Detached Observer

2009-06-08T19:27:00.000-07:00

According to this article, UFOs changed sometime in late 1960s. If before aliens were perfectly happy to flash their flying saucers and vanish into thin air, afterwards they began abducting us into their labs, where painful and humiliating probes awaited us. I wonder how this change maps to the evolution of American culture.

2009-06-04T19:20:00.000-07:00

Its fairly common these days to hear references to "peak oil theory" as a reason why the world is headed towards doom in the near future as we run out of oil and energy prices skyrocket. At the very least, I'm continuously bombarded by books about this when I browse the current-affairs section of the local bookstore. As far as I can tell, theres not that many scientists who literally believe in this; theres a few geologists, an economist here and there, and many environmental activists who promote "peak oil" in order to get more government investments into solar and wind power.

There's various debunkings of peak oil theory available online (see links at the end), but I wasn't completely satisfied by them. So here is my own summary of the basic arguments involved (and their flaws).

First, here is the peak oil argument, at least as I've managed to understand it.
It begins with the uncontroversial fact that petroleum production at many particular oil fields follows a bell-shaped peak. Here for example is the petroleum production of the North Sea:

Moreover, this pattern often holds up when we look at groups of oil fields. For example, if we look at all the oil fields in the US:

The peak oil people then assert that the world's oil production must be following a similar curve. They try to guess how much oil we have left by fitting bell-curves to the currently available data.

This last part is, in my opinion (and in the opinion of many experts), very problematic. Even if we supposed that oil production in any particular source follows a bell curve, it doesn't follow that the world's production will follow a bell curve. The reason people stop extracting oil from any particular place is that it gets more expensive than other places, which are continually being discovered and remapped. Moreover, technology changes all the time, thereby changing which places are the cheapest. As Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, an economist at Drake University puts it,

One of the major defects of Peak Oil is its facile extrapolation or transition from micro to macro level, that is, an unwarranted generalization or extention of what is true in the case of an existing oil well or oil field to the entire world oil production. It is true that every operating or producing oil well or field increases in production rate until it reaches a maximum or peak flow rate, after which the rate of production enters a terminal decline. It does not follow, however, that global world oil production as a whole must soon reach a maximum and begin to run out afterward...

In fact, even as individual oil fields have "peaked" world's oil reserves have been increasing. As this Reason article explains,

...petroleum optimists, such as the analysts at the [US Geological Survey] ... point out that reserve growth and new discoveries have been outpacing oil consumption. (Reserve growth is the increase in production in already discovered and developed fields.) From 1995 and 2003 the world consumed 236 billion barrels of oil. It also saw reserve growth of 175 billion barrels, combined with 138 billion barrels from new discoveries, added a total of 313 billion barrels to the world’s proven oil reserves.

To summarize, we keep discovering new oil, as well as new methods for extracting it, which is why individual oil fields tend to peak and decline, even as global production shows no sign of slowing down and global reserves increase.

Let's go back to the data. Here is the graph of global oil production:

So far, it does not look like the left-half of the bell curve. In fact, the main thought I have from staring at it is that it sure looks like oil production mirrors economic growth. The 50s, 60s, and early 70s were a time of rapid economic growth for the world and oil production expanded fast. Then came the slump of the late 70s and early 80s, followed by slower economic growth ever since. Note the lack of growth in the last year or so corresponding to the current economic crisis.

In fact, peak oilers have a pretty bad record in thinking each hill in this graph represents the permanent peak of world oil production. Just to point out a couple of of examples from especially prominent peak-oilers: Colin Campbell predicted that oil peaked in 1989 and Ken Duffeyes predicted that oil peaked in 2000.

The bottom line:

I believe the peak-oil arguments are pretty silly. Let's not forget, of course, that the amount of oil in the ground is finite, so its bound to run out eventually. However, if your goal is to understand when this will happen, trying to fit bell curves to current oil production is a waste of time.

Finally, if you are interested in more, here are some links to others who have made these and other criticisms. The Reason article mentioned above is a good place to start. This article from the economist focuses its attention on the massive alternative energy sources (tar sands, gtl, shale oil) which will most likely overtake conventional crude oil in the next few decades, and which are either neglected or vastly underestimated in most peak oil arguments. Finally, there is this economics-focused takedown from Ismael Hossein-Zadeh which I quoted from earlier.

2009-03-24T15:37:00.000-07:00

This is from For a Palestinian: A Memory of Wael Zuaiter, an exhibit at the Guggenheim that I visited this weekend. In 1972, Zuaiter was a representative of the PLO - a terrorist organization which at the time was bombing schoolbuses. After the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the munich olympics, he was arrested by the Italian police for his connections with the perpetrators, but was ultimately let go. When Israel, in response to the murders, put together a list of PLO organizers of terrorism in Europe - based primarily on testimony of "turned" PLO members - Zuaiter was on top of the list. Israel assassinated him in October 1972.

The exibition is a collection of Zuaiter's extensive book collection, letters, postcards; photographs of the places where he lived and walked; a recording of Mahler's ninth symphony, which was Zuaiter's favorite; snapshots of him with friends; a photograph of Zuaiter lying in a pool of blood after his assassination, a book pierced by a bullet in his hands; pictures of the artist shooting bullets at books (see photograph above). As the New Yorker summarizes it,

Zuaiter, a poet and an intellectual, was never conclusively linked to Black September, and Jacir’s installation and related film elide thorny questions of his alleged culpability. What emerges instead...is a deeply moving memorial with a blatant political agenda.

Personally, the only emotion this provoked in me is irritation, but perhaps for others it was "deeply moving." Its hard to feel any sympathy for Zuaiter. For the sake of argument, lets accept the premise that Israeli intelligence was wrong - that Zuaiter was not involved in terrorist acts, and that he was, as the second in command of the PLO would claim later, a pacifist. It is still undisputed that he belonged to a terrorist organization. And, really, working for terrorists has its risks, as Zuaiter found out firsthand.

Incidentally, the US, quite rightly, has a similar policy of assassinating Al Qaeda members whenever it can.

What do we owe the families of the people who have been assassinated this way, and how do we deal with the charges that some of them might be innocent?

It seems quite plain to me that we owe them nothing, no more than we owe to families of enemy soldiers in any war the US has fought. The most measured response to terrorism in our arsenal is to use our intelligence to locate terrorists and assassinate them. As long as in doing so, we are not targeting civilians deliberately, our behavior is nothing more than self-defense. I certainly hope that if some US soldier finds Osama Bin Laden in his sights, he won't hesitate to pull the trigger. I also hope the same would go for anyone working for Bin Laden.

In the end, what the exhibit shows most clearly are the moral blind spots of the artist. Its somewhat repulsive that someone would make, and a major gallery would host, a memorial to a member of a terrorist organization.

On a deeper level, what makes the exhibit a fairly trite work of art is precisely the decision of the artist to "elide thorny questions of [Zuaiter's] culpability." Interesting art requires asking uncomfortable questions and being painfully honest in your answers. The Guggenheim exhibit, on the other hand, feels like a second-rate attempt at political propaganda.

2008-11-07T21:28:00.001-08:00

In 2004, Kerry lost 51-48. Yesterday, Obama won 52-46. Thats a net shift of 9 points.

But the shift was not geographically uniform. In the graph below, which I stole from Krugman, shades of blue correspond to shifts towards democrats relative to 2004 while shades of red correspond to shifts towards republicans.

It seems in many places in the US actually experienced large shifts towards republicans - the dark red correspond to shifts of 20 percent or more.

How to explain this data?

The most puzzling thing about it is how the divisions cut across the categories commonly used to think about politics. For example, we tend to think about Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas as being "southern" and hence similar politically, as far as distinct states can be politically similar anyway; but the first two experienced significant shifts towards the democrat whereas the latter two experiences significant shifts towards the republican.

There could be a simple explanation: the differences could simply reflect the efforts put in by the campaigns - perhaps Obama did not campaign, advertise, or moblize voters much in the red-shaded areas. I don't think this is the case; even among safe states for McCain, in which I don't see either McCain or Obama spending much effort, there are large differences.

To take a concrete examples, consider Mississpipi vs. Alabama vs. Tennessee. All three have always been shoo-ins for McCain. Yet Mississippi is covered in blue; it moved the same way as the rest of the nation. Alabama has a mixture of red and blue; and Tennessee is almost entirely covered in red, indicating a large shift in the opposite direction from the rest of the nation.

My guess is that these divisions could represent significant cultural cleavages which I have not seen anyone explain.

2008-09-27T16:51:00.001-07:00

Some links I found to be interesting:

Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way.

Letter to congress by a number of economists.

Letter to the editor in the washington post.

And now a random thought. I wonder to what extent scientists and engineers are responsible for the current financial crisis.

Hear me out. I know for a fact that many investment banks will hire graduates from technical fields (math, physics, engineering) with no knowledge of economics, finance, or law. As far as I can tell, what most of these people do when they get to wall street is something like modeling and prediction of time series, without much concern for the theoretical economic models that generate these time series. Of course, my sample size for making this assertion is around 3, so take it with a grain of salt.

When a time series is nice and regular, trying to predict it is not unfeasible, but rare events - say occurring once every 70 years, or, even worse, for the first time - create problems. There is no good way to predict them based on the data alone; the only hope is to think of whats possible in terms of the fundamental laws which generate your time series, which, in this case, probably requires a really good familiarity with economics and with the american regulatory framework.

But since a lot (most?) of people on wall street don't have this familiarity, they tend to fuck up in major ways every time a rare event occurs. This is a recurring pattern, manifesting not just in the current crises, but also (recently) in the asian financial crisis and the collapse of LTCM.

2008-08-19T20:42:00.000-07:00

I did not very get far reading this polemic by Marshall Sahlins against the proposed Milton Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago. I do want to dissect the first couple of paragraph as an example of really crappy writing.

Suppose you want to argue that the proposed Milton Friedman Institute is going to give rise to ideological research. This sounds like it could be a plausible argument, its a rather hard one to make. The institute is not up and operational yet, and so it has not really sponsored much research so far. One has to read its mission statements and news releases accompaning the founding of the institute for evidence of ideological bias, and those - as far I saw - do not include much besides a commitment to the study of markets.

What to do? How about this: instead of claiming that the institute will support ideological research, why not just claim that some people think the institute will support ideological research? Such a claim does not really need much defending. And viola,

...to many observers at home and abroad, the establishment of a monumental institute named after Friedman and directly subsidized by private funds, will brand the University of Chicago as an academic instrument of a certain ideology.

Of course, the reaction of any normal person reading this is to wonder why we are concerned about the reaction of "many observers" at all - shouldn't we be basing our decisions on whether these claims are, you know, true or not, rather than whether "many observers" think they are true?

By the way, the writers of the faculty petition against the institute pulled a similar trick:

Many colleagues are distressed by the notoriety of the Chicago School of Economics, especially throughout much of the global south.... The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive. Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world's population....

Clearly, we should cancel the institute - we don't want to create distress for "many colleagues!"

