Bandarlog


	The Grammar of the Passive Vice From the Times: The [Islamist group that included the 7/7 bombers] live healthier and more constructive lives than many of their peers here, Asian or white, who have fallen prey to drugs, alcohol or petty crime. It's amazing how to a certain kind of mind "fall prey to petty crime" can mean "commit petty crime". [Doug: 7/30/05 17:15]


	Krugman Pile-on!! Spot-on, Doug. The way Krugman elides the legal prohibition on putting in longer hours illustrates the kind of mendacity readers have come to expect from Krugman. His cleverness steers him away from baldly contradictable statements and to sly praeterition and ambiguity. At the risk of belaboring the ritual bashing, I will add a few observations. First, I have often seen euro-boosters cite the French GDP-per-hour worked statistics as proof that the French system actually produces superior economic results. In my view, this is a statistical illusion. At the margin and past a certain point, for a given worker productivity per hour should go down as hours worked increases. Are you more productive at 2pm, after 6 or 7 hours in the office, or burning the midnight oil after having put in 12 hours already? Or, to cite an example from my own life: when I have gone on a vacation with my laptop, I have found that I can accomplish probably 25% of my regular workload by putting in maybe an hour and a half in front of the computer. It stands to reason that the same worker, put on a 35-hour schedule will produce more per hour than if he were on a 50-hour schedule. But I would wager that the same would go for a 25-hour schedule versus a 35-hour schedule. Yet the fixed costs of maintaining an employee (office space, management oversight, health care, etc) means that a 25-hour-a-week economy will suffer serious efficiency losses relative to an economy with a longer workweek. In addition, a comparison of output-per-hour-worked between countries does not adjust for differing "job mix." Let me again propose an analogy. For years, educators have lamented falling average SAT scores. Here, the pessimists said, lies proof that our schools are getting worse. In point of fact, what depressed SAT scores was a broadening of the population taking the test. Whereas at one point only better students bothered to take an exam geared toward college admission, as time passed more and more students (and more marginal students) decided to take the test. A country like France, with a very rigid labor regime, will tend to keep marginal, poorly educated, and unproductive workers out of the workforce. The minimum wage is too high, the ability to fire bad workers too restricted. In the U.S., employment is wide open. Comparing French and U.S. output-per-hour worked is not an apples-to-apples comparison. More useful would be to look at output-per-hour-worked in a given industry or for a given job classification. Second, Krugman claims that in the U.S. individuals face a coordination problem that prevents them from trading off labor and leisure at their true indifference point. The silent conclusion: we need restrictive labor laws like those of France. But does this ring true with your experience? "Flex-time" is a pretty American-sounding word by my reckoning. The U.S. workforce has led the way in moving to all sorts of unusual work arrangements: part-time, flex-time, consulting, you name it. Krugman's claim illustrates quite nicely how he tends to substitute assumption for data. [Ben H.: 7/29/05 19:09]


	Ritual Krugman-Bashing What with all the French failures in the last few months, and all the enthusiastic piling-on of Anglo-Saxon commentators, there is an intelligent, contrarian article to be written in defense of certain French traits. This is not it. (Although it's the article most emailed by Times readers today -- smug bobos indeed!). Krugman's argument is that societies make a tradeoff between wealth ( = long work hours and family stress) and enjoyment ( = long vacations and family fun), and that France has chosen the latter option, which turns out to be just as "good" for the French. This is wrong in two ways. First, French people do not have the freedom to choose between super-lucrative workaholism and leisure. Mainly out of resentment (a.k.a. "solidarité"), they have made it illegal to work more than 35 hours per week, except in certain special circumstances. Krugman gets it exactly backward, claiming that it is we Americans who have no choice. But I know plenty of Americans, starting with myself, who trade extra income for free time. Krugman is probably thinking of the core New York Times readership, who past a certain age may simply become incapable of forgoing $150 diaper bags (see Sunday's article lauding them) and hyper-aestheticized dining experiences. If his particular tribe is too vain to forgo these things, the fault is their own, not that of the American "system". Then there is the claim that their extra leisure has made the French happier. If he would take the time to visit the country he holds forth on, he might have to revisit his simplistic Economy 101 views on this so-called tradeoff. Shit, Maureen Dowd would have at least rented a movie, like "Comme une image", to get a sense of the current hedonic level there. Let's just say there is a reason why we borrow the word "malaise" from this particular country. And it's particularly rich to say that their tradeoff has yielded the French more loving families. Dude, this is the place where 15,000 old folks died of a heat wave when their families couldn't be bothered to interrupt their vacations to check up on them. My own anecdotal experience also belies this fantasy that French families are super-close. It would be tremendously interesting to investigate why their mandatory leisure hasn't made the French happier. But Krugman can't ask this question because he's so invested in his fantasy that they actually are happier. [Doug: 7/29/05 15:34]


	ZA, QI, KI, FE, OI, and KI The sad thing is that I had already seen a few of them in the new book they feature prominently in, before John G. sent me this link. [Doug: 7/29/05 12:50]


	Hope of the Anti-Chavistas The Wall Street Journal has an interesting op-ed about the Venezuelan opposition. It features Chacao mayor Leopoldo Lopez, about whom you may have first heard about on this site back in '04. [Ben H.: 7/29/05 07:19]


	I believed you, Ben! ... Although I did try not to think about it. If pre-dawn poopage is a constant across neighborhoods, the sign of a gritty neighborhood has to be midday public urination. We walked down to the Lower East Side over the weekend and can attest that it still exists there, within, er, spitting distance of the hyperexpensive new restaurants on Clinton street. Relatedly, you can judge how flourishing a NYC neighborhood's nightlife is by counting the vomit splotches on Sunday morning. [Doug: 7/27/05 14:17]


	Pooped! Not that I like dogs or would ordinarily defend them from slander, but I've long maintained that my early-rising schedule gives me unique insight into the identity of those truly responsible for turds on the street. A recent item at Curbed inspired me to write in, and the good people at the site have allowed me to get my message out. [Ben H.: 7/27/05 11:02]


