I think if you tried this at Paddington or King’s Cross, security and the British Transport Police would be pushing you around within 90 seconds …. A pretty cool piece of street theatre:

While I realize not everyone is as obsessed with photography as I am, many phones now have cameras and I wonder if people remember to use them for the logistics of everyday life. So this post is just a reminder that all those things you often forget (I certainly forget all sorts of details that would be helpful to remember later) can be captured easily with your pocket-sized camera.

A recurring theme when I go shopping is trying to remember the name of that wonderful cheese I purchased earlier. Good cheese can be expensive so it’s a pity to buy the type that doesn’t work out. Last week after buying some cheese that turned out to be very tasty, I decided to take a picture of its label. Yesterday when I returned to the store I started looking for it. I couldn’t find it, but then I showed the image to the person behind the counter and immediately she had an answer. Although they were out of that particular item, she pointed me to another one that, upon sampling it, reminded me sufficiently of the earlier one that I was happy to find it. The woman mentioned that she wished more people would think to take photos as it’s usually difficult to guess what they want from their descriptions.

This method can work with all sorts of details that are easy to forget: book titles and authors, wines, where you parked your car, what you ordered off of a restaurant menu, bus & train schedules, maps (yup, I’ll just take a quick snapshot of a map instead of printing it out), and lots more. For some of these (like maps) a higher resolution photo where you can zoom in is helpful, but for others a simple camera phone should work just as well.

This “bit”:http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/speaking-truth-without-power/ in the NYT made me wonder whether the writer had any clue what he was talking about.

But notwithstanding this stunning success, this week’s withdrawal by John Edwards, coming a week after the departure of Dennis Kucinich, means that both of the preferred presidential candidates of the liberal blogosphere are now out of the race.

followed by some speculations as to whether

like all outsider movements, [the blogosphere] identifies with the underdog. This year that meant support for Mr. Kucinich and Mr. Edwards in the Democratic race, and Ron Paul in the Republican contest.

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Barack Obama’s health care policy has come under a lot of blogworld attacks for not including “mandates”, i.e. fines for people who don’t buy health insurance. Here’s a typical “passage from Ezra Klein”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=02&year=2008&base_name=health_care_debate_mandates_as.

bq. A central tenet of his proposal is that ” No insurance companies will be allowed to discriminate because of a previous bout with cancer or some other pre-existing illness.” You literally cannot have that rule without some mechanism forcing everyone to buy in, as the healthy will stay out. … A mandate is not how you cover everyone, it’s how you force _insurers to cover everyone_, and discriminate against no one.

I don’t know what the force of that ‘cannot’ is supposed to be, but I know it isn’t historical impossibility. Australia for several decades did just the thing Ezra thinks that you can’t do. It had community rating of health insurance, and it didn’t have health insurance mandates. This was true of the periods 1953-1975, and again from 1981-1984. At other times it had compulsory universal basic health insurance. The system wasn’t perfect, bringing in compulsory public health insurance was a very good thing, but it wasn’t as bad as anything I’ve seen in America, and nor was it somehow an impossibility.
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Megan McArdle wants to know something:

bq. Okay, so Obama’s not the most liberal senator. But who is?

One answer can be found here, in Lewis and Poole’s Optimal Classification ranking of voting patterns the 110th Senate. Here’s a description of the method. This measure isn’t quite “liberal vs conservative” but it does tell you which senators are most alike, as based on their voting records and boiled down to a single dimension. For the Democrats, Russ Feingold, Chris Dodd and Bernie Sanders are on one side, with Tim Johnson, Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson on the other. In the 110th congress, there are 10 senators who are closer to Feingold than Obama is. (Of course, the 110th session is only half over.) In the 109th, for which there’s complete voting data, there were 20. In the 109th session only three places separated Obama and Clinton — they were ranked 21st and 25th respectively. So far in the 110th session, eight places separate them. It’s Obama who has moved.

The _New York Times_ has a story suggesting that Bill Clinton cozied up to Kazakhstan president Nursultan A. Nazarbayev in order to help out a big donor to the Clinton Foundation.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton. … the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent. … Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

… Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects … monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers …In a statement Kazakhstan would highlight in news releases, Mr. Clinton declared that he hoped it would achieve a top objective: leading the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which would confer legitimacy on Mr. Nazarbayev’s government. “I think it’s time for that to happen, it’s an important step, and I’m glad you’re willing to undertake it,” Mr. Clinton said.

