Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Narrowing Horizons with the Internet, part 2

A while back I posted a retort to Cass Sunstein's contention that using the internet somehow narrows our exposure to diverse opinions. A reader recently moved to Louisiana, Janis Gore, commented:

Dear Mr. Hofer: Here in the vast red rural wasteland of this country, people like me, who live in communities of less than 40,000, can't pop down to the local newstand and buy a variety of national newspapers and "important" magazines.

The Internet has been a tremendous boon to me for the consumption of products and news. I am a recent comer to my little town of Vidalia, LA, pop. 5,000, after stints in Dallas, Portland and New York City. I can't begin to imagine how the horizons of children in this area have expanded since the advent of the Internet.

Sunstein is a snob. I have to go to the Internet to escape filtration of news. Jeez, what a limited-use kind of soul.

This is a point I neglected to make earlier. Like Sunstein, I'm too used to having international newstands all around me, and neglected to think about those that don't. Disadvantage, MTZ.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Baby Steps Towards HTML Independance

Baby Steps Towards HTML Independance

Links work! At least, sort of! Included at the bottom, note the link to evil Princetonian Dave Tepper ;-) who tried to sneak Cornel West onto the cool green hills of Penn.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Advantage MTZ, and the Scots

Glenn Reynolds Picks up on my Falwell Award a few days ago, given to the Bishop of Winchester for his immortal words:

Would we be in this situation, if western - north American and European - electorates, all with deep Christian pedigrees, had not encouraged, supported or at least allowed our governments, over so many decades, to develop our standard of living at the expense of millions in the southern hemisphere? And if we had not sold their rulers armaments on such favourable terms, and with so little forethought? Cruelly evil though they were, I find that I have to understand the events of September 11 as a judgment upon us; and so, to understand these weeks, this Christmas, as a critical moment, an opportunity for a fresh beginning, its character caught in those words we have read: "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus."

I never miss an opportunity to quote Flanders & Swann:

The Scotsman is mean, as we're all well aware
And bony and blotchy and covered with hair
He eats salty porridge, he works all the day
And he hasn't got bishops to show him the way!

The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.

I must say, the idea that having bishops and using the tired Book of Common Prayer somehow gave us Anglicans some principles was always absurd. Isn't the Book of Common Prayer just an excuse not to put together a service yourself? Just a crutch to allow more time for "tea and cake with the vicar?" Another blow to my wobbling faith.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Decor Change For the New

Decor Change

For the New Year, I've decided to shake things up a bit. Since I'm still figuring out how to make those darn links work -- yes, I know how sad it is to see a former networking professional who can't code simple web page -- no great loss. Here goes!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

They're opening a viewing platform

They're opening a viewing platform for the site

I walked by the new viewing stand yesterday on my way back from lunch & still don't know exactly where it is. But you could sure see the lines. While the article I linked to said the wait was two hours, I heard a woman talking to the cops on patrol, and he said it was more like three and a half.

My personal advice is not to bother right now, unless you're only in town for a couple of days. Two or three hours is a long time to wait, I don't think they let you stay on the platform very long, and it's COLD here! The site pretty much looks like any construction site now, although there's a hole in the ground where you can see into the sub-basements.

The best reason to see the site is just to appreciate the vast scale of what was destroyed. You will still be able to see this in a month, when the crowds will hopefully have died down. Although I know that it would be economically devastating to downtown, and hence will not happen, I would like to see the entire area maintained as one flat green space, with perhaps a flat plaza in the middle, so that generations can see that emptiness.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

New Years Bust A number

New Years Bust

A number of articles on the web today saying that New Year's Eve will be quiet this year. Sounds right to me. Personally, I didn't even consider a loud New Years -- I'm going to dinner & a comedy club, albeit dressed to the nines. Most of my friends are taking a similar route. Whether this is because of the disaster, the recession, or the inevitable toll of aging, I can't guess.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Gray Lady and Her Sisters Before the Reformation

Iain Murray points us to this entire column on blogs United Press International: Anglosphere: The new Reformation?:

This pan-Anglosphere aspect to blogspace has permitted a much richer, closer and more critical examination of precisely who is saying what. The typical chattering class anti-Americanism of, say, the Guardian or The Nation is raked through point by point and torn to shreds within hours of publication. Persistent archiving means the foolish wrong predictions of Sept. 12 can be linked to as events prove them not only wrong, but based on such absurd premises that they appear to have been written by somebody on drugs. Blogspace is already affecting the wider media, as criticisms and corrections first made on blogs get picked up by journalists and columnists.

This writer feels much of academia and the media throughout the Anglosphere has come to resemble, in a way, the Church in Europe immediately before the Reformation. They have grown intellectually lazy, out of touch with the people they believe they exist to enlighten, and irrelevant to the needs they exist to serve. They have come to see their position, incomes and the respect of the public as entitlements due to them for their virtue, rather than earned by achievement.

The intellectual monopoly of the medieval Church was undermined by the advanced communication technology of the printing press. Printers and pamphleteers mushroomed throughout northern Europe, and the rapid and hard-to-control exchange of ideas their network enabled created the medium for new awarenesses and attitudes. Large parts of the old structure of the Church were overthrown and replaced; that which was left was greatly transformed by the Counter-Reformation.

Are these little Weblogs the harbinger of a similar reformation of the academia and media establishments of the Anglosphere? I wouldn't count it out.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Minor Notes Well, it's cold

Minor Notes

Well, it's cold as a mother-in-law's kiss here in NYC, especially down at the site, where the wind blows off the water practically unobstructed. The good news is, they've finally fixed the broken circuit in the air conditioning which was causing all the cold air in the trailer to sweep across the seat of yours truly before finally exiting the vent. So I'm only wearing one set of thermals now, and my fingers have thawed sufficiently to allow easy typing.

On a related note, the move from Chicago seems to have eaten both my winter coats, so I'm not only layered up in the trailer, but wearing a windbreaker and about six sweaters for my long walk to and from the train, with a scarf tied around my head for good measure. The kind of clothing one wears to a construction site is, in general, not the kind of clothing that screams femininity, but six layers of that clothing screams nothing short of "East German Female Bodybuilding Team". So there I was walking down the street yesterday thinking "who is that fat Russian lady walking next to me?" when I realized that that was my reflection in the glass of a shop window. When I returned to the trailer I had to strip to my bottom layer of clothes just to reassure myself that no, I hadn't put on a couple of hundred pounds without noticing. (For those who don't know me, I'm the lanky type. NOT an East German bodybuilder.) This has strengthened my resolve: precious student loan dollars must be spent to avail me of a real coat. This will also simplify the process of dressing and undressing, which sucks up about fifteen minutes per venture outside. But layering does work: I'm toasty warm in that windbreaker, thanks to the magic of air insulation and my incredible EMS thermals.

Post New Years, I'll be returning to my job search, as the work stabilizes and rumors float of 50-hour weeks. (Sniffle -- bye, bye, overtime.) Anyone who knows of prospects in the economics and corporate strategy field, is hereby openly solicited to email me. Complementary fruit basket to the person whose lead finds me a job.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

We had a little mixup

We had a little mixup at work, I think. The greeting card from one of my coworkers that used to be in this spot is being removed. But Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to all!

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

I'm Too Sexy for My Dishdasha....

The holiday season is always an opportunity to hear some strange stuff from your family, especially if your family tends to take a New York Times kind of worldview. I heard little, however, as strange as the independent admission by my mother and sister that they "find Osama bin Laden...{guilty shrug}..kind of..sexy." The roguish, Lawrence of Arabia gone bad qualities apparently hold some strange appeal, according to my psychoanalyst Mom. I guess it is a variation on the weird charisma of those who live outside the norms of polite society.

I have to admit, I thought Catwoman was pretty sexy (TV show and movie). She definitely wasn't one of the good guys, but ooh - that suit and all that purring. It never seemed so strange that women swooned over rock stars who, but for their fame, wouldn't be able to buy them a drink. My wife, I'm happy to say, has no similar feelings provoked about Osama. She does confess that Bill Clinton's sex appeal grew during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. That I can also see, grudgingly.

But if this Osamarousal, if at all typical, has to fall under the heading of "I don't understand (certain) women." How can he have any charisma through all that pedantic talk, not to mention blatant misogyny and mass-murdering tendencies? I think it is also safe to say that the olfactory aspects of Osama's charisma, untranslated by the video medium, might not work in his favor either. Yet it is true that Charles Manson and Ted Bundy have had their female admirer-groupies, long after their crimes were known.

I remember a similar conversation with my mother and sister when they both described how sexy Dracula is in nearly all the versions of the Bram Stoker story. I found that equally odd - that a man who has been "undead" for 300 years and drinks your blood could be so attractive. Many other women have confessed that one to me.

It's enough to make one think that nice guys do finish last.

For an even more bizarre attraction, examine El Al security's reaction to Richard Reid (according to spokesman Nahman Klaiman):

"Our security people were aroused and [Reid] went through a security check, which included a personal check as well as removal of his shoes, which were checked separately," Klaiman said.

OK, that's unlikely. But if this doesn't indicate an attraction, were the guards asleep?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Another Story I Don't Want

Another Story I Don't Want to Hear

Rumors are afoot that Taliban Johnny's father is gay. Cultural conservative leaning types have apparently intimated that the father's moving out to live with another man may have pushed the kid over the edge into militant Islam; more libertarian or lefty types are ignoring the story. But I think this raises an important question: who the hell cares? Cultural conservatives who want to roll back the tide of irresponsibility in our culture are now suddenly turning around and arguing that Johnny had to commit high treason (okay, maybe not legally, but still) because daddy doesn't like girls? A pre-Christmas OpinionJournal reports "Rob Morse of the San Francisco Chronicle blasts Corkery for taking "attacks on [Walker's] family to a new and disgusting level" [although, if homosexuality is a perfectly valid lifestyle, how does intimating that Dad's gay constitute an attack?]. How about blasting him because he told us something that none of us really cared to know, true or not? But then I'm biting my own tail, so I'll return to my original point: Dad could've dressed up as Annette Funicello to take Johnny to school and the kid would still be responsible for the decisions he made five or ten years later.