	The Look and Feel of the Times The New York Times is opening, in a Kentucky airport of all places, the first in a chain of eponymous stores. The Times' flack boasts that the stores will have "the look and feel" of the New York Times. From this, I gather that it will sell pretentious middlebrow twaddle to smug bobo shitbirds. The upside is that if the government, using its Patriot Act powers, tries to find out what book a customer has purchased, the cashier will be sworn to pull a Judy Miller. [Ben H.: 7/26/05 18:08]


	Scary UK Survey Data The good news: multiculturalism has made a gorgeous mosaic of Britain. The bad news: several tens of thousands of the tiles are in favor of blowing up the rest. [Ben H.: 7/26/05 14:05]


	Gitmo to the Moon Ha! Nice one. The irony here is that these orange jumpsuit-clad unfortunates at the mercy of the U.S. government face a much higher risk of death than those at Gitmo! [Ben H.: 7/26/05 08:48]


	Pentagon Aims to Quell Gitmo Critics With Parade of Smiling, Multiethnic Inmates [Doug: 7/26/05 08:02]


	Helprin's "Winter's Tale" was highly recommended to me by HK and Thor. I saw it on your shelf when we came over for the barbecue -- maybe I'll borrow it sometime. I'm trying to get through Colm Toibin's The Master first. That way of phrasing it may make it seem like a chore, but I mean it only to indicate my own terribly slow reading speed. It's actually quite good. You probably know that it's a novel written from the point of view of Henry James. The book's hook is simple to state: James' novels' obsession with veiled communications and social nuances are explained by James' own inability to figure out his own sexuality. Yet it is not at all a crude roman à thèse. Toibin is a very good writer, and if the structure of the book is a little diffuse, it just makes the mood more Jamesian. [Doug: 7/25/05 21:53]


	Bookshelf Picked up Mark Helprin's latest this weekend, and so far I am enjoying it. Helprin's novels have always struck me as a kind of weird mix of Romantic sensibility and Modernist form. At times, he veers into territory dangerously close to portentous solemnity. The new book, while recognizably Helprin, reads a lot lighter. I was delighted to come across the epithet "shitbird", a personal favorite of mine. Of course, after a minute, I realized that I had picked it up from an earlier Helprin novel. [Ben H.: 7/25/05 17:25]


	ShockED and PerplexED The man the London police shot and killed in the tube last week turned out to be not an Islamic terrorist but rather a Brazilian electrician, a man apparently without a connection to the bombers. Very sad, indeed. I hope it won't make you doubt the sincerity of my sympathy for the family of Jean Menezes when I say that I find the Brazilian government's testy response hypocritical. The Brazilian foreign minister professed to be "shocked and perplexed" (which in the Brazilian pronunciation of English consists of six syllables). His shock can only be at the fact that the shooting of an innocent man by the police took place in London; and he has no right to perplexity. As a Brazilian government official, he must enjoy familiarity with extrajudicial executions of Brazilian citizens by death squads. Or, maybe he is shocked that the British police dispatched the victim quickly rather than torturing him. Perhaps he is perplexed at why the British government would own up to its fatal mistake rather than just making the inconvenient victim disappear. It's like Ali G said in his tour of the UN. How come the crap countries get a say? With respect to quality of government, Brazil is a crap country. The crap countries should just shut the fuck up. [Ben H.: 7/25/05 13:49]


	In Russia, Spam Can You! The Congress a few sessions back passed the CAN-SPAM act to try to cut down on unsollicited email. In Russia, they take a different approach. One wonders if after the first blow to the head, the assailant offered the victim the option to "click here to unsubscribe" from further blows to the head. [Ben H.: 7/25/05 12:17]


	Truth and Consequences Doug, I've had similar thoughts occasioned by all the heated back-and-forth in the press about whether the bomber or Blair is to blame for the London attacks, but they lead me to a somewhat different place. Perhaps because the military action takes place far away in Iraq and Afghanistan, people forget that for the Islamic nutters these theaters form only part of the war. You would not count a man a genius or a prophet should he boast of predicting, on the eve of the outbreak of the war, that the enemy is going to shoot back. Now, we can argue if the nutters, in Egypt and Istanbul and the UK and the US and Madrid, are strictly speaking shooting back or just continuing a campaign that predates Iraq and Afghanistan. I find evidence for the latter pretty convincing, but even if you disagree, it makes little difference for the argument. Like Clauswitz says and people love to repeat, war is the extension of politics by other means. And just as with any other political or policy decision, it ought to be the product of calculation of costs and benefits. But do you expect the opposition to denounce a policy choice of the government by screeching in shocked terms that it has had a cost? George Galloway, though, expects to be treated like Cassandra or Nostradamus because he predicted -- after the embassy bombings, after September 11 -- that Islamic nutters would attack us in response to an invasion of Iraq. That in response to our invasion they would continue to do (or at least attempt to do) what they had already been doing, what they had over and over sworn to continue to do, was so obvious as to hardly be worth pointing out. Certainly, to point it out hardly merits the name prediction. Now, should a politician in favor of war claim that we ought to expect, as a matter of fact, instant immunity from attack, he is either a scoundrel or a fool. Just as the Lileks of your example, Doug, would be either crazy or dishonest to act surprised in his hospital bed that having taken on a raving loony he got his ass kicked. But does he have no right to be angry? There is a difference between expectation as a matter of fact and as a matter of right. If you get involved in a war, you should expect as a matter of fact to be counterattacked. You have no call to act shocked. But as a matter of right? Well, it depends on what you are fighting for. And to the extent we are fighting a bunch of evil, violent, blust-lusting, monomaniacal crazies, we ought still to feel outrage at every counterattack. That goes for counterattacks on the battlefield, but even more so for the sorts of attacks we saw in London, that contravene long-established rules of war subscribed to by all the civilized world. [Ben H.: 7/24/05 13:50]


