Why I PGP-Sign All My Comments

Ever since I've begun PGP-signing the comments I make on blogs other than my own, I've been receiving all sorts of negative responses from people who don't appreciate why I bother, and resent the aesthetic impression made by PGP signatures at the bottom of my comments. This post by Jay Allen ought to dispel for any doubters why I find it worthwhile to go to the trouble.

My Own Private Idiot

Over the last few days, I've been posting a great deal of helpful information both here on my site and elsewhere around the web. For a while, I was going through the Trackbacks on the Six Apart website looking for any places where I might be able to clear up confusion. Someone however, didn't seem to like what I was saying.

This person started following me around and leaving comments after mine, accusing me of attacking people on their own sites and lying on Six Apart's behalf for financial reward. Eventually, he brought it here to my blog. After going back and forth, I had had enough and lost it in Grand Jay Allen style. Of course, I should have recognized a troll for what it was, but I didn't.

Although the lying accusation was ridiculous, I wondered about the attacking part. Things have been rather stressful at times and I admit that when I get stressed or have to repeat the same thing over and over again, I can be short with people. So, I endeavored to look back over all of the places I had commented in order to apologize to anyone who I had attacked.

I didn't find one. However, what I did find was a treasure trove of comments by my troll, sometimes under different pseudonyms, quite often attacking, always vituperative and ill-mannered.

So I called him on it and banned him from commenting on my site.

The Misanthropic Doppelganger

But of course, a troll who can't engage simply gets enraged. In this case, he began posting hateful and wrong-headed comments under my name throughout the blogosphere. Most of his comments are extreme and not even close to what I espouse. He has hit many blogs and as I write this, he is still wasting his time and mine.

Normally, I would not feed the trolls, but in this case, I needed to tell people that if they see my name in their comments with rude, aggresive or hateful comments, it is most certainly not me.

"Idiot" is precisely the term to apply to individuals like the one Jay Allen mentions, and it's because the online world seems to be chock full of idiots that I now insist on signing all my comments unless the site owners have the time to waste checking that the IP address matches my usual one everytime they recieve a post under my name; it's a concession on my part to the aesthetic concerns of those who object most strongly, but even looking up IP addresses isn't perfect, as there's no guarantee that my IP address won't change (as indeed it regularly does), or even that the IP address matching any large collection of posts under my name is actually mine to begin with.

I can certainly appreciate to some extent why a lot of people get annoyed at the sight of PGP signatures at the end of comments, but any sympathy I feel in that direction is more than outweighed by my concern for my own good reputation, which I refuse to allow any malignant little cretin on the web to sully under a false guise. It is also true that not everyone will bother to verify a PGP signature anyway, and to be honest, I expect that very few people will actually take the time to do so; nevertheless, the mere fact that a message comes with one makes it easy enough to determine whether or not some comment was actually posted by me, should a reason come up for anyone to care. An additional benefit of PGP-signed comments is that a blog owner can't alter the message in the slightest without breaking the signature, so one can't get words put into one's mouth without being able to disown them.

To be honest, none of these issues with comment verification would exist were it not for the total lack of concern on the part of blog software writers for issues of identity verification, a failing shared with most software developers in other domains, I hasten to add. Had Movable Type and TypePad come with provision for PGP-signing built-in (as suggested here, for example), the aesthetic impact of signing wouldn't be an issue, and as an added benefit, comment verification would automatically be handled server-side. Instead we're presented with a "solution" that is anything but one, although it has the benefit of giving MT-users a nice warm glow inside that "something is being done!" about identity impersonation and assorted shenanigans.

One benefit of working with a GPL-based system like WordPress is that anyone with the requisite skills can always add in support for a desired feature and distribute a version with the necessary modifications, even if the new code is rejected by the maintainers of the original code. PGP-signed commenting support is definitely one feature I intend on working on for WordPress, once I've learnt my way around the current codebase.

Spam and Stupid German Regulations

This Slashdot article is a case-study in the law of unintended consequences.

"As reported on German news site Heise, the system administrators of the Technical University of Braunschweig have temporarily given up the fight against spam [NB - Article is in German]. Because of the legal obligation to deliver all mail and of the delay time exceeding critical 5 days(!), they decided to switch off all filter mechanisms. Before, the 20 servers dedicated to processing e-mail alone had been breaking down under a load of 100000 unprocessed mail messages, ca. 98% of which had been spam or viruses. ... A similar e-mail jam occurred recently at the IT central of the German Federal Government.

