From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Bogus flashback episode

This letter is worth re-reading three years later as we try to figure out what the candidates will do if elected.

What should we do about a repressive regime?

Option 1) Military Aid. Obviously wrong. We are providing the weapons that kill the innocent. See Israel, Turkey, Columbia, Reagan-era Iraq, etc.

Option 2) Economic Aid. Wrong. We are financially propping up the regime. See Egypt, Indonesia, etc.

Option 3) Humanitarian Aid. Still Wrong. By relieving the regime of its financial duty to feed its people, we free up their money for military uses. See Afghanistan, where the US supported the Taliban by providing $43 million in humanitarian aid in exchange for the Taliban not exporting Heroin, thus sacrificing 12 million women to the alter of the failed War on Drugs.

Option 4) Trade / Constructive Engagement. Wrong. This is merely an excuse for US corporations to profit off of the regime's repression of its own people. See China and Reagan-era South Africa.

Option 5) Economic Sanctions. Wrong. The economic sanctions in Iraq have killed 6,000 people a month for the past 11 years, or nearly 800,000 victims of US foreign policy.

Option 6) Military Attack. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! See every military conflict that the United States has every engaged in. (Caveat: There may be a possible exception for the US Civil War, which will be considered obviously justified if you are talking to any white person born in the former Confederacy.)

Option 7) The Prime Directive. Wrong. It is intolerable for the most powerful nation in history to sit by and do nothing while thousands die. It probably stems from a racist lack of concern for people of color of persons of other religions. See Rwanda, Bosnia (not to be confused with Kosovo, which falls under Option 6, above).

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Personal notes

Thanks so much to everyone who sent condolences. I want to get personal responses out, but I leave for the funeral tomorrow, and I have to get everything at work in order before I go. Please know how much I appreciated the kind words and prayers.

On a related note, I have somehow lost all the email that was sent to me between 4AM on Saturday and 6 am Monday morning. If you sent me an email on Saturday or Sunday at my "janegalt -at- janegalt" address, please send it again, as I never saw it.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Looking for hot protest action?

Don't come downtown. I walked a circuit from Ground Zero to the Stock Exchange at lunch. There's nothing going on here. Federal Hall, where somebody's protesting on any decent day has only Falun Gong and the Police. There are also five colorfully dressed people on Broadway and Liberty performing some sort of skit about asbestos. I have some pictures, but they aren't worth the bandwidth.

UPDATE: "what do we want?"

mumblemumblewatermelonrutabaga

"when do we want it?"

"Now!"

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

A wrap-up

I dined last night with my co-blogger, the first time we had spoken face-to-face in about a year. She prepared a delicious meal for the assembled company, including "Jim", Tim Blair, Roger Simon, Amy Langfield, Mickey Kaus, Walter Olson, Matt Welch, Julian Sanchez and Rick Bruner and assorted spouses/partners. Unfortunately, in the middle of dinner Megan received notice (somewhat expected, I gather) of her Grandfather's passing. We cleaned up a bit and a small detachment ambled to a local watering hole.

I had a walk through Central Park on the way over and compared notes with Julian on protest activities. We both agreed that Central Park was a non-event (I have pictures to prove it). I did see several women wearing 'axis of eve' shirts, and if I never ever get flashed by this sample I will be a happy man. Ye Gawds. Where are the really good-looking people getting naked for the cause? On the other hand, if the object was to get women to talk about their genitalia, mission accomplished!. Every third tee shirt had a Bush pun. "My Bush would make a better President" is the most popular. Hey guys, try that at a party! Walk up to the nearest lady and suggest that perhaps their privates would make a good President. Or insult them by saying even their pubic region would make a better President. Or just sing Hail to the Chief!

While we're at it, why are the communists out in force? As Roger pointed out, the protests still have a retro feel. This particular movement hasn't found its own voice yet. Bush/Cheney hatred isn't enough. "U.S. out of Najeef(sic)", as I heard on the broadcast of the mock war-crimes trials Thursday night, definitely isn't enough.

Julian did tell me a funny story about passers-by mistaking "Librarians Against Bush" for "Libertarians Against Bush". He also spent much of the evening entertaining us with textmobs alerts from his cellphone - "200 at Alice Tully Hall, no arrests yet, need more people!"