	Lileks' Failing We know what's great about James Lileks. I'd like to use this occasion -- namely, the occasion of the top three stories on most news sites being Islamic slaughters on three continents -- to talk about his main failing. Lileks, like his hero Kirk, is a straight shooter, or at least a straight talker. He loves to cut through B.S. and remind us in his inimitably pithy and amusing way that it all comes down to personal responsibility. When a Muslim slaughters people, whether in Egypt, England, or Istanbul, it is that Muslim's own responsibility. Lileks knows that the analysis of proximate causes, ultimate causes, efficient causes, of cultural backgrounds, political backgrounds, etc. etc. etc., is the labyrinth of quietism, never to be entered. The dude with the bomb is the bad guy; the bad guy the dude with the bomb; that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. In order to explain why something more than this just might be knowable on earth, I propose the following hypothetical story. On one of those bright beautiful Minnesota autumn days that nobody captures better than Lileks, not even Garrison Keillor, a new family moves in next door to Jasperwood. They belong to a rather creepy Christian sect (just to factor the Islam out) -- think Carrie. But with a father. The father imposes all kinds of bizarre rules on his kids -- they must dress in some crazy way, they may not talk to other kids outside of school, that sort of thing. And of course he's a big fan of corporal punishment, which Lileks witnesses. Lileks thinks this is hurtful for the kids, and of course he's right. He describes the kids' hardships on his website and mentions the family by name, on his blog and on the radio. He describes very colorfully the various apt fates he imagines for the father. The most hotheaded elements of his readership track down the family's address and send the father angry, indignant letters. Whereupon the father, meeting Lileks on the street, beats the shit out of him. Now, the hypothetical neighbor is a terrible man, and Lileks is not. Nothing can be clearer than this. My question is whether it is wise for Lileks to have picked a fight with him. Picked a fight -- what, did Lileks throw the first punch out there on the street? Or did his online taunts set in motion a deterministic process that could only have resulted in his puppetlike neighbor's throwing that punch? No, I am suggesting no such thing, and I am not questioning the Lileksian claim that the neighbor is responsible for being a jerk, responsible for accosting Lileks. What I am claiming is that one could easily have predicted that Lileks' online taunts would be followed by his neighbor beating him up, rather than by an increase in the next-door kids' quality of life. Supposing that Lileks congratulated himself, from his hospital bed afterwards, on his own moral rectitude in comparison with his neighbor's, this would be utterly beside the point. Likewise, it is utterly beside the point for Lileks to keep insisting that our GI's in Iraq are morally blameless, and that the bombers are wrong who find in the GI's actions a justification for slaughter. (I can only assume that he is still hammering on this point; I don't read him anymore. Perhaps he is limiting the Bleat to Jasperwood anecdotes these days, and wearing the same see-no-evil half-smile that the post-"mission-accomplished" White House workers have adopted. But I doubt it.) The point is that the worldwide slaughter we are now witnessing was not only predictable — it was predicted. I hope Lileks and his crowd are right, that the slaughter will usher in new era of Arab peace and progressivism. Because if its only benefit is to give Lileks more and better occasions for doing his impression of Captain Kirk, I will count the Iraq adventure a failure. [Doug: 7/24/05 12:58]


	Coffee Purchases As Cultural Statement John G. sends a link to a coffee-selling site: beans from an exotic region, with personal stories of the farmers, on whose behalf well-to-do Americans will feel good about overpaying. But, as the fey gallery attendent from Beverly Hills Cop might say, this coffee has a twist. [Doug: 7/23/05 15:29]


	You play JATO, I play JOTA, let's call the whole thing off Yeah, the arbitrariness of the word list does make Scrabble kind of silly, and I've already sworn off it a few times. But I keep coming back for the rush of playing seven-letter words. I salvaged a lost game at the very end with HOPLITE the other day -- very satisfying. [Doug: 7/23/05 15:21]


	Fuck Scrabble I promise that instead of using words for which I can easily show abundant attestation, I'll stick to plain vanilla scrabble words. Cor, sorry to have caused you any wae. I'd gam you and apologize in person, but i need to clean out my cwm, which has sadly gotten filled up with kex, lac and other detritus. [Ben H.: 7/22/05 15:23]


	James Lileks: Culture Hero (A continuing series) Today, he unearths the greatest Star Trek quote ever [Ben A.: 7/22/05 12:54]


	Word Ban Ben H, please refrain from using the word "avalize" on this site, as you did a few months ago. It is not a recognized Scrabble word, as I learned when I was robbed of the 126 points it would have given me in an online game. However, speaking of the harem in the sky, "houri" continues to be a key part of the arsenal. [Doug: 7/22/05 09:43]


	Mad Bomber Bit? Interesting incident in the Tube. [Ben H.: 7/22/05 06:07]


	Saddam's Nephews Why are they alive? Based on the article, I would hazard a guess that it is because they skittered away to Syria. The announcement that occasioned the story suggests to me that the administration, having found them, would very much like to follow Machiavelli's advice; but that it would be a lot more convenient if Syria would do it rather than forcing the U.S. to invade or send some kind of hit squad to Damascus. Back From London In the end, I didn't have too much trouble getting to the airport. From the looks of it, the terrorists brought the B-team today. I mean, two of the bombs didn't even detonate. Mustafa, you remember to add the saltpeter, right? -By the beard of the prophet, I used salt, like you told me! But, hey, if by the design of your plan, the A-team blows itself to that great harem in the sky, you're pretty much going to be left with just the B-team. Pizza Snobs Thanks for checking the pizza place out, Doug. You saved me $50! Bestism run rampant, I tell you! [Ben H.: 7/22/05 00:01]


	AuthentiCity We had dinner tonight at Una Pizza Napolitana on 12th Street. Ben H, I think I showed you the manifesto that they shove under area doors in lieu of menus. It goes on and on about how everything they use in their pizza is imported authentic Italian stuff -- if I'd had the patience to reach the end it would probably have informed me of the bottled Italian oxygen they use to fire their wood-burning stove. Bottom line though: excellent pizza, extremely expensive. We won't be making a return visit to what is essentially a hole-in-the-wall joint to pay $55 for dinner. Here is a longer post about this place that our experience squares with. And then there is sliceny.com, the weblog devoted to New York pizza. As the first link mentions, this place does not serve tapwater. Isn't that illegal? [Doug: 7/21/05 20:17]


	Still unclear, to the sites I surf anyway, what happened in London today. On another terror front, the Times says that Saddam's nephews are big backers of the Iraqi insurgents. My question is: Why are these guys even alive? For a bunch of academic neo-cons, the White House war hawks seem remarkably ignorant of the Prince's basic lessons. [Doug: 7/21/05 17:31]