Moving on, Sahlins gives us a dirty smear-by-association,

Does the university expect us to "disappear" the memory of the Friedman-trained Chicago Boys, who supplied the economic programs for the draconian regimes of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the generals in Argentina? The sacrificial reduction of social values to monetary calculations is the essence of Friedman economics, and helps explain its historic taint as the complement of state terror. Not long before he was assassinated in Washington by Pinochet's agents, Orlando Letelier, ambassador of the deposed Salvador Allende government, wrote that the Chicago Boys "convinced the generals that they were prepared to supplement the brutality which the military possessed, with the intellectual assets it lacked."

Of course, helping a government with economic policy does not implicate you in any political crimes the government has made. I'd also note that helping to make Chile richer is nothing to be ashamed of.

Anyway, this is where I stopped reading. Final thought: being a distinguished anthropologist does not prevent you from making really shitty arguments. If you thought that success in anthropology implies some degree of mental rigor, you thought wrong.

2008-08-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

Some random thoughts on the Russia/Georgia war:

1. It seems that most reporting on this subject in the western media has a fairly uniform anti-Russian tone. I can see how it might be tempting to adopt such a tone. Its easy to cast Georgia as the good guy - after all, it is a democracy with free elections. By contrast, the same cannot be said of Russia, which seems to be getting more and more authoritarian every day. Putin now effectively controls what goes onto the major television stations as well as most the print media. Critics of the government are arrested based on flimsy pretexts. And so on.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that its wrong to cast Russia as the villain in this conflict. Majorities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia do not want to join Georgia. Georgia is trying to subjugate two distinct ethnic groups, with distinct cultures and languages, against their will.

Of course, there are thorny questions here (how exactly do we decide which groups are entitled to self-determination?) to which I don't have any systematic answers. Still, its hard to feel any sympathy for the Georgian attempt to restore its "territorial integrity" at the expense of two peoples which have given up thousands of lives in the past two decades fighting for independence.

2. John McCain's reaction to this conflict is pretty crazy:

McCain seized on the conflict again today during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, remarking that Nato's decision to delay Georgian membership in the alliance this year "might have been viewed as a green light by Russia for its attacks".
"I urge Nato allies to revisit the decision," McCain said.

If there is one thing we should learn from this conflict, its that admitting Georgia into Nato makes it quite likely that the US will be drawn into military conflict with a nuclear superpower over a country most Americans haven't even heard of until last week.

2008-07-25T14:21:00.000-07:00

I just saw an english-subtitled version of the confrontation between Hugo Chavez and Zapatero/King Juan Carlos. I know this has been around for more than a year, but nevertheless:

At the heart of the issue, I think, is a divergence in meaning that the word "fascist" has undergone. In most of the world, the word no longer has any connection to any ideology, and none to historical fascist movements; instead, it functions as an insult people hurl at movements who are slightly more authoritarian that they'd like - examples abound. On the other hand, in countries that have actually had experience with fascism, the word retains some connection to the historical fascism, and is considerably more insulting. So Chavez and Zapatero may be using the same word, but end up speaking past each other.

2008-07-05T02:01:00.000-07:00

Is there such a thing as too many american flags?

Personally, I think if your underwear doesnt sport the stars and stripes youre a bloody fucking traitor.

2008-04-22T22:40:00.000-07:00

For a clear-headed discussion of academic freedom in the context of the John Yoo case, see here. I have a few of additional things to say on the matter.

When people typically argue that Yoo should be fired, they tend to resort to two main arguments.

The magic job title: Suppose you and I strike up a conversation, and you happen to ask me what I think about the power of the executive, and I reply that since the president is the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces, there is no legal limitation whatsoever on the orders he can give to the troops. Interesting, you say, can you write this down for me along with the references? Sure, I say.

That's just talk.

On the other hand, suppose I have a JD and have "white house legal counsel" as my job title. Further...

...Suppose you and I strike up a conversation, and you happen to ask me what I think about the power of the executive, and I reply that since the president is the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces, there is no legal limitation whatsoever on the orders he can give to the troops. Interesting, you say, can you write this down for me along with the references? Sure, I say.

Well now thats a war crime.

According to this view, writing down my opinions is clearly not a crime. Its my JD and my job title that magically transform writing my opinions into crimes.

And that, of course, is just silly - a lawyer is just someone who writes down his opinions in exchange for money. Nothing more, nothing less.

The consequence argument: A consequence of Yoo's writing down his opinions was that people were tortured, and therefore Yoo is guilty of a war crime. For example, Marty Lederman (an actual law professor - I am not just pulling random yahoos of the internets) writes,

...no one thinks a professor should be fired for having views deemed morally reprehensible or for producing a shoddy piece of work. The claim here is that the morally reprehensible views, and the shoddy work, in this case were put to use in official state conduct that facilitated and immunized horrific crimes. And that makes the question at least a bit more complicated...

Of course, nothing in this argument references the fact that Yoo was a white house legal counsel. In fact, if he just expressed his views to Bush over lunch, the argument would still hold. As long as his act results in torture or, in Lederman's words, is "put to use in official state conduct that facilitated and immunized horrific crimes," there is no difference whether he wrote it down in a memo or expressed it verbally.

Nor does he have to express it to Bush; it could be any kind of lower ranking official in the white house. Nor, come to think of it, would Yoo even need to do that; if he just published the arguments of his memo in a magazine, the effects would be the same.

You can see how this argument leads to a blanket restriction on speech. Once you start saying that some speech is a war crime based on the acts it inspires in other people (irrespective of its content - for this argument to work, it doesn't matter if Yoo is right or wrong!), free speech is pretty much in the toilet.

2008-04-04T23:06:00.000-07:00

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

So wrote George Orwell almost sixty years ago. I'm reminded of this today by the emerging controversy over John Yoo - a number of people want this man fired because they don't like the legal opinions he wrote while working for the Department of Justice. Of course, if you have any commitment at all to "academic freedom," its impossible to support this. Cases like Yoo's, in fact, are exactly the reason why we have the tenure system -professors need job security precisely so that they can conduct independent and potentially unpopular scholarship. Unless you are perfectly content to live in a world without academic freedom - where the opinions of academics are up for review by their superiors - you have an obligation to support Yoo's right to hold his legal views and still keep his job. All in all, this case is a no-brainer.

Watch, however, how language is twisted in an effort to make Yoo's role seem larger than life. This piece at the Huffington posts quotes the following:

"Addington, Bybee, Gonzales, Haynes, and Yoo became, in effect, a torture team of lawyers, freeing the administration from the constraints of all international rules prohibiting abuse."

while Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber writes

...this is not, in the end, an issue of academic freedom. That is, it doesn’t concern Yoo’s ideas about the laws or communication of same; it concerns credible allegations that Yoo acted directly and deliberately, in his capacity as an employee of the US government to facilitate war crimes.

Of course, when all is said and done, all Yoo did was give his legal opinion. To bring Orwell's point home, you could argue directly that lawyers ought to be jailed if their opinions about the constitution are too wacky, but that would be far too honest.

This whole thing sort of reminds me of another disturbing trend: the way labels like "human rights" have been co-opted in the service of speech suppression. Read more about that here.

Update: This formulation is particularly amusing,

None of Yoo’s critics, to my knowledge, are arguing that he should lose his job for his ideas; rather that he should lose his job for actions that he took as a servant of the US government…

Of course, the actions in question consist of nothing more than writing down his ideas.

2008-04-01T00:13:00.000-07:00

The Times has an article about Palestinian children's tv:

Another children’s program, “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” has become infamous for its puppet characters — a kind of Mickey Mouse, a bee and a rabbit — who speak, like Assud the rabbit, of conquering the Jews to the young hostess, Saraa Barhoum, 11. “We will liberate Al Aksa mosque from the Zionists’ filth,” Assud said recently. “We will liberate Jaffa and Acre,” cities now in Israel proper. “We will liberate the whole homeland.”

The mouse, Farfour, was murdered by an Israeli interrogator and replaced by Nahoul, the bee, who died “a martyr’s death” from lack of health care because of Gaza’s closed borders. He has been supplanted by Assud, the rabbit, who vows “to get rid of the Jews, God willing, and I will eat them up, God willing.”

When Assud first made his appearance, he said to Saraa: “We are all martyrdom-seekers, are we not, Saraa?” She responded: “Of course we are. We are all ready to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of our homeland. We will sacrifice our souls and everything we own for the homeland.”

2008-02-10T14:17:00.001-08:00

Here is a puzzle I thought of the other day.

Suppose a time traveler from the future proposes a deal for you. He has taken some scans of you and he claims to be able to reconstruct you precisely in the future - molecule for molecule. Furthermore, in the future improved advances in medicine have made eternal youth possible, so that what you get is not just more life but eternal life. In return, he asks you to run errands for him for a mere decade or so.

Should you accept? Our immediate intuition is to say no - whatever he will reconstruct in the future will not be you - perhaps it will be a copy of you, but not you, who will have died by then.

Consider, though, a different scenario. Suppose a professor of biology from university X claims to have found the key to eternal youth. He claims that the cell-division process is inherently flawed; every time your cells divide, the new copies are slightly degraded. Worse, some cells in your body do not divide at all, and as a result degenerate over time. He claims to have perfected the cell division process, and learned how to induce division in cells which do not divide.

He offers you a pill - for the same price as the time traveler in our first example - which, if you take, will induce each of your cells to make a perfect copy of itself every day - no degradation. If you take it, he says, you will have eternal life. Some of your friends have taken it and have indeed stopped aging as a result. Moreover, they seem the same as ever - no side effects.

Should you accept? Our immediate intuition is to say yes - this is eternal life, and surely its worth whatever is asked for it.

But the two scenarios are actually identical - in the latter case, you will be copied one cell at a time, but in the former case you will be copied in one shot. Accepting that no cell of your body now is going to be part of the future you, it seems weird to argue that whether the future entity is you depends on how it was constructed from you - whether on a cell by cell basis, or all-at-once.

2007-12-09T23:09:00.000-08:00

Suppose, for a moment, that you are a white farmer of solid means in the antebellum south. You have a neighbor who treats all of his slaves mercilessly, requiring them to work 16 hour days, and feeding them only one meal a day. You feel the need to do something that will, if not fix, then at least alleviate the cruelty you are witnessing.

Your solution: you take a loan and buy the slaves from your neighbor. You figure that if you force them to work 14 hours a day, and feed them breakfast in addition to their one meal, you will earn enough money to repay the loan - indeed you might even make a small profit. So this is what you end up doing.

A happy ending? Everybody is better off, after all; you are making a small profit, whereas the slaves are in a marginally better position. An economist would call that a Pareto-improvement.

Most people would not agree. We have a strong moral intuition that tells us that engaging in exploitation and slavery are wrong, regardless of the circumstances. I'm going to take it as a given that there are certain moral absolutes, and that slavery is one of them.

There is one area of public discourse where the argument of the slaveholder gets offered again and again in slight disguise. This is free trade; one hears that we are only improving the situation by agreeing to purchase products from nations where sweatshops and child labor are prevalent. After all, people are choosing to work in the sweatshops, so they must be better off working in a sweatshop than the other options available to them.

Paul Krugman wrote a decade ago

Why does the image of an Indonesian sewing sneakers for 60 cents an hour evoke so much more feeling than the image of another Indonesian earning the equivalent of 30 cents an hour trying to feed his family on a tiny plot of land...?

and here is Clive Crook writing in the Atlantic Monthly

It is very hard to maintain that (a) trade is good for us in the aggregate and (b) it makes sense to go slow on trade liberalization. If you are going to argue (b), before long you will find yourself failing to mention (a).

