noticeable side effects from my juvenile idiocy.

But even if you think that eating disorders are a HUGE problem, it doesn't follow that they're the fault of the fashion industry. Am I doomed to die of a drug overdose just because some of my favourite musicians did?

Yes, the fashion industry and Hollywood portray women who are something like 4&sigma events on the weight distribution. But that's true on a number of different metrics. I don't see very many women on the street with the beauty of, say, a young Elizabeth Taylor. Women in movies have unattainably good hair, personalities, and fashion sense. Why pick on weight, particularly?

Well, because seeking great hair and witty repartee doesn't endanger your health, of course. But that at least would be an argument I'd listen to; if they said "Government, butt out!", it's even an argument I'd buy. Instead, though, the fashion industry's response has been, well, completely fricking repulsive. The one thing that shines through it all is that they don't really care all that much if their choices about body types endanger the models, or for that matter, every single woman in the world.

The weird lies certainly aren't endearing: "Models just look like that naturally!" Some of them do; I have known veritable stick figures who were regarded with something akin to horror by the owners of all-you-can-eat barbeque joints. But at least a plurality of the models I have known live in a state of more or less permanent deprivation. Like Hollywood actresses, they also tend to get thinner as they age, which is not the normal course of events for people who do not have cancer. I also saw some guy on the news claiming that it's just because they're tall. There's a tiny little bit of truth to this--tall women tend to look thinner, because things don't all scale up the same way. (When you read my vital statistics on paper, I sound like a more statuesque Marylin Monroe; my waist is like 11 inches smaller than my hips and bust.) But stating that fashion models look that way because they're tall is ludicrous. Their body-fat percentages are clearly well below 10%, which is not an effect of being tall; it's an effect of having a hyper metabolism, or of starving yourself.

Even weirder are the nasty attacks on the models. "Girls shouldn't glamourise the models--they're walking hangers." No, no, the fashion industry has nothing to do with glamour; it's just like making corrugated paper, but with softer materials, so why on earth would these daft teenagers glamourise it, or want to look like the people that they send down the runway wearing the clothes? "The message I am sending with this show is not 'this is how my fabulous clothes should look'; it's 'these girls should be hung up in a dark space where no one can see them, along with the shoe rack and the winter sweaters' ". Watching people lie like this is embarassing, like when everyone pretends that Granny hasn't been at the scotch even though the empty bottle's right there next to her chair and she's demanding that the grandchildren join her in a Lindy Hop contest.

That's not, of course, a call for government action. But it would be nice if the fashion industry acted as if they cared enough about the persistent and growing tendency to confuse their self worth with various the lumps of animal and vegetable matter they consume to at least consider changing the way they do business. Hell, it would be nice if they acted as if they cared enough about their customers to at least make some effort to lie convincingly.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

And has thou slain the jabberwock?

Too soon to declare a frabjous day, but the dog is out of surgery to remove his tumour, and the surgeon declares it went as well as it possibly could have. They took off his dew claw to give them enough skin to close the wound, but I doubt he'll miss it. Now to deal with a dog-with-conehead, and wait a week for the pathology report to tell me just how cancerous the thing is.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

'Splain me, please

I'm not sure I understand the objections to mandatory vaccination for HPV.

Vaccination does its best work through herd immunity--which is to say, denying the virus a sufficient number of people to make a disease reservoir. That's why socially irresponsible dimwits in America can now excercise their beautiful freedom of choice not to vaccinate their children . . . because they're free riding on everyone else's willingness to bear the very rare side effects. I promise you that if it weren't for herd immunity, those parents would be a hell of a lot more worried about actual polio than the vaccination for it. Call me a bad libertarian, but public health campaigns like these seem to me to be one of the few cases where government coercion is a slam dunk--much better than, say, income taxes or speed limits.

HPV is a nasty virus that is imperfectly blocked by condoms, incurable, and causes an appalling cancer that kills many women and renders others infertile. The vaccine is, to be sure, expensive. But as public spending goes, the possibility of eliminating an awful disease seems a pretty good use of $140.