	London Lunchtime Three tube stations evacuated, though sounds more like "suspicious packages" rather than any actual explosions. GOing to be tons of fun getting to the airport tonight... [Ben H.: 7/21/05 08:25]


	In London Gorgeous weather here and I understand I am missing a classic New Yorker swelterfest. On arriving at Paddington on the Heathrow Express, I noticed that the line at the taxi rank was about 3 times as long as usual. I wonder if this is a consequence of the bombings. One of my colleagues here at the office, who bikes to work, claims that he sees about twice as many rush-hour cyclists. In any case, I didn't have time to wait for a cab, so I lugged my bags out to catch the bus that runs down Edgeware Road to Oxford Street, by our office. Even though I was carrying bags, accompanied by my baggage-laden colleague, Ali, nobody gave us a second glance. Can't say the bus was crowded, though. [Ben H.: 7/20/05 11:17]


	Humbling Humbug Since you first mentioned this verbal tic, Doug, I notice it everywhere. One would hope that a judge, one who lives by the fine parsing of words, would know better. [Ben H.: 7/20/05 00:40]


	The Litmus Test One John Roberts is nominated for SCOTUS. From the Times: Judge Roberts, appearing with his wife, Jane, in the East Room of the White House, called his nomination "an honor and very humbling." So, he has the ability to maintain contradictions with a straight face -- surely one of the main things Bush was looking for in an appointee. [Doug: 7/19/05 21:54]


	Off Again Heading out to Turkey (suicide bombing over the weekend) and then on to London (suicide bombing two weeks ago), hoping to get some business done and to return in one piece. Meanwhile, for the next two weeks, Bernie will be guest-blogging at Prawfsblawg. [I tracked down the correct URL there, Ben -- Doug] [Ben H.: 7/18/05 14:17]


	Proximity as a Moral Category I attended Saturday's game. Despite Ben H's resemblance to Nozick's utility monster, this weekend sums to a felicific minus across the bandarlog community. [Ben A.: 7/18/05 10:38]


	Speaking of Utilitarian Calculus... Does my pleasure at seeing the Yankees close within half a game of the Red Sox outweigh your pain, Ben A.? For the first two months of the season, a gold-plated rotation could not deliver .500 ball. Now, with Triple-A and the waiver wire supplying the arms, the Bombers are on a tear. Ah, baseball... [Ben H.: 7/18/05 06:14]


	Utilitarianism: Against and Against You are right, Doug, that moral deliberation cannot avoid the image of the balancing scale. As we choose between actions, we rank them along some measure. This is one reason for opposing the taxonomy that divides moral philsophy between "consequentialist" and "non-consequentialist" theories. It addresses the problem in reverse order. Everything can be described as a consequence. Pain is a consequence, an ill-lived life is a conseqeunce, acting according to a maxim that cannot be a principle of universal law is a consequence. The goal of moral theory should be to figure out what moral value is. Maybe then we will conclude that "value" is an entity that can be maximized by some crude algorithm. You don't start with the crude algorithm and declare the show over. Imagine trying to answer a question in aesthetics like this. What's better than the Bach B Minor Mass? Two Bach B Minor Masses! Five! A dozen! The problem with utilitarianism is that it stipulates -- usually without argument -- a theory of value that is, if you think about it for more than five minutes, totally implausible. Positive sensations? The fulfillment of preferences? These are horrendous candidates for moral value. Does anyone on introspection identify positive senstations as the goal of their life? Does anyone want their preferences achieved just because they have them? Maybe the attraction of utilitarianism is that it enables the fantasy of the master planner, providing a God's-eye perspective from which we can remold and the world for the better. A closer examinationm however, shows that utilitarianism is not useful in this context either. Consider the challenge of comparing Mr. X's hedonic satisfaction from eating a snickers bar with Ms. Y's from listening to Wham. What's the metric? Subjective reports? The Bliss-o-matic brain scan? If one abandons hedonic utilitarianism for the preference satisfaction variety, the unaswerable rhetorical questions fly faster and more furiously: How do we know how many preferences Mrs. Z has? Is it better to have more or fewer? Is fulfilling one big preference completely better than fulfilling hundreds of small ones partially? How would we, the committee of enlightened master planners, ever figure this out? Lord Lindsay has a great line about utilitarianism: "Utilitarianism had equated human purposes with happiness. That had meant not simply that the State should take men as it found find them -- a doctrine for which much is to be said -- but that men should take themselves as they find themselves -- a very different doctrine for which there is almost nothing to be said." Amazing that 80 years later, this theory gets taught in every Freshman ethics class. Plame, Again In Washington, legal controversies are like whitecaps on a stormy sea: surface manifestations of stronger, deeper forces. Howard Fineman provides fantastic background on the Plame case. [Ben A.: 7/14/05 09:56]


	Study: Take This Study With A Grain of Salt A recent study concludes that one-third of studies are wrong. In related news, nine of out of ten doctors agree: one out of ten doctors is an idiot. [Ben H.: 7/14/05 08:23]


	Utilitarianism I passed over the content of the George Will article because I was still too worked up over the White House scandal. Now that I've chilled out (went to a free concert that our violinist friend's quartet gave at NYU) here's a brief reaction. I endorse it too. I think it is a shame that PETA nutballs have effectively let the factory farmers get off easy. (Lazy dyads, man, lazy dyads!) I also think the cruelty-free ranches, like the one you linked to, are great. In haute New York restaurants it is now de rigueur to serve "Niman Ranch" pork chops. Maybe we should make up a story about how freshwater alukawatara is caught with special cruelty-free hooks. ('Cause everyone knows the Indians love animals.) And here's an observation about utilitarianism: it's so darned hard to get away from! You (Ben A) sum up your point by saying "preventing puppy agony has a non-zero moral value". Would that mean a positive util count? And even if you phrase it with less explicitly mathematical terms -- say, "preventing puppy agony should outweigh many other considerations" -- the image is still of scalar quantities being compared. You can go ahead and try to get away from utilitarianism with a theory of virtue ethics or categorical imperatives. Just see what the last steps in ethical arguments look like in these frameworks: Action X is more virtuous, less opposed to the categorical imperative, than action Y. You seem always to end up with a moral calculus! [Doug: 7/13/05 22:26]


