Australian news rarely makes it out of the sporting pages internationally (and we’re not looking too good there just now) so it’s pretty exciting for us to make into New York Times coverage of the presidential election campaign. The occasion is a statement by our prime minister, John Howard, to the effect that a vote for the Democrats, and in particular for Barack Obama, would be a vote for Al Qaeda*.

This is not the first time an Australian political leader has commented on the choices available to US electors. A few years ago, then Opposition leader Mark Latham described Bush as ‘incompetent and dangerous’, but this accurate observation did not seem to have much effect in the 2004 US election campaign and probably contributed to Latham’s defeat in the Australian election the same year.

Latham was well known as a loose cannon, and this kind of remark was in character, but Howard has generally been seen as the embodiment of cautious solidity. As far as US politics go, he’s generally been seen as an advocate of unconditional support for US policy, regardless of the political colour of the Administration. He’s been very happy to cash in on his close relationship with Bush, but he was quite keen enough for photo-ops with Clinton. So what possessed him to take a high-risk, low return line like this

[click to continue…]

Hurray for BBC! The Beeb has lovingly created a downloadable version of Newsnight reports, interviews and discussions that can be watched for free. Reports are indexed by the following topics; domestic, world, business and economics, culture and entertainment, politics, and science and technology. The list of interviews is pretty mouth-watering, at least for someone like me who doesn’t own a television. And the discussions cover recent issues such as the anniversary of the Act of Union with Scotland, to a panel talking about the interview of Diana, Princess of Wales’ by Martin Bashir back in 1996. (Watching clips of that interview now, it’s hard to feel the sympathy I once did towards the manipulative gurnings of the Queen of Hearts.) It’s all Paxman, all the time. Heaven.

While I’m at it, there are endless downloadable goodies from BBC, including of course The Today Programme, which is celebrating John Humphreys’ 20 years by presenting a set of clips. This year’s Reith Lecturer is Jeffrey Sachs.

Although it’s a far from perfect institution, the BBC seems to take its public service obligations seriously. It’s really embraced downloading of its non externally copyrighted material. I would love to see the material fully searchable, rather than simply indexed. And it’s about time the BBC started putting its back catalogue of documentaries and dramas online. Surely, back in the days before expensive co-productions with HBO, the rights issues should have been trivial? If the BBC wants to win the argument for an increase in the licence fee next time around, opening up its archives would strengthen the case.

(Oh, and to any wing nuts who wish to comment along the lines of ‘hnnh, bbc, root of all evil’; go away and read a book.)

As of January 1st, 2007, I’ve been keeping track of all the books I read/start. This is mostly because by the time I get to the end of the year and want to make a satisfying round-up of what I’ve read, what I’d recommend or trash, I find I can’t remember more than half a dozen of them. Two years out of three, I’m between homes and most of my books are in storage again, so I can’t run a finger along the shelf to prompt a memory of the year’s reading. Also, in a spirit of self-improvement I started lots of non-fiction books and know myself well enough to realise that a reporting system may be the only thing that makes me finish them. And finally, because my partial training in history and the social sciences gives me faith that data collected even for subjective purposes can be revealing of unexpected things. We shall see. [click to continue…]

Here’s a bit from a “New Yorker piece”:http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070219fa_fact_mayer on Joel Surnow, creator of the TV series _24_.

bq. Surnow’s rightward turn was encouraged by one of his best friends, Cyrus Nowrasteh, a hard-core conservative who, in 2006, wrote and produced “The Path to 9/11,” a controversial ABC miniseries that presented President Clinton as having largely ignored the threat posed by Al Qaeda. … Nowrasteh, the son of a deposed adviser to the Shah of Iran, grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where, like Surnow, he was alienated by the radicalism around him. … Nowrasteh said that he and Surnow regard “24” as a kind of wish fulfillment for America. “Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.

It would be nice to have a secret government to take care of things. That’s certainly what the Shah of Iran thought. I remember reading a report of an interview from the late 1970s with the Shah. He was asked what he thought of the methods SAVAK used to obtain confessions. “They are getting better every day,” he replied.

I’ll mimic Chris’s announcement by mentioning that my old, erratic, permalink-less eyesore of a “blog” (if that was even the word for it) is dead, now that Arts Journal has offered to host something a bit more normally bloggy. It’s called Quick Study, and even has RSS feeds. It feels like I’m finally on the cutting edge of several years ago.

This is a note to former readers of my blog “Junius”, which I abandoned when we set up Crooked Timber back in 2003. Because of issues with the transition to the “new” (googlified) Blogger, I’ve deleted the site. I did save the archives first, though, and I may make these available from an new location if there’s any demand (and if I get round to it).

From the acknowledgements page of Christopher Howard’s _The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=christopher%20howard%20hidden%20welfare%20state&PID=29956 has cheap hardbacks).

