Howzzat again? Llareggolb (it's a palindrome, not a Lovecraftian deity) spots a revealing typo in a lawyer-to-client communique. No comments necessary. (Via Howard Bashman)

 
Lost and ... TRR and The Russian Beauty link to the unique FOUND Magazine, which is a clearinghouse for notable pieces of found art: notes, photos, and other detrital fragments of anonymous lives.

Vaguely related: the stunning, albeit overlong, Decasia.

 
Oh, that Fourth Estate: Max Sawicky takes note of an interesting letter from a WaPo reporter on the Administration's fine-grained media control. (The letter is titled "It's time to change the rules of WH reporting," about a third of the way down the page as it currently stands.) The letter deserves lengthy excerpting:

I was working on a profile of the now-departed chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, R. Glenn Hubbard. I dutifully went through the White House press office to talk to an administration economist about Hubbard's tenure, and a press office aide helpfully got me in touch with just the person I wanted. The catch was this: The interview would be off the record. Any quotes I wanted to put into the newspaper would have to be e-mailed to the press office. ...

Since the profile focused on Hubbard's efforts to translate relatively arcane macroeconomic theory into public policy, the quote I wanted referenced the president's effort to end the double taxation of dividends: "This is probably the most academic proposal ever to come out of an administration." The press office said it was fine, but the official wanted a little change. Instead, the quote was to read, "This is probably the purest, most far reaching economic proposal ever to come out of an administration." I protested that the point of the quote was the word "academic," so the quote was again amended to state, "This is probably the purest, most academic, most far reaching economic proposal ever to come out of an administration."

What appeared in the Washington Post was, "This is probably the purest, most academic ... economic proposal ever to come out of an administration." What followed was an angry denunciation by the White House press official, telling me I had broken my word and violated journalistic ethics.

I had, of course, violated journalistic ethics, by placing into quotation marks a phrase that was never uttered by the source, ellipses or no ellipses.

The article (which quotes the blog of inestimable economist -- hey, isn't that an oxymoron? -- Brad DeLong) is here.

 
It's deadly. Laugh. Tenured twit alert -- as always, our good friends at Duke University's Social Text manage to post-erize anything they can get their hands on. Even bioterror can't escape their gimlet relativism:

What's most real about the anthrax hoaxes is the way the vast majority of Americans failed to see them as pranks. Under the pall of terror, we canceled comedy. Minutes before the attacks, we were laughing along with Molly Ivins over our president's malapropisms. Seconds later, we became grimly straitlaced. Gone were satire, the mainstay of left and liberal criticism, and irony, commonplace of the postmodern condition: even sarcasm, bitter pill of the postpunk generation. ... This was the climate that gave birth to the anthrax hoaxes. With all avenues to humor foreclosed, dreadful but innocent white powder began appearing on desktops and doorknobs. A rumor, a whisper, a doubt, it sifted out of our mail even while we enthusiastically waved our flags. In a climate of fundamentalism where criticism is equated with terrorism, and all forms of terror are equally absolute, we failed to grasp the prank as symbolic act. Lost was the possibility of seeing in the prank all the petty and profound dissatisfactions that inform daily life. Lost was the occasion of reading the prank as symptomatic expression for suppressed criticism and realizing that thousands of disaffected Americans used the prank to voice what could not be said.

Willis, Susan. "Anthrax 'R' Us" Social Text, 20(4):19-28

 
You'll get my gun when you pry one from his cold, dead fingers: Tim Noah at Slate asks, "If there are so many guns in Iraq, why is it still a dictatorship?" A good question, but the answer sheds more light on the culture of Iraq than on "[t]he basic Jeffersonian idea ... that you never know when you'll need to organize a militia against your government."

A popular uprising against an authoritarian government is a coordination game: no single actor can unilaterally pull off a revolt -- and the price for acting alone is, at best, a swift death. (At worst, you get left to Uday Hussein's tender mercies.)

Yes, individual Iraqis may be armed, and (unlike most nations) they may even have firearms equivalent to local military-issue. But the government has something the citizens lack, namely, a command-and-control structure, whereas Iraqis live in constant terror of the Mukhabarat, a paranoia fed by a culture of spies, moles, informants and surveillance. Even the military, often a reliable source for a coup in such situations, is paralyzed; Saddam has created a series of concentric organizations that watch each other with suspicious eye and ready rifle. Not particularly effective at fighting a war, but pretty good at quelling potential malcontents.

