I saw the exhibition Modigliani: Beyond the Myth at The Jewish Museum in New York this week. I highly recommend it, it is a wonderful exhibit. (It’s only on until Sept 19th so don’t delay.) There was a twenty minute wait in line, apparently much more reasonable than a few months ago. The experience was definitely worth the wait.

One nice thing about shows that focus on the entire career of an artist is that you tend to learn more about an artist’s background than possible through just a few pieces mixed in with works by others. Modigliani died at the age of 34, but created quite a bit during his short life. Before learning about this exhibition, I had no idea that Modigliani was Jewish. One may wonder why that matters, but given the anti-Semitism he encountered once he moved to Paris, and given that much of his work focused exclusively on portraitures and an exploration of identities, it seems this part of his identity would be important for understanding his work.

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Paul Beard writes to ask what the economists and social scientists at Crooked Timber think of this interview with economist Ray C. Fair. His model that is predicting that Bush will get 57.5% of the 2-party votes.

Well, the economists and social scientists at Crooked Timber are in bed, so I’ll try. Here’s the model and relevant webpage. Fair is a Yale professor who has been tweaking his model, and successfully publishing papers on it, since 1978. I am a lowly uncredentialed blogger who has spent less than an hour looking at said papers. If I were a betting man, I’d have to bet that Fair is right and I’m wrong when I raise a criticism. If I’m lucky, maybe he’ll respond to my email and humiliate me in comments.

Having said that, a few comments:

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1. Dan Aibel at Contrapositive reads the New York Times very carefully, and points out that it would probably be for the best if the city of New York took an interest in the cars that military recruiters regularly park illegally in Times Square.

To put it simply: If there are going to be 3,000 pound metal boxes parked in the middle of Times Square, they ought to be have an awfully good reason to be there. And they should be inspected regularly–whoever happens to own them.

2. Gary Farber discusses the same post from Bjørn Stærk that Belle pointed to below. My favorite part is this exchange at Winds of Change:

SDN: Don’t worry, Gary, when Jews fly planes into skyscrapers I’ll be hunting them too.

Gary: Yes, I know.

Two points possibly worth making:

a. This is one problem that we can’t blame Bush for. For all of his faults, he has consistently urged respect for the Muslim faith and world, and I’m grateful for that.

b. What is the intended end goal of LGF-ish anti-Muslim agitation? I certainly understand that there’s a lot to criticize. But those comments indicate a significant (?) vein of people who seem unwilling to accept that we’re going to continue to co-exist with Muslims. If this is engagement…

3. I don’t like illegal music downloading, but I’ve made my peace with mp3 blogs. This track, “Seeds of Life”, by the 70s Latin funk group Harlem River Drive, makes me want to quit my job and hit a cowbell for a living. Just awesome.

Be Amazed: as warblogger Bjorn Staerk comes to the stunning conclusion that some people might have gone a bit off the rails in wanting to ban Islam. People like, well, LGF commenters! And Bjorn Staerk commenters!

What has gone wrong when Norwegians, Americans and other Westerners who rever the enlightenment ideals of reason and freedom of thought more than anything, justify restrictions on thought with bad reasoning and paranoia? It’s not just LGF readers. You can read similar views (though fewer of them) at Free Republic, Dhimmi Watch, and Liberty Post – all in reply to the Kristiansand story.

Again, I’m not saying these views are shared by the owners of these websites, or the majority of their readers. But neither do I see many strong, principled objections. Phil says above that “the failure of good Muslims to object or organize and stop bad Muslims indicts the whole Islamic movement”, which doesn’t justify a ban on Islam, but is true in a sense. We all have a responsibility to speak up clearly against extremists in our own ranks, whether we are Muslims or peace activists or bloggers who criticize Islam and support the war on Islamist terror.

And so it’s time to stand up for the basic values of our democracies and confront those in our own ranks who want to abandon those values. Because if we don’t, outsiders will be justified in interpreting this as silent approval or apologism.

Something has gone rotten. We can’t blame it on the “left”, the “relativists”, the “PC crowd” or the “multiculturalists”, (and don’t anybody dare blame it on the Muslims). It’s gone rotten here, among people who on 9/11 woke up to the danger of Islamism. The ban Islam meme and all its relatives (Islam is Islamism, Islam is war) must be confronted here, now, before it spreads.