No one in his right mind would choose to study and write about tax expenditures (better known as tax loopholes) knowing in advance that it entailed a ten year commitment. Investigating the ins and outs of the byzantine U.S. tax code is simply not its own reward, which is why many people pay lawyers and accountants good money to do it for them. If someone were going to study tax expenditures for longer than a day or two, he or she would need to come upon the topic by accident. Over time, that someone might develop a curious affection for tax expenditures, much as one does for a stray dog or cat that keeps hanging around the house. Even then, one would have to remind oneself constantly that studying tax expenditures was not the ultimate goal, but a means of saying something interesting about a larger issue, like U.S. social policy. At least that has been my experience.

I just took a cab to work, trying in vain to get to an interesting talk before it started, and got stuck in traffic. While stranded in a traffic jam somewhere around Connecticut and L I was somewhat bemused to see a whopping big advertisement on the back of the bus in front of me for The Hill‘s Pundit Blog. I tried to get a photo with my phone, but screwed it up. It made me feel pretty weird; it’s a very different blogosphere to the one that I started off in (I suspect the disconnect for the real old-timers is even bigger).

My archiving post got good results. If you want to cite a webpage (in an academic paper, say) and you want to do your best to ensure that the URL you provide will live – even if the page you link goes away – best practices would seem to be: submit the page to WebCite. It’s easy! I tried it. Also, if the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive knows about your page, that’s probably good enough as well. It’s interesting: neither of these archives really has extensive search capabilities. You wouldn’t use them to find something. But stuff is kept there. By contrast, google is for finding, but not for keeping.

Also, it turns out the Internet Archive has a great vintage trailer for one of my all time favorite films: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T!

“Henry”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/07/ip-law-and-bird-flu/ remarks that “my mental model of Tyler [Cowen] often sit[s] on my shoulder while I blog, making polite and well reasoned libertarian criticisms of my arguments.” This follows on from Tyler’s “own advice”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/09/the_phantom_me.html to his grad students:

bq. You have a model of me, a pretty good one, and you know what I will object to and what will delight me. The Phantom Tyler Cowen objects, in your head, before the real Tyler Cowen has much of a chance. That is why the real Tyler Cowen is sometimes so silent.

_My_ mental model of Tyler Cowen says, “This sounds like a rationalization to me.” Meanwhile, “Brad DeLong asks”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/is_henry_farrel.html,

bq. Is Henry Farrell especially sane or especially insane?

for having a model of Tyler sitting on his shoulder making comments. My mental model of Brad DeLong says to my mental model of Tyler Cowen, “Why oh why are we ruled by this idiot?” My mental model of Eugene Volokh says, “This is much worth reading.” But my mental model of Orin Kerr replies, “My sense is that this is much ado about nothing.” My mental model of Bitch, Ph.D begins to object that she is not a brain on a stick before realizing that, being a mental model, in fact she is. Uniquely, my mental model of Dan Drezner has his own mental model of himself, which he refers to as “Ed.” Finally, my model of Cosma Shalizi has the unusual property of being smarter than I am. This ought to be impossible, but of course _I_ can’t understand its explanation of how this could be the case.

When I saw this “story”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/bd900a94-b55d-11db-a5a5-0000779e2340.html yesterday in the _FT_, my first reaction was to wonder what Tyler Cowen would think of it (not only does my mental model of Tyler often sit on my shoulder while I blog, making polite and well reasoned libertarian criticisms of my arguments, but the man has a direct interest in the topic at hand).

Indonesia, the country worst hit by the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, has stopped sharing human genetic samples of the highly pathogenic illness with foreign laboratories, raising fears it could slow international efforts to prepare for a pandemic. … Officials say Indonesia stopped providing samples internationally last month, hindering efforts to confirm whether the virus killing its citizens is H5N1 and limiting production of vaccines to help prevent its spread. … “all will be revealed” on Wednesday, when Indonesian officials are due to announce they are collaborating with Baxter International, the world’s biggest maker of blood-disease products, on a vaccine.

The answer is that Tyler “doesn’t like it much”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/02/markets_in_ever_1.html. More generally, I think this is a pretty tough case for people (among whom I don’t count Tyler) who make overly strong claims about the benefits of intellectual property law for the spread of information, the production of drugs and the protection of human well being. At the least, it suggests that there are important instances where these arguments don’t work very well. It also presents some difficulties for those on the left who argue on behalf of giving intellectual property over drugs produced, say, from indigenous plants, to governments in the developing world; while there are still good equity arguments for doing this, there’s no necessary reason to think that these governments will use these rights more wisely or selflessly than big pharma (they’re more likely to be subject to popular pressure, but will often have material incentives that point the wrong way).