Crazy.

Crook - who is a columnist for the Financial Times - was prompted to write the above by Hillary Clinton's recent statement

...what I have called for is a time-out which is really a review of existing trade agreements and where they are benefiting our workers and our economy and where the provision should be strengthened to benefit the rising standards of living across the world...I’m trying to take the trade agreements that [Bush] has negotiated each one on its merits - and I will support the Peru agreements because it has the kind of strong labor and environmental provisions that I’ve long called for...

for which she has been criticized by various free trade supporters. On the other hand, to me Clinton's statements have been like a breath of fresh air. Most American politicians fall either into the free trade radical or the protectionist camp. Its nice to have a candidate who has a level-headed approach to trade issues.

2007-11-10T16:30:00.001-08:00

I don't dispute that at times the US has been inconsistent in its pursuit of democracy. Sometimes other priorities - like fighting Al Qaeda - have been pursued at the expense of democracy promotion. This has lead some critics to argue that the entire policy is little more than a sham within which the US cloaks its geopolitical interests: while the US criticizes its enemies for their anti-democratic practices, it turns a blind eye to similar practices perpetrated by its allies. I think two recent developments prove this to be false:

The condemnation of steps taken by Pakistan's president Musharaff to solidify his (undemocratic) position.

The condemnation of steps by Georgian president Saakshvilli to suppress opposition movements.

In both cases you havea country allied with the US, lead by a president extremely sympathetic to America. Should the president in question (Saakashvilli, Musharaff) be removed, it is unclear whether the subsequent leader would take a similarly strong pro-US position. In spite of this, the opposition of the US to anti-democratic measures taken by said presidents should be fairly convincing evidence that the US really does take democracy promotion seriously.

2007-11-10T13:47:00.001-08:00

You Are a Caramel Crunch Donut

You're a complex creature, and you're guilty of complicating things for fun.
You've been known to sit around pondering the meaning of life...
Or at times, pondering the meaning of your doughnut.
To frost or not to frost? To fill or not to fill? These are your eternal questions.

What Donut Are You?

2007-11-08T00:34:00.001-08:00

I came across this curious tidbit the other day; this is Johnathan Edwards, addressing the question of whether the Christians in heaven will not be saddened by the eternal sufferings of the damned. The source is here.

The seeing of the calamities of others tends to heighten the sense of our own enjoyments. When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state... When they shall see how miserable others of their fellow-creatures are...when they shall see the smoke of their torment...and hear their dolorous shrieks and cries, and consider that they in the mean time are in the most blissful state, and shall surely be in it to all eternity: how they will rejoice!

2007-11-08T00:04:00.001-08:00

I just came across this book review in the LRB, containing a detailed account of the death of Walter Benjamin:

Benjamin would set out for the [Spanish-French ] border with two other people, Henny Gurland and her teenage son, Joseph, on 26 September 1940 ...Benjamin was a very advanced 48, with a promising future behind him and a number of medical problems, including lung trouble and a heart condition.

Fittko describes the little party striking out at a steady pace, she and Joseph taking turns to carry Benjamin’s black briefcase. Much later, when people asked her if she knew, or he’d said, what it contained, she was impatient. He was carrying a very important manuscript, worth more in his eyes than his own life, as he’d intimated, but that was as far as it went. Fittko was a militant people-smuggler on her first run, not a scholar or literary hanger-on. ‘For better or worse,’ she said of Benjamin’s luggage, ‘we had to drag that monstrosity over the mountains.’ She also called it ‘his ballast’. It’s likely, given the importance attached to it, that she embellished her memoir – and indeed her memory – to make more of the mysterious briefcase. Rolf Tiedemann, co-editor of the Suhrkamp seven-volume Gesammelte Schriften, speculated that its contents might have included a copy of the Theses on the Philosophy of History; the Harvard editors of the Selected Writings say the same. In any event, the manuscript, along with the bag and whatever else it contained, crossed the frontier and promptly disappeared.

On the journey, Benjamin... was a model compared with some of the fusspots she’d later deliver to safety. She remembers resting up, eating ‘a piece of bread I’d bought with bogus food stamps’ and pushing the tomatoes across to Benjamin, who’d asked: ‘By your leave, gnädige Frau, may I serve myself?’ That’s how it was, she says, with ‘Old Benjamin and his Spanish court etiquette’.

Fittko...had taken ten hours to climb from Banyuls to the Spanish border with the Gurlands....She was basking in her first triumph, delighted with the route and – this has an air of embellishment – gratified to think that ‘Old Benjamin and his manuscript are safe now . . . on the other side of the mountains.’

Had Portbou remained a quiet fishing community it might never have been bombed by Italian aircraft during the Civil War, but it became a strategic railway station at the end of the 1920s and was still badly damaged when the refugees arrived. On announcing themselves to the authorities, they were told they’d be returned to France the following day. Birman [a member of Benjamin's party -alex]was mortified: evidently they should have gone through the formalities at an earlier point of entry, which they must have missed; their contact in Banyuls had warned against this eventuality. Birman’s neck ‘was seized by a big male hand’. She was ‘turned around and commanded by a stocky man to follow him closely’. Her destination was the Fonda de Francia, a hotel in Portbou where she and the others were placed under garde à vue. It was a watering hole for special services, including the Gestapo (in those days undercover as shipping agents), informers and spooks from both sides of the border.

Birman says that they all had to double up except for Benjamin, who got ‘a room for himself: his companion with son another place, Sophie and I a room, and my sister and Grete Freund a small cell’. The situation could not have been worse, yet there was a trapdoor somewhere in this despair and Birman fell through it when she and Sophie Lippmann decided that the gold coins they’d brought with them should now be used to pay someone – anyone – to intercede on their behalf with the authorities. Lippmann felt the ‘hotel warden’ might be biddable and predictably enough, when she went to look for him, he was ready to help.

On her return she told Birman that she’d heard a ‘loud rattling from one of the neighbouring rooms’. Birman went to investigate and found Benjamin ‘in a desolate state of mind and in a completely exhausted physical condition’. He told her he could not go back to the border and would not move out of the hotel. She said there was no alternative and he disagreed: ‘He hinted that he had some very effective poisonous pills with him. He was lying half naked in his bed and had his very beautiful big golden grandfather watch with open cover on a little board near him, observing the time constantly.’ This ‘big golden grandfather watch’ was perhaps a pocket watch; and if so, surely the one he’d consulted earlier in the day to ration the pauses during his heroic, debilitating ascent. Birman told him about the attempted bribe and urged him to hold off. ‘He was very pessimistic’ and thought the odds were way too long. A little later, Henny Gurland came into the room and Birman left. There were several visits by a local doctor who bled the patient and administered injections, but if Birman was aware of this, she doesn’t say so. She takes it to be a clear case of suicide. ‘The next morning,’ she writes, ‘we heard that he had succeeded and was no more amongst us.’

If there’s anything as famous about Benjamin’s death as the briefcase, it’s the fact that at the time he crossed, Spanish officials had been ordered to turn back refugees – anyone sans nationalité, as Henny explained it in her letter to her husband – and that this order was enforced for a day or so, then set aside, or ignored, immediately afterwards. It was Benjamin’s timing that was fatal: Arendt called it ‘an uncommon stroke of bad luck’. Much has been said about this, but Momme Brodersen’s remark, in his 1996 biography of Benjamin, is the one that lingers in the mind: ‘It is hard not to ask whether . . . Benjamin’s death was “preventable”, “unnecessary”, though these are unanswerable, pointless questions. Hundreds of others were dying, unnecessarily, anonymously, on the borders; millions were to die with no border in sight.’

The following day was probably more distressing to Birman than the night before... The warden was serving coffee to Birman, her sister Dele, Sophie Lippmann and Greta Freund when two policemen arrived and announced that they’d all have to return to the border and pick up entry visas. They left under escort and made the ascent in a couple of hours. The only sign of a customs point was a weather-beaten phone booth. The frontier itself consisted of a rope and beyond the rope an ominous, bored assortment of goons, French and German. The Spanish gendarmes turned back, pointing out how honourably they’d refrained from untying the rope and delivering them back into Vichy. They even left some coins for the refugees to use in the phone booth: they should phone through, they advised, to the police at Portbou, requesting permission to set foot on the Spanish soil they’d been pacing in such desolation for the better part of 24 hours.

"There we were sitting on rocks and burnt-out slopes. We were so depressed that we did not even notice that the sky was becoming darker and darker, although it was early in the afternoon. A thunderstorm! No, a rainstorm . . . We weighed our possibilities. There was only one direction with uncertain issue, all the others meant death. So we decided to return to Spain. There was no hope of walking down. There were no passable tracks any more, one could only sit on stones and try to glide down."

They slithered back to Portbou under driving rain and arrived at the police station around six in the evening. The captain of the guard thrust some papers in Birman’s pocket, told her their visas were in order and advised them to leave before dark. He waved them on for a baggage inspection, which they survived with their gold intact. The ‘hotel-keeper’, presumably the guardian Sophie had met the night before, was watching eagerly, and once they were through he demanded the promised reward. ‘Her offer had worked,’ Birman says, ‘even in our absence . . . he must have communicated with the police captain to rescind his previous order,’ but too late to stop them being marched back to the frontier. Once the gold was handed over, everything changed. The refugees were escorted to the Fonda de Francia as guests, rather than prisoners, and a lavish spread was prepared.

The gold probably tipped the scales in Birman’s favour, notwithstanding her all-round resourcefulness. If her story is true, it might have held out hope for Benjamin too. But Birman’s ‘professor’ was not a believer. Early in life he’d got out of gold – turning away from the path indicated by his family’s wealth – and into a pure, non-remunerative form of work, perhaps best thought of as the investigation of modernity: a cornucopia of social production and, as he envisaged it, a nearly miraculous condition of the kind you might come to understand after long study of an infant prodigy capable of grand engineering schemes, precocious feats of reasoning, high poetic utterance, generosity of spirit and a cruelty that knew no bounds. The European culture that Benjamin loved had the infernal vigour of the child genius, even though, in his reflections on the Second Empire, he could also discern the outlines of the ageing hag. Living on modest means, he did as much in his century for the discursive essay as Montaigne had done in his, though he was better placed, historically, not just to think about the world, but to try to say how the world thought back. Unlike his father, an auctioneer, rentier and speculator, Benjamin at 48 had a universe to offer but very little to transact, in life or on the point of dying, and so on his last journey he took the cash he could muster and the few articles he rightly considered essential: an obscure manuscript, a pocket watch and enough morphine ‘to kill a horse’, as Koestler had described it after their meeting in Marseille. Gold was not part of this crude survival kit, which provided for dispatch rather more than salvation. Benjamin may have been devoted to memory and posterity, but he had very little intellectual or moral interest in the road ahead – his or anybody else’s. ‘We know,’ he wrote in the last of his aphorisms on ‘Messianic time’ in the Theses, ‘that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however.’

2007-10-20T11:59:00.001-07:00

... a spokesman for gay rights group Stonewall added: "It's great that JK has said this. It shows that there's no limit to what gay and lesbian people can do, even being a wizard headmaster."

source.