And on the Department of Lefty Idiocy side, here's a quote from the above story attributed to one of the men the father allegedly lived with: "I'm really shocked and upset at the stories and rumors going around. I'm afraid for the young man (John Walker, Frank Lindh's son). Is the country going to try him for treason based on rumors? The facts in this case have not come out." While it is hard to believe that anyone could actually say something this stupid, experience teaches that yes, there is a segment of our population that actually believes that Johnny Walker could be convicted of treason for the sin of having a gay father, rather than because he went to a foreign country and took up arms in support of our avowed enemies.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

A Plug for Lord of

A Plug for Lord of the Rings

Saw it on Friday. I loved it. The friend I saw it with, who does not read fantasy or science fiction and doesn't much like action films, loved it. As far as I can tell, everyone who's seen it loved it.

There are very few movies I've seen that left me with nothing critical to say. (Megan? With nothing critical to say? Can this be right?) Saving Private Ryan -- kill the speech to the grave & cut to him saying "Tell me I lived a good life", please. The English Patient -- yes I know the desert is desolate & beautiful, and war sucks. Now get the lead out. Titanic -- well, for starters, stop letting Leonardo read his lines from cue cards located somewhere over Kate Winslet's shoulder. (See? I don't have nothing critical to say.) But Lord of the Rings, while long (a feeling probably exacerbated by the fact that it was late, I was tired, and the air conditioning in the theater was set to "arctic blast") left me filled with nothing but wonder. See it.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

No Help on Social Security

This is the title of the New York Times' 12/27 editorial on Bush's Social Security Commission. It is a fitting title for the Times' coverage of the issue.

The problem is not so great that it cannot be solved with some modest changes in the benefit structure, retirement age and an infusion of revenues. But when the stock market boomed in the 1990's, many experts began beating the drums for a government-sponsored system of private investment accounts to replace Social Security. In response, President Bill Clinton proposed allowing workers to supplement but not replace Social Security with separate retirement accounts subsidized with part of the federal budget surpluses that were projected to arrive throughout the coming years.

...During the presidential campaign, Mr. Bush was always vague about whether benefits would have to be cut in order to finance his privatization plan. His commission, headed by former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Richard Parsons, the chief executive-designate of AOL Time Warner, makes at least that much clear.

Let's paraphrase: "The problem is not so great that some tax hikes and benefit cuts won't fix it. And people can save on their own, as long as its outside the existing plan. But Bush's plan involves benefit cuts." Am I missing something?

According to the Times "changes in the benefit structure" that result in less total benefits don't equal "benefit cuts." Saving outside the plan is fine as long as the current amount of social security reserves invested in special government obligations remains the same.

Here's another precious bit:

In the 1980's a Social Security commission helped lead to bipartisan steps to extend the system's solvency

Just to clarify, the 1983 amendments after the Greenspan Commission raised taxes and cut benefits. Look for yourself.

Social security macroeconomics are pretty simple (micro- is a lot more complicated). It takes money in from the workforce and either redistributes it to the currently retired or saves it up in a "reserve" for future retirees. The reserves are important because of the increasing ratios of retirees to workers (note: on linked chart "2005 should be "2025"). Three factors can improve Social Security's condition, listed here with policies that would create the desired effect:

1) Increased taxes on the working: increase the tax rate or build the tax base through payroll growth, birth rates or immigration

2) Decreased distributions to the retired: increase the retirement age, decrease payout amounts, limit eligibility....or establish a maximum age (!)

3) Increased rates of return on reserves: invest them in something with better return potential than government IOUs but less certainty, e.g. bonds and stocks

Stripped of partisan positioning, the political debate should be about how to equitably distribute the pain of the first two, and deal with the potential uncertainties of the third. According to the times, only item 1 and decreased distributions to the wealthy are "bipartisan" or "consensus building". If true, this confirms what the Times has been denying all along. Social Security is no longer a "savings and retirement plan", it's a bread & butter welfare state program for redistribution of income. How much less "lockbox" baloney would we have to endure if we just admitted that?

Why we shouldn't be looking into the relatively painless option of increasing the rate of return beats me. For some reason, the Times thinks raising taxes and cutting benefits are a no-brainer and increasing returns is off limits. Could it be because it can only happen outside the Treasury?

Also, the reason the system is now projected to bust in 2038 instead of 2017 (as predicted a decade ago) is because economic growth has increased the tax base through increased payrolls. This is the surest way to get out of this problem. The Times has neither publicly considered this fact, nor acknowledged the incredible progress made so far. It may be too pro-corporate for the Times to say so, but pro-growth policies are the best way to increase the solvency of Social Security.

Once again, we receive no help from the Times, only limited choices and partisan puffery dressed up as analysis.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm famous, sort of Penn

I'm famous, sort of

Penn classmates will be happy to know that as soon as I saw InstaPundit.Com attempting to divert Cornel West from Princeton to Penn, I immediately fired off an email in protest. Well, InstaPundit put it on the website, which means that more people just saw my name and deathless prose then have viewed this blog. Maybe when I finally get those pictures up. . .

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Advantage MTZ

Andrew Sullivan took my advice and gave Arthur Schlesinger the Von Hoffman award for 2001.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Best Offense is a Good Defense

...or is it the other way around? There's a difference between offense and defense, but sometimes it's not easy to define.

Bill Keller, up until September the Managing Editor of the New York Times, takes a poorly-aimed stab at defining the two in his Op-Ed on Missile Defense today. In the process, he acknowledges, without indicating as much, the doves' (and the Times, if I remember correctly) mistakes on missile policy prior to the end of the cold war. He divides the 1980's missile defense supporters into two camps - "dreamers", to include Reagan, and "schemers", including McFarlane and Keller's hero Colin Powell.

The more cynical camp — including the national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, and the military assistant to the secretary of defense, Colin Powell — saw an impregnable defense as a pipe dream, but also a useful bargaining chip. It wouldn't stop a nuclear strike, but it would worry the Soviet military planners, and make it easier to drive a favorable deal in arms control talks.

That time around, the schemers had it right. The impermeable superdome was a technological fantasy, and one that could have bankrupted the national treasury. Even if it had worked, it would have been dangerous, because it would have encouraged the illusion that we could win a nuclear war. The prospect of an American missile defense system did, however, help goad the Soviets into mutual cuts in our nuclear arsenals.

OK, fair enough. Keller thinks missile defense was a technological pipe dream, but he acknowledges that developing it put us in a favorable position in arms negotiations and, presumably, our position in the cold war. He goes on to suggest that the "schemers" are up to something much more devious this time, and it is the elephant in the national defense debate living room:

The concept at the heart of nuclear strategy is deterrence, which means that our ability to obliterate the enemy prevents him from doing something rash. It is generally accepted that our nuclear strength deterred the Soviet Union from raining nuclear warheads on America. But preventing Armageddon was not the main purpose of our nuclear forces. The foremost purpose was to stop the Soviet Union from sending its superior non-nuclear armies into Western Europe. By deliberately leaving open the possibility that we would go nuclear if Soviet tanks crossed the Fulda Gap into West Germany, we deterred the Soviets from beginning a conventional war in Europe. Would we in fact have risked decimating the planet to save Europe? Maybe not, but the Soviets could never be sure.

The schemers in the current debate fear that any nation with a few nuclear weapons can do to us what we did to the Soviets — deter us from projecting our vastly superior conventional forces into the world. This could mean Iraq or North Korea or Iran, but it most importantly means China. The real logic of missile defense, to these advocates, is not to defend but to protect our freedom to attack.

"The logic of missile defense is to make the stakes of power projection compatible with the risks of power projection," says Keith B. Payne, a deterrence theory expert and an ardent supporter of missile defense. Missile defense, in other words, is not about defense. It's about offense.

...Why is everyone being so coy about this?

How can you acknowledge the value of nuclear deterrence and not see the rational behind being able to project force? By Keller's definition, a nuclear missile is still an offensive weapon. Yet our ability to launch them quickly from our own soil and from submarines all around the world is, indeed, a heck of a deterrent - a defensive system. But it's little or no deterrent to a terrorist squatting in a headless or hostile state. We would not have nuked Afghanistan to get rid of Osama bin Laden and everybody knows it (no matter how bellicose they think the U.S. is). It is our ability to project power precisely into places like Afghanistan that puts terrorists at risk. We can argue about whether future Bin Ladens would bother to use a missile, when many other cheaper means are available, but a working defense would certainly make it more difficult for him to forestall a U.S. action with a missile.

So why, as Keller suggests, is our ability to project power a covert "scheming" rationale of the defense establishment? It's not. Our ability to project power is the "big stick" that keeps us safe. Plenty of tyrannical trouble-makers in the world are already scratching their heads at what we've done in Afghanistan, because it showed how we can leverage the power of a popular revolution against them, if we so choose.

Keller's piece ends in a swamp of rhetorical questioning, with little opining:

The schemers' agenda, on the other hand, makes a more complicated and uncomfortable debate, because it raises the question of whether missile defense might, in fact, make the world less safe. "Force projection" has an unpleasant, bellicose ring to it. It also drives the Chinese up the wall. There are already plenty of hawks in China who believe we have a long- range strategy to "contain" it — and the force projection rationale tends to suggest they are right.