In the Netherlands, children between the ages of 2 and 4 (which is the age at which compulsory schooling starts) and who are not attending nurseries, can spend two mornings a week together in so-called ‘playgroups’. These playgroups are run by the municipalities. There is also a ‘pre-playgroup’ for kids between 18 months and two years, which only lasts one hour and where they are accompanied by one of the parents (or another adult). This morning a neighbour asked me whether I wouldn’t be interested in enrolling my son for such a pre-playgroup. But, she added, it’s only for mothers, fathers are not allowed. Apparently the justification is that otherwise mothers from certain ethnic minorities, where gender segregation is an important issue, would not attend with their children.

What should we think about such policies? In principle, I would strongly condemn such policies, since they are plainly discriminating fathers, grandfathers, and male babysitters. In practice, I can appreciate the underlying goal of offering mothers from social groups where opposite-sex parental activities are entirely out of the question more options to socialise, and also the social and developmental benefits for their children; but it does restrict the options of more progressive heterosexual couples to equally shared parenthood, let alone the options of gay fathers and single fathers. Since the kids of these ethnic minorities tend to be among the worst-off in society and we can safely assume that they are benefiting from joining a playgroup, I’m trying to look at this from its positive side – but I really have difficulties convincing myself that this is, all things considered, a wise policy.

I’ve been following the French presidential elections at second hand; as “Philip Stevens”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/dc241e40-b261-11db-a79f-0000779e2340.html says in the _FT_, they seem to herald some interesting political changes, no matter who wins.

As one shrewd observer puts it, Mr Sarkozy is a social outsider but a political insider. Ms Royal is a social insider who has reinvented herself as a political outsider. No matter. Neither pays homage to the ancien régime. Talk to those who grace Paris’s political salons and the first thing they will say is that Mr Sarkozy is not an énarque – a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration. The second, that he is not an intellectual. The third – by now the scorn crackles in the air – that, until recently, he has not even sought the counsel of intellectuals. … Ms Royal similarly seems an unlikely king. … The daughter of an army officer, she is an énarque. It was as a student at ENA that she met her partner, François Hollande, the Socialist party leader. Something, though, went awry. To snatch the candidacy, she scorned the party chiefs. She made herself the choice instead of public opinion – a brutal affront to the authority of the old guard as well as to the presidential ambitions of her partner.

Sarkozy in particular is fascinating. While journalists usually compare him with Margaret Thatcher, he seems to me to to have a lot more in common with Richard Nixon (I’ve recently read a draft of Rick Perlstein’s _Nixonland_, so this analogy is on my mind). Sarkozy isn’t a true believer; what marks him is less his commitment to a cause than his extraordinary ideological suppleness. He’s been quite happy to abandon his pro-US stance, and to moderate his opinions on free markets to boost his chances of winning (Nixon went through similar ideological contortions on his way to power). But where the Nixon comparison really seems apt is in the source of his appeal and the psychological factors driving him. The first is a combination of law-and-order, barely concealed appeals to racism, and capitalization on widespread and not unjustified resentment of the dominance of political elites. His anti-intellectualism isn’t a bug; it’s part of what makes him attractive to many voters. The second is that like Nixon, he wasn’t a member of aforementioned elite, nor did he have a happy upbringing, and both continue to rankle. According to an interview quoted in a 2002 _Le Monde_ article (“behind a paywall”:http://www.lemonde.fr/cgi-bin/ACHATS/acheter.cgi?offre=ARCHIVES&type_item=ART_ARCH_30J&objet_id=775337) Sarkozy claims that “what made me is the sum of my childhood humiliations.” As best as I’m aware, Sarkozy, despite his fine gift for political opportunism, hasn’t done anything that begins to resemble Nixon’s assemblage of dirty tricks – insofar as I understand the Clearstream affair (which isn’t very far), he’s more sinned against than sinning. So the analogy isn’t perfect. Nonetheless, he surely deserves to someday have his very own Garry Wills.

I have an archiving question. Suppose I wanted to save a link to a page and do my best to ensure that it stays good – for years and years, in principle, even if the page goes away. As long as google shall reign. The obvious answer: just link to a googlecache URL. One thing I’m not clear about is google’s policy about these page images. Suppose I record a page as it appeared, say, today. That is: the google page has a little ‘as retrieved on 06 Feb 2007 04:14:38 GMT’ or whatever. Does google only take a new snapshot if something changes on the page (does it have some way of knowing that?) so that, so long as the page isn’t changed, the snapshot stays good forever? Suppose I link to a page and, in two years, the page is modified and google has in the meantime taken any number of fresh cache images. There’s no expiry date on old caches, right? (I’m sure about this. But I want to be really sure. Has google made any explicit commitments, archiving-wise? I’m thinking about the long haul here.) Also, googlecache URL’s are a bit unwieldy. Tinyurl promises to offer more convenient handles that ‘never expire’. But what if tinyurl dies? Would it be bad archiving policy to tiny-fy a googlecache link, for convenience (so someone could type it in, more easily than those long monsters?) What would you say are best practices, short of doing the old fashioned thing and hitting ‘print’ and locking the results in a fireproof safe?