You better have a good reason.. and be able to produce identification as well. [Via IP.]
From the monthly archives:
May 2004
From Instapundit
And here’s a question: Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn’t exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority — or even a large and angry minority — of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?
And over at USS Clueless:
When I’ve read news reports lately about some kinds of obnoxious protests, I have mused to myself, “Perhaps it’s time to issue shoot-to-kill orders to security guards.” Perhaps if some people who made grandstanding protests ended up dead, it might cause others to start really thinking about the consequences of their behavior.
There used to be a shining city on a hill … what the hell happened to it? I’m pretty sure that there might be some “consequences” in allowing the United States of America to become the sort of place where newspapers are censored and demonstrators are shot dead for being “obnoxious”. I think I’d be prepared to pay quite a high price to avoid finding out what they were.
Update Should probably make it clear that den Beste steps back from the brink of actually recommending that protestors be shot. But it’s not obvious he’d object over much if they started doing it.
Remember our discussion of the Erdõs number and the eBay bid that followed? The Chronicle is on the story, sort of. There is not one word about humor in that whole piece.. or that it all started out with a light-hearted discussion on blogs. Talk about taking a story out of context. I realize Bill may have posted the bid in all seriousness, but I think a better coverage would have included a mention of how it all came about, which is perfectly clear from his initial post. One interesting point gets no mention in the piece: John’s suggestion that offering co-authorship for free and no labor may be an even better deal for those with a high Erdõs number. (He meant it as a joke! I better add that again before John gets accused of wanting to undercut the system.) I guess in the context of The Chronicle piece that’s less scandelous.. and thus not worthy of coverage. I think I’ll go read The Onion now. [Thanks to my friend Gabriel for pointing me to The Chronicle piece.]
UPDATE: Read about Bill Tozier’s reactions here. Also, to clarify, the article does say in the beginning “The auction began as a bit of fun,” but if you read the whole piece, that part is soon forgotten.
I’ve written a couple of posts critical of the Copenhagen Consensus exercise being run by Bjorn Lomborg”s Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist. The stated objective is to take a range of problems facing developing countries, and get an expert panel to form a consensus on which ones should be given the highest priority. This is a reasonable-sounding idea, and the process has produced some useful contributions in the form of papers by experts arguing the importance of particular problems.
There are however, two big difficulties.
We’ve had more than a few things to say about the Iowa Electronic Markets over the life of Crooked Timber. In particular, John and myself have defended the view that these markets do not appear to offer marginal information above and beyond published opinion polls.
Some would say that this is fighting talk, and that if we really thought this, we ought to be trying to make some money out of it. So here goes …
Big thanks to Nasi Lemak for sharing a dataset of historical poll data with me. I have used that data to construct and backtest a trading system for the IEM Kerry vote-share contract (KERR) which uses only published poll data and generates favourable backtesting over the last four months. The equity curve for this system so far is below the fold; I plan to use it to trade the IEM vote-share market over the rest of the campaign.
My pile of Books to Read grew considerably over the past two months (though not as much as my pile of books to “not read”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001011.html). Robert C. Allen’s “Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691006962/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ sounds interesting, though I’m not likely to get to it. It makes the argument that, comparatively, the Russian economy was very successful from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. The gray world of ’70s Communism wasn’t exactly “Big Rock Candy Mountain”:http://ingeb.org/songs/onasumme.html, but economically it was in the same league as second-tier capitalist countries like those on the European semi-periphery. Considering that Russia was barely post-feudal when the Soviets arrived, this is (to coin a phrase) a big leap forward — at least comparable to the growth-rates of many of the advanced capitalist democracies, and much better than almost all other “developing” countries over the same period.
The book seems like a strong effort to separate the question of economic growth from the political dimensions of Soviet failure. Allen argues that Stalin’s brutal collectivization schemes didn’t do much for growth rates and that most of the benefits of mid-century growth were squandered by bad decisions from the Kremlin gerontocracy. I’ll wait for a full book report from “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/.
Last year, I fell off my bike, and had to have my arm in a sling for a couple of days. I don’t care, even a little bit, that Bush had a spill. It happens.
But if the White House is going to come out and blame the fall on “what the White House described as soil loosened by recent rainfall”… (Here’s the quote: “It’s been raining a lot. The topsoil was loose.”)
Well, I can check that. There hasn’t been any rain in Crawford all week. The last day with more than an inch of precipitation was May 1.
Again, not a big deal, but why would they say that? And do you share my suspicion that Caren Bohan, who wrote the Reuters report from Crawford, knows perfectly well that there wasn’t any rain?
UPDATE: Kos has a similar post, with a different data set but the same conclusion.