This is the sort of idiocy that comes of legislators leaping to regulate everything under the sun, without any thought in mind that technological change or some unforeseen development might ever render their policies obsolete. In point of fact, the German legislation in place is such a stinker that even the delivery of viruses is a legal obligation! I bet no Bundestag representative ever imagined the dandy new legislation he or she was voting for would some day serve as such a boon to online criminals around the world.

What's most pathetic about this development is that all it would take to get rid of most of the spam Braunschweig TU is receiving would be the combination of a subscription to a real-time blacklist like SPEWS and a server-side filter like SpamAssassin or SpamBayes. Instead cash-strapped German educational institutions are forced to bear unnecessary costs in terms of additional bandwidth and storage requirements, and the endless headaches of dealing with preventable virus outbreaks. Well, I guess German IT support staff are smiling, at least, as it means they'll never be short of emergencies to firefight.

No Takers, Uh?

It seems as if my attempt to satiate the appetites of my very, very clever readers with two additional questions has proven successful - too successful, perhaps, as nobody's bothered to submit an attempted solution! What's going on here? Can't anybody even get off to a start with either one?

Senate Democrats Stall Extension of African Growth and Opportunity Act

The Democratic Party's Senate representatives show how much they care about the welfare of all those poor Africans, not like those mean, racist Republican thugs all those who are sensitive to Third World suffering ought rightfully to despise ...

Amid concern that key provisions of the African Growth and Opportunity Act will expire later this year unless Congress votes an extension, supporters have issued a plea for public pressure on Congress.

U.S. government estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of current and prospective jobs in some of Africa's poorest countries are at stake. Advocates of the extension say the next few days are critical to extending the legislation in time to prevent erosion of major gains it has fostered.

The legislation, popularly known as Agoa, which has been a centerpiece of U.S. Africa policy under both Presidents Clinton and Bush, enjoys strong bipartisan backing in Congress. But most Senate Democrats have stayed clear of endorsing this year's proposed extension of the law, which now is in serious jeopardy.

"The U.S. national interest is served by a self-sufficient Africa that is prosperous, peaceful, healthy and democratic," says an appeal from a broad coalition of corporations, religious organizations, nongovernmental groups, lobbyists and trade associations formed to press Congress to renew key provisions of the Act that otherwise expire in four months.

"Agoa must be extended" is the message that should be sent by phone, letter and email to members of both Houses of the U.S. Congress, according to the coalition, which is co-chaired by Jack Kemp, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives and 1996 Republican vice presidential nominee, Coca Cola's Carl Ware, and Rosa Whitaker, who served as assistant trade representative for Africa under both Clinton and Bush and now heads the Washington, DC-based Whitaker Group.

Enhanced revisions of the legislation, known as the Agoa Acceleration Bill, or Agoa3, were introduced in both Houses last year. The bill won unanimous approval by the House Ways and Means Committee on May 5 and is expected to win passage by the full House in early June. Senate action on the message has been snarled by procedural disputes unrelated to the bill itself.

The new bill extends overall application of the law from 2008 to 2015, which supporters say is key to encouraging foreign investment in Africa's manufacturing sector. More immediately, the bill continues duty-free access to the United States for apparel made in Africa from fabrics of another country until September 2007. This provision for "third country fabric" imports ends September 30.

[............]

"I'm calling on my fellow Democrats to stand up on this issue," Whitaker said this week in an interview. "Not one job has gone from North Carolina to Lesotho, or any other place in Africa." Agoa should be seen as a "humanitarian initiative" and not principally a trade measure, said Whitaker, who played a key role in passage and implementation of the legislation, first as an aide to Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York) and then as the first assistant trade representative for Africa in the White House.

"Where are the Democrats at this critical moment?" she asked, citing specifically Hillary Rodham Clinton, from New York. "Her husband signed Agoa" when it was adopted nearly four years ago. "She should be with us now," Whitaker said.

The only Democrat cosponsoring the current bill, introduced by Richard Lugar (Indiana), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, is Joseph Lieberman (Connecticut), who ran for vice president on the ticket with Al Gore in 2000 and unsuccessfully sought his party's presidential nomination in 2004. The other cosponsors, all Republicans, include Michael DeWine (Ohio), Peter Fitzgerald (Illinois), Chuck Hagel (Nebraska), John McCain (Arizona) and Rick Santorum (Pennsylvania). Another Democrat, Max Baucus (Montana), ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, is on record as a supporter, though not cosponsor of Lugar's Agoa3 bill.