Amy is starting a travel website soon, so stay tuned. Kaus professed to be convinced on the virtues of liability caps by Walter (we'll see) and Roger Simon, Walter Olson and I shared stories of Yale alums of our acquaintance who knew John Kerry personally (he was not popular, from this sampling). Welch is on for the convention, seeking 'conflict' hopefully, as relief from the tedium of Boston.

I bought a round of drinks for several of the after-party crowd, but Julian was the only one who caught on, ordering himself a $9 single malt (Lagavulin). Cokes, cranberry with seltzer and white wine for the others. Just my speed, I'm afraid.

I sometimes feel a bit of a fish out of water with the heavy duty blogger/press types, but that's a good thing. I value the growing friendships emerging from this activity. I wish Matt didn't live on the Left Coast. Perhaps Amy and I can lure him East.

Send your condolences to my good co-blogger.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Hey you, get off my lawn

I offer the following in the full knowledge that our comment threads are among the best in the blogosphere and include an unusually large proportion of polite argument. Thanks for that.

Reading about Steven Den Beste's blog fatigue I have to say I am completely sympathetic. While I enjoy our comments section most of the time, I think if I had it to do over again I might well have a blog with no comments and no listed email. If someone wants to nitpick they can bloody well get their own blog and the refers or trackbacks will be my guide.

We have a few comment-terriers who only come to put their mark on our posts. They will pick some detail of the post and scoff, or pronounce how we are not qualified, or offer that 'you obviously don't understand the statistics' or 'you obviously aren't well-versed in the subject'. One wonders why they bother, until you see that these comments are designed to make the commenter feel a little better about him/herself. One of them ridiculed Jane for not having read an essay that turned out to support her argument (guess he hadn't either). I remember another series of posts where I took the time to clarify a lot of facts to satisfy commenters' objections, and our terrier finally claimed that a rhetorical flourish I used at the end of a post invalidated all the prior detail. Sometimes they check in just to climb on top of the other commenters and assert dominance.

Given the density of Steven's posts and his willingness to contradict polite 'conventional wisdom', I suspect it is one hundred times worse for him.

Many of us post in our very limited spare time and move on to something else. It should be only a small annoyance when one returns to a nitpick (relevant or not), even if it is dripping with self-serving rhetorical condescension. Mosquitoes are small and relatively harmless, but when one whines in your ear at night it can provoke a rage, or at least make you hit yourself in the head. (straighten out your metaphors, insect or canine? - Ed.)

I notice that Steven has a much higher tolerance for criticism when it is posted elsewhere. He usually links to it at the bottom of his posts. For some reason when people respond on their own blogs it just seems more conversational. (except for the occasional '-watcher' blog) Even my infamous run-in with the hysterical Justin Raimondo and his dogs of anti-war ( a 'Perfect Horror', he called me, the subject matter sailing freely over his head) didn't bother me as much. Actually, I had a lot of fun with it, and I ultimately came by my ugly-duckling pseudonym courtesy of one of his readers:

"Dare you to post [this comment] MINDLES HEDONIST DRECK"

Dare?

When you receive an email, or a comment appears on your site it just seems to demand response. A 'last word' mentality kicks in, or at least a resentment at being told what to do with your time. I have had a lengthy email correspondence with an elderly British gentleman who writes only to say how horribly screwed up everything is and demand that I cheer him up. Ultimately, I just stopped responding, refusing to supply the Dr. Pangloss he seeks. Similarly, I try not to let commenters tell me what to think and write about the next time I set aside a few moments. I'm succeeding only by not posting at all. Long ago I also stopped leaving comments on other blogs, except the occasional cheer.

On the other hand, these days I'm getting home between 9-10PM and still getting up at 5:00AM. There's more to do at work than I can possibly handle. By the end of the week I'm so sleep deprived I could get annoyed at anything.

I remember Ken Layne once blurting out "Hey you kids, get off my lawn!" in the middle of a post referencing me. I think I know what he meant.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Swift and true?

I haven't been making much out of the Swift Vets controversy, because frankly, who cares? His silver star and bronze star stories seem to have the weight of evidence on his side, and I think lying about a fellow war vet's record in order to keep him from office is a pretty scurrilous thing to do. I'm suspicious of the number of people on both sides who seem to have such crystal clear recollection of events that happened thirty years ago, when I can't even remember what I was doing last week. And who among us hasn't felt the temptation to . . . er . . . enrich a story? It's a minor and quite forgiveable sin, along the lines of leaving the toilet seat up. The problem is, Mr Kerry gave into that temptation in the press, and now his Cambodia tale seems to have caught him out, desperate flailing by Democratic journalists notwithstanding.

