I think Michael Rappaport is straining to find the silver lining in this intelligence cloud.

Consider this an open thread about this important story, with optional special reference to the question: is it a source of consolation if it turns out the whole spy game is usually just seeing how many clowns you can cram into a riddle, wrapped in a question, locked inside an enigma?

Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.

And further into the envelope madness …

Although I started out on the side of John and Bill Carone in believing that there was something funny about the two-envelope problem, I’ve always been suspicious of claims that the class of inifinty paradoxes (even Zeno’s Paradox) can really be tamed by asserting that they disappear if you know how to take limits properly. With that in mind, I mercilessly torture some of Greg Chaitin‘s work to create a version of the two-envelope paradox in which I don’t think there are any limit arguments to make use of. Once more into Socratic dialogue ….

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Apart from going to the Rivals, the bank holiday weekend was something of an Almodovar fest for me. I watched “All About My Mother”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185125/ on Friday and “Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095675/ on Sunday, capping it all with a visit to “Bad Education”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/ at the cinema last night. “Bad Education”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/ really is a terrific film, and the main device of a film-within-a-film (and a script-within-a-script) works well. I won’t post any spoilers, but I will say that it contains one great cinematic moment and that Hollywood would deal with the sexual abuse of boys by priests rather differently. Highly recommended.

John Howard’s government “gets sucked further in”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/31/1085855502334.html to the Iraqi torture scandal. The Defence Department is found to have been aware of the Red Cross’s documenting of torture “much earlier”:http://southerlybuster.blogspot.com/2004/06/defence-chiefs-come-clean-on-abuse.html than previously believed. “Howard insists”:http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9714293%255E28102,00.html that he only learned about the abuses in April and claims to have been “misinformed by the defence department”:http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1120503.htm. Senior civil servants at the Defence department seems to be taking the flak. “Tim Dunlop”:http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/002400.php has more.

So does Howard bear any responsibility or is it just that no-one tells him anything? Though they wouldn’t like to admit it, in many respects Australians have a self-image very similar to that of Americans — they take the same pride in being down-to-earth, straight-talking types. It’s the legacy of a frontier country. A No-BS image is prone to its own distinctive kind of bullshit, but Australian politics does have more of a social-democratic conscience than America and less religiously-inspired self-righteousness. So we’ll see whether they put up with this.

“Draft Syllabus”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/teaching/culture-syllabus.pdf for Soc 508, a graduate seminar/survey course in the Sociology of Culture. Coming this Fall[1] to a University of Arizona near you. Comments welcome.

fn1. If August 24th can count as the Fall. The University of Arizona thinks it can.

Following up my three-way classification of paradoxes,[1] I want to argue that paradoxes involving infinity are always of type-3, that is, the result of ill-posed problems or inappropriate ways of taking limits. (Much the same position is defended in the comments thread by Bill Carone). In fact, I’d argue for the following general principle, applicable to all models relevant to human decisionmakers.

Whenever a result, true for all finite n, is strictly[2] reversed for the infinite case, the problem in question has been posed incorrectly

To defend this, I rely on the premise that we are finite creatures in a finite universe. If a mathematical representation of a decision problem involves an infinite set, such as the integers or the real line, it is only because this is more convenient than employing finite, but very large bounds, such as those derived from the number of particles in the universe. Any property that depends inherently on infinite sets and limits, such as the continuity of a function, can never be verified or falsified by empirical data. Since we are finite, any result that is true for all finite n is true for us.

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On Saturday night we went to a performance of Sheridan’s “The Rivals”:http://www.bibliomania.com/0/6/284/2000/frameset.html at Bristol’s “Old Vic”:http://www.bristol-old-vic.co.uk/ , which has some claim to being the oldest working theatre in Britain (a claim that is carefully qualified to exlude some rivals, though). A very enjoyable evening, complete with a reminder that anxieties about the corrupting effects of new media (internet, the telephone etc) had been fully awakened by the 18th century. Libraries were identified as the cause of moral decline in this exchange between Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute:

bq. Mrs. Mal. There’s a little intricate hussy for you!

bq. Sir Anth. It is not to be wondered at, ma’am,—all this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet!

bq. Mrs. Mal. Nay, nay, Sir Anthony, you are an absolute misanthropy.

bq. Sir Anth. In my way hither, Mrs. Malaprop, I observed your niece’s maid coming forth from a circulating library!—She had a book in each hand—they were half-bound volumes, with marble covers!—From that moment I guessed how full of duty I should see her mistress!

bq. Mrs. Mal. Those are vile places, indeed!

bq. Sir Anth. Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!—And depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.