Arguing that we need missile defense to assure we can take the battle to the nuclear-armed bad guys opens up two ticklish lines of discussion.

One is whether missile defense makes it likelier we will get into a war that is not essential to our national interests, or that we will move more easily from containing bad regimes to ousting them, and whether as part of such a conflict we may find ourselves playing nuclear chicken.

The other is whether missile defense might lead to a new arms-building competition. If it is true that China cares enough about Taiwan to threaten nuclear war — that is, if China's ability to deter us with nuclear weapons really matters to Chinese leaders — then it stands to reason they will work hard to protect their deterrent. However they do that, by manufacturing more missiles or putting multiple warheads on each launcher or by a shift in strategy, a Chinese buildup may well influence the behavior of China's wary nuclear neighbor India. What India does in turn alarms its nuclear neighbor Pakistan. If you're following the news, you know that India and Pakistan are at this moment on the verge of war.

Strategic planners have a technical expression for this kind of discussion. It's called a can of worms.

Well, thanks for the strategic and technical insights, Bill.

The easy way to cut through the equivocating fog here is to think about my favorite phrase - "compared to what?" Accept, for the moment, Keller's argument that missile defense increases our ability to project power - to "move more easily from containing bad regimes to ousting them," as he says. Think about whether we should decrease our ability to project power, which is what happens if we stand still as the world changes around us. Should we emasculate our forces to the point that we cannot oust a bad regime? It is difficult to argue that our ability to get rid of Saddam whenever we choose to has to have governed his behavior somewhat. The fear of being "ousted" is the best deterrent we've got, and our only significant "threat power", to borrow a game theory term. The "hawks in China" should "believe we have a long- range strategy to 'contain' it" because they are an expansionist communist state. How that affects the Pakistan-India conflict I don't know, but let's not violate the prime directive - the defense of the U.S., our allies, and free democracies around the world by a massive deterrent power. If missile defense really allows us to project power, it's a pretty good idea.

There are few reasons, as long as our constitutional democracy is functioning, why we should reduce our ability to project military power. Enhance it and communicate with China, India and Pakistan using clear diplomatic channels. Back that up by doing what you say (i.e., "hand over Bin Laden or your days are numbered"). Keller should not underestimate the U.S.'s credibility.

Here's another question I've asked until blue in the face - if missile defense is technologically unfeasible, how come it has all these incredible ramifications on the arms race and our "ability to project power"? If it doesn't defend us from at least rogue missiles, by definition it has no deterrent or other military value. Our future enemies should be cheering it on as it "bankrupts our treasury" (now there's an exaggeration - it takes a lot to bankrupt the outfit printing the money) and thereby eliminates our ability to project power.

Missile defense is like the theory of man-made global climate change. It is a scientific leap of faith, involving extrapolation of current trends and prognostications that are highly sensitive to how technology and/or humanity will evolve. We face the difficult challenge of evaluating the current and future value of the program against the present value cost. The only difference is that we can sound preachy, high-minded and sensitive whilst talking about global warming, whereas the realpolitik of deterring genocidal maniacs is a hardnosed and calculating business - "scheming", as Keller puts it. I'm willing to finance some "scheming" myself, having been a few hundred yards away as one of those maniac's plans panned out.

Keller is a big proponent of international courts, treaties and organizations. I'd like to ask him a question: Do these organizations need the ability to "project power" or the means to "oust" a criminal regime? Would the existing international organizations have any credibility at all without the U.S.'s ability to do those things? Is a judicial branch meaningful without the executive? Could you possibly define an international organization's ability to muster military power as "defensive"?

John Nash, described in the movie A Beautiful Mind, solved a problem of unstable equilibria in game theory (this article offers more on the subject). The equilibrium must be found where each player has maximizes his own "threat power" - his ability to do harm to the other, net of their ability to do harm to him. When it comes to harm by military means, the ability to project force, as well as the ability to repel it, are opposite sides of the same "threat power" coin. Those who have already become international criminals (terrorists, rogue regimes) and therefore have no fear of economic isolation or the eunuch of diplomatic influence "the disapproval of the international community". That leaves the ability to project force, or our ability to perform the old CIA "dirty tricks" (such as assassination) as the only useful "threat powers" against them. Without at least one of those, you lose. Better learn to grovel fast.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

You can find me at www.janegalt.net

Steven Den Beste and others are discussing Pyra's (home of Blogger) potential demise.

I have secured server space with Cornerhost, and I am trying to figure out the most efficient way to archive my posts outside of blogspot (any thoughts?) in a way that can easily be fed into a new program if necessary. Ultimately, I'd like to combine the Bullpen (short) entries with the longer MTZ posts in a way that is more convenient.

Whatever happens, I'll set the above web address to point to my site.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Nominee for the "Parallel Universe" award

What more could you ask for than free people with the resources to do as they please?

Very little, I would think. Yet along comes David Boyle, armed with his new book The Sum of Our Discontent and a $50,000 PR budget, suggesting additional conditions. It starts out in a promising way, pointing out all sorts of problems and inconsistencies in how everything from national accounts to meaningless news statistics are produced (these are subjects I enjoy). As I plowed into it, however, I began to founder in its finger-wagging criticism of numerical measurement.

Chapter 9 is called "The New Indicators," and it suggests that economists and post-war politicians have focused exclusively on GDP as the aim of government policy. He suggests this is not a good measurement of economic progress. Boyle goes on to plug (and do a disservice to) a variety of alternate indicators, such as the GPI ,described in this Atlantic article, or the related Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. Here's Boyle's verdict on post-war (British) growth:

The mantra of growth has been repeated with growing conviction ever since World War II, and with a kind of manic frustration as real life failed to comply with the figures....

...In the 45 years since Butler painted his hopeful future of growth (1954), there are (sic) more ill health and less creativity, fewer people on sports teams, less amateur dramatics, fewer learning musical instruments or painting. There are more people with asthma, depression, and cancer. There is more crime, more people in prisons. But the key measurement of success used by politicians and economists recognized none of these things as important. By narrowing the definition of what constituted "wealth" we ended up narrowing all our lives.

This breathtaking statement earns Boyle a nomination for the MTZ "parallel universe award." Boyle needs to read up a bit on what happened in the latter half of the 20th century. Doubled lifespans and quadrupled real incomes apparently count for little in Boyle-land, where we are all sick in body and spirit.

One wonders where he gets the figures (there is no footnote) to back this nonsense up. Fewer people on sports teams? fewer learning musical instruments? I'm sure the coal miners in Britain in Doyle-land's 1950s were pleased with the musical literacy of their children. The statements about health are just laughably absurd. One suddenly understands why Boyle is engaging in the counter-tribal (he claims to be a mathematician of sorts) act of attacking numeracy - he doesn't want to be bound by figures.

Also, while GDP is generally the focus of economic policy, it has never been the exclusive focus of economists, let alone politicians. His characterization of GDP growth as the sole political lodestar is therefore a straw man.

To be fair, Boyle is reasonably hard on alternative measures, suggesting that what we choose to measure is a reflection of our aspirations, and our aspirations change. But this is all the more reason to use the elastic abstraction of money. Ignoring the cries of those who somehow think it is crass to measure things in monetary terms, let's consider why we do so. Money is a medium of exhange. We don't all want the same things, as Boyle's ridiculous assortment of alternative measures so aptly suggest. Money can be exchanged for the things we want. Money can be used to pursue diverse aspirations.

Boyle points out that money itself is useless, but that is precisely its virtue in this context. For instance, critics of economic growth worry about inequality. But imagine for a second that somehow one person accrues all of a country's monetary wealth. What is he to do with it? If he cannot trade it for the things he wants he has nothing, so individual and economic freedom are also necessary. If the citizens of that country are allowed to trade with him (there's that freedom thing again), he will quickly part with significant sums, and many will be richer for his wealth. It is true that when freedom is missing, inequality persists - think of Zaire, where President Mobutu traded his ill-gotten gains primarily with the outside world and enslaved his citizens with the blunt stick of his corrupt government. You can hoard all the power in a country, or have a monopoly on the means of production or critical services . But if you have all the money and no ability to use it, you have nothing.

GDP is an attempt, however flawed in calculation, to measure the amount of wealth created by summing all the monetary transactions in a country or zone. Money is meaningless until it is transacted, and that is why, paradoxically, measuring total monetary transactions in GDP is precisely the right way to measure economic progress.

One wonders if Boyle has noticed that terrorists come from countries that cannot manage consistent GDP growth over any stretch of time and are slaves to authoritarian regimes riding the inelastic demand curve for oil. Has he noticed that countries that have both grown their GDPs and respected individual freedom have been particularly peaceful and do not attack each other?

Boyle's diatribe has scary social-engineering overtones. Are we really to measure progress by people learning musical instruments? I am as ardent a booster of musical literacy as there is, but I wouldn't dream of using musical training to measure "wealth" in any way that might be important to government. Boyle goes on in his non-attributing way:

'A country that cut down all its trees, sold them as wood chips, and gambled the money away playing tiddly-winks, would appear form its national accounts to have got richer in terms of GNP per person,' wrote one economist in 1989. Some of them almost did.

Well, that's right. We can do things you don't approve of with money (the above example would bring growth to a screeching halt in the next period). We can also do things you do approve of. That's the point. If we could only do things you approve of, it would be called "Boyle's Authoritarian Economy." Now why isn't there a stampede to renounce the citizenship of our GCP-obsessed countries and move there?

I am highly suspicious of economists that attempt to measure economic growth in non-monetary terms, because the terms they invent reflect their own aspirations for society. The suggestion that one person's particular definition of progress should be shared by all of us is social engineering in disguise, an attempt to shape society to one constituency's interests. In the extreme, eugenics comes to mind as one way people have pursued alternative measures of national wealth in the past.