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I used to be an Apple fan (even own one of the original bondi blue iMacs) but my experience with the iPod has made me disgruntled with the company. I am among the unfortunate many (way too many!) whose iPod gave up service extremely quickly. The battery just died one day for no apparent reason. The iPod was still under warranty so I took it to an Apple store. It took some convincing for them to take a look without charging me the basic $50. Then, after several days, they confirmed that the battery had, in fact, died (brilliant!). Then, after another week or so, they let me know my new iPod was ready for pickup. Unfortunately, my new iPod gave up service soon after as well. By then I was past the warranty period (how convenient for Apple). This time I can’t even tell if it’s the battery. It just won’t recharge and won’t do anything. (It is almost as if there was something comforting about seeing something break in a physically visible manner so you have some idea behind the puzzle. I almost wish I had dropped the thing at some point so I would have something to blame.) I had not used it much, maybe about a dozen times before it gave up service. This whole experience has been quite frustrating, especially for a gadget that costs several hundred dollars.

I am now looking for diePod alternatives. Other companies have not done quite the same job in marketing their products so I am not sure what would be a good option. I am actually considering just getting a memory card for my Treo 600 (a positive review of which will follow at some point) and using that as my mp3 player.

Bottom line: to avoid frustrations, I highly recommend staying away from the iPod![1]

UPDATE: Clearly, Apple’s got battery issues all over the place. It looks like my experiences are not a fluke.

¹ Of course, in the grand scheme of things I realize this is not that big of a deal. But if one can avoid such annoyances then why not do so?

The WashPost runs an Op-Ed piece byPradeep Chhibber and Ken Kollman, claiming that the failure of third parties to do well in the US is due, not to plurality voting or other institutional factors but to excessive political centralisation. The claim is that since third parties

once competed successfully in congressional elections, winning significant portions of the popular vote and often gaining seats in Congress. This was true for most of the 19th century and even the early part of the 20th

the cause of their subsequent failure must be something new – political centralisation[1].

Chhibber and Kollman seem to be well-regarded political scientists. But their argument here is riddled with errors, or at least large logical gaps.

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“James Boyle in the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/2c04d39e-ec5a-11d8-b35c-00000e2511c8.html on Apple’s claim that Real “broke into” the iPod:

bq. How exactly had Real “broken into” the iPod? It hadn’t broken into my iPod, which is after all my iPod. If I want to use Real’s service to download music to my own device, where’s the breaking and entering? What Real had done was make the iPod “interoperable” with another format. If Boyle’s word processing program can convert Microsoft Word files into Boyle’s format, allowing Word users to switch programs, am I “breaking into Word”? Well, Microsoft might think so, but most of us do not. So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.)

He also ponders whether what Real have done is any different from blade manufacturers making blades that fit branded razors.

Since you don’t all listen to BBC7 religiously, and since the obit for Anthony Buckeridge obviously touched a nerve for some of you, you might want to know that, contrary to my speculation, the irresponsible BBC has managed to hold onto at least one of the early Jennings recordings, and played it yesterday as a tribute to the great man. Scroll down to 09.00. It actually lasts just over 50 minutes (not 45 as the page suggests), and stars Buckeridge himself as Wilkins, and, according to the announcer, a prepubescent incarnation of the appalling Jeremy Clarkson as Atkinson. It’s wonderful, and will be archived till next Saturday.

As some of you may have noticed the new English football season is upon us. The BBC is running its “fantasy football game”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/fantasy_football/default.stm for the last time this season, and I’ll be entering as I usually do. There’s a facility to run a “mini-league”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/info/friends.asp consisting of friends, relations, enemies, critics, critical critics etc. So if any contributor, regular commenter or reader wants to join our league — the “Crooked Timberites”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/friends/friends.asp?pin=700279 — they are very welcome to do so. You have to “register”:http://bbcfootball.fantasyleague.co.uk/signup/signup.asp with the BBC and choose your team first, and then email your PIN to me, the Chairman of the League, at crookedfootball-at-yahoo.co.uk . Those who know nothing whatsoever about football can always use the “lucky dip” facility to have the BBC computer pick a team for them. Try to register before 1230 BST on Saturday, 28 August 2004

Apparently. Not yet got confirmation from the OAS and Carter Centre that the ballot met standards of honesty and probity, but it looks like Chavez has come in with a pretty thumping majority; 58% of the vote is really rather good on the massive turnout reported.