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At Wikipedia, the fight against pseudoscience and Republican antiscience across a range of articles from global warming to passive smoking to Intelligent design to AIDS reappraisal,to DDT is continuous and bruising.[1]. Editors have learned to detect bogus sources of information almost immediately. One of my fellow-editors at passive smoking pointed me to an interesting letter to Science (paywalled, but I’ve quoted the important bit), shedding unintentional light on the way the disinformation machine operates. It’s from William G. Kelly of the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness the front organization founded by legendary Phillip Morris shill, Jim Tozzi (Kelly is employed by Tozzi’s lobbying outfit, Multinational Business Services

Responding to criticism of the infamous Data Quality Act (for more on this see the seminar on Chris Mooney’s Republican War on Science, in the sidebar, Kelly offers a classic non-denial denial, saying

Neither Phillip Morris (a multiproduct company) nor any other tobacco company (or nontobacco company for that matter) played a leadership role in the genesis of the DQA. While working with the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness in Washington, DC, I was personally involved with the development of the DQA, and no industry entity contributed to its formulation.

While we’re at it, can I point out that Henry II was nowhere near Canterbury Cathedral when Thomas Becket met with his unfortunate end. The whole point of having people like Tozzi and Kelly, and groups like CRE is that corporations don’t have to play a leadership role in promoting their own interests in Congress.

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There’s a long-standing urban legend about where you meet an attractive person in a bar, they buy you a drink, and the next thing you know you wake up in a bath of ice with a pain in your lower back and a note telling you to get to a hospital. One of the reasons this story is just a story is that in order to usefully extract someone’s kidney for transplant, a whole lot of stuff has to be organized beforehand, and you need to have a lot of skilled people working together against a hard time constraint — too many, really, to quietly and reliably pull something like this off.

On the other hand:

Mr. Mohammed was the last of about 500 Indians whose kidneys were removed by a team of doctors running an illegal transplant operation, supplying kidneys to rich Indians and foreigners, police officials said. A few hours after his operation last Thursday, the police raided the clinic and moved him to a government hospital. … Many of the donors were day laborers, like Mr. Mohammed, picked up from the streets with the offer of work, driven to a well-equipped private clinic, and duped or forced at gunpoint to undergo operations. Others were bicycle rickshaw drivers and impoverished farmers who were persuaded to sell their organs, which is illegal in India.

Although several kidney rings have been exposed in India in recent years, the police said the scale of this one was unprecedented. Four doctors, five nurses, 20 paramedics, three private hospitals, 10 pathology clinics and five diagnostic centers were involved, Mohinder Lal, the police officer in charge of the investigation, said. “We suspect around 400 or 500 kidney transplants were done by these doctors over the last nine years,” said Mr. Lal, the Gurgaon police commissioner.

I’d be interested to see how many suppliers were straightforwardly lied to about what they were getting into, or otherwise forced to undergo operations, and how many were offered money first (and paid afterwards). Unlike some other documented cases of organ sales, this seems less like an illegal but functioning market and more like a criminal racket founded on fraud.

Worth reading (and blogging about if I had more time):

Lane Kenworthy on “the (il)logic of the new Laffer Curve“.

“Ezra Klein”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=01&year=2008&base_name=what_edwards_meant and “Jonathan Cohn”:http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/01/30/why-john-edwards-won.aspx on John Edwards’ withdrawal from the race.

“Ricardo Hausman”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/28b464a2-cf50-11dc-854a-0000779fd2ac.html on the curious inconsistencies between the macroeconomic advice that Washington Consensus folks doled out to east Asia, Russia and Latin America, and what the same people are saying today about the so-called sub-prime crisis.

“Gideon Rachman”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f7aa8626-be00-11dc-8bc9-0000779fd2ac.html is skeptical about economic freedom will indeed produce political freedom in countries like China and Russia (I’ve been meaning to blog about this essay for a couple of weeks, but have been swamped with other commitments, and am realizing this is unlikely to change soon …).