If your country's citizens have money, they require only individual and economic freedom to enjoy increased wealth, as they define it. That they should choose to exchange that monetary wealth for something other than musical instrument lessons is their own choice, much as the David Boyles of the world may lament it.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I'm BAAAAAACK! After a much

I'm BAAAAAACK!

After a much deserved hiatus, spent preparing for Christmas (which culminated in a seven hour train ride to scenic Newark, New York, where I spent 3 straight days cooking for my grandparents before returning to work), I have emerged from retirement to rant about the Enron debacle -- or more specifically, Reason's reaction to it. Which is retarded. Flailing to explain the failure of a market oriented system, Reason strives to argue that no one really did anything wrong. Bullshit. As Reason points out, Enron's entire company match, up to 6% of salary, was in company stock. Let's think about that. The contribution limit for a 401K, provided you don't hit the salary caps, is 15% of salary. (Or at least it used to be when I had, you know, a regular job.). So our hypothetical Joe blow making, say, $50,000 annual, and contributing the maximum, is putting $7,500 into his 401K. The company puts in $3000 worth of company stock as a match. Even if the stock appreciates exactly in tandem with the rest of his investment choices, and Mr. Blow appropriately diversifies the rest of his portfolio into non-oil related, countercyclical investments, almost 30% of his 401K will be invested in company stock which cannot be sold until he turns 50. Since this is about 30% more than any sane financial advisor would allow Mr. Blow to invest in the company for which he currently works, Enron was pushing extremely unsound financial practices on its employees. Remember, that $3000 is not free money -- it is in lieu of other compensation that Enron would otherwise have to give. It also, through the imaginitive accounting used for ESOPs, does not show up on the balance sheets the way that cash would, plus it supports the stock price by providing a large pool of owners who can't sell even if -- well, even if the stock goes to 33 cents. So Enron gets three for the price of one -- conserves cash, gooses its balance sheet, and supports its stock price. The employees get -- 33 cents.

Even if you work for a fantastic company, one with extremely low volatility and sound management practices, this is a dreadful idea. Why? Imagine Joe's great-grandfather, Hiram, a respectable accountant with an extremely stable firm for which he has labored all of his adult life. He not only draws a good salary as he nears retirement age, but has a lucrative junior partnership in his firm from which he will be able to draw over half his salary when he retires, enough to comfortably live out his golden years. He has other investments, of course, but Hiram is counting on the firm to provide the bulk of his funds.

Unfortunately, some young whippersnapper in Detroit starts churning out automobiles, and the buggy whip manufacturer which employs Hiram experiences a couple of years of declining earnings. Several years later, the firm merges with two other manufacturers, leaving Hiram on the street. At 58, it is hard to find another post. His junior partnership is diluted by the merger, then wiped out entirely three years later when the combined firms go bankrupt together. Had Hiram purchased some stocks and bonds instead of that junior partnership, he would be able to retire comfortably instead of moving in with Joe's grandfather and spending his last years crammed in a back bedroom listening to the grandkids screaming through the walls.

Joe's great-grandfather is what my Investments professor called extremely undiversified. Undiversified holdings increase volatility, which is to say the likelihood of extreme events. You can get extremely rich, as you would if you'd plowed all your money into Microsoft. Or you can lose everything, as the Enron folks did. What's worse, they had their entire financial worth tied up in the company, because their jobs were there too. Houston doesn't have a ton of large companies to work for -- and 60 is no time to be looking for a job. Enron should never have allowed, much less encourage (or really, forced) employees to be so undiversified.

Legal? Almost. Nothing restricts companies from offering their matchings in company stock (although -- gasp -- in the opinion of this near-libertarian, the SEC should.) In this case, however, there were two problems. The first is that executives engaged in a clearly criminal (at least to me, and all my b-school buddies) concealment of the actual financial condition of the firm. This means that they were committing fraud by giving employees compensation which they knew to be worth less than the face. Whether this is legally fraudulent I know not, but it certainly meets my definition of fraud, particularly as the executives were the only people who could know the firm's true condition, negating any cries of caveat emptor. They did this at least in part to inflate the value of the firm's stock, delaying the reckoning long enough for at least some of them to sell out large Enron positions. (I'm not saying this is why they pushed the company stock; only that it had this effect). Secondly, they caused employee accounts to be frozen during critical periods (though from what I've seen of the matching plan, so much of those 401k's were in matching stock that couldn't be sold -- because the average Joe Blow contributes much less than 15% of his salary -- that the lockup period wouldn't have helped much.) They maintain it was routine. I maintain that if they had given a rat's ass about their employees, they would have delayed the routine. But of course, having a block of owners that couldn't sell delayed the reckoning by at least a couple of days. Do I know that this factored into the decision? No. But at the very least it showed callous disregard for the employees it subsequently dumped on the street.

Yes, people should behave responsibly. No, you can't protect people from being idiots. And sometimes managers do their best and the companies fail anyway. I don't think that you can prevent people from buying their company's stock with their own money. But it seems to me that you can prosecute the criminal fraud and negligance perpetrated by Enron's directors and captive board (four doctors on a fifteen person board? None of whom, apparently, understood anything about the oil, commodities, or financial markets in which Enron was involved, nor how to read a balance sheet or income statement?) More importantly, you can strip their assets in a civil suit and hand them over to those devastated people near retirment who are losing their houses along with their jobs (and ending up with nothing from the sale, due to the Enron-led collapse in Houston real-estate prices), and have no realistic prospects of either getting another job, or retiring any time soon.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Blogger Back

Phew - we can post again, so I can tell you I am with family in the land of low bandwidth. Back by Saturday.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Beautiful Mind I Once Knew

I read with sorrow of Damian Penny's loss of a friend. Yet another reason, on top of the season and the opening of A Beautiful Mind , to think of a college friend who is no longer around.

Michael Laudor and I were "Social Activities Chairmen" of our residential college at Yale, which means we were in charge of beer and bands for Silliman College's parties. Mike's demeanor was sort of like Leon Redbone. He wore tinted glasses and was extremely laid back. The thing about Mike was he was brilliant, and never seemed to work very hard to obtain straight A's. He and I took a class together on computer-modeling physics problems (in Basic, no less). As his study partner, I found it hard not to coast on his work. Solutions just seemed to come to him.

Mike was open and friendly to anyone, completely without pretense. I never passed a minute with Mike when he wasn't listening and just being gemütlich. And then he'd say your thoughts back to you, only so much more eloquently, often adding information you didn't know. He was as likely to quote Dylan as Plato. People like Mike made Yale exciting. He was intellectually hyperactive yet completely unassuming. I passed many three-hour dining hall marathons with Mike and regretted losing touch with him in the years after graduation.

Mike worked at Bain & Co. for a after Graduation (1985) and had his first serious schizophrenic episode in 1987 when he was applying to Yale Law School, which he eventually attended. He was in and out of treatment during that time, but did well when he went to Yale:

The law school, Laudor told the New York Times in 1995, turned out to be "the most supportive mental-health-care facility that exists in America." The Times story, documenting Laudor's recovery from schizophrenia and his struggle to become a lawyer in a world prejudiced against mental illness, transformed his life. It led to a $600,000-plus advance from Scribner for writing his saga and $1.5 million for the movie rights from director Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment. At one point, Brad Pitt considered playing the lead in the film, titled, like the proposed book, The Laws of Madness. Society seemed ready to proclaim Laudor a hero, another who overcame.

(from "A Precarious Genius")

In 1998 Mike stabbed his pregnant wife, Caroline Costello, to death. He has, of course, been locked up. While medicine has made great strides, treatment of mental illness has not produced a cure for his tortured mind.

There 'but for the grace of God' go we.

Several articles on Mike are available on the web:
Why Deinstitutionalization Turned Deadly
A Precarious Genius
The Michael Laudor Tragedy
A Hotshot Haunted and 'Hunted'

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Happy Pagan Rituals; December Birthdays; Cheap Link to 'Mindles''s Wish List

Kathy Kinsley writes on the "Spirit of Secular Christmas" today:

There is a secular "spirit of Christmas" which has partly come out of the old pagan celebrations, and partly out of the entirely human urge to connect with family and friends, and to show appreciation to them.

.....I also know Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Wiccans, and atheists who celebrate the "secular" side of Christmas. There is something about the idea of Christmas that seems to warm the hearts of people everywhere. I think that is a good thing. Those who don't might consider moving their birthday celebration to the month in which Christ was born.

It's true. Everybody loves the pagan rituals of December such as Christmas Trees. Apparently the Romans did too, and that's why they chose this time to celebrate Christ's birthday.

Incidentally, my birthday is the 27th of December. When I was a kid, everybody bent over backwards to make sure my brithday wasn't acquired by Christmas, so no harm no foul.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Merry Christmas

Sshhh! Santa Claus is about to arrive for the three little proto-pundits in the Hofer household. There's nothing like tonight. I hope you are all having as much fun as I am right now.

And laying his finger
Aside of his nose,
And giving a nod,
Up the chimney he rose

This painting is by Robert Weir. It was painted in 1837 based on the 1822 poem "A Visit from Saint Nick" ('Twas the Night Before Christmas). Apparently, St. Nick was not "fat and jolly" until Thomas Nast illustrated him in that fashion in 1888.

If you go to the source of this image (click on it), you can comment on it in the New York Historical Society Luce Center Database

This painting of "Flags on 57th Street" (1918) by Childe Hassam was Bill Clinton's Christmas card this year. It's one of his series of flag paintings depicting New York's patriotism towards the end of World War I.

If you go to the source of this image, you can comment on it in the New York Historical Society Luce Center Database.