As for why do it in school--what better time? We're already sticking the little darlings for everything from measles to chicken pox; they'll hardly notice one more needle. Plus if we wait until the virus is a bigger threat, we'll miss kids who become sexually active early--and are probably at greater risk than the general population--and also get tangled in the understandably mixed emotions parents tend to have when their sons and daughters start developing sexually. As a public policy measure, I should say it was far better to do it when those sorts of questions are entirely academic.

So why should I be against this?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Note to self

There are worse problems than being too tall for normal clothing manufacturers.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Ezra Klein has a question

So in a fit of culinary inspiration triggered by Bill Buford's Heat, I decided to give up my cheap non-stick saute pans for some serious, stainless steel cookware. Those were heady, exciting days, imagining the blisteringly quick convection of heat, the perfectly browned food, and the end of carcinogenic teflon flakes. They have not come to pass.

It's important to know that I primarily cook tofu, frying it in a tablespoon or two of olive oil till it develops a bit of delicious crust. My expectation was I'd be able to do this on slightly lower heat with the new pans, retaining more moisture in the soy itself. That's, uh, not happened. Instead, the steel cookware simply tears off the crisping, outer layer of the tofu, resulting in a dirty pan and soft, white cubes, rather than the beautifully browned chunks I'd been anticipating. I've tried superheating the oil, but that just makes the whole contraption catch on fire, albeit only for a moment or so (on the other hand, this seems to happen often in restaurants, so maybe it's to be expected)?

What am I doing wrong? How can I brown my tofu in my good pans, or is soy too wimpy and delicate for real cookware? And if so, what's the actual benefit of steel cookware? Better chefs than I seem to favor it, but why?

One of the things most people don't realize is that the primary concern of restaurant kitchens is not some magical qualities of the pans, but cheapness and durability. Really good home quality pans are better than what is used in a restaurant kitchen; chefs can't afford to pay that kind of money for a pan that will take so much abuse. One of the reasons that chefs hate nonstick is that it won't take any rough handling.

That said, I also hate nonstick, because it won't brown or sear properly. I have exactly one nonstick pan, used for cooking eggs, and the dog's dinner. The advantage of stainless is that it will take the highest heat and the most handling, and unlike copper, won't poison you. The disadvantage is that it is the stickiest of the major pot-making materials, which is good for developing something called a fond on your meat, but bad for cooking delicate foods like tofu. Also, it conducts heat too well, so it needs something a little less temperamental, like copper or aluminum, sandwiched between the heat and the cooking surface. Luckily, Ezra seems to have bought some tri-ply pans with an aluminum disc inside.

Personally, I mostly use anodized aluminum. But I'm decent on the stainless, and I like me some good fried tofu. So here's my technique, for what it's worth:

1) Use at least firm tofu. I'm an extra firm girl myself. Silken tofu sure is silky . . . in my smoothies. Not so much good for cooking, unless you want to get into deep frying, in which case you can make a kind of soy-based mozarella stick that isn't bad.

2) Use a lot of oil. One tablespoon is inadequate. Start with four and work it down. Peanut oil is my preferred poison here; it will go to a higher heat without smoking.

3) Use a brush or a paper towel to distribute the oil evenly over the pan. Get a thin layer on the sides.

4) Use high heat. And by high, I mean "turn the dial as far as it will go". Heat the oil thoroughly. A tiny bit of smoke coming off of it is all right.

5) Cube the tofu and drop it into the oil all at once.

6) Keep it moving. Let it rest for fifteen seconds, and then whee! away we go again.

7) Cook it fast. This shouldn't take more than two minutes. I usually stir-fry some vegetables first, for three minutes, drop in the tofu for two, put in a little stir fry sauce to heat through for thirty seconds, and then serve. But I also like it plain, with a sesame-soy-ginger dipping sauce.

Ezra's commenters saying "Stainless steel pans suck, use a wok", are, to put it bluntly, on better drugs than I ever seem to get. As far as I know, real woks are made out of . . . that's right, stainless steel. They're designed, however, to be stuck in a round hole in the oven top, so that the whole surface is bathed in gas flames. On a western stove, which is flat, they're inferior to a decent saute pan.

