I have to agree with Scott Lemieux about the validity of self-reported incomes in responses to an online questionnaire. Is the “mean average” [sic] income of LGF readers actually over $105,000? Do Roger Simon readers really pull down a (mean, natch) average of $116,000? Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that user death2dhimmicrats5 claimed to be making…one BILLION dollars a year. Click through to the linked Dennis the Peasant post for more hilarity. A bewildered commenter there wonders:

In a prior career, my title was “Media Buyer”. If this is accurate it’s highly pathetic. With all their money, couldn’t PJM come up with $15k to put together a bitchin’ printed media kit? Media buyers like to have something tangible in their hands. And don’t they have a WebEX account? What the heck is going on?

I feel horrible for laughing at this because I have been a fan of LGF and Glenn and Roger for 3+ years. These guys are savvy at so many things, but this is a fiasco. How can this happen?

How, indeed? And if the Pajamas Media readers love The Blog so much, why don’t they marry it? Oh, wait, looks like they’re working on it.

Please welcome Blue Force, a blog dedicated to progressive discussions of military and national security issues, with a special interest in electing military veterans.

This ought to hotten up the blood:

Do you have a question you’d like to ask Tim Russert, Peggy Noonan, or Fred Barnes?

I’ll be in a conference with all three next week. I’m not sure how much face time I’ll have with any of them, but there is a good chance I’ll be able to ask at least one question each.

So: what is the question you’d most like to ask each of those folks?

I’m looking for insightful questions that might set them back on their heels. They’ve thought of all the obvious ones and have their formulaic answers well rehearsed.

Let’s shake them up!

Comment over there, not here.

Oh dear oh dear. The last person who ought to be educating the world on the Internationale is Jane Galt who gives “a rather literal translation of the French words over at Asymmetrical Information”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005684.html . The first time I sang the Internationale was on Mayday 1978 in Paris when I joined the UNEF contingent on the traditional march. The last time I heard it was when a colleague’s mobile phone rang. She told me, embarrassed, that she’d spent hours programming the tune in and that it had then gone off during a meeting with top university administrators, none of whom would have recognized it but for a BBC documentary about the end of the Soviet Union on the box the night before.

One important thing to get across to an Anglophone audience is that the British and American words are different (what do Australians and Canadians sing, btw?). “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationale has a reasonably accurate version of the British words but starts:

bq. Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.

The version I learnt had “starvelings” for “workers”, “criminals” for “prisoners” (though I remember that being controversial) and, later in the verse, “conditions” for “tradition”.

Having picked up the the anthem by listening to my comrades, I also misunderstood the next two lines for my first year or so of singing it in English. These are are:

bq. For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!

Yes, you’ve guessed it … I imagined this was a reference to the supersession of Kantianism by the Hegelian dialectic. “… at last ends the age of Kant!” Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Last post from The Army and Vietnam by Andrew F. Krepinevich. This section describes both the Iraqification and the “oil spot” strategy, in which local forces take over security duty, and pacificed areas spread out and undercut the ability of the insurgents to draw strength from the local population. Eventually, this forces the insurgents back toward the borders and back into low-level harassment. It sounds as good as anything I could come up with. However, a strategy that heavily employs many small, light infantry units is inevitably in conflict with the goal of force protection, as these small units are vulnerable to IEDs and hit and run attacks.

It’s also interesting to note how the analogy with the Vietnam war breaks down with regards to Iraq. Iraqification is probably more difficult than Vietnamization because of the threat of ethnic civil war, and I don’t think that it’s accurate to talk about “guerilla bands that lie in wait just outside the populated areas” in Iraq. But, as always, I might be wrong.

(Comments on the last excerpt were especially good.)

[click to continue…]

CT readers who aren’t already following the Moretti discussion on the Valve, should head over to read Cosma Shalizi’s “essay”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/graphs_trees_materialism_fishing/ on Moretti’s approach to the analysis of literature. It’s one of the best pieces of scholar blogging that I’ve ever seen, if it’s not in fact _the_ best such piece.

