As a sort of coda to Chris’s post of a couple of days ago, _02138_ magazine ran an article a few years ago on how various well known Harvard professors used research assistants. The magazine has since gone belly-up, but the article has been preserved “here”:http://harmonicminor.com/2007/12/09/a-million-little-writers/ and a few other places on the Internets. This bit on Dershowitz seems relevant to his various forays into public intellectualism:

Several of his researchers say that Dershowitz doesn’t subscribe to the scholarly convention of researching first, then drawing conclusions. Instead, as a lawyer might, he writes his conclusions, leaving spaces where he’d like sources or case law to back up a thesis. On several occasions where the research has suggested opposite conclusions, his students say, he has asked them to go back and look for other cases, or simply to omit the discrepant information. “That’s the way it’s done; a piecemeal, ass-backwards way,” says one student who has firsthand experience with the writing habits of Dershowitz and other tenured colleagues. “They write first, make assertions, and farm out [the work] to research assistants to vet it. They do very little of the research themselves.”

When one student couldn’t find a desired source for an HLS professor’s project, a Harvard research librarian commented, “Isn’t that the opposite of how you’re supposed to do it?” Other students point out that Dershowitz has been at the law school for four decades, and thus even his most apparently off-the-cuff suppositions are based on a long career of reading and practicing law. And Dershowitz does acknowledge researchers in his books.

The “juxtaposition”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/15cd24ee-73c4-11df-bc73-00144feabdc0.html of two quotes in an article on Turkey in today’s _FT_ is pretty interesting.

bq. Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, attacked the “very unfortunate choices” by Turkey and Brazil, the other country to oppose the measures. “They are now the outliers,” she said of the two traditional US allies. “They are standing outside of the rest of the Security Council, outside of the body of the international community.” Russia and China, long doubtful about sanctions, voted in favour after a dogged US campaign for support.

and

bq. On Wednesday, Robert Gates, defence secretary, suggested European Union reluctance to admit Turkey as a member could be pushing it away from the west and expressed concern about the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli ties. “If there’s anything to the notion that Turkey is moving eastwards, it is in no small part because it was pushed, and it was pushed by some in Europe refusing to give Turkey the kind of organic link to the west that Turkey sought,” he said while visiting London.

American notions of ‘international community’ are pretty weird if you look at them at all closely. On the one one hand, Rice’s quote suggests that the ‘international community’ more or less reduces down to ‘states that are prepared to agree, however reluctantly, with the US belief that Iran needs to be punished.’ Turkey and Brazil are members of the UN in good standing – and on various counts (democracy etc), they have a lot more legitimacy than e.g. Russia and China. On the other, Gates’ view (entirely apart from its rather dishonest failure to acknowledge that US support for Israel may have done a wee little bit to alienate Turkey) suggests that membership of the European Union isn’t very much more than a generic recognition of Turkey as part of the ‘west’ (whatever the ‘west is construed to be). I’m very strongly in favor of Turkey becoming a member of the EU – but like everyone who has looked at this at all closely, I recognize that this would involve big changes to both Turkey and the EU, and that the EU is not a standard international organization. So on the one hand the US sees the international community as nothing more or less than the states which are prepared to go along with its priorities, and on the other hand, when the US encounters _actual_ communities in the international sphere, it thinks that they should hand out membership of this community without any debate because it would serve the US’s geostrategic interests. As I say, weird.

Update: see also “Charlemagne”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/06/turkey_and_eu.

There are two national elections in the Low Countries this week — today in the Netherlands and Sunday in Belgium. The Belgian elections are actually hugely important for the future (or absense of such a future) of the country, since there hasn’t been any real functioning government in the last three years, and the Flemish voters are probably going to vote en masse for NVA, the flemish democratic nationalist party. More on this on Sunday.
In the meantime the Dutch voters had their chance to vote for a new government today, and “the first prognosis”:http://www.nrc.nl/binnenland/verkiezingen2010/article2560933.ece/Exitpoll_PvdA_en_VVD_even_groot, based on exit poll results, is that the VVD (mainstream ‘liberal’ (in the European sense) right wing party) and the PVDA (the social-democrats/labour party) would both be leading, but only with 31 out of 150 seats. The Christian-democratic party, who were the biggest in the last couple of elections, would fall back to 21 seats. PVV, the right wing anti-immigrant party of Geert Wilders would have 22 seats, and other parties 16 (populist socialist party), 11 (Greens), 10 (Left-Liberals), and 7 seats for the orthodox Christian parties. So this is extremely scattered. All this needs to be taken with a serious pinch of salt of course – it’s merely exit polls, but nevertheless still interesting, since it shows how difficult it will be to form a coalition. It’s not unlikely that a four-party coalition will be needed.
For more background information, read “this post”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2010/06/dutch_elections.html by Erik Voeten. The comments section is open for anything related to the Dutch elections, including predictions on what kind of coalition would be plausible, and actual results as they become available. I’ll add my bit as long as I am awake.