	Rocket Fuel for Winners I saw the NYMag story to which you're referring, Ben. I have to say, the best part had to be Lizzie Grubman considering herself above representing a pimp. If Dante could describe a hell with an intricate hierarchy, maybe there is some justification for a publicist to sneer at a pander. [Ben H.: 7/13/05 19:27]


	I Love NY When you see the phrase "Rocket Fuel For Winners" what do you think of? Would this change if you saw the phrase engraved on a titanium business card? [Ben A.: 7/13/05 18:44]


	Maybe just thinking of it as "principle" without the ideological designator will help... Addendum Make money by hurting animals less? Only in America! [Ben A.: 7/13/05 16:55]


	Sorry, Ben A, although I have more free time than most adult Americans, I don't have enough to read an article that introduces a conservative intellectual whose principles entail that we should etc. etc. etc. Maybe back in college, before conservatives had power, before "conservative principles" became a joke, I would have; but this is an era when conservatives rail against big government while racking up record deficits, slaver about national security while betraying our spies in order to consolidate their own personal power, and preach about free trade while shutting out the basa fish -- er, pangasius. It's a post-ideological age. When a conservative writes an article on how I can make money from being kind to animals, let me know. [Doug: 7/13/05 16:23]


	And Speaking of Things Edible... I approve this message. Mark down the humane treatment of animals as yet another good cause retarded by association with that most bogus of moral theories: utilitarianism. It's hard to get much traction for a reform movement when the most prominent voices heard belong to auto-discrediting 'advocates' like Peter Singer and the "a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy" goofballs of PETA. Here's the point. You shouldn't torture puppies for fun. Indeed, to avoid the Puritan bear-baiting point, if a really nifty version of Grand Theft Auto can be produced only by coders exposed to chemicals produced via a puppy-torturing process, our nation will have to do without this delightful product. This principle doesn't imply puppies have rights. It doesn't imply that one ought not cause pain to a whole bushel of puppies to further medical research. And it certainly doesn't imply that that hedonic utlity is the master value. All it means is that preventing puppy agony has a non-zero moral value. We should behave accordingly. [Ben A.: 7/13/05 15:27]


	Another Intersection ... between the themes of excessive government control of the economy and fish-naming, is the basa catfish wars of 2001-2. After trade was normalized, the Vietnamese started selling us more and more cheap catfish. Southern states complained that their product was being undersold, so they forced through a law preventing the Vietnamese from calling their fish "catfish". Instead, they had to call it "basa" and indicate its country of origin. I thought that Vietnamese themselves should have turned this around and made "basa" into a prestige fish. I don't think they did this, but from what I've read, the protectionist law didn't hurt Vietnamese sales here too much. ... *Catfish War Update!* The Vietnamese seem just this year to have gotten wise to my uncle's strategy, and to the coming polysyllabic trend in prestige food names (so long ramps!) -- say hello to pangasius! [Doug: 7/13/05 14:57]


	I think you should keep the syllabic inflation. Freshwater Avakaneema -- "it's a light, subtle fish, but more flavorful than most Ocean white fish ... I might compare it to the Pacific Moi" -- is a winner. [Ben A.: 7/13/05 14:34]


	Hmmm, now I'm thinking that in order to make a virtue out of its Great Lakes provenance, you should include "freshwater" in the name, but then it won't scan well unless it's one-syllable. Maybe "freshwater q'naap"? [Doug: 7/13/05 14:14]


	Scandales d'antan et de demain It's funny that you mention Indian gambling, because my uncle was a trailblazer in lobbying on behalf of Indian casino developers. I'm sure he did none of the naughty things Abramoff is accused of, although I'll hit him up for any "novelistic details" next time I see him. In Oscoda he told us about the latest scheme he's musing about for his Native American clients. It involves fleecing the gullible New York rich, rather than the gullible Midwest poor, which is to its credit. A tribe that he represents has special fishing rights in Lake Superior. They sell whitefish to some big concern, but whitefish turns out not to be a premium product (I think most of their gets turned into gefilte fish). So his idea is to rebrand it as something else, some exotic Native American delicacy "fished using ancient methods from the deepest, coldest waters of Lake Superior". I suggested making up a mellifluous name like "avalakaneema" and claiming it mean "deep cold waters" or something. Unfortuantely, the best opening for this rebranding may have just passed, with the temporary disorder that accompanied the move of New York's main fish market from Fulton Street in Manhattan to someplace in the Bronx. [Doug: 7/13/05 14:06]


	The Aristocracy of Pull You know Ben H, I almost appended a paragraph to that post about highly regualted industries (especially ones where non-governmental entry barriers are essentially nonexistent) inevitably generate enormous coruption. The good libertarian moral: government power correlates inversely to government honesty. The alternative to Darwinian marketplace competition is, alas, Darwinian Senator-bribing competition. [Ben A.: 7/13/05 14:05]


	Scandal Du Jour And for sale cheap! From what I hear, EM legislators cost quite a bit more than $500K. Why is it so blatant in regard to Indian gaming? Here is an area where it is within the established power of the government to make or unmake fortunes. Corruption does not vary as a function of the cost of running a campaign or the stringency of the campaign finance laws but rather of the power of the government to influence microeconomic outcomes. The more powerful the government, the more corrupt, once you control for cultural factors. [Ben H.: 7/13/05 13:17]


	Scandal Du Jour I don't have much to say about Plamegate. Guys like Tom McGuire (and, it seems, Ben H!) have been following the issue closely than me. I do tend to agree that the story as it stands reads more like a (legitimate) desire to discredit Wilson rather than an attempt to destroy Plame. Obviously, this was a mistake; how serious a security and ethical violation, is harder to assess. If, as Ben H speculates, Plame's position was common knowledge, not so much. If it's a real outing -- even if that outing was not the primary purpose of Rove's reference -- that seems like a major lapse. Plamegate, however, is not a fun scandal. Better by far is the Jack Abramoff/Indian Gambling scandal. And I love it because of the perversity of the coverage. Let's see, the Choctaw Nation spends 45 million dollars to buy influence and destroy rivals. Am I supposed to be outraged because they failed to get their money's worth? It's hilarious that Abramoff used the money to employ beach bums, run a sniper summer camp, and the like. Novelistic details like these exert an undeniable fascination. Yet the main issue here is that members of a regulated industry spent a staggering sum (500K per senator!), to protect and expand their business. "Your Government, For Sale" -- that's the headline! [Ben A.: 7/13/05 13:00]