I don't agree. I think gay people can become doctors, lawyers, scientists, politicians, etc. But I don't think a single gay person will ever become a wizard headmaster.

Am I homophobic?

2007-10-20T01:17:00.000-07:00

I really don't know how I feel about this.

2007-10-19T22:14:00.001-07:00

From the Times:

Though street crime is relatively low in Japan, quirky camouflage designs like this vending-machine dress are being offered to an increasingly anxious public to hide from would-be assailants.

This is not a joke.

2007-10-07T22:29:00.001-07:00

This is fascinating:

The posters taped on the walls at a political rally here capture the rawness of Switzerland’s national electoral campaign: three white sheep stand on the Swiss flag as one of them kicks a single black sheep away.

“To Create Security,” the poster reads.

The poster is not the creation of a fringe movement, but of the most powerful party in Switzerland’s federal Parliament and a member of the coalition government...

More than 20 percent of Swiss inhabitants are foreign nationals, and the SVP argues that a disproportionate number are lawbreakers. Many drug dealers are foreign, and according to federal statistics, about 70 percent of the prison population is non-Swiss.

As part of its platform, the SVP party has begun a campaign seeking the 100,000 signatures necessary to force a referendum to let judges deport foreigners after they serve prison sentences for serious crimes. The measure also calls for the deportation of the entire family if the convicted criminal is a minor.

Human rights advocates warn that the initiative is reminiscent of the Nazi practice of Sippenhaft, or kin liability, under which relatives of criminals were held responsible and punished for their crimes...

In a short three-part campaign film, “Heaven or Hell,” the party’s message is clear. In the first segment, young men inject heroin, steal handbags from women, kick and beat up schoolboys, wield knives and carry off a young woman. The second segment shows Muslims living in Switzerland — women in head scarves; men sitting, not working.

The third segment shows “heavenly” Switzerland: men in suits rushing to work, logos of Switzerland’s multinational corporations, harvesting on farms, experiments in laboratories, scenes of lakes, mountains, churches and goats. “The choice is clear: my home, our security,” the film states.

See the video below.

2007-09-26T22:56:00.000-07:00

An interesting article on Al Qaeda at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

2007-09-26T21:45:00.000-07:00

The Guardian has recently republished a series of interviews its reporters have done during the twentieth century; one of them was with Hitler in 1923. It makes for some interesting reading.

"Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"

"Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.

"Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.

Although socialism meant something quite unique to Hitler, conservatives these days sometimes argue that Nazi party was left-wing, since, after all, it was the National Socialist party. I've seen this argument on tv talk shows at least a few times - and its not too hard to find it online:

A Little Secret About the Nazis...They were left-wing socialists. Yes, the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany, otherwise known as the Nazi Party, was indeed socialist, and it had a lot in common with the modern left...

The Nazis are widely known as nationalists, but that label is often used to obscure the fact that they were also socialists. Some question whether Hitler himself actually believed in socialism, but that is no more relevant than whether Stalin was a true believer. The fact is that neither could have come to power without at least posing as a socialist.

Sad.

2007-09-07T17:58:00.000-07:00

Here is Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post on poverty statistics in the United States:

The government last week released its annual statistical report on poverty and household income. As usual, we -- meaning the public, the media and politicians -- missed a big part of the story. It is this: The stubborn persistence of poverty, at least as measured by the government, is increasingly a problem associated with immigration. As more poor Hispanics enter the country, poverty goes up. This is not complicated, but it is widely ignored.

The standard story is that poverty is stuck; superficially, the statistics support that. The poverty rate measures the share of Americans below the official poverty line, which in 2006 was $20,614 for a four-person household. Last year, the poverty rate was 12.3 percent, down slightly from 12.6 percent in 2005 but higher than the recent low, 11.3 percent in 2000. It was also higher than the 11.8 percent average for the 1970s. So the conventional wisdom seems amply corroborated.

It isn't. Look again at the numbers. In 2006, there were 36.5 million people in poverty. That's the figure that translates into the 12.3 percent poverty rate. In 1990, the population was smaller, and there were 33.6 million people in poverty, a rate of 13.5 percent. The increase from 1990 to 2006 was 2.9 million people (36.5 million minus 33.6 million). Hispanics accounted for all of the gain.

Consider: From 1990 to 2006, the number of poor Hispanics increased 3.2 million, from 6 million to 9.2 million. Meanwhile, the number of non-Hispanic whites in poverty fell from 16.6 million (poverty rate: 8.8 percent) in 1990 to 16 million (8.2 percent) in 2006. Among blacks, there was a decline from 9.8 million in 1990 (poverty rate: 31.9 percent) to 9 million (24.3 percent) in 2006. White and black poverty has risen somewhat since 2000 but is down over longer periods.

Only an act of willful denial can separate immigration and poverty.

Two comments:

We need a better index to measure how poverty evolves with time, one which is unaffected by recent arrivals. Immigration may change in many ways: number of immigrants admitted per year, the financial situation of those immigrants, and so on. If we are interested in endemic poverty in the US, we need an index which is insensitive to all this.
The tremendous decrease in poverty among blacks from 1990 to 2000 is another highlight of how so many things went so right for America during the Clinton era.

2007-09-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

I was walking to my office today when I ran into someone I knew. We started chatting, and he said to me, "this is your fourth year as a graduate student, right?"

I said no - in that tone of voice so as to say its not even close. What year am I? I started counting...1,2,3...4.

Fuck it, I am fourth year. Graduating in five years is more or less out of the question. But to graduate in six, I will have to apply for jobs a little more than two years from now.

Scary to even think about it. I better come up with something really impressive pretty soon.

2007-09-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

After reading the latest news from Belgium on the inability of Flemish and Walloon political parties to form a government, I am wondering how many successful multi-lingual states actually exist. That is, how many genuinly multi-lingual states - those with a significant percentage of the population speaking different languages - do not have persistent political friction due to the language/cultural differences?

The only example I can think of is Switzerland. By contrast, the tally for failures is quite large. Leaving aside African states, which I am not very familiar with, here are some examples which immediately jump to mind:

Canada: despite recent defeats at the polls, support for Quebec separatism remains at 40-45%. This number has been essentially unchanged in recent years.
Spain: Basque separatism has been a steady source of terrorist attacks over the last few decades.
Czechoslovakia: defunct after the first free elections.
Yugoslavia: an extremely bloody breakup into five ethnicity-based states and one multi-ethnic state.
Israel: 20% of the population speaks Arabic. Racial riots are not uncommon.
Moldova: fought (and lost) a civil war with a Russian speaking province in the early 90s.
India: being a blend of a number of different ethnic and linguistics groups, India has had a large amount of separatist terrorism over its history.
Sri Lanka: in a civil war with Tamil-speaking separatist insurgents.
Indonesia: fought bloody wars over East Timor and Aceh. Both of these province have a distinctively separate linguistic identity. The former conflict was effectively lost, the latter is still continuing.
Cyprus: after many wars, divided between Greek and Turkish enclaves.

This list is of course not comprehensive and there are many other examples out there. One pattern is that language-based frictions vary in strength based on the number of speakers of the language (for example, compare the relative weakness of Breton nationalism in France with the relative strength of Basque nationalism in Spain) and on the linguistic similarity between the various language. If the languages are different enough though, the conclusion seems to be that language-inspired political frictions never work themselves out, except by violence or separation.

By contrast, I am tempted to say that the reverse was true in the 19th century. Most Italians and Germans speak the standardized version of their languages (possibly concurrent with their local dialect). But standard Italian and standard German were not spoken 200 years ago; they were successfully foisted upon the population by governments that sought to strengthen national identity.

Such a thing does not seem to be possible now due a freezing of national and linguistic identities. Its hard to predict what trends will take place in the future, but if current trends continue, its hard to be optimistic about Canada or Belgium.

2007-07-26T16:24:00.000-07:00

Intel has set you free! Via Bruce Schneier, there is this hilarious ad.

2007-07-26T00:00:00.000-07:00

Among the pseudo-hippie university students I am currently surrounded with, its quite trendy to profess allegiance to eating only locally grown food. The idea, I think, is that this is supposed to be good for the environment - and your local farmer (it seems like the support you are obligated to give a farmer decreases proportionately to the distance between you and the farmer). Not surprisingly, like most ideas conceived by environmentalists with little understanding of modern technology, it ends up making little sense in terms of the actual environmental impact. The Boston Globe ran an article about this today:

...a gathering body of evidence suggests that local food can sometimes consume more energy -- and produce more greenhouse gases -- than food imported from great distances. Moving food by train or ship is quite efficient, pound for pound, and transportation can often be a relatively small part of the total energy "footprint" of food compared with growing, packaging, or, for that matter, cooking it...

Judged by unit of weight, ship and rail transport in particular are highly energy efficient. Financial considerations force shippers to pack as much as they can into their cargo containers, whether they're being carried by ship, rail, or truck, and to ensure that they rarely make a return trip empty. And because of their size, container ships and trains enjoy impressive economies of scale...

"Local food systems are often built around small-scale logistics," says Chris Foster, a research fellow at England's Manchester Business School and co-author of a December 2006 study on the environmental impacts of food production and consumption commissioned for Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. "You begin to make more trips in cars. More food is shifted around in small trucks and vans, which are relatively energy-inefficient ways of moving."

The difference can be dramatic, according to Rich Pirog, a food-systems researcher at Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. A bag of potatoes shipped from Idaho to Boston by rail, he estimates, is likely to require less energy in transit than the same bag of potatoes driven from Maine to Boston in a farmer's truck.

2007-05-16T19:09:00.000-07:00

Despite a few generalities I'd quibble with, this article is by far the best piece I have read on the middle east in years. As they say, read the whole thing.

2007-05-07T12:51:00.000-07:00

Although I love to maintain my detached cynicism towards politicians throughout the political spectrum, I have to say that Republicans take the house when it comes to gaffes. Everybody says stupid things, but the sheer volume given to us by Dan Quayle and Dubya is unmatched. It looks like 2008 won't be any different; here's Mitt Romney:

In France, for instance, I'm told that marriage is now frequently contracted in seven-year terms where either party may move on when their term is up. How shallow and how different from the Europe of the past.

Ha ha.

2007-04-24T14:06:00.000-07:00

From the Times today,

Military and other administration officials created a heroic story about the death of Cpl. Pat Tillman to distract attention from setbacks in Iraq and the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the slain man’s younger brother, Kevin Tillman, said today...

Former Pvt. Jessica Lynch leveled similar criticism today at the hearing about the initial accounts given by the Army of her capture in Iraq. Ms. Lynch was rescued from an Iraqi hospital in dramatic fashion by American troops after she suffered serious injuries and was captured in an ambush of her truck convoy in March 2003.

In her testimony this morning, she said she did not understand why the Army put out a story that she went down firing at the enemy.

“I’m confused why they lied,” she said.

I don't buy the interpretation Kevin Tillman puts on this. The number of things supposed to distract us from the failure of the Iraq war seems to grow larger and larger every day. Is it really that distracting to know that someone died heroically? Yes, it puts a more positive spin on the war, but only momentarily, and at the end it might even lead you to question whether those deaths were worth it.