Last week was the centenary of George Formby’s birth. You can hear about his life in a sweet bio-documentary by Russell Davies (probably only for the next couple of days) called (misleadingly) George on George. The best bit concerns Beryl Formby (George’s wife and manager) who, when the South Afrcan Prime Minister phoned her to complain about George’s enthusiam about playing to mixed audiences and apparent colour blindness, shouted “Why don’t you just piss off you horrible little man”, and slammed the phone down. If only more had been like them.

Last week was the centenary of George Formby’s birth. You can hear about his life in a sweet bio-documentary byRussell Davies (probably only for the next couple of days) called (misleadingly) George on George. The best bit concerns Beryl Formby (George’s wife and manager) who, when the South Afrcan Prime Minister phoned her to complain about George’s enthusiam about playing to mixed audiences and apparent colour blindness, shouted “Why don’t you just piss off you horrible little man”, and slammed the phone down. If only more had been like them.

Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor whom Richard Nixon attempted to fire in the “Saturday Night Massacre”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/watergate/articles/102173-2.htm has “died at the age of 92.”:http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/30/cox.death.ap/index.html I use a video about those events in my social theory class, when we read “Weber”:http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Weber/Whome.htm, because it nicely illustrates Weber’s views about authority and “bureaucracy”:http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Weber/BUREAU.HTML.

As the video goes on, you can draw an organizational chart of the official relationships between the main players — Nixon, Agnew and Haig in the White House; Cox, “Elliott Richardson”:http://clinton4.nara.gov/Initiatives/Millennium/capsule/richardson.html, “William Ruckleshaus”:http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/1998/Oct98/ruckles.htm and “Robert Bork”:http://www.mediatransparency.org/people/robert_bork.htm at the Justice Department — and see how Nixon’s efforts to fire Cox were, in effect, an effort to act like he was the King rather than the President. Nixon didn’t have the authority to fire Cox even though he had the authority to fire Cox’s superiors. After Attorney General Richardson and his deputy Ruckleshaus had refused Nixon’s demands and themselves been fired, Robert Bork — then Solicitor General and third in line at Justice — agreed to do the job. Weber’s analysis of office-holding is nicely illustrated in Richardson’s refusal: “Methodical provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfilment of these duties _and for the execution of the corresponding rights_ … When the principle of jurisdictional ‘competency’ is fully carried through, hierarchical subordination — at least in public office — does not mean that the ‘higher’ authority is simply authorized to take over the business of the ‘lower.’ ” In the video, Bork is interviewed about his decision and in his defence says “Cox had done nothing wrong, but the President can’t be faced down in public by a subordinate official.” When paired with Cox’s famous statement that night — “Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people” — you get a perfect articulation of the difference between “traditional and legal-rational authority”:http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Authority in a democracy.

The interesting thing is that you don’t have to stop there. Because it’s clear from the video that Richardson’s great personal integrity (Nixon called him a “pious son of a bitch”) carried him through Nixon’s efforts to pressure him, and the following day Richardson got a standing ovation from the staff at Justice as he formally announces his resignation. So two other Weberian ideas — that office-holding is a vocation, and that charisma can persist in bureaucracies — are also relevant.

It’s an effective way to teach this bit of Weber, because he isn’t the most charismatic writer in the world himself, and although the students have heard of Watergate, the details of the constitutional crisis that culminated in the Saturday Night Massacre are new to them.

About two weeks ago, Boston City Counselor City Councilor Chuck Turner (Green Party) and Nation of Islam representative Sadiki Kambon held a shameful press conference. They distributed photographs, allegedly of American soldiers raping an Iraqi woman, and said “The American people have a right and responsibility to see the pictures.” The pictures were fakes, taken from a pornographic website, and it was extremely irresponsible and offensive to make such a serious accusation without a more careful double-check. (This is assuming that they made an honest mistake.)

