July 2007

A little while ago, when “Harry discussed the latest addition to the Real Utopias Project on basic income and stakeholding”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/28/redesigning-distribution/, some commentators raised the issue of the gender effects. I promised at that time that I would write a post about it. Well, finallly the time has come — thanks to a workshop on this topic that the “Heinrich Boell Foundation”:http://www.boell.de/ organised last Thursday in Berlin. They are the think-thank of the Green German Party, which is currently seriously debating whether they should advocate a basic income as (part of) a welfare state reform strategy. The workshop addressed the question whether a basic income would have different implications for women and men, and whether, all things considered, it would be a policy reform that feminists may want to support. [click to continue…]

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Christopher Caldwell on Michael Moore:

Mr Moore’s enemy … is the complexity of it. He rejects subtleties. His goal is not to break through to those who do not agree with him but to drown out the doubts of those who do. Those who sit down to watch Sicko without a broad knowledge of the US healthcare system will leave the theatre with a shallower understanding of the crisis than the one they arrived with. One should face up to the fact that this is the way Americans increasingly choose to get their information on all sorts of issues, not just healthcare policy. The appetite for slanted ideological dramas grows. Mr Moore is not alone in satisfying it. His anti-Bush documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, was met with the anti-Kerry adverts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Perhaps the internet has made this kind of journalism easier. Mr Moore has been described as a “tireless researcher”, but you do not have to be, nowadays. He notes in his film that an online appeal for healthcare horror stories yielded 25,000 of them within a week. In a country of 300m people, any such appeal will provide enough anecdotal evidence to edit into a plausible and even rollicking case for pretty much anything – and to liberate a grateful populace from the heavy burden of level-headedness.

Doesn’t this prissiness about simple-minded propagandistic cherrypickers sit a little oddly when it comes from one of two senior editors at the _Weekly Standard_, the gutter-trawling publication that perhaps did more than any of the others of its ilk to “propagandize”:http://theweeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/768lyuyh.asp for the “Iraq war”:http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_11_21/article.html, to relentlessly “simplify”:http://www.soulstrut.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=365971&page=0&fpart=7&vc=1 and “smooth away “:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/360lggnc.asp the reasons why the occupation would fail, and to “demonize”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/920ygass.asp those who argued against it? And so it continues. Kieran has already “mentioned”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/04/operation/ last week’s “everything’s dandy with the surge”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/818pmqsq.asp number from the Kagans, who, as he says, “get to author policy and neutrally report on it at the same time.” This week’s “The soldiers think they can win. Some Senators lose their nerve” “version”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/849nkdmm.asp of the same theme from Caldwell’s boss, William Kristol isn’t exactly what you’d call a level-headed assessment of the facts either. And that’s not even getting into the Weekly Standard‘s list of associate editors, which includes such notable flinty-eyed pursuers of truth as Charles Krauthammer, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz. Slanted ideological dramas, how are ya.

I had to stop at the local Wild Oats this morning to pick up my monthly supply of liberal condescension. Some of the fruit was labeled “Organic.” The non-organic stuff was labeled “Conventional.” I found this a little odd, because when I see “Conventional” used as a label, I expect its opposite to be “Nuclear.”

The term “phishing” refers to the malicious practice of trying to extract sensitive information (such as passwords) from users. Compared to numerous other Internet-related terms, “phishing” is one of the least understood ones among users. I have found this in my work as have others in theirs. Of course, it may be that people understand the concept of phishing without knowing it is called as such. It is difficult to do large-scale data collection using more elaborate methods, but I implemented some related questions on a survey recently taken by over one hundred students who were randomly sampled from a diverse group. (See the end of this post for details about the data set.)

In the context of a larger study, I showed participants three hypothetical emails and offered several options for how they might proceed (respondents could check off several actions such as “delete it”, “ignore it”, “forward to tech support with a question”, etc.). When shown an email that looked very much like the one that comes from the IT department of the university (one that would not be hard to replicate by someone with malicious intent) over half of respondents said they would “follow the instructions outlined in the email”, which included going to a Web site and entering their username and password. Even more students said that they would “click on the links in the message and follow the instructions on those pages”. Less than 15 percent checked off the option of contacting tech support with a question or reporting the email as abuse. And in the open-ended field where respondents could explain what else they might do, only one student described actions that suggested the potential problem with the email. This among the generation that is supposedly savvy about digital media. See my forthcoming paper on The Role of Expertise in Navigating Links of Influence for more on this (especially pp. 12-19.).

When I talk to my students (at a different school than where the above study was conducted) about online privacy and security issues, and ask them about the potential implications, the usual response is about financial concerns: credit card numbers stolen, money lost. However, as I try to remind them several times throughout the course, financial issues are not the only ones at stake when managing one’s identity and actions online. For example, in the realm of health and politics one can easily come up with examples of cases where third parties should not have access to our information.

And then there is reputation. I have noticed some troubling incidents on Flickr recently and wanted to write a post about these experiences to remind people about the importance of being vigilant. Don’t stop reading just because you are not a Flickr user, by the way. These same issues could occur on lots of other sites as well.