In every sense of the term.

The NYT runs an Op-ed Piece by John Lott, reporting statistical work he claims to have undertaken.

(Only too believable section). Lott’s results support current Republican talking points.

(Via Tim Lambert and Kevin Drum)

Still more from The Army and Vietnam by Andrew F. Krepinevich. What strikes me in this passage- and I know this is done to death outside of the Pajamasphere- is the incompatability of counterinsurgency strategy with the Rumsfeldian goal of minimizing troop numbers. The coalition in Iraq had a striking advantage, which Americans in Vietnam did not: they were replacing an unpopular dictator with a much more inspiring fledgling democracy. Maybe we could have short-circuited the escalation of violent ethnic conflict if we had paid sufficient attention on Iraqi security. I don’t know.

(As always, Arms and Influence has more.)

(UPDATE: This sort of corruption, of course, is another big part of the story.)

[click to continue…]

Via Robin Vargese at the excellent “3 Quarks Daily”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/01/donate_to_the_n.html, the Graduate Students Organizing Committee at NYU have set up a “hardship fund”:http://www.2110uaw.org/gsoc/donate.htm , which will help defray “indispensable expenses such as health care, utilities, and rent for those who have lost their pay.” Need I say that this is an important cause, not only for the grad students at NYU, but at other universities too?

It’s been a while since we’ve had a survey around here. This one is on what sites and services you know about and use. It should take no more than 2.5 minutes (two and a half, NOT 25!). I’ll report back with results and why I am interested in this in a few days.

Take the survey. Thanks!

UPDATE 1/31/06: The survey is now closed. Thanks to those who participated. I will be posting results soon.

Belle’s post on the fact that the US appears unlikely ever to go metric prompted me to try and put together some thoughts I’ve had for a long time.

When I lived in the US around 1990, I was struck by all sorts of minor inefficiencies that seemed to be sanctified by tradition. In addition to its unique system of weights and measures (similar to, but confusingly different from, the Imperial system I had grown up with), there was the currency, with no coin of any substantial value, thanks to inflation (this particular inefficiency was subsequently enshrined in the Save the Greenback Act), and the practice of quoting prices net of sales tax, so you always had to pay more than the marked price. And then there was a huge, but ill-defined, range of activities where tips were expected, apparently regardless of the quality of service. In all of these cases, Americans seemed much more willing to put up with day-to-day inefficiency in the name of tradition than Australians would be, and much more resistant to government action that would sweep such inefficiencies away in the name of reform.

Bigger issues like creationism can be fitted into this picture. As far as I can see, very few supporters of creationism (or intelligent design or what have you) have any desire to see it taught in university biology departments [there are a handful of exceptions, like Bob Jones, that are resolutely stuck in the pre-Civil War era on most things] or applied by oil geologists. Their big objection is seeing evolution stated as fact in museum displays or taught in high schools. Broadly speaking the position seems to be like that with the metric system – scientists are welcome to be evolutionists as long as they don’t try and ram it down the throats of our kids. Obviously, this is costly; as with metric and traditional measures, the two systems are bound to clash from time to time.

Then there’s the inefficiency that seems to be built in to the US system of government. When I lived there, I was subject to four different levels of government (town, county, state and federal) with multiple overlapping responsibilities, and procedures that seem designed to achieve maximal inconvenience for citizens (not to mention resident aliens!).

All of this of course, was set against the background of a general level of technology in advance of very other country in the world, and an economic system in which the pursuit of efficiency wasn’t much hindered by concerns about equity. At least for the upper-middle class to which I belonged, these things produced a very high standard of living.