Moreover, I don't really care what Mr Kerry did, or did not do, when he was 24. I shudder to think about my destiny, if my career prospects in my seventh decade are to be decided based on my behaviour as a slip of a girl. To be fair, John Kerry has rather brought this on himself, by insisting that we focus on his four months in Vietnam and ignore the other 99.99% of his life. But the people who see inflating war stories -- or even involving himself with an ill-conceived protest movement with some unsavoury members -- as some unforgiveable moral failing . . . well, I think you'll have to stop reading this blog. I think I may have done both on the same day, back in college. Yes, my dears, I once was young, with the characteristic desire for dramatic importance in my life.

But I digress.

Actually, the original point of this post was that while I am horrified by neither the Swift Vets, nor their allegations (except if they're lying, which I don't have enough information to make up my mind about), I think the newest piece of news is going to hurt Kerry rather badly. A liberal friend who's been following the story closely has made much of the fact that the two people who have emerged so far after the ads were released, who are aligned with neither the Kerry campaign nor the Swift Vets, have both supported Kerry's stories. Well, now another non-aligned person has emerged, and he's delivered a rather crushing blow to the story about Kerry's purple heart. Far worse, from Kerry's point of view, is that he's a bleedin' retired admiral. As the New York Post summarizes:

Schachte said that Kerry:

* Wasn't wounded by hostile fire.

* Wasn't even under fire by the enemy.

* "Nicked" himself with a grenade launcher and "requested a Purple Heart" afterward.

If Schachte's version is accurate, Kerry would not have been eligible for the award, the first of the three Purple Hearts he received.

Max Boot's commentary in the LA Times yesterday is directly on point. Kerry is already seen as a political opportunist. The story of his service record can be neatly told to bolster that claim: he joined the navy only after his draft deferment was denied. Requested service in Vietnam in the safest gig their was, the Swift boat coastal patrol, only to have the massive bad luck of having their mandate changed to dangerous river patrols before he reported for duty. Once there, he claimed purple hearts for every scratch, and bugged out as quickly as humanly possible. He then sold out his former comrades-in-arms by accusing them of war crimes as a stepping stone to office. He is now trying to win office based on the medals he pretended to throw away when that was politically convenient. He cares about nothing except his own career.

I don't say that that is an accurate story of his service, mind you. But it is one that his opponents can plausibly tell, because the facts in it are broadly true. And it gets much, much worse if he, as is becoming more credible, claimed a purple heart he wasn't entitled to, and then turned around and used the "three hearts" rule to get out of the service. The story then goes from mere opportunism to fraud. A mild and understandable fraud, to be sure, and if he hadn't made his war record so central, one that I'm pretty sure the voters would overlook, given the war record of his opponent and predecessor. But if he indeed did lie to get a medal, it's a lie that he's actively continuing today. And I'm pretty sure the voters won't like that very much.

Update: The plot thickens.

Update II: Tom Maguire says he's not quite as non-partisan as he's making out.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

War for Oil

This view is available from the PATH station at Ground Zero.

Here's a detail:

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Stop the world, I want to get off

Profanity is too weak. No, no, I can't describe it. You'll have to see for yourself.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

I Heart Surowiecki

James Surowiecki, guest-blogging at Marginal Revolution, on the Google IPO and the IPO price setting process, which for the past fifteen years, at least, has involved a level of insider collusion that would make a horse-race-fixer blush:

But the offering was also a success for another reason, which is that it forced institutional investors to compete, for once, on a level playing field. The problem with the current IPO system isn't just that companies end up leaving billions of dollars on the table when they go public, but that select mutual-fund and hedge-fund managers (as well as well-connected individuals) are handed what amounts to free money. In a traditional IPO, the investment bank underwriting the offering controls the allocation of shares. In the late 1990s in particular, that allocation process became a way of doling out favors and securing future business. For instance, if you were a mutual-fund manager who funneled a lot of trades through an investment bank -- or who agreed to do so -- then you were more likely to get a hefty allocation of IPO shares.