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Matthew Yglesias re: positive responses to Sicko:

The crux of the matter is that ordinary people think that if there’s a sick person, and you’re in a position to help the sick person, that you ought to help the sick person.

Insurance companies strengthen this commonsense moral obligation by actually entering into contracts – you pay them, each and every pay period, so that when you’re sick, they’ll help you. But insurance companies are largely in the business of devising excuses to avoid helping you when you’re in need. They employ people wake up every morning, drive to the office, and work all day denying sick people health care. The labors of these individuals line the pockets of the companies’ executives. Most people find this repugnant. Bloodsucking vampires and flesh-eating zombies have the excuse of being driven by insatiable urges. Insurance companies have free will and just choose to do bad things because they’re greedy.

Well, I haven’t seen it, so I’ll write what I know. [click to continue…]

While looking back at whether Iraq was “all about oil“, I thought it might be a good idea to check on the US reconstruction program, and found the State Department report for April 2007. The lead items are electricity generating capacity and oil output, which used to be followed eagerly by those in the blogosphere arguing that the MSM were ignoring “Good News from Iraq”. As Tim Lambert and Jim Henley pointed out a couple of years ago, the same good news kept getting announced over and over again, but the prewar levels (average electricity output of 4300 MW, availability of 11 hours per day, oil output 2.5 million barrels per day (MBPD)) were never surpassed.

We don’t hear quite so much about good news from Iraq these days. The original good news blogger Arthur Chrenkoff shut up shop a while ago. Winds of Change picked up the baton, but seems to have given up. Google finds this site with three entries this year, none containing any actual good news, and this quasi-official site, apparently produced by the Defense Department, and mainly reproducing press releases. It’s not clear whether press releases containing bad news are excluded or whether no such releases are issued.

So, I’ll pick up the ball and summarise the news in the State Department’s report. At this stage, 99 per cent of the US money has been committed, and 87 per cent has been spent, so there’s no more where that came from. Adding “new”, “restored” and “maintained” generating capacity, we get a total of 4373MW, which, assuming 80 per cent uptime, would correspond to average output of around 3500MW. Oil shows a capacity of 2.7MBPD and output of 1.9MBPD. (Table is over the fold). Then there’s the usual schools and hospitals, but these days both schools and hospitals in Iraq are very dangerous places to attend.

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I’ve just “linked a paper”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/polsci/2007/07/middleton_and_green_on_whether.html at my political science papers weblog that seems potentially pretty interesting to CT readers and others. Joel Middleton and Donald Green have written a “piece”:http://www.yale.edu/csap/seminars/middleton.pdf that tries to gauge the effects of MoveOn’s canvassers on voting turn-out. They estimate this by looking at situations where (a) the boundary of two voting precincts bisects a street so that people on one side of the street are in one precinct, and those on the other side are in the other precinct, and (b) where one of these districts had MoveOn organizers canvassing prospective voters, and the other didn’t. They then look at the voters on each side of the relevant street – this should eliminate potential bias (there’s pretty good reason to think that voters on different sides of the same street aren’t going to be measurably different from each other). When they do this, they find that people contacted by MoveOn canvasers seems to be 7% more likely to vote than the control population, which is a pretty significant difference. As Gerber and Green say, this is a nice result for the election turnout literature. But it has wider implications, as they note in an aside. There’s a lot of talk from Robert Putnam and others about how people are losing ‘social capital’ as the Internet becomes ever more important. Regardless of the underlying merits of the social capital thesis (personally, I’m pretty skeptical of it, at least in Putnam’s formulation), this provides smoking gun evidence that the Internet can enable greater participation than would otherwise have been possible, through allowing decentralized movements such as MoveOn to get the vote out more effectively.

Before I get evacuated (not a completely crazy idea with the sheriff right outside my office), I thought I’d post just how quickly fire can spread depending on the circumstances.

I realize those are not on the same scale, but the surrounding trees should help identify the areas. Understand that I was just trying to do some work this afternoon and then headed out periodically to take some pictures. I didn’t set up shop for a sequence.

The distance between the fire and the nearest road is quite big so eventually the firetrucks just had to head up on the hill.

The above photos would convey things much better if I added lots of helicopter noise, but I should get back to work…

And I promise not to clutter the blog with future dish fire photos. I might be inclined to if the fire got any closer, but if that were to happen, I am certain we’d be evacuated immediately anyway.

Via “Engadget”:http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/04/steorns-orbo-free-energy-machine-demonstrated-tomorrow/ comes news that “Steorn”:http://www.steorn.com/ are back with an allegedly working demonstration of their magnetic “free energy” (i.e., perpetual motion) machine, the “Orbo”:http://www.steorn.com/orbo/. You may remember them from “last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/22/free-lunch-and-irish-breakfast/. As before, the reading on the kookometer is over in the red, as the device is being pitched directly to the media, the demo is taking place as a show at an “art museum”:http://www.kinetica-museum.org/new_site/, and some convoluted jury system “challenge” is in place to validate it. The smart money, I believe, is of the view that Steorn — if they’re not just charlatans — have honestly reinvented some version of the magnetic motor, a mainstay of perpetual motion cranks.