The lies in question are actually not very surprising. Who wants to tell the parents their kid died from friendly fire? Indeed, why wouldn't the military make every soldier into a hero whenever possible? It costs the military nothing, it makes the parents feel good, and it lets the person be remembered in a positive light. I'd guess this is an extremely widespread practice, rather than the effort to make a small number of public figures (Tillman, Lynch) into hereos.

2007-04-22T22:56:00.000-07:00

Steven Landsburg writes in Slate:

Why parking your car is more environmentally destructive than driving it....It's crazy to feel guilty about dirtying the atmosphere without feeling even guiltier about clogging city streets. You might argue that global warming is a bigger problem than urban congestion, and you might be right. But that's not the issue. The issue is your contribution to global warming versus your contribution to urban congestion. And if you're a typical urban driver, the latter probably dwarfs the former.

Even if you never drive into the city, you're (at least indirectly) still part of the problem. Suburban shopping malls almost everywhere are required to have vastly oversized parking lots that are never close to full.

So, lets get this straight. Your contribution to congestion is greater than your contribution global warming, and this is true whether you are a "typical urban driver" or whether "you never drive into the city." And yet as a whole the problem of congestion is less serious than the problem of global warming.

Landsburg is aware that if you add up bigger numbers, your result will be bigger? I could put it in terms an economist like him can understand by saying that addition is a monotonically increasing function of its arguments.

2007-04-22T22:32:00.000-07:00

Two points about the Virginia Tech massacre.

1. I've been surprised at the number of people who have blamed NBC for releasing Cho's videos. There is the classic argument for free speech - that while ideas may actually be harmful, it is better to diffuse and debate them out in the open, rather than achieve dubious results by suppressing them. If you do not believe this, on some level you must be opposed to free speech, since the case for suppressing harmful ideas is immediate. Either a whole lot of people are not being consistent, or the support for free speech in our society is not as near a consensus as I had believed.

2. Now that the material is out there, we have a much better idea of what went on. This knowledge may be helpful in figuring out how to prevent incidents of this form. This article in Slate, contrasting Cho with the Columbine killers, is particularly useful.

2007-04-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

I've never been able to read the Volokh Conspiracy. David Bernstein and Orin Kerr are quite good, but the rest of the gang, especially Volokh himself, are apt to fill their posts with non-sequiturs. Today provides us with a shining example of this:

What, though, is the argument against allowing professors and other university staff to possess weapons, if they choose? ...One argument is that it's just dangerous for law-abiding citizens to have weapons, because they'll start shooting over arguments or fender-benders. But that's precisely the argument that has been rejected by the 38 states that allow any law-abiding citizen to get a concealed carry license (or, in 2 of the 38 states, to carry without a license).

No, not 38 states!

When reading stuff like this, I constantly wonder whether I should write something refuting it (um, there is no reason to substitute majority opinion for evidence, especially when the majority in question is comprised of politicians who spend a fair amount of time thinking about how to influence donors, various lobbies, etc) or whether it would be a waste of my laptop's battery power to do so.

Update: More nonsense from Volokh:

...I know of zero evidence that for those professors who are likely to seek and get concealed carry permits, the risk of misbehavior is materially greater than for police officers.

On the other hand, I know of no evidence that arming professors reduces campus crime. Oh, wait - could it be because no one has studied the effects of arming professors on campus crime?

2007-04-14T21:25:00.000-07:00

It will be interesting to see how this develops:

A federal Green party candidate in British Columbia said the media have mischaracterized the meaning of a column he wrote in which he appeared to cheer on the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the column, he said that "when I saw the first tower cascade down … there was a little voice inside me that said, 'Yeah!'

"When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said, 'Beautiful!'

"When the visage of the Pentagon appeared on the TV with a gaping and smoking hole in its side … I felt an urge to pump my fist in the air."

He added that "whenever I passed a TV or newspaper with a report on the ensuing U.S. war to capture Osama bin Laden, I secretly said to myself, 'Go, Osama, Go!'"

In an interview with the Canadian Press, Potvin said he didn't mean he was dismissing the deaths.

"If you read the story that I wrote, you'll notice that I'm talking about it on a symbolic level," he said.

National Green party Leader Elizabeth May said she found his statements "shocking," adding that she would not sign his nomination papers if "those reflect his real views."

The ambiguity of the last sentence makes it difficult to predict what will happen. Note that the green party is Canada is less marginal than its American counterpart, polling close to %10 recently. The full text of the column is here.

What strikes me about the column is how monstrous it is. Potvin first frames terrorists as fighting against "corporatism and militarism." As for their methods, he argues

...is terrorism not war, waged by those who can't afford tanks and airplanes? If someone wanted to wage war on the US, with all its satellites and drone bombers and smart missiles, what other form could it possibly take besides terrorism?

The obvious moral distinction between terrorists and the American military is that the former deliberately target civilians, while the latter do not. It is true that many civilians have died as a result of the Iraq war, but the US government has not been targeting them. Note that civilian casualties were fairly low during the fight between Saddam's army and the US military. If they have increased since it is due to the propensity of insurgents to blend into the Iraqi population, making it difficult to figure out who the civilians are. Moreover, the Pentagon has invested a very large amount of money over the past few decades to develop extremely accurate weapon systems which can hit military targets without causing as much damage to the surroundings.

None of this is to suggest that the US military has been flawless as far as civilian casualties are concerned. With over 100,000 US troops in Iraq, its plainly impossible that no slip ups will occur on the part of the individual commanders. And yet the moral difference remains - either we accept that certain things are beyond the pale, or everything is permitted and one can massacre at will.

Note how Potvin's column slides this difference under the rug, describing both sides as simply at war, ignoring the massacres on one side and the restraint on the other. The equivalent of Potvin's view on the right would be those who argue that we should nuke anyone who threatens us. This complete disregard for civilian lives is what I mean when I say that Potvin's column is monstrous.

I've had no warm feelings for the Canadian greens previously. But if this guy continues as a candidate - well, how much respect can you have for a party where this view is considered within the realm of reasonable discourse?

Update: CBC - "Green party drops controversial journalist as candidate"

2007-04-12T19:42:00.000-07:00

Here is a conversation between a girl of about 7-8 and a woman in her 30s that I overheard at a Vancouver starbucks:

-Mommy, where are you going next week?
-To the US honey.
-Isn't that where the bad guys are?

2007-04-12T19:41:00.000-07:00

This is amusing.

2007-04-11T01:27:00.000-07:00

Take a look at this instapundit post. It makes me wonder if the man knows basic facts about American government. I remember that my grade 12 goverment textbook had a sidebar devoted to the Congressional approval rating. The most basic fact about it is that it tends to be extremely low, and as I recall there was a question on my grade 12 final to this effect. It's always been this way - take a look here, for example, which has data from the past 40 years (to spare you the clicking, it was 29% in 1966, 29% in 1978, 28% in 1990, 35% in 1996, and 38% today). It's one of those things about the American political psyche - we tend to think of Congress as slow, wasteful, uncoordinated, etc. Instapundit's endorsement of the link between Congressional approval and the "loss of faith in America's political class" highlights some basic ignorance on his part.

2007-04-09T16:12:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting article in Der Spiegel highlighting the "comprehensive Islamicization of Indonesia." The accompanying photo gallery is interesting too, see a sample below:

2007-04-02T15:18:00.000-07:00

From Der Spiegel:

The fate of 12 German giant rabbits delivered to North Korea is in doubt. The breeder who sent them suspects they have been eaten by top officials rather than used to set up a bunny farm.

Life imitates Borat?

2007-03-19T01:36:00.000-07:00

I've gotten addicted to the wikipedia page for july 31, which is my birthday. It seems that I share a birthday with Milton Friedman, Primo Levi, and J.K. Rowling. On the same day, the weimar constitution was adopted; the Nazi party won the last free election in the weimar republic; and Hermann Göring ordered SS general Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question." Something to think about when the date comes around again.

2007-03-04T21:55:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has a "Must Do List"

..of things that need to be done to reverse the unwise and lawless policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Worth a read if you need yet another reminder of the sad state of civil rights in America.

2007-02-07T22:36:00.000-08:00

The tendency of bloggers to make political over-generalizations based on their personal experiences drives me up the wall. I swear, if I have to read one more post premised on "my liberal friend said X to me today," which proceeds to discuss how X is probably believed, though not outrightly stated, by most liberals - I just might kill a small, furry animal.

In much the same vein, Jane Galt writes

[The debacle in Iraq] has not convinced me of the brilliance of the doves, because precisely none of the ones that I argued with predicted that things would go wrong in the way they did.

A difficult statement to argue with. For all I know, her friends are not the brightest bunch out there. Who knows what they said to her? On the other hand, this statement by a group of IR scholars from before the war has held up extremely well.

2007-01-31T11:28:00.000-08:00

What constitutes imperialism? According to Chalmers Johnson, the United States has an "imperial basing policy:"

As but one striking example of imperial basing policy: For the past sixty-one years, the U.S. military has garrisoned the small Japanese island of Okinawa with 37 bases. Smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands, Okinawa is home to 1.3 million people who live cheek-by-jowl with 17,000 Marines of the 3rd Marine Division and the largest U.S. installation in East Asia -- Kadena Air Force Base. There have been many Okinawan protests against the rapes, crimes, accidents, and pollution caused by this sort of concentration of American troops and weaponry, but so far the U. S. military -- in collusion with the Japanese government -- has ignored them. My research into our base world resulted in The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic, written during the run-up to the Iraq invasion.

So: The United States makes agreements with the legitimately elected, democratic government of Japan, rather than with activist groups, and this constitutes an "imperial basing policty." By the way, I like the language of this paragraph - by making an agreement with the government of Japan, the US becomes in collusion with it.

2007-01-30T08:33:00.000-08:00

In the course of an article on the influence of wealth in politics, Bradford Plumer writes

Bruce Bartlett, a conservative columnist, [argues] "If my real income does not fall, how am I hurt when Bill Gates makes another billion dollars?"

On their face, these arguments sound reasonable enough, although one could interject with all sorts of complaints (among other things, median incomes in the United States have largely stagnated in the past few years, so Bartlett's hypothetical doesn't quite apply).

This seems to me to be misleading. Here is a chart of real US median household incomes:
Its certainly technically correct to say that household incomes have stagnated over the last few years. However, looking at the chart, this stagnation is quite typical of the pattern in the years following depressions. Overall, the trend seems to be consistently positive.

2007-01-26T11:38:00.000-08:00

Click here to listen to someone who cares about the proper use of the English language.

2007-01-25T05:26:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting article in the Times today entitled Of Gay Sheep, Modern Science and the Perils of Bad Publicity, about the attempts of PETA and gay rights advocates to shut down basic research into sensitive subjects. From reading the article, its pretty clear none of the activists actually understand the science in question:

Mr. Gala, who asked that he be identified as openly gay, cited the news release for a 2004 paper in the journal Endocrinology that showed differences in brain structure between homosexual and heterosexual sheep.

The release quoted Dr. Roselli as saying that the research “also has broader implications for understanding the development and control of sexual motivation and mate selection across mammalian species, including humans.”

Mr. Newman, who wrote the release, said the word “control” was used in the scientific sense of understanding the body’s internal controls, not in the sense of trying to control sexual orientation.

“It’s discouraging that PETA can pick one word, try to add weight to it or shift its meaning to suggest that you are doing something that you clearly are not,” he said.

