He is no longer merely “Big Media Matt”. He is become Giant Media Matt. Mentioned by name in a Krugman column, thank you very much. Who would have thought that mere editorship at the Harvard Crimson Independent would take a young man so far…Advantage: blogosphere. Sort of. Well, OK, advantage traditional old boys network. Still, Matthew kicks ass.

Australia is such a small country that, whenever any Australian gets noticed for anything[1] we all tend to feel a glow of vicarious achievement. So I was pleased to see that Germaine Greer was ranked second in a Prospect magazine list of 100 top British intellectuals, just ahead of Amartya Sen and Eric Hobsbawm.

Having enjoyed my burst of patriotic pride, I have to ask what they are smoking in the Old Country these days. The Australian view of Germaine Greer[2] is probably best summed up by Geoff Honnor

Greer has metamorphosed into a Barry Humphries creation: the eccentric old bluestocking aunt who loves to blather on in a colourfully opinionated, slightly shocking way about the great issues of the day. These, oddly enough, seem to always come back to the single greatest issue of all – herself.

In fact, Humphries himself would rank ahead of Greer in my rankings of expat Aussie intellectuals. And if you want an expat with bitterly negative views of home, you can’t go past Robert Hughes (admittedly, since he’s based in the US, he wasn’t eligible for the Prospect poll).

fn1. It doesn’t even have to be something creditable. Just being noticed is enough. And we’re not too fussy as to who we count as an Australian. In particular, any Kiwi who’s done so much as pass through the transit lounge at Sydney airport automatically has their achievements added to the Australian total. OTOH, we’re happy to disown Rupert Murdoch.

fn2. I leave aside the shrinking pool of those who are silly enough to be outraged by her provocations

JuliusBlog has assembled a timeline of terror alerts, along with the bad news for the Bush Administration that preceeded them. They’ve done a good job of finding links and backup.

My take: It looks like a pattern- bad news for Bush is followed by a terror alert or the announcement that a terrorist has been captured- but I don’t think that I buy it. Any administration will consistently face a stream of bad news, large and small, bogus and legitimate. Even if the dates had been chosen by throwing darts at a wall calendar, a dedicated researcher could probably come up with a timeline that looked much like this.

I don’t think that it’s too hackish to say that a lot has gone wrong for Bush in the last year, but many of the most harmful stories were not met by a timely terror warning or capture announcement. I’m thinking of Richard Clarke, Valerie Plame, and the first release of pictures from Abu Ghraib.

I just don’t want to see this approach turned around on President Kerry, I guess.

* Michael Savage, the nationally syndicated conservative radio talk show host with two best-selling books under his belt, said this yesterday:

“When you hear “human rights,” think only one thing: someone who wants to rape your son. And you’ll get it just right. OK, you got it, right? When you hear “human rights,” think only someone who wants to molest your son, and send you to jail if you defend him.”

* “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” come in for a debunking from Matt Gunn, and more from Bob Somersby. For example: I had heard of Grant Hibbard, Kerry’s former commanding officer who has questioned Kerry’s first Purple Heart. Many, many sources have repeated his recollection that Kerry’s wound “resembled a scrape from a fingernail.” I had not heard that his recollection was so bad that he misidentified where Kerry was wounded. (Hibbard said that he recalled the “scrape” on Kerry’s forearm; medical records show that the shrapnel was actually removed above Kerry’s elbow.)

I think what I find most disappointing are the people who know better. They know that this group is untrustworthy, but they find the charges too useful not to promote. And yes, I’m sure that there are ample ways to turn this charge around on liberals. Poetic justice as fairness, once again.

* Roy Edroso points to an old article by Mark Goldblatt about how his debut novel, 176 pages of racial shock-jockery called Africa Speaks, has been “whiteballed” because he hasn’t gotten any big-name reviews. There’s a lot of competition for this title, but I really believe that this self-pitying tripe may be the Worst National Review Article Since They Stopped Openly Supporting Segregation. Worse than “I hate Chelsea Clinton.” Worse than “Howard Dean’s incest vote.” Worse than their stint hosting Donald Luskin’s Poor and Stupid blog. It may be worse than Ann Coulter’s “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”- at least Ann had the excuse that she was in genuine state of grief and shock. Yes, the competition is stiff, but this scrappy guy is a real contender.

(Fun fact: did you know that there were 175,000 books published last year? It’s true!)

I cannot tell you how good Daniel Drezner and The Volokh Conspiracy look to me right now. We need rational right-wingers more than ever.

Most of the on-line obituaries for Henri Cartier-Bresson are photograph-free, which is a bit pointless. But the “New York Times is an exception”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/arts/04CND-CARTIER.html?hp , and includes links beyond to Magnum and elsewhere.

UPDATE: _Libération_ has “a good set of links”:http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=228457 to HCB galleries on the web.

In reading the discussion on my post on pharmaceuticals and the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, I thought it might be useful to look at the more fundamental question – how should we pay for medical research ? In the framework of neoclassical economics, it’s natural to start by looking at the free-market solution. In the absence of government intervention, firms innovate in the hope of securing above-normal profits by offering a superior product. They discourage imitators using a variety of methods such as branding and trade secrets. While these methods don’t work forever, in some cases they deliver enough profits to finance a satisfactory rate of innovation. But, as far as I know, no-one seriously suggests this is the case in relation to medical research. To finance adequate levels of medical research, we need some form of government intervention. There are three main options

* Patents

* Research grants

* Research rewards

Of these options, patents involve the most intrusive government intervention and the largest welfare costs.