	Long-Range Economic Projections: Seasoning Required You've heard me beat the drum before about the folly of getting too worked up about "fiscal crisis" stories that rely on long-term projections. In the late nineties, observers were quaking in their boots at the prospect of the disappearance of the Treasury market. A few years later, the same people had us teetering on the brink of insolvency. Well, suprise, surprise, the one-year-ahead deficit projects looks to be way off (too pessimistic) due to revenue overshoots. Republicans will probably say the Laffer Curve is alive and well. Perhaps, but I think the better lesson to draw is that one should not put too much faith in long-dated projections of economic variables. So should we just throw up our hands and trust to Providence? Of course not. The way a government should change its policy-making to take account of the unreliability of forecasts is to make a priority of flexibility when it come to variables it can control. Governments should refrain from making very long-dated spending commitments. Primary spending is one variable a government can control; unless, that is, it reliquishes control by making long-term commitments the magnitude of which are subject to the vagaries of unpredictable long-term economic variables! For example, committing to pay people pension for their entire lives; or covering their prescription drug expenditures. While the excellent revenue performance of the federal budget is, by itself, something to celebrate, it can become bad news if Congress decides to make commitments based on the permanence of this outperformance. [Ben H.: 7/13/05 12:04]


	You're being a little selective with the facts, Doug, though I do agree that given the stated concern of Republicans with national security, you would think they would consider this a bigger deal (at least until proven otherwise). Wilson misrepresented in the press the findings of his Niger trip (see the Senate Intelligence Committee report from last summer, specifically pp. 43-45). Wilson's own trip confirmed the existence of a 1999 trade delegation from Iraq to Niger, led by a guy in the Iraq government involved in its alleged proliferation activities. In addition, the report details that the CIA had other sources of information about enquiries made by the same group of Iraqis in Somalia and Congo. So it does not seem to me that Bush's speech contains a lie; although, I would agree that it does leave out pertinent information, namely that these attempts to obtain yellowcake almost certainly failed. Still, to the extent it speaks to Saddam's motives, the statement is true. As far as the disclosure of Plame's "covert" status, it sounds like it was pretty well known by the Washington press corps, well before any conversations about it between Rove and Matt Cooper, that Plame worked for the CIA. And based on Rove's lawyer's account of the conversations between Rove and Cooper, Cooper pressed Rove on the question of who suggested sending Wilson. Rove disabused Cooper of the notion, then current, that Cheney had selected Wilson and told Cooper that Wilson's wife, a CIA employee, was very involved in it. To the extent Wilson was out in the NYT telling a misleading tale about his Niger trip and its implications, it doesn't seem that unreasonable that Rove would answer a reporter's question bearing directly on Wilson's credibility. It is a stretch to say that Rove came up with a diabolical plan to punish Wilson by ruining his wife's career. That said, to the extent that he knew Plame was a covert operative, he should have figured out some way to explain why Wilson might not be so credible without blowing Plame's cover. However, recent events would suggest that people generally do not get worked up enough about breaches of security protocol. It seems like Sandy Berger stuffing classified documents into his underpants and smuggling them out of the National Archives is a security breach at least as serious (and more premeditated) than Karl Rove letting slip Valerie Plame's status in response to a question from a reporter. And yet, in that case the outcry and the consequences for Berger were slight. Likewise, the New York Times splashed across its front page the name and operational details of an air charter company the CIA was using for covert activities, putting the CIA operatives working on this project in substantially more danger than Plame will likely ever face. Are Times readers up in arms? Hardly. [Ben H.: 7/13/05 09:20]


	The Karl Rove story is amazing. Or maybe it's the meta-story that's amazing, the fact that Bush's supporters are so ignorant and/or fanatical that the story won't affect their support for him. Bush states the following lie in the 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Mr. Wilson, a State Dept. guy posted to the country in question, calls him on the lie, saying that he himself gave the CIA information that discredited the uranium-shopping story. In retaliation for his speaking a truth that is in opposition to its propaganda, the White House destroys the career of, not Wilson himself, but his wife. The message to would-be whistle-blowers in the government: keep your trap shut or we will destroy your family. And to think that the Democrats put up a weenie like Kerry against these guys! I guess I shouldn't speak too ill of the Republican mafia, though, given the benefits I receive indirectly from it. My uncle built the luxury dacha in Oscoda largely thanks to the GOP (he's a lawyer friend of the ex-governor, and was payed well by corporations to influence the governor's views on legislation). The Oscoda set-up was kind of funny, actually. The town is on the hardscrabble east side of northern Michigan. People of my uncle's station would normally vacation on the west side (Traverse City, Charlevoix, etc.), but our family has fairly deep roots in Oscoda, so that's where he built. There are older cottages up and down the lake from us. I think the longtime neighbors on the left may once have been middle-middle-class like our family, but instead of veering up, they veered down; they now live in their little cottage year-round with three kids; the dad drove a truck for a while. Now I have no idea about the politics of their family, but it has all the cultural signs of Nascar Republicanism. So it amuses me to think the signs are correct, to imagine them drinking beer at their picnic table, looking up at us drinking Chardonnay and Cabernet on our elevated deck, and thinking "Yup, those people are on my side, because they believe in Jesus and Nascar!" (I should add that my uncle himself is a supporter less of Bush than of John McCain, who has had his own problems with Karl Rove.) [Doug: 7/13/05 08:30]


	The Benefits of Diversity! I concede that Britain's Anglo-Saxon community could not fill in this particular corner of the gorgeous mosaic. Notwithstanding my well-advertised cultural chauvinism, I head back to London for two days next week, where I will be sure to take the tube, like always. [Ben H.: 7/12/05 20:33]