19th century Kerchief of Santa with a flag! You can comment on this one too.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

In which MTZ is sucked, somewhat reluctantly, into an intentionally provocative debate

Fredrik Norman, provoking controversy, wrote the following:

Does Welfare Equal Terrorism? I'd answer that with a resounding yes.

I spent part of the wee hours a few nights ago responding on his site in the negative. Unfortunately that's lost now after the great Kristiansand Server-Freeze. So let me try again.

I agree that government redistribution of wealth is coercion and a substantial reduction in individual liberty. I think Fredrik and I would also agree that there are millions of lost souls who have forgotten that this country was built on a foundation that prohibited coercion by individuals (the rule of law) and limited coercion by government (the Constitution). Liberalism was founded on the ideal of "freedom from" coercion, not the statist or communitarian entitlement ideals of those who wear the "Liberal" label today. The Utopia we should be striving for is the one where individuals are free from any obligation that today's government may force on us. We could argue whether the sacrifices forced on us by government are necessary, but we should agree that ideally they would not exist. We would be free to finance neither redistribution nor Daisy Cutters, if we so chose.

Most of my trouble comes from the label "Terrorism". It shouldn't mean anything that involves coercion, as that dilutes the term. We reserve a special label for this purposeless violence. The best definition I can provide is "violence, purely for the sake of fear and intimidation but under the pretense of a dispute, intentionally made on a party unconnected to that dispute." A state and its citizens are inextricably involved. In fact, an oppressive state is in a direct dispute with its citizens. So it is difficult to accuse a state of Terrorism per se. But that doesn't mean the state may not be brutal, genocidal, oppressive or thuggish, all of which we also associate with Terrorism.

Democracy also makes a difference. We may have no choice but to have our wealth redistributed, but we can try to vote the bums out. The folks in the WTC had no connection whatsoever, let alone a chance to object, to Al Qaeda's concerns. Which is what makes them a party "irrelevant to the dispute."

It is tempting to extend the definition of Terrorism to any form of coercion to perform something we find abhorrent. But then the only thing that differentiates terrorism from a "legitimate" use of force is the judgement we pass on its aims. It becomes the Justice Stewart definition of Terrorism - "I can't define it, but I know it when it happens to me," if you will.

I concede Fredrik's point about "matters of degree". To some extent I am making an argument that serves our aims of coalition-building in a war against Terrorism rather than strictly on the logic of freedom limited by force. But I think it is legitimate to have a special name for a particularly abhorrent and unusual (thank goodness) form of violence or coercion, as much as it is legitimate to have a special and violent effort to combat it. We would not make military war on the proponents of an expanding but democratice Welfare State, even though they attack and hinder growth and opportunity for the little guy while hypocritically using him as a symbol of their cause.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

"No Sanctions" crowd forgot to speak to the locals

In a recent post, I made lengthy comment about the illogical arguments against the sanctions on Iraq.

A reader pointed out an article by Michael Rubin in the (June 2001) New Republic on the contrast between Northern Iraq and the rest of the country under sanctions:

But Sulaymaniyah, a city in northern Iraq with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, tells a different story. Indeed, across a crescent-shaped slice of northern Iraq, the picture is the same: The shops are stocked, and the people are eating. Northern Iraq lives under exactly the same international sanctions as the rest of the country. The difference here is that local Kurdish authorities, in conjunction with the United Nations, spend the money they get from the sale of oil. Everywhere else in Iraq, Saddam does. And when local authorities are determined to get food and medicine to their people--instead of, say, reselling these supplies to finance military spending and palace construction--the current sanctions regime works just fine. Or, to put it more bluntly, the United Nations isn't starving Saddam's people. Saddam is.

....All of which helps explain why, despite the inconveniences, residents here don't want sanctions weakened--they want them strengthened. Indeed, when the Bush administration recently announced it was going to use "smart sanctions" to target the military--not Iraqi civilians--one farmer in a rural village asked rhetorically how the administration could talk about Saddam's war crimes one day and reward him the next. Didn't the United States care that Saddam started two wars and used gas against Iraq's non-Arab population? Then again, whatever doubts northern Iraqis have about American resolve, it's better than the sheer disdain they feel for the French and the Russians, who, they say, sacrifice freedom to win lucrative contracts from Saddam. "Surely they understand that we hate Saddam," says one northern Iraqi deputy minister. "Once he is gone, we won't forget that they wanted to help him."

The arguments for weakening or removing the sanctions peddled on Lowly Delusions suffer from what Steven Den Beste calls "deeply loving and compassionate chauvinistic contempt." There is no moral high ground for those who suggest we ease up.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Attacking the corporate shell instead of its contents

While I did not make my way through most of the New York Times this weekend, I could not help but notice the Thomas Frank Op-Ed on the fellow who has come to be known as Tali-boy (the American formerly known as John Walker).

This article is extraordinary. First it lays out a reasonable criticism of the moral right's reaction to Tali-boy:

the culture warriors have decided that Mr. Walker's doings are an obvious reflection of the treasonous tendencies of the "liberal elite" and have commenced offensive operations accordingly. Radio commentators decry Californian "permissiveness." The Weekly Standard has posted Mr. Walker's teenage hip-hop noodlings on its Web site as though these were profoundly embarrassing to the left. Shelby Steele suggested in The Wall Street Journal that Mr. Walker's path to the Taliban started with the 60's, "countercultural hipness," sneering intellectuals and "cultural liberalism."

We really don't know enough about John Walker to pin his deeds on anyone other than himself.

I don't object to examining Mr. Walker's writings, and if they happen to parrot one ideology or another I don't care. Frank is right, it's a bit of a stretch to link Walker's obviously losing his group on reality to the political orientation of his family, let alone those he parroted along the way. Can you feel the "but.." coming?

But as long as we're passing out explosive bits of blame, we would do well to turn the spotlight on that other corner of American life where a band of impudent snobs, elected by no one, wax subversive and work to undermine the authority of parents, the sanctity of marriage and even the honor of the flag.

I refer, of course, to corporate America.

Oh God, not one of these. Here we go:

It is from TV commercials for sneakers and S.U.V.'s that we learn of the horror of American sameness and the freedom and personal authenticity that await us when we fire up a Macintosh or zoom away in a Honda CR-V. Extremism in the pursuit of intensity, the ad men tell us, is no vice. John Walker's generation was encouraged to use "extreme" cordless drills, buy its Dodges from an extreme used car dealer and catch its trout with an extreme fishing rod. Just for them did ecstatic TV hipsters steer their sedans up Himalayan peaks in search of the phattest possible brand experience. Maybe the boy Talib is simply an attentive consumer, his ill-fated affair with extreme Islam merely a twisted continuation of his search for the weapons-grade authenticity promised him so many times by manufacturers of bell-bottom jeans and lemon-lime soda.

The HORROR! That's right, "extreme sports" breeds extremists! What an epiphany. All those people who climb sheer cliffs with their bare hands and drive SUVs are just Taliban waiting to happen. And when we promise extreme sports and deliver only Mountain Dew we are driving them to misogyny and genocide rationalized by religious fundamentalism. While he's at it, Frank also manages to join the human haters who consider not only consumption, but catering to consumption a form of coercion. Not only is purchasing an SUV a sin, but selling one is worse.

Corporations are, of course, to blame for the tastes of their customers. It's also hard not to notice that Frank rather enjoys employing the very tactics he criticized ages ago in the prior paragraph. But wait a minute, he's not done:

And if shallow, questing soul talk has an institutional home, it is management theory. This is where you go to find impassioned stories about becoming a "change agent," searching earnestly for the true identity of a brand or devoting yourself to a "corporate holy man."

All that our culture warriors claim to deplore can be found in fashionable corporate literature: the relativism, the affected reverence for the wisdom of the East, the denunciation of old white males. Had the world not changed on Sept. 11, the teenage Talib might have anticipated a career back in Marin, schooling audiences made up of his middle-class homies in the leadership secrets of Mullah Omar.

Well, I like some of the scholarship on leadership, but I'll admit, some of its over the top. Management is about people, so the leadership studies tend to focus on getting managers excited about the people who work for them. But isn't the idea of Tali-boy being a young Peter Senge or Jack Weber a little far-fetched? And isn't likening those folks to Mullah Omar...well, extreme? This is by far the most curious (not to mention puerile and silly) example of Ad Talibanum I've seen yet. I've been imagining in my free moments this weekend, how else could we build an argument similar to Frank's? I have a few.

1. Media. It's the media that's to blame. They are constantly offering us quick fixes for short attention spans. Good Morning America tells us if we read a book or change a few daily habits, we'll turn our lives around. It's no wonder John Walker went off in search of a more rigorous and effective curative for his soul, which was emptied by the media

2. Self-help specialists. There's not a religion or philosophy in the world these folks have boiled down or strained through a sieve as a band-aid for our deeper needs. If "shallow questing soul talk" has an institutional home, it is the self-help world.

3. Women. Women wear all these clothes that flatter their shape. They employ the artifice of underwire bras and control hose. They use makeup to enhance the smoothness of their skin and the shape of their cheekbones. They flirt and are coy. But when you see them in the morning, they aren't what they appeared to be. Walker's conversion to a misogynistic religion is just a "twisted continuation" of his search for the flesh and blood authenticity of a woman under a cane fearing for her life.

I looked into Thomas Frank's body of work. He clearly believes that corporations rule our culture unchallenged, and are enemies of democracy. Seeing as we customers vote every day with our dollars, I find his entire worldview hard to fathom. Take for instance his claim in this article that "Above all markets love the country of Singapore." Have a look at a chart of Singapore's STI index against the S&P 500 (SPX) and wonder how Frank developed this conclusion.