This is pretty standard scientific lingo across many different fields - see for example control theory.

This part is the most ridiculous of all:

By discussing the human implications of the research, even in a somewhat careful way, Dr. Roselli “opened the door” to the reaction, Dr. Wolpe said, and “he has to take responsibility for the public response.”

If the mechanisms underlying sexual orientation can be discovered and manipulated, Dr. Wolpe continued, then the argument that sexual orientation is based in biology and is immutable “evaporates.”

Except if human sexuality is not immutable, then its not immutable. Dr. Wolpe seems to be concerned that reality will take a shape he finds unattractive, which leads him to be critical of research that might lead to discoveries that settle the question.

2007-01-22T08:09:00.000-08:00

Check out Dinesh D'Souza's appearance on the Colbert Report; it can be watched here.

2007-01-22T07:51:00.000-08:00

Fucking amazing. See video here.

2007-01-22T07:34:00.000-08:00

This is pretty funny, in a sad way.

2007-01-17T12:59:00.000-08:00

It seems like the best suggestion in the debate over the Iraq surge comes from Hillary Clinton:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the presumed Democratic front-runner, called on Tuesday for the United States to cap its troop level in Iraq at the number present in the country on Jan. 1, but also to send more American forces to Afghanistan.

Just back from a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan, Senator Clinton said that the administration had “frankly failed” in its dealings with the Iraqi government. Instead, she said, “Let’s focus on Afghanistan and get it right.”

With Taliban forces in Afghanistan expected to mount a major offensive soon, she said that “this spring is a make-or-break time” for the U.S. and other foreign forces there.

It has been clear for a while now that continued US military presence in Iraq is not accomplishing much. Moreover, ``success'' in Iraq - defined as the establishment of a stable, tolerant democracy - is at best elusive. Afghanistan, on the other hand, differs in a number of ways. It already has a working democracy; unlike Iraq, it is actually important to the war on terror; and, most importantly, the overwhelming majority of Afghanis want US troops in Afghanistan:

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, public optimism has declined sharply across Afghanistan, pushed by a host of fresh difficulties: Worsening security, rising concerns about a resurgent Taliban, troubled development efforts, widespread perceptions of corruption and reduced faith in the government's effectiveness in facing these challenges.

The U.S.-led invasion remains highly popular, the Taliban intensely unpopular...

Most Afghans — 57 percent — now call the Taliban the single greatest danger to their country...Compared to a year ago, this poll finds deterioration in a range of public perceptions about the country's condition: a 22-point drop in views that it's headed in the right direction, a 17-point drop in the belief security has improved since the Taliban was in control and a 13-point drop in personal optimism for the year ahead....Some of these ratings, to be fair, have fallen from probably unsustainable levels. Sixty-eight percent approve of Karzai's work — down from 83 percent last year, but still a level most national leaders would envy. Fifty-nine percent think the parliament is working for the benefit of the Afghan people, down from 77 percent but still far better than American approval ratings of the U.S. Congress....

...big majorities continue to call the U.S.-led invasion a good thing for their country (88 percent), to express a favorable opinion of the United States (74 percent) and to prefer the current Afghan government to Taliban rule (88 percent)...Indeed eight in 10 Afghans support the presence of U.S., British and other international forces on their soil; that compares with 5 percent support for Taliban fighters and 11 percent for jihadi fighters from other countries.

2007-01-10T21:28:00.000-08:00

From today's Times:

[Bush] put it far more bluntly when leaders of Congress visited Mr. Bush at the White House earlier on Wednesday....pressed on why he thought this strategy [the troop increase in Iraq] would succeed where previous efforts had failed, Mr. Bush shot back: “Because it has to.”

2007-01-09T22:39:00.000-08:00

Theres an interesting Crossfire episode from 1986 on censorship available online and definitely worth watching. The broader lesson, I think, is that its amazing how much latent support there is for anti-democratic measures (restrictions on speech, and more recently renditions, torture, etc).

On a related note, what is the purpose does bleeping out swear words in radio/tv? Spoken language has redundancy in it, so that one can reconstruct the sentence even if some words are deleted - for example, in the above video, when Frank Zappa tells the conservative columnist "kiss my -bleep- ass," you know exactly the word that was bleeped out. Unless you attach some special meaning to the act hearing the swear word, the bleep does absolutely nothing.

2007-01-01T20:46:00.000-08:00

There is a piece in Slate on the most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006. Only six years ago it was impossible to imagine that so many such things would happen...

2006-12-09T12:19:00.000-08:00

Pretty disturbing:

Life was different in Unit E at the state prison outside Newton, Iowa.

The toilets and sinks — white porcelain ones, like at home — were in a separate bathroom with partitions for privacy. In many Iowa prisons, metal toilet-and-sink combinations squat beside the bunks, to be used without privacy, a few feet from cellmates.

The cells in Unit E had real wooden doors and doorknobs, with locks. More books and computers were available, and inmates were kept busy with classes, chores, music practice and discussions. There were occasional movies and events with live bands and real-world food, like pizza or sandwiches from Subway. Best of all, there were opportunities to see loved ones in an environment quieter and more intimate than the typical visiting days.

But the only way an inmate could qualify for this kinder mutation of prison life was to enter an intensely religious rehabilitation program and satisfy the evangelical Christians running it that he was making acceptable spiritual progress. The program — which grew from a project started in 1997 at a Texas prison with the support of George W. Bush, who was governor at the time — says on its Web site that it seeks “to ‘cure’ prisoners by identifying sin as the root of their problems” and showing inmates “how God can heal them permanently, if they turn from their sinful past.”

One Catholic inmate, Michael A. Bauer, left the program after a year, mostly because he felt the program staff and volunteers were hostile toward his faith.

2006-12-08T16:23:00.000-08:00

Here is an answer to a really dumb question approvingly quoted over at Cafe Hayek:

More than a few reputable scientists see potential problems in the climate change that is occurring...For every factoid about ice sheets or sea levels or sun spots I can pull from the skeptics' literature, someone else can produce a counter-factoid. How is a nonscientist to decide which is accurate?

It's really not very hard. Much like in the debate over evolution, one side is made up of the overwhelming majority of scientists; the other is not (the wikipedia list of scientists who are global warming skeptics currently contains 16 names).

2006-12-04T23:31:00.000-08:00

From the Times today:

Israel’s military, which has been accused of abuses in its war against Hezbollah this summer, has declassified photographs, video images and prisoner interrogations to buttress its accusation that Hezbollah systematically fired from civilian neighborhoods in southern Lebanon and took cover in those areas to shield itself from attack...

In video from July 23, a truck with a multi-barreled missile launcher, presumably from Hezbollah, is parked in a street, sandwiched between residential buildings. The video was transmitted from an Israeli missile approaching the truck. The screen goes fuzzy as the missile slams into the target.

In another video, from a Lebanese village, rockets are seen being fired from a launcher on the back of a truck. The truck then drives a short distance and disappears inside a building. Seconds later, the building itself disappears under a cloud of smoke from an Israeli bomb.

There is a link to the video next to the article. It seems like the public showing of these videos has been a low priority for Israel's government; the evidence would have had much more impact had it been released as the fighting was going on. Even the effort to compile these videos has been made by a think tank, rather than the government itself.

2006-12-02T12:16:00.000-08:00

More violations of civil liberties from the Bush administration.

2006-11-28T11:24:00.000-08:00

This is interesting.

2006-11-25T13:54:00.000-08:00

Two things to keep in mind about the midterm elections:

- It wasn't just a win for the Democrats, it was a landslide. According to Wikipedia, the Democratic party captured 57.7% of the House vote. By contrast, no presidential candidate in the last 20 years managed to achieve this.

- As a consequence of gerrymanding, the actual results of the election are heavily skewed towards Republicans. Democrats have so far won 53.3% of the seats in the House, with a small number of seats still undecided. Compare that with 57.7%, and you have about a 4% edge for Republicans built into the system. Even the supposedly most democratic element of the American system of government - direct election to the House of Representatives - is not very democratic at all.

2006-11-20T12:09:00.000-08:00

Because I believe that military actions aimed at military targets are justified in a war, even if they cause significant civilian casualties, I find little occasion to criticize Israeli policy re Lebanon or the Palestinians. Nevertheless, a few days ago the Times ran a piece on movement restrictions in the West Bank which describes actions on Israel's part which I think are counterproductive and unjust.

In one of the more sweeping restrictions, men under 35 from the northern West Bank are generally not allowed to leave the area. The rules often change, but this one has been enforced most days for the last four months, Palestinians say.

I don't think road blocks are unjustified, despite the inconvenience they cause to all those who wait in line, due to the lives they save. I can't oppose emergency lockdowns - when no one is allowed to pass through a road block - in response to reliable information that a terrorist attack will take place in the area soon. But a permanent lockdown for all men under 35 is going too far. It may be acceptable as an emergency response, but made quasi-permanent its a violation of human rights.

2006-11-15T20:05:00.000-08:00

Who is the most liberal republican senator? It depends on how one defines ``liberal.'' You are probably thinking of Olympia Snow or Lincoln Chafee, but measured relative to the average political persuasion in each state, the answer is Orrin Hatch - see the chart here.

2006-11-08T21:49:00.000-08:00

One story not getting much attention in the wake of the election results is the approval of Proposition 2 in Michigan (58%-42%), which bans affirmative action from public universities and agencies. University of Michigan and various interest groups have stated they will sue. I know nothing about the law, but given that challenges to the same ballot measure in California have failed, it seems unlikely that these efforts will be succesful.

I wonder if the backers of Proposition 2 will put up similar measures in more states in 2008. California and Michigan are arguably left of center, so that if an anti-affirmative-action measure can pass there, it can probably pass in most other states.

The full list of ballot measures in this election makes for interesting reading. A South Dakota measure allowing people with "debilitating conditions" to grow "not more than six plants" of marijuana narrowly failed 48%-52% (although I think it would have been purely symbolic as growing marijuana would have still been illegal under federal drug laws). Still, if medical marijuana measures have the support of 48% of the voters in South Dakota, I'm guessing that they have larger support nationwide. In other news, a silly Arizona measure to award $1 million to a random voter faced a resounding defeat 66%-34%.

2006-11-03T17:21:00.000-08:00

This from the NYT review of the Borat movie:

That Mr. Baron Cohen plays the character’s anti-Semitism for laughs is his most radical gambit. The Anti-Defamation League, for one, has chided him, warning that some people may not be in on the joke. And a sampling of comments on blogs where you can watch some of the older Borat routines, including a singalong in an Arizona bar with the refrain “Throw the Jew down the well,” indicates that the Anti-Defamation League is at least partly right: some people are definitely not in on the joke, though only because some people are too stupid and too racist to understand that the joke is on them. As the 19th-century German thinker August Bebel observed, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, a truism Mr. Baron Cohen has embraced with a vengeance.

Huh? That last pseudointellectual reference makes no sense to me. Bebel's point was that the capitalist system is inherently opressive, and that people's anger at those who are successful in the system (i.e. jews) ought to be redirected towards the system itself. I really don't see how the Sasha Baron Cohen embraced Bebel's truism.

2006-10-17T01:56:00.000-07:00

Just thought I'd pass along this website. Some of my readers may find it quite useful. Thanks, FBI.