So, as long as individual actors believe that the state can muster more forces to crush them than they can to resist them, revolution will remain unlikely -- you can't use the bullet without the bullhorn. The repressive social environment of Iraq almost ensures that potential plotters will stay out of contact with each other and, since neither we nor our allies have any kind of substantial human intelligence presence in Iraq, it seems very unlikely that we can provide the kind of connections between groups necessary to spark a revolt.

Hussein knows that his people would kill him if they could, and certainly he's aware that an armed population could be almost as dangerous as a determined American battalion. But as long as he controls the machinery of fear, he isn't arming a populace -- just a single person at a time.

 
How I learned to start worrying: Find your own weapons of mass destruction in Dr. Strangeblix (Flash required, courtesy of William Sjostrom of AtlanticBlog).

 
No such thing as a free lunch, part 87: An article in the current issue of Demography finds that adolescents (though not younger children) whose families receive welfare have lower educational attainments than comparable adolescents in non-welfare-receiving families. The study says:

For the whole-childhood model, the fixed-effect estimate suggests that one more year of exposure to welfare [during adolescence] reduces the probability of high school graduation by .037, relative to the mean probability of .80. (The corresponding reduction is .020 for the cross-sectional model.) Given that the average number of years on welfare in the full individual sample is 0.85, parental welfare receipt is associated with a reduction in the probability of graduation of .03 (.037 × .85). For children who were ever exposed to welfare, the impact is much larger. The predicted reduction in the probability of graduation is .241 (.037 × 6.5 years) relative to children who never experienced welfare.

The study is especially interesting inasmuch as it controls for both income and unobservable family characteristics (by comparing siblings), so it's about as close to a "pure" model as we're likely to see in the near future. (This doesn't mean it comes without caveats; the benefits of raising family income via welfare, the paper notes, may sufficiently countervail the negative effects of receiving welfare so as to nullify them; the authors also caution that "parental welfare receipt during these periods may reflect more serious transitory adversity than welfare during early childhood. Fixed-effect estimation using a sibling sample removes a bias that is due to persistent unobserved disadvantages of welfare families, but not unobserved transitory ones.")

Ku, Inhoe and Robert Plotnick. "Do children from welfare families obtain less education?" Demography, 40(1):151-170

If you have MUSE access, you can find the current Demography here; the working-paper version of the article, open to the public, is here.

 
San Jacinto on the Euphrates: Atlantic Monthly editor Sage Stossel interviews author and NRO contributor Richard Brookhiser on decision-making in the Bush White House: morality, Manicheanism, and "mean streaks." An interesting note is the President's identification with and inspiration from the great Texan Sam Houston (which serves to prove the President's Texan bona fides to me).

Should you be inclined to war, there's a curious historical parallel here that perhaps the White House has taken note of. There are two "fathers of Texas," Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin. Of the two, Houston is the more interesting, yet more problematic man; he was easily angered, a former drunk, and often petty in his dealings with others, but also a man of strong moral vision, a youth who chose to live amongst the Cherokee, a slaveowner who freed his slaves when it was illegal to do so, and a Southern politician who lost his office when he refused to swear an oath to the Confederacy. (Houston's relationship with his slaves was unique: they were educated, could live with their own families, and earned their own money. One of Houston's former slaves, Joshua Houston, was a Reconstruction officeholder, prominent Republican delegate, and founder of Bishop Ward College. Austin, on the other hand, privately deplored slavery but never let his misgivings color his public life.)

It was Houston's rallying of the troops following the massacre at Goliad, and his relentless pursuit of Santa Anna to the famed denouement at San Jacinto that made possible the creation of Texas. For all his faults, Houston's dedication and decisiveness created Texas anew. By contrast, Austin's preference for working with liberal factions in Mexico City over fighting for Texas independence have made him a paragon of muddled moderation -- perhaps, one might say, the forefather of the multilateralists in today's debate.