	Oscoda Report I am still at the dacha. I spent a week here with Dao and my family and am staying an additional week by myself (of which two days remain). It's been both relaxing and frustrating. The relaxing part is easy enough to explain. In all external ways the vacation has equalled just about any expensive resort getaway. The house my uncle built up here is big and beautiful, and seems even more so if you happen to remember the decrepit cottage that it replaced. The lake that it's on is still nice to look at and boat on, although it has too much algae-type stuff to swim in. (Probably due to lawn-fertilizer runoff. Apparently some municipal organization is looking into it.) In the evening -- right now -- the sun reflects off the lake and makes the old pine trees shimmer. The weather has been perfect. I drive five minutes to lake Huron and swim. The frustrating part is that I haven't got anywhere with my math work. I've done some work on a paper, an exposition of the basics of this spacetime-model project, and I'm happy enough with that. But I haven't been able to get back into the mathematics of it. The notes I've been looking over, which I was supposed to continue while on this vacation, are utterly opaque to me. Finitely generated boolean algebras? Completely generated boolean algebras? Was I really reading and understanding proofs about this stuff three months ago? For me, proving theorems in this area is like running a marathon. In that I cannot do either of these things, yes, but what I mean to say is that insofar as I am capable of doing either, it would require a strict training regimen lasting months. I would have to get up early every morning and re-prove some fundamental results as a sort of calisthenics, and only then do two hours or so of hard-core math. But now the only reproving I'm doing is of myself, for my stupidity and laziness. For the first time I've thought seriously of bagging this project. Its payoff seems very uncertain. I initially undertook it because it seemed like the world would remain a totally inscrutable mystery unless it worked along the lines I was proposing. I still basically believe that. But very little (at the moment) seems to ride on my success or failure in working out a detailed theory along those lines. I am definitely having a Humean dinner-and-backgammon moment. Maybe I should just look for a job in some new industry, like Dao is doing. [Doug: 7/9/05 21:04]


	Tony Blair says: "We know that these people act in the name of Islam but we also know that the vast and overwhelming majority of Muslims here and abroad are decent and law-abiding people who abhor those who do this every bit as much as we do." Perhaps you're right, Tony. But wouldn't it be more appropriate to hear them say it? I'm still waiting... [Ben H.: 7/8/05 06:08]


	I agree, Doug, that if this is the best shot Al Qaeda can deliver, the war on terror has made substantive progress. A couple of attacks like this a year can be absorbed by the civilized world as a nuke attack could not. Intrusive security measures, even if they could stop these small-scale attacks, are still probably not worth the disruption and disutility they would inflict. On the other hand, changing immigration policy to apply heightened scrutiny to Arabs and Muslims and expediting their deportation in case of suspicion of consorting with terrorist groups would cause little inconvenience to Americans and Brits. Such a policy would not put an end to small-scale attacks, given the fifth column our permissive immigration policies have allowed to form, but would probably make them more difficult to pull off at the margin. [Ben H.: 7/7/05 12:13]


	I feel compelled to post about the London attacks since it's a big geopolitical event but the truth I don't really have much to say. I feel sorry for the victims and their families. I agree that countries should deport more of their Muslim radicals back to where they came from. This is just sort of where we are, though, Islam-wise. They're going to murder us every year or two, in chunks of fifty or a hundred, and there's not much we can do to reduce that number without making other aspects of our lives much worse. It sucks but it's manageable. The big effort we should be making is against nuclear proliferation. [Doug: 7/7/05 11:32]


	London Attacks Everybody in our London office had already arrived for work, so none was affected. In fact, they seemed strangely blase about it. Perhaps the Diana funeral cry-fest was an anomaly and British reserve remains alive and well. In any case, the wires now report 33 dead and 350 injured -- a sad day for the UK and all her friends abroad. I hope that in light of the attack, the US and the UK will step up efforts to round up and deport Muslim radicals. When the wires first reported a single explosion, we joked that the French were showing themselves to be sore losers. When it turned out to be a series of explosions set off by crazy Muslims, we said: the French are showing themselves to be sore losers. [Ben H.: 7/7/05 11:09]


	Riposte to Chirac [Ben H.: 7/7/05 08:04]


	Live 8, the African Perspective Man bites dog story: African economist tells the West, keep your damn aid! One of the other pernicious changes in how people conceptualize charity is the equation of solutions and money. I think this may be a consequence of the shift of charitable activity from direct action to lobbying the government. The roadmap of government work is the budget and the budget is at bottom a list of financial commitments. Yet few problems can be solved by money alone. If Africa's stagnation is a consequence of predatory government bureaucracy, will not consigning more resources to this bureaucracy intensify the continent's suffering? I doubt many of the attendees, or even participants for that matter, of Live 8 reason even this far. After all, they act in order to persuade themselves of their own virtuousness much more than to accomplish any external goals. [Ben H.: 7/7/05 07:18]


	Enlightenment Philosophers as Pokemon Strange, quite strange [Ben A.: 7/6/05 19:59]


	Fake, but Funny Paris 2008! [Ben A.: 7/6/05 19:32]


	"It is your voice we are after, not your money": Or, Very Brief Thoughts On Live 8 I like Bob Geldof. Most celebrities use thier fame and fortune to promote nefarious cults or to procure whores. Better surely to try to alleviate human suffering. So it is with regret that I note that the live 8 message is almost the worst possible one that can be sent about aid to Africa. (Ok, "exterminate the brutes," or "do nothing and laugh it up" would be worse). The "voice" of millions of people means almost nothing -- especially if the expression of that voice is showing up to listen to free music. 25 million people signed their names to the Live8 petition. Had each of them contributed $100, that would be 2.5 billion dollars, seven times the direct economic aid to Madacasgar, and enough to retire 54% of that island's sovereign debt. A hundred bucks would probably be a sacrifice for many of the people who text messaged Bob Geldof. That's good: it would cause them to actually care about where the money went, to follow-up, to demand results. Instead, live 8 encouraged a notoriously disaffected and ungenerous group -- the young -- to continue to view "the man" as the problem, and to cast themselves in a passive critical role. If you want to send your money to Africa, must one lobby the government to do it for you? Just cut a check to the International Rescue Committee. [Ben A.: 7/6/05 19:10]