(via Harry Hutton)

2006-10-11T20:12:00.000-07:00

What kind of a Republican favors increased government regulation?

The answer, apparently, is a Republican who had a bad brush with the insurance industry:

Mr. Lott, a Republican and former majority leader, is one of thousands of homeowners on the Gulf Coast who have been fighting with their insurers over payments for damage in Hurricane Katrina...Mr. Lott’s claim for the loss of his $400,000 house in Pascagoula was rejected by State Farm.

Mr. Lott said he was...planning to introduce legislation requiring the insurers to include in their policies a prominent listing in plain English of what they refuse to cover. He said home insurance policies contained “a bunch of subterfuges” difficult for laymen or lawyers to comprehend.

I'm very sympathetic to libertarian views skeptical of goverment intervention, but this last part sounds to me like an excellent idea.

2006-10-09T22:34:00.000-07:00

From Nuclear test sparks fear in Canada's Korean community in the CBC:

Youngkyu Ko, who was sipping coffee with a friend in the downtown Toronto neighbourhood known as Little Korea, said he became concerned after Pyongyang announced its plans — and then claimed to have carried out early Sunday.

"Oh, that was horrible," he said. "That was not very nice."

Not very nice indeed. Sounds like this guy has assimilated into Candian society pretty well.

2006-09-25T13:51:00.000-07:00

If you have not been following the case of Cory Maye, Radley Balko's article in Reason is good reading.

2006-09-23T10:27:00.000-07:00

Fact of the day: in 2004, 46% of the public did not know which party controlled Congress.

See historical data here.

2006-09-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

"Anti-zionism" as a political phenomenon is puzzling to me. There are no comparative movements with respect to other countries - one does not hear critics of the Iraq war bring up 1776 to say that the American rebellion was unjustified, the revolution should not have happened, etc. Mostly everyone is fairly content to take the existence of America as a given in these debates and proceed from there; and yet with Israel there is the peculiar tendency to go back to 1948 and reargue the merits of the Israeli war for independence.

I should clarify that I'm talking here about anti-zionism in its practical sense, i.e. what people who have said they are anti-zionist have went on to say in their conversations with me. So I want to side step the issue of what anti-zionism is intellectually and whether its intellectual core actually implies anything like the first paragraph above. For practical purposes, I feel that my description is fair: all the people I have met who declared themselves to be against zionism went on, in the next few minutes, to argue against the propriety or wisdom of Israel's existence.

In fact, what I wrote in the first paragraph is not entirely accurate. There are movements against the existence of Transistria in Moldova; against the existence of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan; against the existence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. There are a number of such examples associated with breakaway and semi-autonomous states all over the world. What all these movements have in common, though, is that they are more or less limited to the countries that want to capture back what they see as their territory, i.e. Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia in these instance. By contrast, anti-zionism seems to have a steady base of support in the United States and throughout the western world.

There is another difference - the above examples are all associated with recent conflicts whereas Israel has existed for close to 60 years now. As far as I'm aware, there is not a single other state which has existed for that long that still has a significant body of critics of its existence throughout the western world.

2006-09-18T10:21:00.001-07:00

Some more on religion, by Eric Rauchway.

2006-09-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

Jacob T. Levy has some interesting comments on the controversy over the Pope's recent statements.

2006-09-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

The Times has an interesting piece today:

Using her own name and her personal e-mail address, an editor ordered three English literature papers from three different sites on standard, often-assigned topics: one comparing and contrasting Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Orwell’s “1984”; one discussing the nature of Ophelia’s madness in “Hamlet”; and one exploring the theme of colonialism in Conrad’s “Lord Jim.”

The punchline:

Stephen Greenblatt, a Shakespeare scholar at Harvard and a confessed “soft touch,” said the grade he would give this paper “would depend, at least to some extent, on whether I thought I was reading the work of a green freshman — in which case I would probably give it a D+ and refer the student to the writing lab for counseling — or an English major, in which case I would simply fail it.”

As they say, read the whole thing.

2006-09-03T02:21:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting article in the New Yorker about the Duke lacrosse scandal (via KC Johnson).

2006-08-31T02:49:00.000-07:00

I've been paying intermittently close attention to the Duke lacrosse rape case over the last few months. The case against the lacrosse playeres has been slowly falling apart, as more and more evidence demonstrates the innocence of the Duke students and the contradictions and inconsistencies in the case of the stripper who accused them. Which is why I was at first surprised, and later disgusted, to read the Times page-1, 5,600 word piece on the subject - "Files From Duke Rape Case Give Details but No Answers." The piece tells us,

...an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in [prosecutor] Mr. Nifong’s case, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.

And what is this body of evidence? If you read the Times piece, you will discover the main evidence supporting the rape charge is....notes written down by a police sargeant from memory four months after interviewing the alleged victim. These notes, having been written at a time when gaps in the case have been leaked to the press, appear to have the alleged victim saying things that patch up the very same holes. Moreover, they have her saying things that directly contradict what others (who took notes at the scene) have her saying at the time:

As recounted in one investigator’s notes, one of the indicted players does not match the accuser’s initial physical descriptions of her attackers: she said all three were chubby or heavyset, but one is tall and skinny. In Sergeant Gottlieb’s version of the same conversation, however, her descriptions closely correspond to the defendants.

The Times takes this extremely shaky piece of evidence produced by a beleagured and criticized police department and runs with it - downplaying many inconvenient facts. Facts such as: one of the players the alleged victim identified as having raped her has an airtight alibi (an ATM video camera has him a mile away from the crime scene, coupled with an affidavit from a taxi driver and the record of a key-card swipe at his dorm, all spanning the time period when the rape allegedly occured); the complete lack of DNA evidence (despite the alleged victim's statement that she spat out semen onto the floor, and that her rapists did not use condoms, both of which, it goes without saying, leave DNA evidence); the fact that the other stripper at the party told the police she was not away for the accuser for more than five minutes, and that she did not observe the rape (by constrast, the accuser says she was raped for 30 minutes).

If you are interested in more details, see this piece at Slate, which does a good job of running through the many contradictions/inconsistencies in the case. See also an open letter to the Times, by Brooklyn/CUNY history professor K.C. Johnson.

In short, its disgusting to see the lengths to which the Times will go to push its own political agenda. Besides the obvious immorality of biasing news towards one's preferred conclusion, there is also the future of the students accused which is at stake.

I'm wondering how people on the left approach this incident. Do you agree that there is something clearly wrong with the New York Times here - perhaps a simple lack of journalistic ethics, perhaps an inability to separate facts from one's preferred version of the events? How could such blatant violations of ethics occur, especially given that the story has been written by two reporters and looked at, most likely, by a multitude of editors? How widespread is the problem - is it limited to this article/issue or does it pervade the Times coverage generally?

2006-08-27T03:55:00.000-07:00

If there is a grain of truth in this, I am going to be so fucking angry.

2006-08-21T02:54:00.000-07:00

This is from a guide to dating geeks:

If you're not up on your Star Trek, you can forget about getting or keeping a geek dude. And I'm not just talking vintage-era Captain Kirk and Spock either. You've got to be up on your The Next Generation, your Deep Space Nine, your Babylon 5. Armed with your own knowledge of Federation policies, you can better gauge when and how to act. The sexual politics of Star Trek are pretty blunt: the men run the technology and the ship, and the women are caretakers (a doctor and a counselor). Note the sexual tensions on the bridge of the Enterprise: the women, in skin tight uniforms, and with luxuriant, flowing hair. The men, often balding, and sporting some sort of permanently attached computer auxiliary. This world metaphorizes the fantasies of the geek dude, who sees himself in the geeky-but-heroic male officers and who secretly desires a sexy, smart, Deanna or Bev to come along and deferentially accept him for who he is. If you are willing to accept that this is his starting point for reality, you are ready for a geek relationship.

2006-08-21T02:44:00.000-07:00

Interesting fact:

...the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting) is about the same as the number of Americans killed over the same period by lightning, accident-causing deer, or severe allergic reaction to peanuts.

2006-08-20T04:16:00.000-07:00

The latest Connecticut poll has Lieberman at 53%, Lamont at 41%, and Schlesinger at 4%. What Lieberman loses in lack of support from the democrats, he more than makes up for by getting 75% of the republican vote in the poll.

I'm not going to predict the outcome of this race - I simply don't know enough about CT politics, nor am I able to gauge the national mood at this stage. But given that the odds currently offered by tradesports.com as of writing this are 68% for Lieberman and 32% for Lamont, and given that betting markets have been shown to be not-too-inefficient in past political races, I think we can safely assume that a Lieberman win is the most likely scenario.

It seems that the liberal blog crowd (i.e. kos, atrios, etc) has made a tremendous miscalculation here. If Lieberman wins, not only will he feel much fewer obligations to democrats - who, after all, rejected him as a candiate - he will be keenly aware where his votes have come from. As an independent senator in an increasingly polarized country, Lieberman will have to make choices that put his republican base at odds with his democratic one. At this point, its completely uncertain that which side he will swing should the chips really come down (for example, should the senate be split so that one vote will make a difference). In the end, Lieberman is a politician; given that he can stick to his basic principles as either a liberal republican or a conservative democrat, he is probably going to pick the option that will make re-election easiest. So the same liberal bloggers who profess that their most important goal is to retake Congress have ended up jeopardizing this goal out for the sake of what seems like personal enmity for a defender of the Iraq war.

Still, I think that a Lieberman win would be good for the party. It would certainly demonstrate that the rank and file of the party and the "netroots" are quite out of touch with the average American voter. I'm hopeful that it would lead the sober people at the head of the party to intervene more frequently in local races to keep the influence of the bloggers and activists in check.

2006-08-20T04:09:00.000-07:00

The following bit from Steven Levitt's Freakonomics was quite surprising to me:

There is a strong correlation—a negative one—between adoption and school test scores. Why? Studies have shown that a child's academic abilities are far more influenced by the IQs of his biological parents than the IQs of his adoptive parents, and mothers who give up their children for adoption tend to have significantly lower IQs than the people who are doing the adopting. There is another explanation for low-achieving adoptees which, though it may seem distasteful, jibes with the basic economic theory of self-interest: a woman who knows she will put her baby up for adoption may not take the same prenatal care as a woman who is keeping her baby. (Consider—at the risk of furthering the distasteful thinking—how you treat a car you own versus a car you are renting for the weekend.)...

In a paper titled "The Nature and Nurture of Economic Outcomes," the economist Bruce Sacerdote addressed the nature-nurture debate by taking a long-term quantitative look at the effects of parenting. He used three adoption studies, two American and one British, each of them containing in-depth data about the adopted children, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents. Sacerdote found that parents who adopt children are typically smarter, better educated, and more highly paid than the baby's biological parents. But the adoptive parents' advantages had little bearing on the child's school performances. As also seen in the ECLS data, adopted children test relatively poorly in school; any influence the adoptive parents might exert is seemingly outweighed by the force of genetics. But, Sacerdote found, the parents were not powerless forever. By the time the adopted children became adults, they had veered sharply from the destiny that IQ alone might have predicted. Compared to similar children who were not put up for adoption, the adoptees were far more likely to attend college, to have a well-paid job, and to wait until they were out of their teens before getting married. It was the influence of the adoptive parents, Sacerdote concluded, that made the difference.