This made money managers look a lot smarter than they were -- even if you set the bubble aside, there are lots of fund managers whose returns from the late nineties need an asterisk next to them -- and it wrecked the price-setting process, since there was no real attempt to let the price reflect the real demand for a stock. It also sabotaged one of the best things about capital markets, which is that in theory they aggregate the opinions of anyone with enough capital and enough risk tolerance to participate, and not just the opinions of those with the right connections. (There should be no velvet ropes in capital markets: if you can pay, you can play.) Google turned all this around: the only way to get shares in the Dutch auction was to do the valuation work and make a reasonable bid. The traditional IPO relies on the power of cronyism. Google's IPO, flawed as it was, relied on the power of markets. Bad for the Street, good for everyone else.

Mr Surowiecki, you may guest blog for us any time.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Marriage minded

I've been doing a lot of research on poverty and inequality recently, and one of the major factors behind both turns out to be having kids out of wedlock.

{Note: I so do not want to hear from liberals calling me judgemental, or a "closet social conservative" for using the term "out of wedlock". I have no moral feelings about whehter other people marry, or not. I myself am not married, and do not feel that this is a moral failing on my part. I am interested in the social question of the results, not the moral question of whether one should, or should not, reproduce without the aid of a long-term committment from both parties. I use the terms "out of wedlock" and "failure to marry" because they are succinct, not because I think that women who have children without first marrying the fathers are jezebels who should be ridden out of town on a rail. 'Kay?}

In a world of two-income families, single-income families are, ceteris paribus, going to tend to fall lower down on the earnings scale. And when the role of bread-winner and primary care-giver are combined in a single person, the effect is vastly more powerful, because properly caring for children makes it much more difficult to succeed at a full time job.

{Yes, my liberal interlocutors, even in places with marvelous state-provided day care, because state-provided day care centers, like the private kind, will not take in a child who is sick, out of the very reasonable fear that they will infect the other children. Having only one parent, instead of two, simply makes it harder to deal with the recurrent crises that seem to my, non parenting, eyes, to be the principle feature of parenthood.}

Single-parent families also seem to predispose the children towards poverty, and other problems. Having only one biological parent in the house is correlated with problems no matter what your income level, but of course it is worse if you are poor, and lack the financial and social resources to help your kids weather their problems. And you are much more likely to be poor if you are never married (and thus probably get little in the way of child support) than if you were married, and are now divorced or widowed.

Thus, Bush's marriage promotion initiative, which I confess, I was much more skeptical about before I did the research and saw just how powerful an effect having kids out of wedlock has on the lives of both mothers and children. To cite just one statistic, a Brookings report estimates that if families currently in poverty got married before they had children, it would cut the poverty rate from 13% to 9.5%. Welfare benefits would have to more than triple before they could achieve a similar reduction. I still don't think that the marriage promotion initiative is going to work, but I appreciate the motive more than I did.

But many of the women heading single households would love to get married -- it's just that there don't seem to be any very good candidates. I recently read an advance copy of Jason DeParle's absolutely stunning book American Dream, which follows three women through the welfare system, and then out of it as welfare reform took place. I highly recommend it to every one of my readers: it's a beautifully nuanced account of the lives of women in the welfare system. Of all the surprising observations in the book, this was perhaps the most heart-rending: at the age of 35, not one of the three women had ever been to a wedding.

Jason DeParle goes more deeply into that problem in a terrific new article in the New York Times:

The evidence is on his side: mounds of social science, from the left and the right, leave little doubt that the children of single-parent families face heightened risks. Kids can overcome it, and they do all the time, but for someone growing up poor, having just one parent amounts to a double dose of disadvantage. A generation ago, the effects of family structure were the subject of much greater dispute; now several large data sets give contemporary scholars an empirical edge. ''Growing Up With a Single Parent,'' a 1994 book by the sociologists Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, remains a definitive text.

In our opinion, the evidence is quite clear: Children who grow up in a household with only one biological parent are worse off, on average, than children who grow up in a household with both of their biological parents, regardless of the parents' race or educational background. . . . [They] are twice as likely to drop out of high school, twice as likely to have a child before age 20 and one and a half times as likely to be ''idle'' -- out of school and out of work -- in their late teens and early 20's.

They are also more likely to commit crimes. As for why kids usually benefit from having a stable father at home, there are multiple theories, and Ken seems to have mulled over them all. There's a second income that fathers generally bring and a second set of hands. There's the added stake that live-in fathers tend to feel they have in their children. There's emotional bonding. There's discipline. ''I feel like every kid should have a father in his life,'' Ken said. ''Someone to play that manly role, to give them that loud voice when they need it, to show them discipline, throw a football -- all that.'' There's also what sociologists call ''social capital,'' the network of worldly connections that fathers can bequeath. That's a role that leaves Ken particularly wistful. As a high-school linebacker with a vicious hit, he received some letters of interest from college recruiters, which fell by the wayside at home. He has never shed the sense that in another life, with the help of a father, he might have gone on to college and even the pros. Instead, a few weeks after graduating from high school, Ken started selling crack, and father-absence took a more intimate toll. Ken started feuding with his mother's boyfriend, and the boyfriend shot him in the testicles.