Via “Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/a_surge_of_kagans.php comes the latest family full-court press from “the Kagans”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/818pmqsq.asp, who get to author policy and neutrally report on it at the same time:

bq. The new strategy for Iraq has entered its second phase. Now that all of the additional combat forces have arrived in theater, Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno have begun Operation Phantom Thunder, a vast and complex effort to disrupt al Qaeda and Shiite militia bases all around Baghdad in advance of the major clear-and-hold operations that will follow. The deployment of forces and preparations for this operation have gone better than expected, and Phantom Thunder is so far proceeding very well.

I saw Kagan on TV for the first time recently in that “Frontline Documentary”:http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/endgame/interviews/kagan.html on Iraq. My immediate impression was that he looked like just the sort of tabletop war nerd who had whiled away many happy hours as a child thinking up names like “Operation Phantom Thunder,” and who had managed to parlay this into a career. This was confirmed by what he said when asked about his participation in a Camp David meeting with Bush and his advisers:

Was it the first time you’d been to Camp David?
Oh, yeah, sure. … It was a very cool experience. They flew [us] up on a Chinook from Fort McNair, which is also a cool experience, to fly along the Potomac like that. It’s a beautiful place, and it was quite a good setting, I think.

What fun. Still, “Phantom Thunder”? Looks like we’re running out of tough-sounding modifiers for the word “Thunder.” We’ve had “Blue Thunder”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Thunder and before that there was “Operation Rolling Thunder”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rolling_Thunder, which sounds better than “Operation Bombing Vietnam To No Real Purpose.” “Phantom Thunder” clearly isn’t one of the classics. Let’s see … “Operation Flash of Thunder”? “Operation Thundercats”? “Operation Grabpot Thundergust”?

All the heavy thinkers of the American right are united in condemning any cynical ideological doublethink that might be used to justify the pardon of Scooter Libby:

* Robert Bork and James Rosen, writing in the National Review: “Lying under oath strikes at the heart of our system of justice and the rule of law. It does not matter in the least what the perjury is about.”

* Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois, who from 1985 until 1991 was the ranking Republican on the House Select Committee on Intelligence: “If citizens are allowed to lie with impunity — or encourage others to tell false stories or hide evidence — judges and juries cannot reach just results.”

* Roger Kimball, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Leftists Sacrifice Truth on the Altar of Friendship”: “In the culture wars that have been transforming American society since the 1960s, truth has been a conspicuous casualty: not only particular truths but also allegiance to the very ideal of truth as an indispensable component of any just and moral life. The competing, countercultural ideal holds that loyalty to the personal trumps loyalty to the truth….”

Oh, no, wait, I may have misread something….Plenty more at Acephalous. (And hat tip to Josh as Brainiac, whose cherry-pickings are here expropriated.)

UPDATE: Check out Phil Nugent’s commentary on the stupid things that can be said — and are, in fact, being said — about this fine moment in the history of the republic.

The arrest of a doctor in at the Gold Coast Hospital near Brisbane, accused of being connected to the failed terror attacks in London and Glasgow, brings international terrorism a lot closer to home than it has ever been before for me. Of course, it’s front page news, and the fact that most of the (alleged) participants in these attacks were doctors is pretty disturbing. Not surprisingly, the hospital’s switchboard was jammed with calls.

Still, my impression is that most people here are taking it in their stride. The risk of being caught up in a terror attack is part of the background of modern life, along with other largely random risks like hit-and-run drivers and street thugs, to name just two. At a policy level (and arguably in terms of moral response, though I think they are all fairly similar cases) these problems are different, and require different responses. But as far as day to day life is concerned, it’s mainly a matter of getting on with it.

Update “Alleged” turns out to be the operative word. The case against the Brisbane doctor apparently turns on the fact that when police tried to interview him about his links to one of the British accused, they found him at the airport with a one-way ticket to India. But it appears he was going there to join his wife who had gone home a week or so earlier after having a baby.

Glen Greenwald took a few bites out the latest NYTimes transcription, by White House stenographer Michael Gordon, of Administration/military talking points in the campaign for war against Iran, made by Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner, now US military spokesman in Iraq and previously, (not reported) Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Iraq. So somebody at the Gray Lady apparently decided that the piece might be improved by a mininal amount of actual reporting, such as the fact that the claims in question have been repeatedly denied by the Iranian government (with backing, although this is not mentioned, from a large number of independent analysts).

What’s interesting to me is that these changes are not noted. But if the journal of record had attributed the remarks to the wrong general or mis-stated the spokesman’s position, the error would surely have been noted with a correction. A blogger who made a change like this in response to justified criticism would get accused, rightly, of a stealth correction. Shouldn’t the New York Times be held to at least as high a standard?