The Boston Globe ran a story about this press conference. Here’s the link. The story is 316 words long. By my count, 191 of those words are a sceptical discussion of the authenticity of the photographs. Here are those 191 words:

The images, depicting men in camouflage uniforms having sex with unidentified women, bear no characteristics that would prove the men are US soldiers or that the women are Iraqis. And there is nothing apparent in the images showing they were taken in Iraq. Unlike the photographs widely publicized last week, the images appear to have been taken outdoors in a sandy area with hills in the background.

A woman who answered the phone at Nation of Islam’s US headquarters in Chicago declined to give further information about the photographs, Muhammad, or his whereabouts. Local Nation of Islam minister Don Muhammad did not return messages left at his place of business.

A spokesman for the US Department of Defense, Lieutenant Colonel Joe Yoswa, said the department could not confirm the authenticity of the photographs.

“I would caution that there are many fake photos circulating on the Internet,” Yoswa said.

Turner and Kambon said they don’t know where or when the photos they distributed yesterday were taken. But Turner said they came from a “very legitimate person.”

“We cannot document their authenticity,” he told reporters. “But you have the ability to do that.”

The Globe ran a photo with this story. They did not run any of the pictures that Turner and Kambon handed out. Instead, they ran a photograph of Turner and Kambon holding a posterboard with four of their pictures. In this photo, pornographic details are visible, with only a little imagination. With a moment’s reflection, it seems obvious that the editors made an error in running this picture. Here’s a scan of it: if in doubt, don’t click.

This photo was run in the early edition of the paper. In later editions, the photo was shrunk to obscure the details in the photo, and finally dropped. They apologized for running the photo the next day. Here’s the apology.

My take is that the Globe made a legitimate choice to cover an incendiary story about the accusations made by a local politician, expressing scepticism as they did it. They also made a serious error in judgement by running this photo, which was compounded by their decision to shrink it, instead of remove it, when they realized that they had made a mistake. I’d think that we can question the judgement and attention to detail of these editors without calling them un-American.

Like I said, that’s my take. For an opposing point of view, here are exerpts from ten Instapundit posts which have referenced the subject.

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Tim Lambert has more details on yet another Astroturf operation, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, recently in the news for attacking open source software and also a shill for the tobacco industry.

A point of interest for me is that I don’t think you really need detailed evidence in cases like this (though of course, its handy to have the kind of chapter and verse Tim provides). Unless it’s devoted to the life and works of de Tocqueville, an outfit with a name like the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is bound to be bogus.

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Before I went to graduate school I worked for a year at an oil refinery — “Ireland’s only refinery”:http://www.hydrocarbons-technology.com/projects/whitegate/, in fact — in East Cork. Reading reports about the “hostage crisis in Khobar”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3761263.stm, I wonder why the terrorists went after the oil workers rather than the refineries they work at. After all, if you’re prepared to plan and execute a heavily-armed attack like this, you could do a lot more damage if you just broke into the plant. Oil refinery hardware is just lots of open-plan exposed pipes, tanks and towers filled with flammable liquids. Popping a few RPGs in the direction of a kero tank or “butane sphere”:http://www.vijaytanks.com/spheres.htm could have spectacular consequences. In the “fractionation towers”:http://www.cii-chemfab.com/gallery/infogalleryprojmgmt1.html the crude has helpfully been vaporized for you in advance. Instead, though, these guys hole up with 50 oil workers in a residential compound and basically wait to get themselves killed. Why? Hostage situations haven’t been reliably successful for hostage-takers since the 1980s. The CNN reports cite the terrorists as saying they are out to get “Zionists and crusaders” who are in Khobar to “steal our oil and resources.” Maybe they hate the workers but love the refineries? Who, exactly, are they trying to send a message to here? Do they think that killing foreigners will garner support whereas the destruction of a refinery would turn Saudi opinion against them?

*Update*: Just as I was finishing this post, I discovered that inquiring minds like “Billmon”:http://billmon.org/archives/001490.html want to know the answer to this question as well.