Of course, Singapore is a country known for favoring caning. Frank might argue that's a reasonable "authentic" reaction to all the fake violence peddled by corporations.

Corporations are groups of individuals, banded together to work make a profit in the free market. They are slaves to their customers - the people in their markets. And they have been an important agent in capitalism, which is the best friend the little guy ever had. It's a mystery to me why commentators of both conservative and liberal ilk crap on them like this. Except to observe that since it has become unacceptable to openly peddle your hatred of humanity, beating up on the corporate shell has become sort of chic, much like those leadership gurus Frank hates so much.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Pourquoi Test?

Pourquoi Test?
So I can stay up all night with templates.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Test Entry

Test Entry
Fiddling with templates. Need more than one entry.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Greenwich Village feels the U.S. is Provincial part 5,483

This links you to the audio of a panel discussion held at the New School including journalists from the Weekly Standard, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and Harper's. In it you will find Al Jazeera and New York Times journalists bemoaning the ignorance of Americans, objecting to the use of the flag, etc., and calling it "censorship". You will also hear the Greenwich Village audience clapping enthusiastically for Al Jazeera's representative Hafez Al-Mirazi, then clapping sort of furtively when John Podhoretz calls out Al-Mirazi for running the "Mossad did the WTC" story and being horribly anti-semitic. For his part, the Al Jazeera reporter claims they qualified the Mossad story as a rumour and ran their own editorial condemning the rumour-mongers. Apparently it is necessary to report ridiculous and unfounded rumours in order to be objective - as if they were statistics from an independent source. The audience hoots scornfully at the "hidden message" argument about the Bin Laden tapes, but applauds thoughtfully when it is suggested that showing an American Flag in WTC coverage is jingoistic. If 4,000 Jordanians were killed, and CNN covered the event, would it be jingoistic to put the Jordanian flag in a cover graphic? I can't relate.

The questions at the end are precious (and predictably left-leaning and long-winded), the best one being the irate Northern European-sounding man who asks "why is the American Left so utterly useless?!?" Before anyone else can answer, John Podhoretz injects "Because you're wrong."

Listen as you blog. You will find yourself wishing Mark Steyn was there instead of Podhoretz.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

MTZ before it was MTZ

Anticipating a dry spell during the holidays, I'd like to throw some vintage material up. Before I started this site (way back in September and prior), I was an enthusiastic correspondent with some newspapers. I am sure you find this shocking. If you read my site, you know I am a bad food/bad weather/good company Anglophile. However, a certain reporter got my dander up when he described the American reaction to the Yank Ryder Cup victory in 1999. Here is my letter to The London Evening Standard", which was published:

Gentlemen:

The following is excerpted from a US story summarizing European reactions to the American Ryder Cup victory on Sunday.

"Let us be painfully honest about it,'' columnist Matthew Norman wrote in the London Evening Standard. `"Yes, they (Americans) are repulsive people, charmless, rude, cocky, mercenary, humorless, ugly, full of nauseatingly fake religiosity, and as odious in victory as they are unsporting in defeat."

I admire Mr. Norman for his forthright writing style. There is no doubt as to his position on this important issue - how best to completely over-generalize about Americans so as to diminish their come-from-behind victory in the Ryder Cup.

Coming from the people that invented drawing and quartering, colonized three quarters of the world (then lost it), put a succession of deranged monomaniacs on the throne, and invented not only the genocidal religious "crusade" and the "hooligan spectator", but also the Spice Girls, this really hurts. But at least Mr. Norman didn't call us whiny, self-satisfied, snotty, hygienically challenged, prissy, clotted cream-eating bigots. That would have been too much!

I was at The Country Club on Saturday, we applauded every player resoundingly, and I didn't hear or see anyone bothering Colin Montgomerie. Monty does have the uncanny ability, however, to hear the sound of a fly suppressing a fart at 100 paces. But his main problem is he frowns at everyone, everywhere- in Mr. Norman's words, he is truly "charmless". Please understand, I favor capital punishment for any spectator that spits on anybody. But it seemed to me that on Saturday, the most popular player on the course was Sergio Garcia, who, perish the thought, smiled occasionally and engaged the crowd with grace and and good humour. America adored him, even more than our much less expressive hero, Tiger Woods. Golfers on both sides could take a lesson from El Nino.

There is no doubt that America owes much to Europe. In this very Ryder Cup, the American golfers learned about teamwork from the Europeans, to their benefit. I will grant you that civility is fighting a losing battle on both sides of the Atlantic (read up on Valderrama, Mr. Norman), but is having a better time of it on the Continent. Britain has given us, to name just a few examples, the (British) Open, Monty Python, Rowan Atkinson, Fry and Laurie, P.G. Wodehouse, Jane Austen and Samuel Barber. However, with just one word you will see that you now owe every American with a young son or daughter an apology: Teletubbies.

Yours in cocky, humorless odiousness,

You see, I've always been like this, I can't help it.

It did tip off a long series of letters with a very congenial fellow named Edward Rawes, who is a serious history buff. He took issue with crusades (Pope Vezelay?) and chided me for picking on King George's Porphyria (sp?). A genuine non-cyber blogging experience.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Great Moral Case for Capitalism

Quiet and manly blogger Richard Bennett's makes an aside that reminds me of something important:

Now that NSI doesn't have a monopoly on domain registration, discount brokers are on the scene offering domain names for as little as $5 for a UK domain, or $9 for a American one (ending in .com, .org, .net). 123-reg and Domains for $10 offer basic registration services, and actual DNS management (the thing that directs web surfers and e-mail to tour server) is avaible anywhere from free to whatever you want to pay for it. ZoneEdit and My Domain offer it for free. Are any of these guys going to stay in business?

See, that's just the thing about competition. We all like to make fun of competing companies if they price themselves out of business. Remember, however, its the consumer that gets the profits they don't earn.

Subroutine: Soap box

Ever wonder how so many things are cheaper, such as food, appliances, etc.? It hardly costs anything to deliver 1950-level healthcare now. It's 2001 level healthcare that's expensive. As it happens, the 2001-level fridge is less expensive than the 1950-level fridge. Guess which one's better? More energy efficient?

Another example is telecommunications. Investors dole out money based on business models that anticipated 17-cent a minute long distance. They doled out so much money Sprint is now offering 2.2 cents a minute. Go look at Qwest's stock price over the last year. Then look at your long distance bill.

In recessions, profit margins shrink. (8 to 6% in these last two business cycles). Know who gets the difference? You.

Capitalism is the best friend the little guy ever had. (a phrase I'm borrowing from Woody Brock) The only economies that grew consistently in the 20th century are capitalist economies. Lifespans doubled and income quadrupled as a result. Compare that to your average middle-eastern kleptocracy - growth averaging negative 1% for years on end. Where is the "inequality-bred" terrorism coming from?

Capitalism is the best friend the little guy ever had. People who don't see that are blind or delusional. People who impugn capitalism with fictitious evil motives are immoral.

End soap box. Return.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

More Donuts

A colleague, who had been instructed on the "donut" story (see previous post) by his college German professor writes to me:

Perhaps my schooling was overly pedantic about matters of grammar. Now that I've read the the article, I find this nuance (metaphorical vs. literal) rather compelling. It's also worth noting that the Berlin audience cheered rather than snickered. I like the New Yorker comparison. Roz Chast could do a cartoon showing JFK in one frame saying "Ich bin ein Berliner" with a listener envisioning a jelly donut and Willy Brandt in another saying "I am a New Yorker" with a listener picturing him as a magazine.

My own story of transnational embarrassment was telling an attractive young German woman I met shortly after my arrival at a summer job in Germany that I had been "präpariert" instead of more correctly "vorbereitet" for something or other. "Präpariert" means castrated as in what they used to do to Viennese choirboys.

Note: The colleague in question has a mellifluous baritone voice and children. Not by the German girl, however....

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

I am a donut

This picture of a Euro protester dressed as Satan, on a bicycle, dragging a sign sayin "Ich bin ein Euro" reminded me of the famous Kennedy speech.

I only know a bit of German. Enough, however, to understand that the use of articles can make a significant difference in meaning. In fact the same is true here, as I'll demonstrate. My understanding (courtesy of several people, most recently Eddie Izzard) is that ein Berliner is a pastry. The use of the article ein ("a"or "one") makes it so, vs. the article-less Berliner meaning "person from Berlin". Imagine for a moment the difference between "I am Danish" and "I am a Danish".

So, Izzard insists, Ich bin ein Berliner means "I am a donut". Izard goes on to give thanks that Kennedy didn't go to Frankfurt and Hamburg on that famous trip or he would have likened himself to the entire American Diet: "I am a hamburger, a frankfurter and a donut."

However, learned sources say this is "the gaffe that never was". Too bad, because it is a beaut.

So my question is - what are the overtones of Ich bin ein Euro, if any? Thomas, are you there?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Supply and Demand

Reading this interesting Glenn Reynolds post on his alleged Euro-bashing reminded me of something I saw in a "family newsletter." One of my relatives abroad hoped that 911 would make Americans "less pushy" about our culture.

I still don't get it. First of all, we seem to be under the gun for not having a culture. Second, the culture I observe is based on individual rights and choice, so it is the antithesis of pushy. Third, who is in Europe "pushing" our culture on them? It is similar to remarks about "exporting" culture. The thing about exports, as we know all too painfully, is that somebody has to buy them - import them - or they never become exports. I remarked on this in an earlier post , nobody is forcing anybody to buy Big Macs, listen to N'Sync (I obviously don't) or watch Die Hard movies.

