11D

Laura has moved and renamed her blog simply 11D. She now has comments, which presumably has the upside that she doesn’t have to have millions of mini-email conversations; on the other hand it means she won’t have as many nice email conversations. Since I link to her every other post, this affects me more than most: I’ll have to start thinking of things of my own to say. Most impressive is that she has, thus far, only one blog on her blogroll — guess which one? No, don’t guess — go and see.

Imagine

WASHINGTON- In an unusual joint press conference, President Bush and Senator John Kerry announced the nomination of Rep. Christopher Cox of California to serve as director of the CIA. The joint nomination virtually ensures Cox’s confirmation, at a time when Administration officials have warned the public to expect attacks. “In this time of uncertainty, we need stability in our intelligence agencies. I promised to reform our intelligence capabilities, and I intend to keep that promise,” said President Bush. “That’s why I’ve been in communication with Senator Kerry on this nomination…”

If you don’t like Christopher Cox, pick someone else. I wouldn’t dream of any President extending this kind of consideration for most appointments, but the CIA director is an unusual case. Porter Goss is a poison pill in a position where we can least afford one. There seems to be some agreement that Porter Goss’s open partisanship makes it almost inevitable that he will be dismissed in the event of a Kerry victory. That’s not good.

Maybe Goss will turn out to be an excellent head of the CIA. But his nomination has more than a whiff of positioning, and he’ll have no traction until November (if Bush wins) or January (if Kerry wins). If we’re sincerely expecting attacks, and we’re sincere about wanting to reform our intelligence, then we’ve got to have CIA leadership that can get to work, regardless of which way the votes fall.

Maybe I’m daydreaming, but it seems like we’ve missed a great opportunity for statesmanship. You may say that I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one.

Spelling

Whilst English speakers doughtily plough on with our archaic and tough spellings, and have to acquire a tolerance for the inconsistencies between British English and American English (to name but two), the German authorities have fought to implement a thorough spelling reform. But it seems that implementation faces a major hiccough as some of the major German newspapers have had second thoughts. Scott Martens gives a rough but excellent account of developments and rationales over at Fistful of Euros. (In other news, I shall be travelling to Loughborough this weekend.)

Here's your fucking latte, sir

I looked this one up for an argument in comments to Belle’s post below, and I’ve been laughing and crying ever since. It’s a useful way to think about the extent to which “trickle down” economics has worked for the poorest in society. As we all know because people who know we’ve read Rawls keep telling us, the poorest benefit from economic growth. How much do they benefit?

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Venezuela through the looking glass?

What the bloody hell is this all on about??? My Spanish is a bit ropey, but I have at least established to my own satisfaction that vheadline.com is correctly reporting a Venezuelan national press story, and VENPRES was reporting a story which El Mundo of Madrid did in fact carry (but isn’t available without paying). In this story, El Mundo is apparently reporting (and, btw, I’ve usually found the Spanish press pretty reliable on the few occasions I’ve had to rely on them) … the following assertions:

Update: thank heaven somebody bothered to check this one out

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Curiouser and curiouser

A very odd column by Christopher Hitchens about Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA, and so forth. It finishes by hinting at a more critical position toward the Allawi government than some of Hitchens’s admirers have hitherto managed:

As I write, the Allawi government in Baghdad is trying, with American support, a version of an “iron fist” policy in the Shiite cities of the south. (“Like all weak governments,” as Disraeli once said in another connection, “it resorts to strong measures.”) Chalabi, who has spent much of this year in Najaf, thinks that this is extremely unwise. We shall be testing all these propositions, and more, as the months go by.

The Political Slime Machine

Steven Johnson has written one of the smartest political essays that I’ve read in a long while, using a simplified version of complexity theory to explain why the Dean campaign went bad. Johnson argues that the Dean campaign was based on a simple positive feedback loop in which more volunteers and donations led to increased publicity, leading to yet more volunteers and donations usw. However, its radical decentralization and lack of complex communication meant that it wasn’t able to cope when the environment changed, and the feedback was interrupted, it couldn’t adapt. Like slime moulds and pheronome-induced ant trails, the Dean campaign was “great at conjuring up crowds … [b]ut … lousy at coping.”

Johnson suggests that other forms of emergent behaviour cope better with changes to the environment, but that they don’t scale very well. They’re probably not suited to large-scale national campaigns in complex polities like the US. This seems to me to be a useful corrective to some of the hype about new kinds of campaigning and fundraising. They are having important effects on politics - but it is unclear (at best) whether they can radically reshape politics at the national level. Johnson suggests that the political lessons of emergence apply more clearly and easily to Jane Jacobs style urbanism and local politics. It’s a fascinating little essay, which packs a lot of punch into seven pages. Go read.

