From the “Economist”:http://www.economist.co.uk/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2703519 :

bq. At the next official meeting of OPEC, in Beirut on June 3rd, Saudi Arabia will be asked to demonstrate solidarity with its co-conspirators in the cartel. The bargain that holds OPEC together—each member shows restraint in production, so that all can enjoy higher prices—is at stake, they will say. But it is widely assumed that Saudi Arabia must also keep its side of a more fundamental bargain. It must be conscious of American petrol prices, especially in an election year, and, in return, the world’s only superpower will continue to offer the desert kingdom its protection.

My friend and occasional collaborator, the sociologist “Alan Carling”:http://www.betterbradford.org.uk/about.htm , is running as an independent candidate in local elections in Bradford, West Yorkshire (in the UK). Bradford has in recent years acquired something of a reputation for urban deprivation, ethnic violence and increasing patterns of residential segregation, something which the main political parties have done little to address. Alan has thought more than most people about the problems of combining social justice and ethnic diversity. I’m sure that if I lived in Bradford I would give him my support. Alan’s campaign aims to tackle some of these issues head-on. He has a campaign website “BetterBradford.org.uk”:http://www.betterbradford.org.uk/campaign.htm . From Alan’s “campaign statement”:http://www.betterbradford.org.uk/campaign.htm :

bq. Multicultural policies have rightly recognised the differences in ways of life. The question in Bradford is whether the well-intentioned practice of multiculturalism in the past has contributed inadvertently to undesirable forms of segregation in the present. Multiculturalism makes us think in terms of single identities and multiple ‘communities’: the White community, the African-Caribbean community, the gay and lesbian communities and so on. But ‘community’ can mean an inward-looking attitude, so that each separate group regulates its own affairs without reference to anyone else outside. This is undesirable in an open democratic society.

bq. Identity is about how we describe ourselves, as ‘White’ or ‘Sikh’ or ‘Muslim’ or ‘English’ or ‘Ukrainian’. But whatever we choose as our main label, the truth is always more complicated. There are different meanings to each label, and there are many different ways of observing any religion. No-one is only White or only Muslim, because we are also women and men, young and old, and these different identities mean different things in different circumstances. A new perspective on multiculturalism would emphasise a single community and multiple identities.

(I don’t know what others at CT would make of Alan’s campaign: this just represents my own endorsement of Alan.)

The front page summary of the lead story on CNN’s “US edition”:http://us.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/24/bush.iraq/index.html reads:

bq. In a speech outlining the future for Iraq, President Bush warned Americans there would be “difficult days ahead and the way forward may sometimes appear chaotic,” but added: “No power of the enemy will stop Iraq’s progress.” Bush outlined five steps to Iraqi self-government in the first in a series of addresses in the weeks before the handover of power to Iraqis.

The subheading reads “‘Albright: More Specifics Needed'”:http://us.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/24/albright/index.html. Meanwhile, the front page summary of the lead story on CNN’s “European edition”:http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/24/bush.iraq/index.html reads:

bq. With approval ratings at new lows over Iraq and increasing doubts over his handling of the war, President Bush has outlined his five-step plan for the war-torn nation. Additionally, he says the U.S. will demolish the controversial Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad in consultation with a new Iraqi government.

Here the subheading reads, “‘Bush approval near record low'”:http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/24/bush.poll/index.html. Gotta cater to your audience.

From an NYT story on “ghost” prisoners in Abu Ghraib

The memorandum criticizing the practice of keeping prisoners off the roster was signed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and a James Bond, who is identified as “SOS, Agent in Charge.” Military and intelligence officials said that they did not know of a Mr. Bond who had been assigned to Abu Ghraib, and that it was possible that the name was an alias.

My mother was visiting here in Singapore when Brandon Mayfield was first arrested in Oregon. The FBI claimed to have found his fingerprint on a plastic bag associated with bomb materials turned up by Spanish investigators of the Madrid train bombings. Mayfield is a white American convert to Islam, and was tangentially associated with one of the men convicted in an Oregon terrorism case (Jeffrey Battle), having represented him in a custody dispute. He claimed not to have been outside the US in nearly ten years, a claim made all the more plausible by the fact that he does not currently have a valid passport.

Mom’s verdict: this is a total set-up. The FBI has been monitoring this guy for a while and now they want to pin something on him. But Mom, I said stupidly, granting that fingerprint matching is not a particularly exact science, and wrong ID’s do happen, what are the odds that the wrong match would happen to be a convert to Islam with any connection, no matter how tenuous, to any alleged terrorists? And she said, exactly. You just wait and see. Well, once again, she was right (though, as of a few days ago, he was still barred from talking about the case or leaving his house without permission from the authorities). Here is a quote from the official FBI apology to Mayfield (I’m actually pleased and suprised that they did apologize, so, 10 points for the FBI):

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Abu Ghraib prison is to be demolished. Obviously, I welcome this news and hope that this symbolic measure will be accompanied by the substantive changes it should represent, including the abandonment of the policy of detention without trial.