2006-08-20T03:45:00.000-07:00

Why is amazon's book recommendation feature so bad?

Think about it: the data that amazon has collected - which books people buy, look at, browse, post reviews at, read customer reviews, etc - is a social scientist's wet dream. Amazon is uniquely suited to suggest books to you that you may not even know exist. Instead, my recommendations are almost entirely composed of books by authors that I've bought/put on my wish list.

Another frustrating feature is that its very difficult to search the lists amazon customers make. I was trying to list three or four of my favorite books so that I could see if someone had perhaps made a list with them included. Guess what - thats impossible to do this on the amazon site, as far as I can tell.

The sad thing, amazon could be so much better. If only their book recommendation and listsearch functions were better, I'd probably spend hours and hours on their website scouring for books. The only explanation I have is that bn.com is not giving them enough competition.

2006-08-17T03:28:00.000-07:00

This is amusing, from a book review by Freeman Dyson:

When I was a junior fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, Hardy was my mentor. As a junior fellow I enjoyed the privilege of dining at the high table with the old and famous. During my tenure, Professor Simpson, one of the old and famous fellows, died. Simpson had a strong sentimental attachment to the college and was a religious believer. He left instructions that he should be cremated and his ashes should be scattered on the bowling green in the fellows' garden where he loved to walk and meditate. A few days after he died, a solemn funeral service was held for him in the college chapel. His many years of faithful service to the college and his exemplary role as a Christian scholar and teacher were duly celebrated.

In the evening of the same day I took my place at the high table. One of the neighboring places at the table was empty. Professor Hardy, contrary to his usual habit, was late for dinner. After we had all sat down and the Latin grace had been said, Hardy strolled into the dining hall, ostentatiously scraping his shoes on the wooden floor and complaining in a loud voice for everyone to hear, "What is this awful stuff they have put on the grass in the fellows' garden? I can't get it off my shoes." Hardy, of course, knew very well what the stuff was. He had always disliked religion in general and Simpson's piety in particular, and he was taking his opportunity for a little revenge.

2006-08-17T03:01:00.000-07:00

The latest NY Review of Books has an interesting piece on Stefan Zweig.

2006-08-16T03:06:00.000-07:00

The Post has an interesting summary of some recent research:

American women earn substantially more money and narrow the long-standing gender gap in income if other women in their workplaces reach the ranks of senior management, according to a new national study presented here.

By contrast, the study found, increasing the number of women managers in junior positions makes no difference to the gender gap -- women on average continue to earn about 20 percent less than men.

Surprisingly, men who work for women managers seem to do slightly worse in income than men who work for men, irrespective of whether the women managers are in senior positions.

The study answers for the first time what happens to workers when women break through the glass ceiling, and is based on 1.3 million American workers in nearly 30,000 jobs and 79 metropolitan areas...

Cohen and University of California at Irvine sociologist Matt L. Huffman found that women earn about 81 percent of what men make, and that figure remains unchanged when the number of junior-level women managers rises from 2 percent to more than 50 percent. But when women become senior managers, female workers earn 91 percent of men's salaries.

The sociologists used data from the 2000 census that asked Americans about their professional lives, including the industry they work in and their incomes. The sociologists then compared the information against what was known about the ratio of male and female managers in particular industries, and how senior the female managers were in each of those local industries. They accounted for dozens of other variables, including race, geographic location, size of workers' families, education and experience.

For example, the sociologists found 1,887 restaurant managers in the Los Angeles area and 10,422 restaurant workers. There were far more female restaurant managers in Los Angeles than in New York, but the Los Angeles female managers were more likely to be low-level. Consistent with the study's findings, women restaurant workers in New York earned 95 percent of the pay of their male counterparts, while workers in Los Angeles earned 92 percent of what men made.

I have not seen the paper. I do wonder, though, how solid the conclusion is.

There are two immediate theories that would explain the data described in this report. One is that the presence of female managers lessens anti-women discrimination in the workplace, thereby increasing earnings by women. Another is that the success of women in the workplace - both in terms of earnings and chance of making the senior management - is positively correlated with some cultural factors which differ from city to city in the US - it may be just my prejudices, but I think women are more succesful relative to men in San Francisco than in Wichita, Kansas.

Both of the above explanations, if true, would produce a correlation between number of female managers and earnings by women. The first explanation though would imply a causation from the former to the latter, while the second would not. So I wonder whether Cohen and Huffman managed to rule out alternative explanations.

2006-08-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

It seems like this is not a joke. Wow.

2006-08-15T04:29:00.000-07:00

I liked this bit:

Midway through Assad's speech, members of the audience who said they were Lebanese stood up loudly thanked Assad.

"Without the support of our sister country Syria, we would not be able to achieve what we have achieved," one woman screamed.

The audience then broke into applause and shouts of "With our blood, with our soul, we redeem you, Oh Bashar!"

2006-08-15T00:15:00.000-07:00

MSNBC reports on our president's summer reading:

[Bush] read Albert Camus's The Stranger, triggering a discussion about existentialism with his aides. "He found it an interesting book and a quick read," said [White House Press Secretary Tony] Snow. "I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism."

2006-08-03T03:34:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Stone remarks on the unethical sectarianism that pervades that current US government.

2006-08-03T02:20:00.000-07:00

I was reading a Times article about Walmart when I came upon this:

In Germany, Wal-Mart stopped requiring sales clerks to smile at customers — a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting — and scrapped the morning Wal-Mart chant by staff members.

“People found these things strange; Germans just don’t behave that way,” said Hans-Martin Poschmann, the secretary of the Verdi union, which represents 5,000 Wal-Mart employees here.

There is a Walmart chant?

Germans are not the only ones who do not behave this way; am I the only one that finds this pretty weird?

After some googling, I found the following in an online forum:

Twice a day there is a walmart chant at every store. Before the morning shift and before the evening shift walmart employees gather for a meeting so that the company can tell them about how well the business is going...These meetings end with rhythmic clapping and the walmart chant. "Give me a W!, W!", "Give me an A!, A!"

Its like never graduating high school.

2006-08-01T03:56:00.000-07:00

Slate has an interesting piece on rereading The Three Musketeers as an adult.

2006-08-01T03:38:00.000-07:00

Surprise! Michael Crichton, Ann Coulter, and others do not understand science. Peter Doran, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, has an op-ed in today's Times:

In January 2002, a research paper about Antarctic temperatures, of which I was the lead author, appeared in the journal Nature...

My research colleagues and I found that from 1986 to 2000, one small, ice-free area of the Antarctic mainland had actually cooled.Our report also analyzed temperatures for the mainland in such a way as to remove the influence of the peninsula warming and found that, from 1966 to 2000, more of the continent had cooled than had warmed....

....many news and opinion writers..erroneously concluded that the earth was not warming at all. “Scientific findings run counter to theory of global warming,” said a headline on an editorial in The San Diego Union-Tribune. One conservative commentator wrote, “It’s ironic that two studies suggesting that a new Ice Age may be under way may end the global warming debate.”

In a rebuttal in The Providence Journal...I explained that our studies offered no evidence that the earth was cooling. But the misinterpretation had already become legend, and in the four and half years since, it has only grown.

Our results have been misused as “evidence” against global warming by Michael Crichton in his novel “State of Fear” and by Ann Coulter in her latest book, “Godless: The Church of Liberalism.” Search my name on the Web, and you will find pages of links to everything from climate discussion groups to Senate policy committee documents — all citing my 2002 study as reason to doubt that the earth is warming.

2006-08-01T02:00:00.000-07:00

The Post has an interesting article about the current popularity of a now deceased brutal dictator in the Congo. Mobutu Seko is probably most familiar to Americans as the villain of Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (I say this because the book is in Oprah's book club). He seems to be having a resurgence:

On the eve of the first multiparty balloting here since 1960, nostalgia was running high for a man who, though corrupt and brutal, kept united a country that has experienced little but mayhem since he was driven from power in 1997.

This bit I did not know:

Mobutu, a former army officer who took power in a 1965 coup, was one of Africa's archetypal Big Men, putting his image on currency, on pictures in public buildings and on billboards across the country. The evening news began with images of him descending, god-like, through the clouds. And he changed his name to an eight-word phrase meaning "the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake."

2006-07-31T00:37:00.000-07:00

The "Photos that damn Hezbollah" article in the Sunday Herald Sun is hardly surprising.

2006-07-28T23:23:00.000-07:00

I normally do not bother to read Juan Cole, but I saw this quoted elsewhere:

What was done to Lebanon as a whole is among the most horrible war crimes of the young 21st century. And that it was done tells me that there is something sick in the heart of the Israeli military and political elite, a sickness of the soul...

Here is a list of military conflicts in the twenty-first century, followed by number of casualties on both sides (civilian plus military). The source is wikipedia. I omitted the civil conflicts in Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Haiti because I did not manage to find reliable data on total number of casualties.

Darfur Conflict: one estimate is 140,000.

US Invasion of Iraq: best estimate seems to be 50, 000 civilians and 11,000 soldiers.

US Invasion of Afghanistan: 1000-4000.

Waziristan war: 2500.

Chad-Sudan conflict: 1000-1700.

Israeli-Lebanon conflict:
450-500 so far.

Does that like like "among the most horrible war crimes of the young 21st century" to you?

2006-07-28T00:18:00.000-07:00

There is a good article in The New Republic on the assertions one often hears that Israel is violating international law. As usual, the standards applied to Israel markedly differ from the standards that are usually applied to everyone else. The author singles out Amnesty International and the UN for criticism, but he might as well have been talking about large portions of the blogosphere.

2006-07-23T23:43:00.000-07:00

Stanley Fish has a pretty good op-ed on academic freedom and the Barrett case.

2006-07-22T03:33:00.001-07:00

Slate has an interesting review of some recent research on marijuana. The summary is that,

- Rats who are fed marijuana are not more motivated to find heroin. However, once they do obtain it, they are likely to take more of it than rats who are not fed marijuana.

- Pot smoking does not have a statistically measurable effect on lung cancer (in contrast to cigarette smoking).

2006-07-22T03:33:00.000-07:00

2006-07-21T21:45:00.000-07:00

The Mercury News runs an article about a tour of the damage to Beirut's southern suburbs:

separating Hezbollah's charity work from its commitment to violent resistance is no easy task. Memorials to fighters who died in "martyrdom operations," local parlance for suicide missions, still clung to some walls Thursday.

A reporter found a photo of what appeared to be camouflaged Hezbollah guerrillas firing rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The reporter picked up the photo and blew off the dust to examine it when a stony voice interrupted.

"I advise you not to take any papers from here, and we won't tell you twice," said a black-clad man who identified himself as a member of Hezbollah. "Remember, we are watching."

The hour-long tour ended when Israeli jets broke the sound barrier with two loud booms. Yells of "Evacuate!" echoed through the barren corridors, and panicked journalists ran to their cars.

Meanwhile, it appears that the efforts to hit Hezbollah's missile supply are working (or they are simply running out of misisles):

As the fighting moved into its ninth day and Israeli warplanes continued to hit targets across Lebanon, Hezbollah rocket fire at northern Israeli towns and cities dropped off sharply, with about 40 salvos counted by late evening Thursday, the Israeli military said. On the heaviest days of such attacks, as many as 130 rockets had fallen.