“Eric Rauchway”:http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a8c2e4ae-387c-4e0a-b942-1d0a05b0d94d on Findlay and O’Rourke’s _Power and Plenty_ (a book that will probably be finding its way onto my IR syllabus next year).

The website Books That Make You Dumb seems designed to bring out the scolds among us. The methodology is dubious (use Facebook to determine the ten most popular books among students at various colleges and universities, then organize this data according to average SAT scores for each institution) and there is no reason to suppose the books cause stupidity, rather than serving to diagnoise a preexisting condition.

The creator of the site, Virgil Griffith, acknowledges the problems. “I’m aware correlation [does not equal] causation,” he says. “The results are awesome regardless of causality. You can stop sending me email about this distinction. Thanks.”

Gripe if you must, but diverting the chart certainly is. The Book of Mormon falls right in the middle. There is probably a Mitt Romney joke to be plucked from this, like over-ripe and low-hanging fruit. Verily I say unto you, have a look. (via Librarian.net)

There was a full moon last Wednesday, when Ischa was born. A month earlier, I was at a Christmas party in Belgium, and was warned to return home on time ‘because babies tend to be born when there’s a full moon.’ Why that would be so, no-one has yet told me. But it is a fact that last Wednesday, the delivery ward in the hospital was full, and two women had to be referred to another hospital. The nurse who served breakfast confidently told me she knew it would be busy when she came to work the night before – she had noticed that the moon was full.

I’ve also been told that children born under a full moon would somehow be special. Ischa is absolutely adorable (I know, I know, all parents suffer from this kind of prejudice); he’s been rather kind to his parents (so far!) by sleeping relatively well at night; he’s a big supporter of the nappies industry; and he makes an interesting case study for international private law scholars, since, “just as his older brother”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/21/whats-in-a-name/, he has two different official surnames thanks to the unwillingness of the Belgian state to recognise the surname that his parents have chosen for him. Yet whether any of that can be traced back to his being born under a full moon — I doubt it.

The news that over a million homes went into foreclosure in the US in 2007, affecting about 1 per cent of all households or around 3 million people, supports the view that foreclosure has taken over from bankruptcy as the primary mode of financial catastrophe.

As with bankruptcy, however, the high frequency of financial distress is partly offset by the fact that US law and standard contractual arrangements are more debtor-friendly than in other countries. Compared to those in other places (at least in Australia) US mortgage contracts have commonly favored borrowers in two important ways. First, they have been fixed rate contracts with no, or limited penalties, for early repayment. That means that borrowers can stick with their fixed rate if market rates rise, but can refinance at lower cost if market rates fall.

Second, most mortgages are non-recourse, meaning that the lender can take the house but cannot recover the debt from the borrowers income or other assets. That means that once the value of the house falls below the amount owing (equity becomes negative) the borrower can walk away from the house and the debt. As Felix Salmon notes, the difficulty of pursuing deficiency payments means that most loans are non-recourse in practice even if the contract says otherwise

In the jargon of financial assets, the standard contract gives borrowers both a put option on the house (the ability to walk away) and a call option on the debt (the ability to pay early). Both of these make the contract more valuable to borrowers and less valuable to lenders. There’s quite a good discussion of all this from Tanta at Calculated Risk, though the author makes heavy weather of the put option and seems to me to be unreasonably exercised about the fact that households are now treating their debts to banks with the same calculating attitude that corporations have long shown to their workers and other creditors, paying them if it is profitable to do so and defaulting otherwise.
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In November, we’ll be sending out our most liberal, least trustworthy candidate to take on Hillary Clinton—perhaps not more liberal than Barack Obama, but certainly far less trustworthy. And the worst part for the Right is that McCain will have won the nomination while ignoring, insulting and, as of this weekend, shamelessly lying about conservatives and conservatism.

(Over at the Corner.)

In this election the right hand has no clue what either the right or left hands are doing. Apparently. Nor can I really believe it’s some sort of deep game – Operation Briar Patch.