Ken's childhood neighborhood offers another look at the risks of fatherlessness. A stronghold of the Gangster Disciples, stocked with guns and drugs, Jeffrey Manor, in the southeastern corner of Chicago, sounds like a familiar pocket of urban poverty. But it wasn't poor: the poverty rate in Ken's census tract, 10 percent, was 2 points below the national average. Nine of 10 families owned their own homes. Indeed, the only lens through which the Manor seemed ''at risk'' was in the abundance of single-parent families. According to the 1980 census, a third of the neighborhood kids were being raised by single parents, twice the United States average. Writing in 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, America's prophet of family decline, warned that a ''community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority . . . asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder . . . that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable.'' That's pretty much how Ken nostalgically describes the block. ''You come to the neighborhood with your hat the wrong way, I'm kicking some butt,'' he said.

There's clearly a subculture in our society for which the marriage ethos -- the social pressure on women, and particularly on men, to get married, or be in a long term relationship that looks in all important respects very like marriage -- has been destroyed.

My own time in the inner city leaves me with some sympathy for what the Bush plan is trying to achieve. Inner-city kids want and need dads, and while marriage is no panacea (Ken's parents were married), stable marriages are the surest way to provide them. Expanding economic opportunity is clearly a big part of the solution, but probably not the answer in whole, given the hurdles to fatherhood and marriage posed by community norms. Wanting to marry only when you can do it on a tropical beach is like wanting to work only when you can start at $100,000 a year -- that is, not to want it in any meaningful sense. Even as teenagers, Jewell's and Angie's kids talk of wanting kids someday, but dismiss marriage out of hand. ''That'd be too plain -- like you'd have to see the same woman every day,'' Jewell's son Tremmell said. Angie's son DeVon, who is 16, said, ''I need some little me's''- children. But, he added, ''I just can't see myself being with one woman.'' One lesson of the 90's -- from the declines in smoking and teenage pregnancy to the plunging welfare rolls -- is that cultural signals matter, so even public-education campaigns aren't to be dismissed out of hand.

Poor women want to get married just as much as middle class women do, but the social environment they live in just doesn't seem to enable it. Marriage seems to be better for everyone, but can the institution regenerate itself? And if not, what can? Predictibly, I don't expect any government campaign to amount to much -- the government is best at writing checks, not changing people, and besides, my skin gets all crawly when the government starts telling people how to live. But what then?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Unmoderated?

So I'm googling around trying to find out what happened to Josh Marshall's teaser 'big scoop' of some time ago, and I find this comment, which I will not reprint here. Lovely- here's 'hoping', Sicko.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Double Take

The bumper stickers read:

• W '04
  
• Vote Libertarian
  
• Bill Spadea
  
• Dump Daschle
  

Needless to say you don't often find this combination, let alone on an old Volvo in my rabidly Democrat town. When I raised funds door-to-door for Greenpeace* a Volvo in the driveway was a sure $50, maybe more.

I only had a second to get this shot. Apologies for the bad focus, as well as the sloppy license obfuscation.

*Yeah, yeah. Did you know we kept 30%?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Notice

Have I mentioned that Dr Manhattan is back? And better than ever, I must say. Go Yankees!

Also, those who have been visiting my new website, Unpopular Culture took, er, a sort of unplanned hiatus. But I've made up for it by posting all the chapters I missed, and you should cruise over now to catch up if you got discouraged.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Blegging

Hey, liberal readers! A while back, there was a meme going around the liberal blogs to the effect that a ridiculous proportion of Americans think they are in the top 10% of income earners. Can someone point me to either an entry about it, or the poll itself? I'm on a tight deadline, and my undying gratitude goes out to the person who finds it for me.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

They blinded me with science

Stunning flash of insight from a scientific study:

Children who start toilet training at an older age. . . are more likely to be late toilet trainers, according to a study of nearly 400 youngsters.

Stand by for studies proving that people who drive fast get more speeding tickets!