The Al-Cockney Army

From this morning’s papers, a bit more light shed on the questions I raised below. It appears that explanation c) (that the Sadrist forces have been recruiting since April) is at least part of the reason for the discrepancy. I would imagine that the two Londoners who have shown up in Najaf are not particularly representative of what’s been going on, but it makes a useful hook for newspapers, and us, to have a look at what’s going on.

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Good Stuff from the Decembrist

Two good things from Mark Schmitt (but you wouldn’t expect anything less, right?). There’s an American Prospect Piece by him about the long-term effects of the congressional reforms of the 1950s and ’60s, and a post about jobs with no sick leave:

According to the brilliant analysts at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, sixty-six million workers, or 54% of the workforce, does not get a single paid sick day after a full year on the job.

That statistic, I think, is one of the best indicators of the two classes of the labor market, and how the divide is not so much about wages and income as about benefits and security. And those of us on the relatively secure side of the divide cannot really understand how different life is in a world where you don’t have any paid sick leave. I might think I understand what it is to earn low wages — $10,500/year, in my first job — but I’ve never had a job that didn’t offer sick days. Can’t even imagine it.

Jacob Hacker has a sort of preview of his next book in The New Republic, and I think he is most clearly saying the big thing that needs to be said about the economy: That the principal problem, the big thing that has changed, is not the number of jobs, the rate of growth, or income inequality. It’s the shift in risk from the government and corporations onto individuals. … [B]ut while some of us have been able to exchange the security of the past for greater economic opportunity, a majority of workers are absorbing more risk without accompanying reward.

We’ve mentioned this phenomenon before at CT, as has Daniel in some older posts about pension schemes.

Vandalism

From Mark Lynas’s new blog on climate change (hat-tip Harry’s Place ) comes this story of the medieval village of Heuersdorf , in eastern Germany, which is threatened by strip-mining for lignite. God knows why anyone should mine dirty, horrible, acid-rain producing brown coal anyway, let alone demolish medieval churches to do so. This story needs wider circulation.

"He got his Visionz from our visions."

A strange and interesting article from the Washington Post, which highlights an urban subculture I know nothing about, despite having lived in D.C. for many years (not recently, though). The article is long, but the gist is this: there are about 30 high-end T-shirt and warm-up gear stores in D.C., each of which vies for its target audience with constantly changing styles and local spokesmen, from comedians to go-go bands. Apparently the trade started as a back-of-the-truck thing at clubs and concerts in the ‘80’s, and grew into a big enterprise. The shirts usually sell at $100 each.

Around 1995, the style changed from silkscreens to elaborately embroidered shirts. And an enterprising Korean immigrant named Jung Kang began to sell his services, first as an embroiderer with unheard of turn-around time (he would deliver the shirts back the same day), then as a T-shirt producer as well. It seems like almost all the D.C. lines were using Kang. But then he got the idea to start his own shop, and his own line, called Visionz. He hired a popular local comedian as a spokesman, and hired local designers to come up with the T-shirt designs. And then he started selling the shirts for $30.

I think you can guess what happened next.

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Yellowcake analysis

Joseph Cirincione and Alexis Orton at the Carnegie Endowment have just put out a very useful short analytic brief on Iraq’s putative efforts to obtain uranium in Niger.

Their conclusion:

The numbers tell us that Iraq’s alleged interest in Niger uranium - even if true - never represented an immediate or significant threat to the United States. Simple math and common sense confirm that the claim should never have appeared in administration statements as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapon program.

The Road from Surfdom

Tom W. Bell has a fun post analyzing surfing as a system of non-state enforced property rights. Surfers apparently have a very-well developed set of norms regarding who gets which wave. Bell, who is a hard-core libertarian, sees this as mostly reflecting surfers’ “profound respects for property rights.” Surfers, by his account, behave like Lockeans when divvying up the waves. However, there’s an alternative explanatory framework that does a better job, I reckon, of explaining what’s going on - Lin Ostrom’s account of common pool resources, and the rules governing them.

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Lumpencommentariat

Both Dan and Matt Yglesias provide us with empirical evidence that the number of insurgents in Iraq is snowballing. It’s a far cry from the ridiculous predictions of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds that jihadists from across the Arab world would get sucked into Iraq, leaving the US safer. Indeed, if the Brookings people are right, the number of foreign insurgents has grown only slightly since December, while the number of domestic insurgents has grown fourfold. Flypaper, my ass. This whole nonsensical theory was never more than ex post wishful thinking masquerading as foreign policy analysis - as I argued last year, it seemed to be based on the fallacious notion that there was a limited “lump of terrorism” floating around in the international system that could be absorbed by a conflict in Iraq. Instead, entirely predictably, we’re seeing what seems to be an enormous increase in recruitment to anti-American forces - an eightfold increase over the last fifteen months. The dynamic effects are swamping the constant ones. I don’t see how this can be anything but bad news.