	France's Consolation Prize Totally agree, Ben. But let's not forget that France recently won a consolation prize, another huge international project (that was going to Japan until a world-class whining campaign was launched) -- the new super-duper fusion reactor. As an enemy of whining I found this reversal distasteful, until I learned what Japan was promised in return. Apparently France's multi-billion dollar reactor will just be a "proof of concept" version; assuming all goes well, Japan will build the subsequent versions that actually do practical work. There is a certain logic here. [Doug: 7/6/05 09:22]


	IOC Opines The result is the best of all worlds. We get the pleasure of seeing the French defeated in the final round, but New York, having lost earlier, bears none of the costs of this delicious outcome. London's victory over Paris is a particularly appropriate touch, coming as it does so near to the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar and also right after Chirac's flippant comments about British food and agriculture. Well, Jacques, lesson learned, right? The Olympics are not about Olympian disdain. [Ben H.: 7/6/05 08:26]


	IOC Crunch Time! Delegates of the IOC are meeting this week in Singapore to decide which of the finalist cities will host the 2012 Olympics. Mercifully for our purses and piece of mind, New York stands no better chance of victory than a Jamaican bobsled team. I imagine that the IOC, in its assessment of a city's suitability, considers the ease of getting to it and getting away from it. Coincidentally, I have over the last two weeks flown to three of the five finalist cities; in the spirit of Olympic cooperation, I will share my data with the IOC. City: Moscow Arrival Time from arrival at gate to arrival at destination: 1hr30 minutes* Gate to clearing passport control: 25 minutes Baggage wait and walk to transport: 0 minutes Wait for transportation: 5 minutes Airport to desination: 1hr (car -- big assed Mercedes) Cost: Free* Departure Time from downtown to gate: 1hr25 minutes Downtown to airport: 1hr15mins (car - big assed Mercedes) Check in: 5 minutes Check-in to gate: 5 minutes Cost: $50 City: London Arrival Time from arrival at gate to arrival at destination: 45 minutes Gate to clearing passport control: 10 minutes Baggage wait and walk to transport: 5 minutes Wait for transportation: 0 minutes Airport to desination: 30mins (London cab, granted at 2am) Cost: GBP45 = $80 Departure Time from downtown to gate: 1hr Downtown to airport: 25 mins (cab + Heathrow Express) Check-in: 15mins Check-in to gate: 20mins Cost: GBP20 = $35 City: New York Arrival Time from arrival at gate to arrival at destination: 2hr10mins Gate to clearing passport control: 15 minutes Baggage wait and walk to transport: 50mins Wait for transportation: 0 mins Airport to destination: 1hr05mins** (NYC cab) Cost: $50 Departure Time from downtown to gate: 1hr30mins Downtown to airport: 1hr10mins (E train + Airtrain) Check-in: 5mins Check-in to gate: 15mins Cost: $7 * Host organization got me access to "VIP" immigration and customs, arranged for car. Regular immigation/customs in my experience is substantially worse ** This at 11am on a Saturday of a holiday weekend when the city should be empty. In addition, the cabby did not know how to get from JFK to the BQE and had to be directed. Had I not known the way, it would have taken substantially longer. [Ben H.: 7/4/05 10:17]


	Spielberg's Extreme South End Ben A. notes the denouement of War of Worlds takes place in the ruins of the posh South End. Spielberg looked a little further south for where to shoot the supposed Boston neigborhood: Brooklyn. The slapped-on gas-lamp notwithstanding, I recognize my borough! It's a one-block street near Prospect Park, guessing either Polhemus Place or Fiske Place. Had Spielberg meant for the re-union scene to take place in New York, no doubt he would have set up the production in Toronto. On film Toronto looks more like New York than New York. My apologies for infringing on Wintrex's trade slogan. [Ben H.: 7/3/05 23:30]


	The Ring 2 The Kraft story was all over the news while I was in Russia. Mr. Kraft's explanation seems pretty obviously ex post facto. I first heard it from one of our political consulting services, who apparently had a representative on the tour where the incident occurred. Their report made it sound like Putin simply pocketed the ring. Didn't anyone ever tell Bob Kraft not to travel to dangerous places wearing ostentatious jewelry? [Ben H.: 7/3/05 11:05]


	Meeting Vladimir Did Putin "borrow" any sentimental objects during your interview, Ben H? You've got to hand it to Vladimir, he can shake down a business tycoon without regard for citizenship. [Ben A.: 7/3/05 00:05]


	Exotic Places Speaking of exotic places, we've been in Oscoda, Michigan for a few days, at the family dacha. More accurately, at the house my uncle had built on an ancestral plot and which nobody else calls the dacha except me. We've done fittingly little. Played a lot of online scrabble. Our rating is now at a respectable level, above 1000, but way below our friends Tina (1263) and Carl (1490). Played TANDOORI last night for about 90 points. I will probably do a lot more blogging starting tuesday, when everyone else takes off and I spend an additional week here working on math. [Doug: 7/2/05 09:29]


	The Last Leg I'm posting from the BA lounge at Heathrow as I wait for my flight back to New York. Accept my apologies for the very light posting. I do particularly like to blog from interesting places, but over the past two weeks I've had a grand total of about an hour of free time. Matters were not helped by travel difficulties, including a screwed-up Russia visa, and a flight from Moscow to London that wound up circling Heathrow for so long that it ran through its fuel supply and had to divert to Stansted (where we sat on the tarmac for 2 hours and i witnesses a near-riot of passengers who wanted to get off the plane). Will try to share some impressions of RUssia, including a meeting with the Prime Minister, when I get home (and have dealt with two weeks of accumulated mail and laundry). [Ben H.: 7/2/05 02:51]


	Spielberg on Parenting It's funny that you mention AI, Ben. It seems kind of ironic that a project intended for a director with a notably pessimistic view of intimate human relations (Stanley Kubrick) wound up in the hands of a filmmaker whose work is suffused with gooey parent-child love. The story seems designed to mine the veins of creepiness in that very relationship, the overpowering nature of attachment, the potential for its power to damage both parent and child, the idea of having children as a way for parents' fulfilment, etc. Spielberg was truly the wrong man for the job. [Ben H.: 7/2/05 02:47]