I'm open to suggestions, as I have remarked before, but I have yet to see an example of us "exporting" culture that someone else didn't want to import.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Critics who claim that 'Internet use narrows intellectual horizons' should be brained with typewriters

I read on Samizdata of a pitiful wail from technophobe Cass Sunstein about how the internet may be narrowing its users' consumption of information. I was stewing about it all the way home.

See only what you want to see, hear only what you want to hear, read only what you want to read. In cyberspace, we already have the ability to filter out everything but what we wish to see, hear, and read. Tomorrow, our power to filter promises to increase exponentially. With the advent of the Daily Me, you see only the sports highlights that concern your teams, read about only the issues that interest you, encounter in the op-ed pages only the opinions with which you agree. In all of the applause for this remarkable ascendance of personalized information, Cass Sunstein asks the questions, Is it good for democracy? Is it healthy for the republic? What does this mean for freedom of speech?

I haven't read the book so I can't say I'm giving Sunstein fair treatment but...oh screw it, I can still react - GAG ME WITH A QUILL PEN! This is complete reactionary technophobic horseshit, a 180-degree inversion of the truth.

Think about your daily interactions. You go to work and you are exposed to people with similar backgrounds and living contexts. You converse with those who need to transact business with you. You interact with the people in your community, who are likely to be much like you.

What is it about the internet, do you suppose, that Sunstein thinks actually narrows our sphere of interactions? In order for two people to interact, they have to have something in common. In the physical world they have to be in the same place at the same time, for starters. This severely limits our interactions. Speaking the same language and not self-immolating with dynamite strapped to one's chest helps as well. We probably interact more with people whose interests or worldview iverlap with ours in some significant way. If two people disagree on everything, they are unlikely to spend much time together. In the physical world we live with constrained interactions.

Similarly, we go to a newstand, we buy what's available: The New York Times, the Post, The Atlantic Monthly, etc. Our choices are constrained by the choices that are economical for the newstand. Ditto for the bookstore.

The only thing different about the internet is that it eliminates the time and space restrictions of interaction, and the economics of information are completely different. We find people whose interests overlap and interact. We seek out information, but our choices are infinitely wider. Does Sunstein think my local Pakistani-owned newstand spends much time making sure I have a diversity of news sources? I think not. Sunstein is singling out filtering technologies and a la carte news services like "My Yahoo", but he vastly overestimates the technology's capabilities. Anybody seen a filter that limits delivery of commentary to those pundits reinforcing the reader's worldview? The most effective filter I've seen for that is the New York Times editorial board.

As it happens, I consume the New York Times and Wall Street Journal largely on the web. But, thanks to its lack of geographical constraints, I also look at a variety of European and Middle Eastern news sites (Dawn, Arab News). I am linked to and link a variety of weblogs and I have a lot in common with them. But as much as we overlap, we also differ. Not only are we from all over the world, but throw military tribunals or post the absence of any guidance on foreign policy in libertarian thought and...splat...do you hear raw meat landing in front of the salivating dogs? It seems as a community, we spend a lot of time dissecting those with whom we disagree. Which, I've noticed, usually requires reading them (this post is an exception, I note with some guilt). Mr. Sunstein has potential for this list.

To interpret the removal of time and space constraints in my interactions and information gathering as "limiting" exposure to "topics and ideas they would not have chosen in advance" is ridiculous. Every time I run a search to start a blog, I find ideas that are new, and range from eye-opening to...downright revolting! In the physical world, would I have been exposed to Common Dreams, the idiot Eric Margolis, a deconstruction of Newton, The Afghan Resistance, Britney Spears does physics, The Leonard Nimoy Album page, Aussie editorials, The Waco Holocaust Museum or Anti-Lomborgians? I don't think Sunstein has spent much time on the 'net.

If Sunstein or other critics want to read paper academic journals by like-minded colleagues or pore over the Times or (hah) watch TV. and think they are getting a range of exposure, be my guest. Removing constraints with the internet exposes us to a much wider diversity of opinion.

So tap away on your Smith Corona, but don't pretend it makes you more or less well-read than the rest of us.

When I wrote this last night, I couldn't remember which weblog. I added the Samizdata link in the morning

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Deconstructing Martha

Those of you who stroll by the Bullpen every now and then will see I have coughed up a variety of articles on deconstruction. You will also have noticed that I make derisive reference to "deconstructionism" in a variety of posts on this page. Several of you have queried me about it. In the prior post I criticized defeatist reasoning for not providing alternatives. In this post, I submit to you that deconstruction-style reasoning is how defeatists can dismiss every positive contribution to the world made by Western culture.

Deconstruction originated as a school of literary interpretation, in which the meaning of a work was interpreted with reference to the "binary" references (a simple example of a binary reference is "good and bad") that are the work's cultural foundation. These binary references are inferred from the "canonical texts" (in Western Lit. the Bible, Plato, etc.) and the prevailing system in which the author operated. If confined to literature, this is an interesting way to turn one's assumptions upside-down to re-read a work. The invitation to challenge the assumptions of the prevailing system and structure, however, provide an enormous temptation to enter the political realm. A student at Brown interprets the consequences of this method as follows:

One consequence of deconstruction, then, is that a theorist's criticism of a given system is limited in that it is always dependent upon (and complicit with) the prevailing terms of that system. Deconstruction's suggestion of the critic's complicity with dominant social formations has translated in the decades following Derrida's work into the pedagogical responsibilities of colonial, postcolonial, and transnational cultural studies of imperialism and the struggle for decolonization. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading postcolonial critic, uses deconstruction to problematize the privileged, academic postcolonial critic's unknowing participation in the exploitation of the Third World.

It is possible that in practice, as suggested by this student, deconstruction has gone way beyond its original theory. Nonetheless, current practice is what bothers me, for several reasons:

1) It is a complex methodology for turning everything on its head, including logic and critical thought as well as...good and evil. As far as I can tell, deconstructionists believe they have found an excuse to commit a grand ad hominem fallacy: Western literature (and by extension science and culture) is evil,racist and false because Western civilisation has been Logocentric, Eurocentric and Phallocentric (biased towards Greek and French Enlightenment reason, absorbed in the Western perspective and hopelessly rooted in male dominance).

2) It glorifies the academics over scientists, writers and speakers, as only they are capable of deconstructing "canonical texts" (everything from the Bible to Newton's Laws) and thus "proving" their falseness due to the authors being....Logocentric, Eurocentric and Phallocentric

3) It is impossible to understand becuase its practitioners write in the most jargon-infested dense prose possible. Clarence Walton, who wrote a difficult but interesting book on Deconstruction's effects on academic, religious and political discourse, describes the problem as follows:

Derrida always insisted that deconstruction, properly understood, was not a philosophy but a practiced activity of reading always tied to the text it interrogates. Deconstruction can therefore never be defined as an independent self-enclosed system of operative concepts. As a consequence, it is practically impossible to identify what might be called a "deconstruction creed." Consistency is a contradiction in terms; indeed, it may be suspected that Derrida wrote in an overly opaque style to frustrate other French philosophers who, like Gilson, sought clarity in thought and word.

I don't like to go to bed confused (some might say I don't like to go to bed at all), but trying to understand deconstruction is a sure-fire formula for bedtime confusion.

3) finally, and most irksomely, The Yale Literature Department has been considered its spiritual home, although somewhat discredited by the exposed bigamy and compulsive lying of its deconstruction luminary, Paul De Man. De Man is appropriately cited in Columbia World of Quotations as follows:

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

This is the excuse for reasoning that pollutes the discourse of defeatists, and attempts to place academics and pundits in the extraordinarily privileged position of being the only "pure" judges of good and evil. As Walton said, "the scribe walks before the speaker." The scribe is also, conveniently, excused from basic rules of logic, because of their morally bankrupt Western origins.

A benign example is deconstruction-style criticism of Martha Stewart, which shows her to be the blunt edge of a colonialist and racist society:

But just how to interpret Ms. Stewart's cultural prescriptions is open to vigorous debate. In the introductory essay to their anthology, "Martha Stewart's Living: History, Fragmentation and Late Capitalism's esthetician," Ms. Wazana and her co-editor, Zoe Newman, explore parallels between Ms. Stewart's work and the psychology of colonialism. Through repeated rituals that center on cleanliness, nostalgia and setting boundaries, they argue, both Ms. Stewart and colonialists strive to create a safe haven in a hostile world, demarcating the imperial "us" from the menacing "other."

"You leave Mother England and you go into the bush and you try to carve out a place that reflects upper-class English sensibilities," said Ms. Newman, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Toronto. "You eat your picnic off china and crystal in the middle of the desert."

A similar ethos is at work in Ms. Stewart's advice, which holds out the promise of security through grace, beauty and meticulous order. An essay in the Newman-Wazana anthology, "A Look at Linen Closets: Liminality, Structure and Anti-Structure in Martha Stewart Living," examines Ms. Stewart's rage for organization as represented in an instructional article in her magazine on arranging sheets and towels. The author, Ashley Prentice Anderson, argues that linens are fraught with messy, primitive associations, which trigger in Ms. Stewart -- and in everyone else -- an urgent need for control. "You're born on a sheet and you die on a sheet," said Ms. Anderson, a graduate student in English at New York University.

Ms. Newman also cited recurrent images of fences, hedges and garden walls as well as an article in the magazine on organizing basements that portrayed the nether region of the house as a place of foreboding and disorder. "I connect that to a need to regulate, a fear of transgression and the need for clear boundaries," she said.

By imposing such boundaries, these scholars say, Ms. Stewart serves to stem unease about race, class and sexuality. "It's people of color, it's working-class people" who are being put at a distance, said Ms. Newman, who stressed that she was not accusing the literal, flesh-and-blood Ms. Stewart of racism but rather examining her work as a symptom of the larger culture.