Update: I’d forgotten that Ted too posted on this eleven months ago.

I’m going to make a prediction that I feel pretty good about: a year from now, no one will be very proud of the flypaper theory.

And I reckon that Robert Schwartz owes him $100 …

Egalitarian Capitalism

I’ve mentioned this book before, but now that it’s been published so I thought it worth mentioning again. Egalitarian Capitalism is a new book by my new colleague Lane Kenworthy, who’s just joined us at Arizona. It’s a comparative analysis of trends in income inequality and household pre- and post-tax transfers in sixteen wealthy capitalist democracies. Lane’s approach is to ask whether the data support the idea that there are tradeoffs between a low degree of inequality, on the one hand, and strong growth, high employment and growing incomes on the other. The short answer is “not really.” The longer answer has interesting discussions of which approaches work and which seem not to. It’s a good book: the argument, the writing, and the data analysis are accessible and easy to follow. As has often been said around here, policy and public debate in the United States hardly ever looks around to see how other countries organize the relationship between economy and society. Maybe the current climate provides an opportunity to change that: To see how equality is compatible with various measures of economic success, read the book. (To get a sense of how these countries compare to Neoconservative ideals, just continue to follow the news about Iraq.) You can read the first chapter to get a better sense of what the project is; look at the cover; or just buy it.

Liar

Either Bob Somerby has invented a transcript out of whole cloth, or he has caught Vice-President Dick Cheney lying on tape.

CHENEY: John Kerry is, by National Journal ratings, the most liberal member of the United States Senate. Ted Kennedy is the more conservative of the two senators from Massachusetts.

(LAUGHTER)

It’s true. All you got to do is go look at the ratings systems. And that captures a lot, I think, in terms of somebody’s philosophy. And it’s not based on one vote, or one year, it’s based on 20 years of service in the United States Senate. (emphasis added)

That’s not a matter of interpretation; that is a baldfaced lie. The National Journal ranking that Cheney is referring to is based on one year, 2003. Kerry and Edwards missed a lot of votes in 2003, because they were out campaigning. When the National Journal looked at their lifetime voting records, both Senators were in the middle of the Democratic pack. Here are the ten most liberal Democratic senators currently serving, according to the National Journal:

1. Mark Dayton, D-Minn. 2. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md.
3. Jack Reed, D-R.I.
4. Jon Corzine, D-N.J.
5. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
6. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
7. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa
8. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.
9. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J.
10. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt

When Republicans say that Kerry was ranked as the most liberal Senator, that’s an extremely misleading claim, but it’s technically true (for one year, according to one publication). When Cheney said that the ranking applied for 20 years of Kerry’s service, that’s not even technically true.

It’s fun to see Jon Stewart humiliate Rep. Henry Bonilla on this issue (the video is on the right). It’s not nearly as fun to realize that Kerry’s opponents get away with it constantly in front of professional journalists.

P.S. Googlebomb for most liberal senator. Pass it on.

Bounty hunting

The Onion TechCentralStation on unleashing the power of the free market to capture Osama Bin Laden. Priceless!

Only good news, please

The Allawi government’s decision to ban Al-Jazeera has received a lot of attention. Rather less has been paid to a subsequent announcement of a wide range of rules to be applied by the new Higher Media Commission. Prominent among them is a prohibition of “unwarranted criticism” of Allawi himself. This was reported in Australia’s Financial Review and also in the Financial Times (both subscription only) and also in a number of Arab and antiwar papers, but not in any of the general mainstream press.

For those inclined to a “slippery slope” view of censorship, this is certainly a case study.

Here’s a protest letter from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

How many troops does Sadr have, exactly?

Another entry in my occasional role as co-ordinator of the Campaign For Real Body Counts; grateful for any comments that might help me make sense of these numbers:

As recently as the April uprising, the Sadrite Al-Mahdi militia was estimated by Iraqi experts to be between 3,000 and 10,000 strong, with the Pentagon suggesting that the hard core of fighters could be as small as 1,000.

In the May offensive against Sadr in Najaf and Karbala, it was once more credibly estimated that 1,500 of the Al-Mahdi Army were killed (note that this reference suggests that, as of the beginning of May, only 1,000-2,000 of the militia were located in or around the city of Najaf).

In the more recent episodes of fighting, official sources have told us that the Najaf branch of Sadr’s forces have taken a further 300 casualties, and lost a further 1200 men captured or surrendered.

So to recap … a force which was meant to have only 1,000 serious fighters, has had 1,800 of them killed and continues to fight on. Sadr had about 2,000 fighters in Najaf, has lost 3,000 of them and continues to fight¹. Something doesn’t add up (or to put it another way, nothing does add up). Either:

• original estimates substantially underestimated the size of Sadr’s forces, or
• we have substantially overestimated the amount of Sadr’s force which has been neutralised, or
• Sadr has managed to recruit very substantial amounts of force indeed over the last three months.