Of course there is now a fairly substantial Catch-22 situation. Part of the reason why Chavez was able to win was that in recent months he’s been throwing around money like water on social programs. He was able to do this because oil was up above $40 a barrel, generating vast profits for the state oil company. A lot of the reason why oil prices were so high was that … there was significant uncertainty about supply from Venezuela because of the impending referendum. Now that some of the uncertainty has been resolved, oil futures have already started tumbling, meaning that it’s going to be that little bit more dfficult to deliver on these promises; if I were a Venezuelan, I wouldn’t be assuming that we were out of the woods yet.

Update: Carter Centre and Organisation of American States just more or less endorsed the votes; they didn’t find evidence of serious fraud and the results more or less match what the independent observers were seeing.

A couple of interesting position papers are available on school admissions and school choice. This one, from the right-of-centre PolicyExchange, has been up for a while. The authors give a nice quick survey of the varieties of choice scheme operating around the world (though, like many on the right, they emphasize the Swedish example a bit more than they should), and draw conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. What is interesting about this is that they are much better informed and more honest about the proimise and limitations of schemes than other voucher supporters like Chris Woodhead and Stephen Pollard: they understand, for example, that the targetted nature of the Milwaukee scheme is crucial to its political success, and also that the availability of a large, low cost, pool of providers (absent in the UK0 was necessary for it to get off the ground. They are currently working on a specifically UK-oriented proposal to which I’ll link when they’ve completed it. One of the things that is clear from it is that the Tories (presumably under the influence of Willetts) are really trying to think through the practicalities of their voucher-type proposals.

The Social Market Foundation report has been out just a week or two (why did they release it in the summer??). It’s an excellent, and well-informed, proposal about school admissions. The key, and interesting, proposals are a dramatic simplification of the admissions process; and the idea that when schools are oversubscribed they should admit by lottery (an idea I have advocated for a long time). The piece also recognises the need for built-in oversupply of places in order for the ‘market’ in places to work, an idea that the government is pretty set against (since it views ‘surplus’ places as wasteful). The government has also consistently resisted the idea of removing discretion over admissions from schools, on the grounds that it is unfeasible and would not make any difference anyway. I hope that the quirky release date of the report does not mean it will be ignored by ministers.

My post the other day about the Allawi government’s attack on press freedom attracted criticism from some pro-war bloggers. “From Stephen Farrell’s report in today’s London Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1217933,00.html :

bq. “YOU’VE got two hours to leave or we are going to open fire at you. It’s just our orders,” said a policeman guarding the headquarters of the Najaf Governor, Adnan al-Zurfi, when myself and other journalists arrived at his office yesterday.

bq. (…)

bq. Police threatened to arrest or shoot journalists if they did not leave the city and shots were fired into the hotel housing Western and Arab reporters, which lies within a government-controlled area. The threat came even as Mr Allawi spoke at the country’s long-awaited National Conference in Baghdad, calling it “the first step on the way to democracy”.

Nick Cohen, “writing in the New Statesman”:http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_NS&newTop=Section%3A+Front+Page&newDisplayURN=200408160014 cites “my post on John Laughland”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002269.html and his views from the other week. (Thanks to “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html for letting me know.)

Brad de Long points to a piece on the equity premium by Marty Weitzman and says,

Marty Weitzman is smarter than I am …This is brilliant. I should have seen this. I should have seen this sixteen years ago. I *almost* saw this sixteen years ago.

Weitzman’s idea[1] is the replace the sample distributions of returns on equity and debt with reasonable Bayesian subjective distributions. These have much fatter tails, allowing for a higher risk premium, lower risk free rate and higher volatility, in the context of a socially optimal market outcome. Here are some of the reasons why this is important

My immediate reaction is the same as Brad’s. Something like this has occurred to me too, but I’ve never thought hard enough or cleverly enough about it how to work it out properly. This is a very impressive achievement, and Marty Weitzman is very, very smart (which we already knew).

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