Incredible how a home and garden show that helps people (who choose to watch) achieve a commonly desired aesthetic end is, in truth, an instrument of racism and colonial imperialism. What a tour de force of criticism! Oh- but I don't mean to be "too hard on Martha - I just made her Avocado Soup!" (that's an actual quote from the issue of American Studies that focused on Stewart).

Next time you read Fisk or a defeatist "Guardependent" editorial, or some such swill, think about how this sort of "reasoning" pollutes the commentary. Since the government and the (non-academic) privileged are hopelessly burdened by "the bloody record of the United States in the past 50 years and the seemingly limitless capacity of U.S. officials to kill without conscience" , our institutionalized racism, and a foundation of militarism and colonialism, the U.S. can make no moral judgement. Since our definition of "evil" is by necessarily polluted by our definition of "good", we cannot condemn. Since to reason deductively is to be guilty of "logocentrism", we are incapable of demonstrating that outcomes in Afghanistan are positive (see Rall). Since corporations are an "illegitimate structure of authority" they cannot benefit us, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We are doomed prisoners of our past and our inherently racist "canonical texts."

Using the logic born in deconstruction to condemn everything Western is now a gateway to an "elite" opinion-maker status, an ostensibly foolproof way to become a "Scribe." Ta-da - Punditocracy.

Amusingly, deconstruction creates its own hierarchies and privileged elites. Once recognized, anything written is polluted by the elites' privileged status, and they are rendered meaningless on their own terms. Deconstruction (as practiced here) eats its young. DeMan discovered when his World War II-era writings were uncovered as anti-semitic and Nazi-justifying . De Man's paradoxical (isn't that ironic?) writing career became the subject of entire books.

Enough of this academic stuff. Let's talk about Winona Ryder......

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Compared to What?

The best way to identify misleading use of statistics or presentation of facts is to ask a simple question: "Compared to What?"

For instance, what if I told you I had a cure for the common cold? Proof? Well I found ten people with colds and gave them my cure. They were all better within a week! Miraculous! Except, as you well know, this was bound to happen. I'd love to tell the public I was responsible for curing all these good people, but my cure may have been irrelevant.* "Compared with" a control group, there would likely be little difference. Similarly, I would love to claim conclusively that tax cuts cause GDP growth, but the best I can tell you is that economic growth has followed tax cuts three times. There were many other things going on in the economy, so I can't prove to you that growth was the direct result of tax cuts or, for that matter, the exact contribution of tax cuts to economic growth. That part is left to econometric modelers, and if anyone can spin a grain of truth into a blanket of falsehoods, it is people who interpret complex models as precision tools (but that's another post).

Scientific testing is done with control groups and "double blind" procedures. Because outcomes are meaningless without a benchmark in which multiple contributing variables are held constant in order to test the reaction to one independent variable. In the absence of this testing, one has to be guarded with one's conclusions.

Which brings us to all the hideous charges leveled against the United States by those who think we can do no right. The most extreme examples are brought to you by the addled brains of that irritating species Pondscumi Guardependenti and related parasitic swamp life currently congealed at the website known as "Common Dreams." (Have I been reading Moira Breen? guilty!)

I marked four representative items of delusional thinking from Common Dreams in the MTZ Bullpen today. Tearing my hair out trying to select the most stupid from this impossibly high-achieving group, much like judging a flatulence contest for subtle differences in bouquet, is what prompted this rant. These simple organisms witness (and occasionally inflate) the evidence of many people dying of hunger and abuse around the world or dying as casualties of conflicts in which the U.S. has

a) been directly involved;
b) been indirectly involved; or
c) selfishly refused to become involved,

and jump to the conclusion that our involvement, or lack thereof, is the 100% contributing factor to this misery.

As an example, look at the charge that 1.5 million people have died in Iraq "due to our sanctions" (which comes from the not-so credible Iraqi government), and the more credible U.N. estimates of increased child mortality rates, which show a return to 1970 levels of child mortality. This is certainly the most popular evidence requiring American isolationism on Common Dreams. Curious, really, how much they have in common with Pat Buchanan. Maybe that's why they keep posting Eric Margolis columns. Nonetheless, this is one of the few arguments that more credible pundits have advanced recently, so let's think about it.

Accepting these numbers as fact, the fact that they exist does not attribute them directly to sanctions. There is a lot more going on in Iraq from 1988 to the present:

1) the country is run by a ruthless dictator who has nationalized, no personalized, everything that makes money so as to enrich himself to the tune of $7 billion dollars.

2) That same dictator is busy throwing every weapon he can find at residents of his own country

3) At the inflection point in child mortaility rates, the leader of this country invaded a neighboring country for no particular reason, placing hundreds of thousands of soldiers, his own citizens and, of course, the citizens of the invaded country, at considerable risk, and squandering the country's resources on the adventure to boot.

So, exhibiting our usual genocidal tendencies, we refuse to do business with him...until we can verify he is no longer stockpiling weapons to back up any more grand scheming. To prove we are killers, we offer ever-expanded oil-for-food programs (up to $17 billion dollars) despite the fact that he makes sure almost none of it ends up in the hands of these dying children. To expand on these themes, read this article.

I ask "compared to what?" What if there were no sanctions? There would be a lot more palaces in Iraq. Thousands more Kurds and other residents of the region would be dead from chemical and biological weapons experiments. And the Iraqi government would hide all the starving children from UNICEF surveyors (who depend on Saddam's voluntary hospitality) in order to show better mortality rates, as they did prior to 1990. If Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapon, he could walk into Iran or Saudi Arabia with near impunity and slaughter whomever he wished. But we are the murderers for not buying his oil.**

And what should we do instead? It's clear these folks don't think we should invade. Should we pretend this is a legitimate regime? It's pretty clear that would be a mistake. It's one thing to speculate about a leader's intentions, but this guy actually did invade another country and has used weapons of mass destruction on his own people. What constitutes a basis for our involvement? And absent invasion or sanctions what would you do? If you favor the U.N., what do you suggest the U.N. do, if it isn't hopelessly paralyzed by the politics of the general assembly? It's so easy to bemoan the consequences of others' actions when you take or recommend none yourself. Until you realize that if we completely gave up on Iraq millions of people would die horrible deaths at the hands of Saddam Hussein or be condemned to a life under his dicatorship. I suppose the U.S. would be responsible for that as well. Because we drive SUVs. Because there are rich people here. Because we like to shop....

In truth, the "no more sanctions" movement is really the "more freedom and palaces for the Hitler of the Middle East" movement. But that's a claim we can debate. Remember, these are the folks who believe that "Global slavery is the secret behind our economic success.". For sheer self-contradicting idiocy, try this Madeleine Bunting quotation on for size:

So this year, as we pull the crackers, we can happily reflect on the fact that those dear Afghans are now flying their kites and listening to their screeching music (though it's a mystery as to why they would want to) once again, thanks to us. To top it all, feeling really good usually requires some measure of feeling superior; so round off that seasonal glow with some gloating at the idiots who opposed this war.

Oh that screeching Afghan music, and those condescending...everybodies. Now try this inarticulate nod to deconstructionism from U.T.'s own Robert Jensen. These words are intended to show a lack of cynicism:

For example, I am against the illegitimate structure of authority called the corporation. I want to see different forms of economic organization emerge. I am hopeful about the possibilities but not optimistic that in my lifetime I will see the demise of capitalism, corporations, and wage slavery. Still, I will do certain things to work toward that.

The same can be said of the problem of U.S. aggression against innocent people in the rest of the world, particularly these days in Afghanistan, where the aggression is most intense. Given the bloody record of the United States in the past 50 years and the seemingly limitless capacity of U.S. officials to kill without conscience, I must confess I am not optimistic that such aggression will stop anytime soon, in large part because those corporate structures that drive the killing are still around. But I will do certain things to work against it.

Or take the large state research university. I am concerned about how the needs of students are systematically ignored and the needs of corporate funders are privileged, how critical thinking is squashed not by accident but by design. I am concerned about the illegitimate structures of authority that I work in and that compel me to act in ways against the interests of students. I am not optimistic that the structure of big research universities is going to change anytime soon. But I will do certain things to work against the structures.

Apparently "doing certain things" includes rewriting history and blaming corporations for...everything bad in the world. What it doesn't include is posing any alternatives at all, let alone superior alternatives.

Wouldn't it be nice to be as free with logic as the people who infest the pages of in yer dreams? It's all very well for me to suggest they think a bit more scientifically, but the most productive thing these folks could do with a calculator would be to hit themselves over the head with it. Of course that would somehow be the U.S. Government-corporate conspiracy's fault as well. "After all (thunk) here it is (thunk) happening (thunk) right before your (thunk) eyes so (thunk) it must be (thunk) the CIA/FBI/ExxonMobil/BUSH (thunk) OW!"...

*Or, as Michael Flanders would say, "But it's not irrelevant, it's a hippopotamus."
**Of course, we are also murderers for buying oil from other thugocracies

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

MTZ Religious Studies Department

Many some One of you has written in to critique the MTZ intelligence coup of the year - the overheard conversation between Osama and one of his men over a short-range radio. "How can virgins have The Clap?", the reader asks.

Actually, this hits on an important aspect of the unique interpretation of Islam that is Bin Ladenism. Several of OBL's wives have had venereal disease, including one that infected OBL on his wedding night - well, that particular wedding night. Explaining what at first seemed inexplicable, OBL proclaimed it a miracle and led a propagandaprayer session this new discovery - the miracle of Immaculate Infection subsequently became a canonical text of bin Ladenism. Unlike the one-time miracle of Immaculate Conception, true followers of OBL have reported many instances of this incredible sign from God. This is just one of the many reasons they have such faith in the justice of their cause.