To be honest, each of these three possibilities looks as bad to me as each of the others. Someone wake me up when it finally becomes acceptable to make comparisons to Vietnam.

Footnote:
¹ Even allowing for the likelihood that the Najaf militia would have been reinforced after May from Sadrite forces elsewhere in the country, I still can’t get this one to pass the laugh test. I’d also note that the 1,500 figure refers to Sadrite casualties in the whole of Iraq and probably shouldn’t be conflated with the Najaf figure of 300, but the qualitative conclusion is unlikely to be affected.

Another Green World

I’ve just finished Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love, which I recommend very highly; it’s the best novel she’s ever written. Her earlier work is sometimes extraordinary (if you can find a copy of Winterlong, buy it without hesitating) but it’s never quite under control - one has the impression of an artist struggling with her materials and every once in a while being overwhelmed by them. She’s overcome this in her recent shorter work - in particular “Cleopatra Brimstone,” and The Least Trumps. Both these stories have a technical mastery that was only sporadically present in her early work. They’re acute and sharp.

Mortal Love repeats this success at novel length. It has a wealth of materials - Richard Dadd (lightly disguised), Pre-Raphaelites, Henry Darger style outsider art - but handles them with style, grace and economy.

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Two men enter, one man leaves

So I wander for no particular reason to Hugh Hewitt’s blog and he’s quoting an approving review of his new book from the print edition of the National Review.

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Bush Accepts Democratic Talking Point

Seriously -

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Bush said Friday he opposes the use of a family history at colleges or universities as a factor in determining admission.

Bush stated his position [sic] to what’s known as “legacy” in response to a question during a Washington forum for minority journalists called Unity 2004.

He was asked, “Colleges should get rid of legacy?”

Bush responded, “Well I think so, yes. I think it ought to be based upon merit.”

…

Prominent civil rights leaders have also called for an end to the legacy practice, as have some Democrats — including vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards.

From the same article:

While Bush clearly stated his opposition to quotas, he also suggested that he was not opposed to affirmative action.

But he didn’t explain what the distinction was.

“I support college affirmatively taking action to get more minorities in their school,” Bush said as the audience laughed.

No explanation given for why they were laughing.

More idling

Further to my last post on idling , I see via Limited, Inc. that the French electricity company EDF are disciplining an employee (an economist who also happens to be a Lacanian psychoanalyst … only in France!) who has written a book — Bonjour Paresse — on how to skive at work. The Belfast Telegraph offers some top tips :

Skiving off is such an ugly expression. Much more preferable are terms such as ‘zero-tasking’ or ‘enabling real-time back-end utilisation’. For those interested in how to zero-task successfully, here are five hot tips:

1. Never walk down a corridor without a a document in your hands. People with documents in their hands look like hard-working employees heading for an important meeting.

2. Make sure you carry home lots of documents at night. This gives the impression you work much harder than you do.

3. Use your computer to look busy. Try www.IShouldBeWorking.com or www.BoredAtWork.com for entertainment. The I Should Be Working site has a neat panic button that instantly transfers you to a more business-like page with one click.

4. Build huge piles of documents around your workspace as only top management can get away with a clean desk. Last year’s work looks just like this year’s - volume counts.

5. If you have voicemail on your phone, don’t answer it. Let the callers leave a message. Try to return the calls when you know the callers aren’t there. In the end they’ll try to find a solution that doesn’t involve you.

Competing narratives

I assume that everyone reads Juan Cole , but if not, they should. Belle linked the other day to his coverage of the burned double agent story. But, of course, he is best know for his continuing coverage of Iraq. One popular narrative has the current Iraqi government as the harbingers of peace and democracy, impeded in their efforts by ex-Baathists, Al Qaida, the Mehdi Army, the Iranians, etc, and therefore fully justified in using all the force at their disposal to establish order. If I read Cole correctly there is another, competing story, the credibility of which is bolstered by the arrest warrants against the Chalabis (including the one in charge of Saddam’s trial). Namely that Allawi and his allies are using their position, and their access to US and allied firepower, to crush their competitors for political power. The distinction between these narratives is somewhat blurred, of course, by the fact that the current objects of repressive or judicial action are or include very many people who are indeed rogues, gangsters, fanatics, etc. Still, I wouldn’t bet my house on the first version, in which Allawi and co will turn out to have been the good guys, there will be genuinely competitive elections, the righteous will flourish and the unjust will be punished, and so on.

CT/Old Media Synergy

Timberite and internet expert Eszter Hargittai is quoted in this interesting Washington Post article about improving access to the internet in low-income, urban communities. People are setting up Wi-Fi accounts which can be shared by a number of families. Cool stuff.