This can’t last. Quite possibly, it can’t last another week. If McCain wraps it up, what will Republican wisdom be? (Obviously the bumperstickers won’t read ‘McCain: probably less liberal than Obama’.) There are basically three options: 1) McCain as maverick liberal goes down the memory hole. Don’t look back. We have always been at peace with McCainia. 2) McCain as new direction. So far, there is zero evidence of this sort of framing. But there is obvious desire to get the Republican party back on track, after Bush. So, if McCain is it, there is an advantage to brandishing his former maverick status as evidence that real change has been achieved. 3) It was personal, not political. It will be discovered that McCain’s maverick status was just a function of his personal rivalry with Bush. We’re done with Bush, so we’re over that.

It is very hard for me to imagine a world in which Republicans reliably say any of 1)-3) about the formerly anathema McCain. But they can’t call him a liberal, or run him as an ‘until 2012’ placeholder. What, then? What will be the reason why McCain was obviously always the best man for the job?

A follow-up on John’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/25/we-have-seen-the-enemy-and-it-isnt-us/ below. I don’t want to get into the back-and-forth about whether or not the conservative movement is hopelessly compromised, but I do want to point to some empirical evidence on the kinds of conversations and arguments that exist between left and right wing blogs.¹ Dan Drezner and I co-edited a “special issue”:http://www.springerlink.com/content/l7p064672q84/?p=516aa6a2b8ee43ed8f1dde6e7f703b43&p_o=4 of _Public Choice_ on blogs, politics and power which came out this month – unfortunately, it is behind a stiff paywall (as best as I can discern, Springer Verlag is not an enormous fan of the access-to-knowledge movement). Among its contents are a piece by Sunstein (which provides a slightly more blog-specific version of the argument that John disputes), and an article by Eszter and two of her grad students on the specific ways that left- and right-wing bloggers talk to each other.

Eszter and her colleagues work from a sample of 40 well-known political blogs, and examine how these blogs did or didn’t link to each other over three week-long periods. Like previous studies, they find that the majority of links are between blogs sharing the same ideological position. However, over the three weeks examined, only five of the conservative blogs never link to a liberal blog, and only three of the liberal blogs never link to a conservative one. In general, they find that there is evidence that blogs are somewhat insular (they are far more inclined to link to other blogs like them than to blogs with different ideological positions), but far from being insulated (there still is a fair amount of left-right conversation going on). In general they find “no support for the claim that IT will lead to increasingly fragmented discourse online.”

More interesting still, Eszter and co. do some basic content analysis on the substance of links between left and right wing blogs. They distinguish between (1) ‘straw man arguments’ (their term for yer basic full on attack intended less to persuade than to harangue), (2) disagreements on substance (which offer critiques or refutations of the other blog’s argument), (3) neutral or non-political links (not politically argumentative at all; the example given is an Orin Kerr link to a Talkleft post about a parrot called Marshmallow), (4) redirects or posts which suggest that someone read another blogger on topic _x_ without attempts to agree or disagree with the other blogger, and (5) agreements on political substance. Unsurprisingly, they find that the first category includes a lot of links back and forth – in total, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, it accounts for just under half of left-right and right-left links combined. But that also means that slightly more than half of cross-linking blogposts don’t involve scorched earth attacks, but real back-and-forths, and sometimes actual debate. This debate can itself be pretty excoriating to be sure, but it does have Real Arguments and all, something which doesn’t fit well with the standard media account of the blogosphere as a brutish ideological mudwrestling match.

This doesn’t mean that Cass is necessarily wrong; this is a glass half-empty glass half-full debate. Cass can argue that nearly half of all blogposts are exercises in simple pointscoring, people like myself who are more inclined to point to the democratic benefits of the blogosphere can argue back that there is obviously real debate happening at the same time. Really, what is needed to move the debate forward is a better understanding of how the effects of blogs compare with those of other forms of political communication. Here, my understanding is that John is largely correct on one important point. The political science literature strongly suggests that most people don’t have much contact in their daily life with strongly differing political views, and blogs may be the first point of vantage for them on starkly different political views. Two GWU colleagues, Eric Lawrence and John Sides, and myself, are currently writing an article which attempts a first cut at the broader set of issues on the basis of data about blog readers, but you’ll have to wait a little while to see what we have to say on this …

¹ If I did, I’d get into some of the differences between the linking patterns of left and right wing blogs, which on an initial glance at the findings of Hargittai et al. go against some common lefty perceptions, but that’s a topic for a different post.