Any further required explanations will be provided at pub trivia tonight.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Five things you don't know about me

Yes, I know, I've been sitting on this meme for about six months. Here goes:

1) When I was in high school, I made up my own alphabet. This was a very silly enterprise, really, since the one I already had was working perfectly well. It did contract a few letters, which made it slightly faster to write, but this effect was more than counteracted by the fact that I hadn't been practicing it for ten years or so. I do now find it useful for taking notes I don't want people to read . . . but only people looking over my shoulder, as I imagine the code would take about ten minutes for anyone of rudimentary intelligence to crack. And when I use it, I have to answer embarrassing questions about what language I am writing in. I alternate between telling people "Urdu", "Hebrew" and "Shorthand", depending on which they seem the least likely to recognize.

2) I have a very small extra eyebrow. It is, if you look at it, easily visually distinguishable as an eyebrow, and also as not a part of one of my other eyebrows. A friend once, upon noticing it, made up a hilarious (to everyone else) impromptu skit based on my being the third alien in this Twilight Zone episode.

3) When I was in college, and still believed that I had a great future as a radical writer, I read the complete works of Karl Marx, picked up from a used bookstore for $12.95 plus tax. As I recall, it seemed to be some sort of book club set from the forties (did Communist's have book clubs?), made with cheap paper and bound in some sort of horrible mustard yellow ersatz leather. The end result of all of this was some very bad diary entries, an enormous boost in sales at the coffee shop where I sat reading them (also, I believe, at the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company), and the fact that I still smell crumbling paper and stale coffee every time I hear or read these words:

There is a spectre haunting Europe . . .

4) I once appeared on A Current Affair as part of a "dramatic re-enactment". I was the devil-worshipper with the bright pink Tretorns peeking out beneath her robe.

5) I received a handwritten rejection note for a short story from the New Yorker, urging me to send in more of my work.

That was the last short story I ever wrote.

I'd tag someone with the meme, but I think everyone's already seen it. So I'm tagging my readers. What don't people know about you?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Odd moment of self-recognition

As I've mentioned before, I do not attach a high probability to the existence of God. Even less do I believe that an omniscient, omnipotent being will change His mind because I tell Him how much I want something. I presume that, along with everything else, He already knows my desires. If He exists, that is.

So why was I praying "Please, please please let him be all right" as I waited on the phone for Finnegan's results? With Whom was I mentally bargaining to give up some of my own health in exchange for his continued well-being? More curiously, why did I continue these imprecations after I had noticed myself doing it? Even after I had pointed out to myself that I did not, in fact, believe that they would have any effect? Enquiring minds want to know.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Worst. Day. Ever.

Fun facts about my day:

1) My dog has something called a mast cell tumour on his paw. On the one hand, it's on a limb, which gives a good prognosis. On the other hand, it ulcerated, and probably has been doing so periodically since before Christmas, which is not a good sign. On the third hand, it only ulcerates when he runs around like a maniac, which is probably not totally surprising given that it's located on his paw. On the fourth hand . . . who the hell cares. My dog has a tumour. I'm going to panic until proven otherwise. He goes in for a surgical consult on Tuesday, and has the thing taken off on Wednesday. Then maybe chemotherapy and radiation.

2) The nice laptop people called to say they can fix my machine. For $450. Time to see if the Giant is having any good specials on cat food.

3) Apparently my landlord decided to inspect my apartment in New York, along with five others, yesterday. It seems more likely than not that my lovely, cheap apartment, which I have carefully fixed up with my own two little hands, is about to become someone else's co-op.

4) I have a presentation tomorrow which I am having trouble finishing because I am biting my nails over items 1, 2 and 3.

5) Several other items not worth whining about to all you good people, but piling on to drag this day further down into the mire of despair.

I'm sure I've had worse days in my life . . . but none are coming to mind immediately. Pardon me while I sob convulsively.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Sentence of the day

From this New York Times article on selling sleep:

But the Center for the Advancement of Health, a nonprofit group in Washington that advocates using science as a basis for making health decisions, has criticized the statistic in its newsletter, saying that it is based more on extrapolation than on hard epidemiological data.

Are there non-profit groups in Washington advocating using something other than science as a basis for making health decisions*? Do the Christian Scientists have a lobby?

*Yes, yes, yes, I mean aside from abortion.