It is irresistable to think that Bush's identification with Houston has made him aware of the value of decisiveness and steadfastness in parlous times. Austin's attempts to convince Mexico City to keep the Texan colonists' interests in mind, even when it cost him his liberty, were admirable, but futile; it took a daring, and indeed reckless, Sam Houston to strike for Texan freedom.

Goliad on one side, San Jacinto on the other. As always, the bold court possibility and peril alike.

 
Warm up those electric sheep: A staple of modern philosophy is the question of what would happen if your brain was replaced, one neuron at a time, by computer chips that performed the exact same function -- in other words, just where does that (epi)phenomenon called "consciousness" lie? Now, USC researchers are preparing trials for just that sort of gedankenexperiment: an artificial brain. (A better article is here.)

Whether this technology can scale to something more complex than a rat is still an open question, though. I'm far beyond my competencies in reading the various journal articles they've published on their work, but it appears that they've used nonparametric analysis to derive functions that produce outputs equivalent to those of functioning hippocampi. While an astonishing feat in any case, their techniques may not prove sensitive enough for larger neuronal systems. Perhaps, though, given enough time, we can rebuild you....

Bonus quote from the always-entertaining, rarely-enlightening New Scientist:

Any device that mimics the brain clearly raises ethical issues. The brain not only affects memory, but your mood, awareness and consciousness -- parts of your fundamental identity, says ethicist Joel Anderson at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

And here I was still banking on that spleen theory of emotions. So much for Greek philosophy!

 
All steamed up: Professor Karlson (of Cold Spring Shops) brings word of the latest crusade against immoral television: the unconscionable violence inherent to Thomas the Tank Engine.

 
Dark tidings: Dynamic Serbian leader Zoran Djindjic (pronounced Jin-jic) was assassinated today in Belgrade, with reports suggesting that a sniper from a organized crime group pulled the trigger. Most organized crime in Serbia is linked to the deposed government of Slobodan Milosevic, which used (and often created) them to carry out the dirty, and nominally illegal, work of ethnic cleansing. Although details are still sketchy, this portends dark times for Serbian democracy, which has just lost its most visible, and most promising, standard-bearer.

The new digs: One of the nice things about moving to our own server is that we can now bring you article content separate from the rest of the site; blog entries can be short and to the point (well, as much as I can be, anyway), and articles can be put on their own separate pages, like God intended them to. Graphic elements, like the one below, denote article content -- too long for the front page.

 




The Devil's Laboratory: Gray Davis apologizes for an American evil. (Article)

 
Delenda Est Carthago: To Hegel, war provided people with the ability and the incentive to rise above their parochial concerns and join together in the defense, both philosophical and martial, of their culture; to him, war had the same beneficial effect on a people corrupted by long peace as the winds did in breaking up the wrack and ruin that would otherwise befoul the sea. War also shattered the illusion that relative values of a culture were eternal and unchanging, allowing cultures to reach a point of radical punctuation, thought and culture changing in a very short time.

Now Mr. Bingely sends along word of an article at TechCentralStation that lays out the ultimate realpolitik case for war:

The criterion [for success in a war against Iraq] is, Does our action tend to make the Islamic fantasist more or less realistic in their assessment of the world? Success comes when we have created a higher degree of pragmatic realism on their part; failure comes when we have simply encouraged them in their fantasies.

In other words, to use the old Arab proverb, beat the dog and the lion will behave.

What makes the article so refreshing is its candid admission that the upcoming war is a radical break with American history, and its willingness to completely explore that possibility, without vitriol or rancor. Perhaps its best advice:

Once the world-historical magnitude of the risk is understood, it is possible for men of good will to differ profoundly over the wisdom of this or that particular response - and not only possible, but necessary. But this must be done in a climate free of pettiness and personalities: the cult of naïve cynicism - that oxymoron that characterizes so much of what passes today for intellectual sophistication - must be dismantled and as soon as possible if we are to make our response as intelligent and as creative as it must and can be. To call prudence appeasement is wrong. But to call the United States' response a bid for empire is simply silly.

 
Soundtrack for a war: Admittedly, Peggy Noonan's choice of Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble" in her optimistic piece of short fiction is as strange as ... well, as using Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" as a patriotic anthem. (Perhaps Ms. Noonan was involved in selecting theme music as well as speechwriting for the Reagan White House.) Nonetheless, Mickey Kaus seems to like the idea, calling it "suitable for tearing across the desert in an armed Humvee."