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Ken Layne is back from a long hiatus, and he’s smelling opportunism in the Sunday terror alert. He begins:

After getting through the insane security at CitiBank Headquarters — caused by four-year-old Evidence of Terror Plans released Sunday to scare the bejesus out of you — you get to say “Hi” to Laura Bush in the lobby! That’s neat. (emphasis added)

It’s neat when schedules work out that way.

Oh, and the Immediate Alert Scary-Ville terror info? Now they’re saying it actually refers to an attack planned for Sept. 2. You know, the last day of the Republican Convention in New York, when Bush gives his big speech?

This stinks. Go ahead and say, as Tom Ridge did this morning, “This is not about politics. It’s about confidence in government.” If you have to deny it’s about politics — while your party is actively campaigning in the locked-down buildings of New York City filled with teevee cameras and photographers and frazzled employees who wonder if today’s Terror Day — then you have done a Poor Job of showing us otherwise.

I didn’t know that. I’ve been content to be agnostic about this; I genuinely sympathize with the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dillemma that the Administration faces.

But, yeah. If Homeland Security seriously believed that the CitiBank building was under direct threat- an “enemy target area”, specifically- what was Laura Bush doing there? Wouldn’t it put her safety at risk, while making the building a more attractive target?

As I’ve remarked “before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001332.html, the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda is a prince among fiction reviewers. Dirda has wide-ranging tastes and an altogether infectious delight in the books that he loves (see “here”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/columns/dirdamichael/ for a collection of his recent reviews). It’s a pity then that the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report has “provoked”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10807-2004Jul24.html him into a fit of the “Birkerts”:http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/bdbirk.htm.

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I’ve recently read some of the Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. Few who have picked them up will be surprised to hear that I’m finding them to be very, very good. But it occurred to me, while reading them, that virtually all of the non-human characters so far seem to act like humans.

They do things that real people can’t do, but they all seem to share the same motivations as people- pride, jealousy, duty, family ties, anger, love of power, and so on. Despite all the things separating them from humans- immortality, immense power, the obligation to hop around the universe picking up people when they die- the non-humans can be psychologically understood as super-people. They don’t seem noticeably less human than, say, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, or Humbert Humbert from Lolita.

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“I felt I should do my part to counter the prevailing notion in my neighborhood that Republicans are all obnoxious blowhards.”

Catherine Seipp, Beyond the Valley of the Bush-Bashers, in National Review Online

“I’m glad to be reminded that not everyone on the left is a Stalin apologist.”

Catherine Seipp, same article

via Roy Edroso

Most of my blogging time this week has been devoted to criticism of the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United States. Wait! Don’t stop reading yet!

I know that “Trade agreement said harmful to small faraway country” is the stereotype of a boring newspaper story, but this one is really important to Americans as well as Australians, and to anyone interested in health policy. If you ever hope to see affordable health care in the US, you’d better hope that (against all the odds) this agreement falls at the final hurdle.

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Due to a sudden period of enforced idleness, my insomnia is back (my previous schedule of working five caffeine-fuelled 14 hour days a week and recovering at the weekend had cured it nicely. I can recommend this method to anyone although to be honest, my doctor frowned on it). As a result, I find myself thinking about the aggregativity of capital, labour theories of value, and so on. I therefore pass on this small question which may be of some amusement to those of our readership who indulge in either cannabis or value theory; the two groups may find it equally interesting.

If you had all the wealth in the world, ie you owned every single object of value that was known to humanity ….

what would you spend it on?

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I realize some blogs have already covered this, but just in case people missed it, the American Museum of the Moving Image has an interesting online exhibition about presidential compaign commercials since 1952. You can watch all the ads online, which are organized by year, type of commercial and issue. They also have a section on Web ads. A propos the Museum and campaigns, Richard Gere had a related comment at the end of the Museum’s tribute to him in April: “Never trust anyone who believes that God is exclusively on their side. [- — long pause – –] Especially when that man is the President.” [Hat tip for URL: my friend Jeff whose site is currently down so no links.]

I’m preparing an introductory course on game theory at the moment, and selecting readings for the week on communication and games of limited information. One of the key contributors to this literature is Joseph Farrell (no relation) who has done seminal work on how “cheap talk” (costless communication) may affect rational actors’ behaviour when it conveys useful information about an actor’s type. He also shows that “babbling equilibria” are always possible, in which actors’ communication conveys no information about their type whatsoever, and is consequently always ignored by others. This seems to be a rather abstruse argument with little real world relevance – but I reckon that one nice way to bring it home to my students is to point to how it helps explain DC taxi-cabs. In many (perhaps most) cities, cabs use their cab-sign to signal whether they are available or not. A lighted cab-sign indicates that the taxi-cab is free; an unlighted sign indicates that the cab is occupied. Washington DC, for some reason, is different. As far as I can tell, whether or not a cab’s sign is lighted bears no relationship to whether it is occupied. Thus, after some initial confusion, newcomers learn to ignore whether the cab has a lighted sign or not, instead squinting as best they can into the interior, to see whether they can spot any passengers. This is about as close to a babbling equilibrium as one may reasonably expect to find in the real world. How this came about in DC, and not in other American cities, is anyone’s guess.