How much do these minor inefficiencies matter? In one sense, I think, quite a lot. In another, they don’t matter very much at all, and can in fact be defended on cultural grounds

[click to continue…]

Henry gave me the heads-up on this extraordinary story from Institutional Investor (it is worth watching the interstitial ad in order to read the story as it really is dynamite). It’s an account of the dog’s breakfast that was the Harvard Institute for International Development’s mission to Russia. I learned a few things I didn’t know from it – particularly, it was interesting the extent to which Jeffrey Sachs, who suffered quite a lot of damage to his reputation through being the titular head of HIID at the time it all blew up, wasn’t actually in charge, and to which Andrei Shleifer and his wife were involved in the whole thing to an extent which it is rather implausible to dismiss as the work of a head-in-the-clouds academic who didn’t realise that there might be a conflict of interest. It adds quite a lot to David Warsh’s excellent coverage of the same story, and indeed to the cacophony of fuck-all which has been our beloved mainstream media’s coverage of what is quite visibly one of the most interesting and scandalous tales of the 1990s (I’m linking to Warsh’s own story on the II story because it contains a few quotes that are in the paper version but not the online one, but it is well worth poking around in the Economic Principals archives for other stories on this subject).
[click to continue…]

A long excerpt from Osama bin Ladin’s complete letter to America (UPDATE: Please note, as per comments, that this is a letter from 2002.) Between the call to Islam, the condemnation of homosexuality, gambling, financial interest, alcohol, the separation of church and state, and the liberation of women, does anyone else feel like they’ve heard this before? It’s practically Howard Dean’s stump speech, isn’t it?

Between the part about how Clinton was let off too easily for immoral acts committed in the Oval office, and the part about how America “brought (the world) AIDS as a Satanic American Invention”, I’m surprised he doesn’t already have a diary at Daily Kos. Is Osama really out of the anti-Bush mainstream with this?

Um, yeah. He really, really is.

[click to continue…]

I read Haruki Murakami’s Underground last week; it is a book about the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway. I have been a big fan of his fiction for a long time, but this was my first foray into his non-fiction. It is a fascinating book, consisting of interviews both with the sarin victims and with members of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult whose members carried out the attack. The latter were interesting but struck me as very similar to tales of what motivates cult members in the US–alienated loners with a certain cast of mind I would call quasi-philosophical were initally drawn in by the promise of a totalizing explanation for the world, and then a meager diet, little sleep, forced labor and indoctrination did the rest. By quasi-philosophical, I mean something like this, from Murakami’s interview with cult member Hirokuyi Kano: [click to continue…]

I’m reading Off Center. Here’s something from p. 87:

When the debate over prescription drug coverage picked up in the late Clinton years, the pharmaceutical lobbying group PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, pronounced “Farma”) went so far as to establish a faux grassroots organization that putatively represented the elderly: “Citizens for a Better Medicare.” Despite the lofty title, Citizens for a Better Medicare had few, if any, actual citizens on its rolls Its main activity was to spend millions of PhRMA dollars on slick ad campaigns supporting an industry-friendly drug plan. When Citizens for a Better Medicare came under fire, PhRMA switched its “grassroots” efforts over to the United Seniors Association, a conservative direct-mail organization that had cut its teeth with frightening scare letters to senior citizens. The United Seniors Association board included, among other GOP political operatives, Jack Abramoff …

Greg Sargent and Kevin Drum have lately suggested that (as Kevin writes) “Dems might do well to tie the Republican corruption scandal to the broader theme of Republican addiction to special business interests.” Healthcare and the energy industry are the obvious places to start. But I haven’t yet seen anyone point out this fairly direct Abramoff/Medicare bill connection. Rather a useful factoid, perhaps, for purposes of converting the maddening complexities of this legislative boondoggle into damning talking-points. Medicare. It doth glaze the eyes over.

Mark Schmitt:

The backlash against the Medicare drug bill may or may not be a backlash against the people responsible for the Medicare drug bill. If it merely increases cynicism and deepens the sense that government can’t do anything right, then the ground remains fertile for the Republican anti-government message – even if it is Republicans themselves who betrayed their own anti-government message. Democrats have a very complicated (but absolutely true) story to tell here: They have to show that the Medicare bill was a guaranteed disaster from the start, that its consequences were not accidental but imtimately related to the corruption of the Republican majority, and that there is an alternative that would do more and cost less, and that Democrats would make it happen. We cannot assume that this story will occur automatically to people as they struggle with the program.