In any case, Noonan and Kaus have inspired me to look into the recesses of my iPod for a soundtrack for our endlessly-delayed war. Since Wagner's already been appropriated by another war, we'll ignore him, and start with:

Outkast, Bombs Over Baghdad (Team B Mix) Dr. Dre and Big Boi wittily, if unconvincingly, conflate the Clinton strategy on Iraq with street-level violence, using 100-MPH lyrics over a menacing background. Their terse appraisal of the Clinton Administration's pinprick escalation of missile exchanges is suitable for an Anthony Zinni or Paul Wolfowitz: "Don't pull the thang out, unless you plan to bang / Don't even bang unless you plan to hit something."

Leonard Cohen, Democracy (Due Process Mix) Worried about John Ashcroft's plan for the Constitution? Terrified that even the FISA court doesn't trust the DoJ anymore? The Bard of Montreal won't assuage those fears ("It's here the family's broken and it's here the lonely say / that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way") but he does hold out some hope that "democracy is coming to the U.S.A." Unless your county purchased electronic voting machines, that is.

Bruce Cockburn, If I Had a Rocket Launcher (Saddam the Dread Remix) Bruce Cockburn may be opposed, in a moderate way, to the war on Iraq, but his song captures the anger of a Chris Hitchens amongst the Kurds: "Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry / If I had a rocket launcher ... Some son of a bitch would die."

Paul Simon, All Around the World: Or, the Myth of Fingerprints (Total Information Awareness Mix) Between Bubble and Fingerprints, Paul Simon paints a world of terrorists and technology, of soldiers, surveillance, and hidden modes of power. Since John Poindexter has arisen from the '80s, we might as well resurrect Graceland as well.

Aaron Copeland, Fanfare for the Common Man (Any-Economic-Plan-But-Bush's Remix) Europeans who freely lambast "cowboy diplomacy" might prefer his Billy the Kid symphony instead.

 
I feel safer already: Speaking of Capozzola, he notes the brave work of Rep. Robert Ney, who "today responded to a letter circulated by U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, and ordered that 'French fries' be removed from all restaurant menus in the three House office buildings" and be replaced with 'freedom fries.' Chairman Ney directed this change, as well as the new term, 'freedom toast,' instead of 'French toast.'"

Perhaps we'll also get around to sending that pesky Statue of Liberty back to France someday, too. Plus the whole of the Louisiana Purchase.

It does seem that the Hon. Messrs. Jones and Nye have found the limit of their legislative competency, neither having a particularly distinguished record despite their careers as professional politicians. Rep. Jones of North Carolina is especially proud of his "First Flight Commemorative Coin Act of 1997," while Chairman Nye wins the economic incomprehension award by touting his attempts "to ensure that Ohio's compliance plan for federal Clean Air mandates preserved Ohio's coal jobs by encouraging the use of coal cleaning 'scrubbers,' rather than the use of [clean-burning] out of state coal." (Ney also voted to withdraw America from the WTO, against fast-track trade authority, and consistently rails against foreign imports that threaten Ohio's chronically uncompetitive integrated steel mills.)

Oddly enough, Ney does have a nuanced view of our relations with one part of the world: Iran, where he spent the pre-revolutionary years teaching English. (He remains fluent in Farsi.) Fey's H. Res 59 "expresses its heartfelt gratitude and appreciation to the courageous people of Iran for their brave expressions of support" after the 9/11 attacks, and, pace the "axis of evil" rhetoric, "urges the President to engage with and express support for the Iranian people's domestic movement for democracy and reform and their legitimate aspiration for freedom and democracy." So, one is compelled to ask, is Iran a better ally to the United States than France?

 
Di Capo? Financial journalist and bete noir of conservative pundits Jim Capozzola has sorta-kinda-"sure, why not?" floated the idea of running against GOP vet Arlen Spector (campaign slogan, "Spector: not as repulsive as Rick Santorum"). Drs. DeLong and Sawicky have weighed in on Jim's behalf, which gives him the endorsement of two more economists than the Administration's fiscal plan has. (Thank you! I'll be here all week.)