I keep getting emails asking for more posts with a long string of unconnected links, about which I have nothing intelligent to say. I live to serve:
BusinessWeek on government waste.
Kos on the Bush campaign’s crazy money burn rate
Katherine at Obsidian Wings has three reactions to the stories that Chalabi has been working for Iran: the initial reaction, the responsible reaction, and the snarky reaction.
Respectful of Otters asks why a crime prevention program with a remarkable history of success has to bow and scrap for funding.
TalkLeft reminds us, “Every few months, it’s worth remembering that your tax dollars are being spent to incarcerate Tommy Chong so that the Justice Department could send a message about pot pipes and bongs.”
The Poor Man goes all kung-fu on the idiotic claim that one (1) chemical weapons shell is “an arsenal”. He also writes a mean Dem Panic Watch.
Gary Farber on how to resurrect old New York Times stories.
Ogged at Unfogged refutes an untrue smear on Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi.
Jeanne D’Arc makes the new images from Abu Ghraib sting in a thoughtful post.
Finally. Something funny.
Jonah Goldberg wishes liberals were more interested in ideas, specifically the history of their own ideas. He wishes they were less ‘intellectually deracinated’; more like conservatives:
I spent a lot of a flight from London to Singapore reading “Tragically I was an Only Twin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031231891X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, a well-edited collection of the comedy sketches, monologues and occasional journalism of “Peter Cook”:http://www.petercook.net/. It turns out that Cook addressed many of the issues that preoccupy us at CT. Like “intelligent design theory”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001543.html:
*Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling*: Well, I’d like to say I believed in God, of course, but I’m afraid that, as a thinking person … there are two very good reasons why I simply can’t. … A — Wasps. Can’t see the point of a wasp, can you? And B — caviar. I mean really, what is the point of having caviar locked away inside sturgeon? So inaccessible. I’m sure if there were a real God he’d have arranged for caviar to just sort of toddle over to your house on a pair of little legs in a self-opening jar.
Or “sociobiology”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001642.html:
*Interviewer*: [B]ut isn’t an anthill a very organized society?
*Prof. Henrich Globnik*: If your view of an organized society is thousands of ants milling around in corridors, bumping into each other with bits of twig and other rubbish in their mouth then I understand why you elected that woman.
Or “political theory”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001856.html:
*Arthur Grole*: No you don’t [speak Russian], you poor sod. And you have an inalienable right not to speak Russian in this country. In Russia you have to speak Russian. But in this country we have an inalienable right not to speak Russian.
And “philosophy of language”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001408.html:
*Ludovic Kennedy*: Do you speak any Lap yourself?
*Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling*: I have a smattering — or a smeurtering, as they call it. They don’t in fact call it Lap. They call it Leurp. But I do have a smeurtering of Leurp. A few words … I like to think if I found myself in fourth-century Lapland I could get by — probably. Or preurbeurbly.
So obviously you should “just buy it”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031231891X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/.
Check out Sgt. Stryker on the bubble that some right-wingers are making for themselves regarding bad news from Iraq (via Gary Farber). He sees this as a mirror image of a left-wing bubble that has existed since September 11th.
Stryker is a likable, moderate right-winger, whom I greatly respect. I have no doubt that he’s calling it like he sees it. Here’s my attempt to call it like I see it:
I don’t think that it’s the same thing. Left-wingers spend a lot of time just talking to each other. That’s one kind of bubble. And, there’s no doubt that movement left-wingers and movement right-wingers have a tendency to trumpet news that’s congruent with their political attitudes, and a tendency to scrutinize contrary news more carefully. And, I have no doubt that, for all of us, the other side’s tendency is much, much more frustrating than our own. This leads to the totally, totally awesome posts wherein someone discovers that those treacherous Elses haven’t made enough noise about X, proving that their alleged belief in equality/liberty/ lies in tattered rags.* But it’s inevitable.
What isn’t
Finally, if you haven’t heard the Sgt. Stryker’s piece about the bubble that some right-wingers are making for themselves regarding bad news from Iraq (via Gary Farber). He sees this as a mirror image of a bubble that the left has been in.
Stryker is a likable, pro-war moderate right-winger, and I have no doubt that he’s calling it like he sees it. Here’s me calling it like I see it, in brief:
I don’t think that it’s the same thing. There’s no doubt that movement left-wingers and movement right-wingers have a tendency to embrace news that’scongruent with their political attitudes, and a tendency to scrutinize contrary evidence more carefully. This opens us all up for totally, totally awesome posts wherein someone discovers that those treacherous Elses haven’t paid enough attention to our favorite story, proving that they hate America/freedom/minorities/whatever. But, it’s probably inevitable.