In my inbox from the “Cato Institute”:http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=7235 this morning.

_More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws_
(University of Chicago Press, 2010)

BOOK FORUM
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Noon (Luncheon to Follow)

Featuring the author John R. Lott, Jr.; with comments from Paul Helmke, President, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence; and Jeff Snyder, Attorney and Author, Nation of Cowards: Essays on the Ethics of Gun Control (Accurate Press, 2001). Moderated by Tim Lynch, Director, Project on Criminal Justice, Cato Institute.

On its initial publication in 1998, John R. Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime drew both lavish praise and heated criticism. More than a decade later, it continues to play a key role in ongoing arguments over gun-control laws. Relying on a comprehensive data analysis of crime statistics and right-to-carry laws, the book challenges common perceptions about the relationship of guns, crime, and violence. Now in this third edition, Lott draws on an additional 10 years of data — including provocative analysis of the effects of gun bans in Chicago and Washington, DC — that he claims lends even more support to his central contention that more guns mean less crime. Join us for a wide-ranging discussion of guns, self-defense, and public safety.

Why yes indeed. You could say that _More Guns, Less Crime_ “drew”:http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=john_donohue “heated”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/322833?journalCode=jpe “criticism”:http://www.jstor.org/stable/3216880. But then, you might prefer to ask why John Lott became a public laughing stock before you got into detailed back-and-forths about the econometrics. “Mysteriously”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/lott.php “disappearing”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/01/23/a-lott-of-old-rosh/ “surveys”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2078084/. The wonderful “Mary Rosh”:http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/01/the-mystery-of-mary-rosh, a former ‘student’ of John Lott’s who went after Lott’s critics on the Internet, and gushed about how “Lott was the best professor that I ever had….Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material,” before she was revealed as a sockpuppet for John R. Lott himself. And finally, the famous “lawsuit against Steven Levitt”:http://chronicle.com/article/Dueling-Economists-Reach/6720/.

The people at Cato can hardly be unaware of this peculiar history. After all, one of their own research fellows, “Julian Sanchez”:http://www.cato.org/people/julian-sanchez, did as much as anyone to uncover Dr. Lott’s various misdeeds. But they’ve chosen nonetheless to associate themselves with the notorious Dr. Lott, and to promote his work. If Michael Bellesiles was still working on gun issues, and the Center for American Progress was holding events to promote his work, it would be a problem. But Bellesiles’ hackwork is still treated as “toxic”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee290 by the left. Cato is an odd mix of genuinely smart and honest people (e.g. Sanchez, Brink Lindsey) and organized hackery. It’s not doing its reputation any favors by hosting this event.

Its a long time since the first installment, I know. At least I’m not embarrassed by having to post recommend another David Cohen book straightaway — that can wait till the third installment.

This recommendation is Tony Wagner’s book The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need–and What We Can Do About It The reason I read Wagner’s book has nothing to do with what I found so valuable about it. I was preparing a talk for teachers at a local high school on educational equity, and I knew that one of the teachers was obsessed with the “achievement gap” between American and foreign students, so wanted to learn more about it. And, indeed, Wagner is very clear about the kinds of things that our schools (and colleges) could be doing better for even our most advantaged students — in particular failing to create opportunities for higher order cognition, and structuring their learning to produce the traits and skills that will serve them well in a global economy. He includes a nice, and in my experience quite accurate, critique of the AP History exams (I don’t think my colleagues in English all agree with me, but AP English seems much better at eliciting the kind of curriculum in which students learn things that are valuable).

What grabbed me was none of that, but his description of the Change Leadership Group that he runs at Harvard.