At last the diocese has given him what he wanted.

You better have a good reason.. and be able to produce identification as well. [Via IP.]

From Instapundit

And here’s a question: Freedom of the press, as it exists today (and didn’t exist, really, until the 1960s) is unlikely to survive if a majority — or even a large and angry minority — of Americans comes to conclude that the press is untrustworthy and unpatriotic. How far are we from that point?

And over at USS Clueless:

When I’ve read news reports lately about some kinds of obnoxious protests, I have mused to myself, “Perhaps it’s time to issue shoot-to-kill orders to security guards.” Perhaps if some people who made grandstanding protests ended up dead, it might cause others to start really thinking about the consequences of their behavior.

There used to be a shining city on a hill … what the hell happened to it? I’m pretty sure that there might be some “consequences” in allowing the United States of America to become the sort of place where newspapers are censored and demonstrators are shot dead for being “obnoxious”. I think I’d be prepared to pay quite a high price to avoid finding out what they were.

Update Should probably make it clear that den Beste steps back from the brink of actually recommending that protestors be shot. But it’s not obvious he’d object over much if they started doing it.

Remember our discussion of the Erdõs number and the eBay bid that followed? The Chronicle is on the story, sort of. There is not one word about humor in that whole piece.. or that it all started out with a light-hearted discussion on blogs. Talk about taking a story out of context. I realize Bill may have posted the bid in all seriousness, but I think a better coverage would have included a mention of how it all came about, which is perfectly clear from his initial post. One interesting point gets no mention in the piece: John’s suggestion that offering co-authorship for free and no labor may be an even better deal for those with a high Erdõs number. (He meant it as a joke! I better add that again before John gets accused of wanting to undercut the system.) I guess in the context of The Chronicle piece that’s less scandelous.. and thus not worthy of coverage. I think I’ll go read The Onion now. [Thanks to my friend Gabriel for pointing me to The Chronicle piece.]

UPDATE: Read about Bill Tozier’s reactions here. Also, to clarify, the article does say in the beginning “The auction began as a bit of fun,” but if you read the whole piece, that part is soon forgotten.

I’ve written a couple of posts critical of the Copenhagen Consensus exercise being run by Bjorn Lomborg”s Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist. The stated objective is to take a range of problems facing developing countries, and get an expert panel to form a consensus on which ones should be given the highest priority. This is a reasonable-sounding idea, and the process has produced some useful contributions in the form of papers by experts arguing the importance of particular problems.

There are however, two big difficulties.

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We’ve had more than a few things to say about the Iowa Electronic Markets over the life of Crooked Timber. In particular, John and myself have defended the view that these markets do not appear to offer marginal information above and beyond published opinion polls.

Some would say that this is fighting talk, and that if we really thought this, we ought to be trying to make some money out of it. So here goes …

Big thanks to Nasi Lemak for sharing a dataset of historical poll data with me. I have used that data to construct and backtest a trading system for the IEM Kerry vote-share contract (KERR) which uses only published poll data and generates favourable backtesting over the last four months. The equity curve for this system so far is below the fold; I plan to use it to trade the IEM vote-share market over the rest of the campaign.

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My pile of Books to Read grew considerably over the past two months (though not as much as my pile of books to “not read”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001011.html). Robert C. Allen’s “Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691006962/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ sounds interesting, though I’m not likely to get to it. It makes the argument that, comparatively, the Russian economy was very successful from the late 1920s to the early 1970s. The gray world of ’70s Communism wasn’t exactly “Big Rock Candy Mountain”:http://ingeb.org/songs/onasumme.html, but economically it was in the same league as second-tier capitalist countries like those on the European semi-periphery. Considering that Russia was barely post-feudal when the Soviets arrived, this is (to coin a phrase) a big leap forward — at least comparable to the growth-rates of many of the advanced capitalist democracies, and much better than almost all other “developing” countries over the same period.

The book seems like a strong effort to separate the question of economic growth from the political dimensions of Soviet failure. Allen argues that Stalin’s brutal collectivization schemes didn’t do much for growth rates and that most of the benefits of mid-century growth were squandered by bad decisions from the Kremlin gerontocracy. I’ll wait for a full book report from “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/.

Last year, I fell off my bike, and had to have my arm in a sling for a couple of days. I don’t care, even a little bit, that Bush had a spill. It happens.

But if the White House is going to come out and blame the fall on “what the White House described as soil loosened by recent rainfall”… (Here’s the quote: “It’s been raining a lot. The topsoil was loose.”)

Well, I can check that. There hasn’t been any rain in Crawford all week. The last day with more than an inch of precipitation was May 1.

Again, not a big deal, but why would they say that? And do you share my suspicion that Caren Bohan, who wrote the Reuters report from Crawford, knows perfectly well that there wasn’t any rain?

UPDATE: Kos has a similar post, with a different data set but the same conclusion.