However. Left-wingers haven’t put the loathing and rejection of the mainstream media close to the center of their intellectual movement.
I can have an intelligent discussion with someone who argues that (say) the biases of reporters lead them to unconsciously slant the news toward liberal points of view. I generally don’t, because I’m sick of it, but sometimes they’ve got some reasonable points.
What I’ve seen recently is different. I’m seeing a number of conservatives who seem to think that the media is deliberately doing what it can to lose the war in Iraq in order to discredit Bush. Matthew Yglesias puts it well:
Flip over to, say, Instapundit and you’ll see that Baudrillard simply spoke of the wrong Gulf War when he said it didn’t really happen. Over there, it appears, the second Gulf War is just a social construction of the virulently anti-Bush US news media. Nevermind that the foreign news media paints a distinctly bleaker picture. Nevermind that some of the voices of bleakness (Bill Kristol, George Will, etc.) can hardly be said to be virulently anti-Bush or liberal. Just nevermind. Bad news can be dismissed because the media is biased, and you can tell the media is biased because they keep reporting so much bad news!
Here’s Roger Simon: “In a world where people’s heads are being lopped off and others are being castrated live these sleazy careerists (the media) are hellbent on winning an election over all.” He simply refuses to believe any negative story from Seymour Hersh. Instapundit sees pictures of vandalized New York Times newboxes and asks for more. One of his readers emails “I’ve tuned out the MSM (mainstream media) and rely on the ‘Net — bloggers, Lucianne.com, etc. — to keep me informed, which it does quite well. That way I get all the info but don’t have to endure Dan, Tom and Peter, Wolf, etc. I miss nothing that’s happening but I gain all the stories that the mainstream media simply ignore.” Lucianne.com, for Christ’s sake. Ralph Peters writes about “journalists sympathetic to terrorists and murderers” and says that in Falujah, “The media weren’t reporting. They were taking sides. With our enemies. And our enemies won. Because, under media assault, we lost our will to fight on.” (The pen is that much mightier that the sword, apparently.) The President himself “to see his news reading largely, if not entirely, as an exercise in detecting liberal media bias,” in Josh Marshall’s words, and prides himself on avoiding opposing viewpoints. Mort Kondracke writes that “The American establishment, led by the media and politicians, is in danger of talking the United States into defeat in Iraq.” (It’s funny; Republicans control all three branches of the federal government, have a loud, loyal media megaphone, and control a political machine that would make Lyndon Johnson weep with envy. And yet, many still see themselves as being under the boot of “the establishment”, and think that they can pawn off responsibility for their failures on a handful of critics. It reminds me of one of my favorite Digby posts. Anyway…)
I’m coming to believe that the incredible popularity of the “blame the liberal media first” mindset is going to be pretty bad for the country.
(ALSO: http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_21.shtml#1085433164)
A review of Michael Ignatieff’s The Lesser Evil below the fold.
A propos election designs, check out Designs on the White House. Their goal is to generate great T-shirt designs for the Kerry campaign and then sell them to support the campaign. There will be some public voting and then voting by a list of judges (which for some curious reason does not include any Timberites;). They have sevaral themes: Best Pro-Kerry Shirt (positive spin, no mention of Bush), Best Anti-Bush Shirt (negative spin, must mention Bush), Best Issue Shirt – Domestic, Best Issue Shirt – Foreign, Funniest Shirt, Best Retro Shirt, Best Get Out The Vote Shirt and Most stylish. Be sure to check it out and also get those creative juices flowing and submit your own designs/quotes!!
I noticed the W has made it on to their list. Great minds think alike. (Hey, I can say that, it wasn’t my idea, it was a friend’s.) Oh, and for those interested in some W wearables immediately, here they are. I have added some circular Ws and some baby options in response to commentators’ requests.
UPDATE: As expected, others had thought of and implemented the W design a while ago. Take your pick: one, two, three, four. Thanks to a reader for pointing me to these sites.
Obviously there are tons of ways in which one can study memory and recall from the trivial to the immensely important. This morning I was wondering about a tiny corner of this area: how do people remember numbers, and in particular, phone numbers? I wish I had a better reason than the following for bothering with all this. I was woken up, for the nth time, by a phone call from a number that looked much like mine. What gives?
The New America Foundation has put together a Cartoon Guide to Federal Spectrum Policy. It is very amusing and quite compelling, though more technically minded people than me can assess the argument made there; that industry lobbyists are using meaningless technical mumbo jumbo to avoid sharing radio spectrum, and that licensing of spectrum is increasingly a barrier to entry and innovation. Well worth a look.