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Laura McKenna has an interesting claim and “data point”:http://11d.typepad.com/files/blog-evolution—mckenna.pdf (PDF).

bq. However, the move from independent bloggers to paid staff members of important newspapers and interest groups had an impact on the old system of blogging. Perhaps because these newly professional bloggers felt pressured to distance themselves from their amateur roots, they stopped linking to independent bloggers. They were more likely to link to academic studies, foundation reports, newspaper articles, or live-blogged events.

bq. Matthew Yglesias is one of the superstar bloggers who went pro. … His new professional status has had an impact on his linkage patterns. In the last week of September of 2004, Yglesias wrote 30 posts with 31 hyperlinks on his independent blog. Fifteen of those links were to independent blogs, and the remaining sixteen links were to newspapers, websites, journals, or think tank studies. In the last week of September of 2009, he wrote 66 posts with 131 hyperlinks for his blog at the Center for American Progress. Only seven of 131 hyperlinks were to independent bloggers. The remaining 122 links primarily pointed readers to everything else, but primarily traditional newspapers and journals. Yglesias is writing a lot more, but referring to independent bloggers a lot less.

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Price Fishback’s paper suggesting that the US welfare state is bigger than Sweden’s and Denmark’s got a “lot”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/05/social-welfare-expenditures-in-the-united-states-and-the-nordic-countries.html “of”:http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/56094/wilkinson-fishback-u-s-and-scandinavia/reihan-salam “attention”:http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2010/05/25/americas-nordic-sized-welfare-state/ a few weeks back on the right side of the blogosphere. Since I outsource most of my thinking on statistical comparisons of the welfare state to Lane Kenworthy, I’ve been waiting for him to assess the argument. He “finally has”:http://lanekenworthy.net/2010/06/07/social-spending-and-poverty/.

bq. This looks like good news for the poor in the United States. Is it? Unfortunately, no. These adjustments change the story with respect to the aggregate quantity of resources spent on social protection in the three countries, but they have limited bearing on redistribution and on the living standards of the poor. … Begin with tax breaks. … . In the United States these disproportionately go to the affluent and the middle class. … Public transfer programs in Denmark and Sweden tend to be “universal” in design … To make them more affordable, the government claws back some of the benefit by taxing it as though it were regular income. All countries do this, including the United States, but the Nordic countries do it more extensively. So how well-off are the poor in the United States, with its “hidden welfare state,” compared to social-democratic Denmark and Sweden? One measure is average posttransfer-posttax (“disposable”) income among households in the bottom decile of the income distribution. Here are my calculations using the best available comparative data, from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). (The numbers are adjusted for household size. They refer to a household with a single adult. For a family of four, multiply by two.)

bq. Government services — medical care, child care, housing, transportation, and so on — reduce material hardship directly. They also free up income to be spent on other needs. The comparative data, though by no means perfect, are consistent with the hypothesis that public services help the poor more in the Nordic countries than in the United States.

bq. Helping the poor is not, of course, the only thing we want from social spending. But it surely is one thing.

Alan Dershowitz never disappoints, does he?

bq. It is a close question whether “civilians” who agree to participate in the breaking of a military blockade have become combatants. They are certainly something different from pure innocents, and perhaps they are also somewhat different from pure armed combatants.

I like that “perhaps”, as if it might turn out, after further legal cogitation by the professor, that torpedoing or bombing the convoy would be a legitimate act.

(Following on John’s installments, part <a href=https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/03/the-oregon-petition-a-case-study-in-agnotology/> one</a>, part <a href=https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/05/agnotology-followup/>two</a>, and part <a href=https://crookedtimber.org/2010/05/08/ignorance-is-strength/>three</a>.)

I’m not sure how I missed this — I think I was lost in the archives at the time.  But last month, right around the time everyone on CT was discussing <a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotology>agnotology</a>, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, came out “cautiously” in favor of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s demand that the University of Virginia turn over (as the <i>Washington Post</i> <a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/03/AR2010050304139.html>put it</a>) “all data and materials presented by former professor Michael Mann when he applied for five research grants from the university.” (That includes “all correspondence or e-mails between Mann and 39 other scientists since 1999” until Mann left Virginia for Penn State in 2005.) Wood <a href=http://www.nas.org/polArticles.cfm?Doc_Id=1315>writes</a>, citing renowned scientist and powerful logic machine operator John Hinderaker:

<blockquote>John Hinderaker’s point is well taken. No one has the right to take public funds just to make stuff up and pass it along as science. And “academic freedom” could well suffer a greater crisis of legitimacy from that kind of abuse than from the interference of meddling politicians.</blockquote>

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Perhaps, despite the sample of one and the obvious irrelevance of the opening anecdote (didn’t people miss important letters amid the junk mail back in the old days?), there is something to this NYT story about how the Internet is killing our attention span. But I can’t help imagining some grouchy old-timer saying something like “Damn cave paintings. In my day, we told stories about the sacred mammoth hunt, and you really had to use your imagination. Kids these days just want to stare at a wall all night. No wonder they can’t throw a spear straight”.

Andrew McCarthy’s book is apparently selling well! We’ll get to that.

But first: a couple weeks ago Jonah Goldberg did one of those diavlog thingies with David Frum. The occasion was Frum making accusations of ‘epistemic closure’ and Goldberg protesting that it’s all nonsense. The Jim Manzi/Mark Levin thing. The section we will be concerned with is this one. Only 9 minutes long, so you can watch it yourself. I’ve transcribed some highlights. (If anyone listens and notices I’ve mistranscribed or misleadingly paraphrased, please say so in comments.) [click to continue…]

A couple of years ago, I was in Rome for work. I never had the chica-boom, so to speak, to put in the following this taxi receipt for reimbursement.
Gotta love the patriarchy…

… so here’s something, part 2 of my ongoing boxing series, apparently.

Other fun stuff. While I await my copy of Kim Deitch’s new book, The Search for Smilin’ Ed [amazon], his dad’s first animated film was re-discovered a couple months ago: “Howdy Doody and His Magic Hat”.

And a good story to go with:

The catch to this opportunity was that all of us bright young hotshot UPA stars absolutely hated the Howdy Doody show, and felt that the puppet itself was gross—a ten on a kitsch scale of one to ten. We determined to “improve” the Howdy Doody character to the level of our hallowed UPA design standard. After all, we were already the toast of New York animation, raking in the prizes and publicity. We simply couldn’t lower ourselves to something so crude, even if the client was paying us to do just that. So we just blithely went ahead with transforming Howdy Doody in our own image.

Unfortunately, this God-like endeavor went down in flames. Kagran paid for the film, but “Buffalo Bob” Smith, Howdy Doody’s Daddy, hated what we had wrought, and ordered the negative destroyed. Our little pride and joy experiment was never shown publicly, and was never properly listed on the International Motion Picture Database. In plain language, it simply did not exist.

So far as I’m concerned, that’s the heart of liberalism: you take some red-blooded red state icon like Howdy Doody and you succumb to the unbearable temptation to ‘make it more like Europe’ – all ‘modern’, New York stiff and flat. And you emphasize that – hey, it’s just a hat. (Thus does the liberal strike at the heart of American exceptionalism.)

At any rate, I’d rather look at Howdy Doody (even without ears) than Glenn Reynolds.

Via “Jonathan Chait”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/75247/the-conservative-beauty-paradox-explained, _Right Wing News_ is “running a competition”:http://rightwingnews.com/2010/06/the-20-hottest-conservative-women-in-the-new-media-2010-edition/

bq. One of the most popular articles at RWN last year was, The 15 Hottest Conservative Women In The New Media. So, when you have a big hit, what could make more sense than doing a sequel?

It seems to me a wee bit unfair that all them healthy heterosexual Republican gals (and, for that matter, the five or six Log Cabin Republicans who have stuck it out despite all) can’t get in on the fun. So let me propose an alternative competition to find the Hottest Conservative Man In The New Media. And by one of those funny coincidences, the eight finalists for this much coveted award are the members of the “distinguished panel of judges” that _Right Wing News_ has chosen to adjudicate which of the laydeez is the smokingest.¹ Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Glenn Reynolds

Jonah Goldberg

Andrew Malcolm

Dan Gainor

‘Van Helsing’ from Moonbattery (artist’s depiction)

Alfonzo Rachel

James Joyner (who is actually a good bloke imo who really ought to have known better)

And remember! You can only pick _one._

¹ It occurs to me that ditch-hurlers might want to point out in comments that I myself am not possessed of what used to be called matinee-idol good looks. This would be a wonderful way of missing the point, reinforcing it, or both.