In an effort to boost prospects for Agoa's passage, supporters led by Lugar, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair, hosted a reception on Capitol Hill Tuesday with Bono, lead singer of the U2 band, who has become a prominent campaigner for debt relief and the fight against HIV/Aids in Africa.

"Trade is the most important thing to our friends in Africa," Bono said, addressing a large Senate hearing room filled with Congressional staff, lobbyists, African diplomats and Agoa supporters. American leadership on Agoa and HIV/Aids "sends a message to the world" at a time when the United States needs support from other countries, the Irish rock star said. Lugar said passage of his Agoa bill is "critical to further bolster the progress Africa already has made."

Ed Royce, Republican from California who chairs the House Africa Subcommittee, said it is important to act because "Agoa has lifted people with export-led growth and has promoted reform." Agoa-related trade and investment has created some 200,000 jobs in Africa and spurred more than $340 million in investments, according to U.S. government figures.

[............]

Congressional inaction on an extension "could have serious impact - losses of jobs, the closing of factories," Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Africa Florizelle Lister told the House Africa subcommittee on May 11. In one of Africa's smallest nations, Swaziland, with a population of just over one million, whose economy has been hard hit by HIV/Aids, the 28,000 jobs and the livelihood of some 100,000 people would be negatively affected by expiration of Agoa's key provisions this year, Prime Minister A. T. Dlamini told AllAfrica in an interview earlier this month. "This is very important for alleviating poverty in Swaziland," he said.

Like other African leaders who have visited the United States in recent weeks to champion Agoa, the prime minister noted that manufacturers need stable supply lines and investors want dependable environments. Planning for end-of-the-year holiday sales is already underway, and unless retailers are assured of extension of the third-country fabric provision, they may quickly shift apparel production from Africa to Asia. (emphases added)

It's inaction over issues like this one that make me immune to attempts by Democrats to sell themselves as somehow morally superior to Republicans when it comes to foreign policy, but when push comes to shove, they're always missing in action. It's a sure bet that not a single one of the lefties who made such a big hue and cry over Bush's shameful pandering to protectionist interests will raise their voices in concern about this particular issue - if they're even aware that it's an issue to begin with. At best, I expect they'll try to justify Democratic inaction as being in service of "a greater cause"; anything is justifiable if it serves to remove the evil Bushitler™ from service, even the return of 200,000 Africans into the throes of joblessness, and the foreclosure of any prospect of better things for millions more.

Authenticity in Judaism

As anyone who's been reading this blog for some time ought to know, I'm not in the least bit religious. I don't believe in heaven and hell, spirits and gods, and all the other sorts of meta-physical phenomena that seem to be taken as givens by most of the other people in this world. Nevertheless, that I am irreligious doesn't mean that I don't take religion seriously - given its tremendous importance to a lot of other people, I feel a duty on my part to understand the various religious systems that are most historically and culturally important, and to obtain a better appreciation of them both as means of social organization and as bodies of philosophical thought that various individuals have tried to fashion into consistent systems, some with greater success than others.

It is with these ideas in mind that I devote so much of my time to studying the various monotheistic religions, though I am not in the least bit religious myself; but if one is intent on understanding Christianity and Islam, one cannot hope to get far without coming to grips with another religious tradition of which both are offshoots (or heresies, as some might prefer), namely Judaism. Though its adherents are few in number in comparison to the other two religions - and largely because of the competitive antagonism of Christianity and Islam - it's influence on the world at large has been far out of proportion to the number of individuals who have subscribed to it, greater even than Christianity and Islam individually, in so far as both would never have come into being without Judaism as their precursor.

Getting to the main point of this post, one thing that I have noticed in the course of my learning about Judaism has been an unthinking and subconscious bias on my part that I think is shared even by most believers in Judaism itself (and certainly by Israel's legal and political system), which is that while Reform and Conservative Jews may be Jews on a purely ethnic level, in a religious sense, they are somehow less "authentically" Jewish than their Orthodox and Hasidic counterparts, who are the true carriers of a Judaism "unsullied" by compromises with the modern world. It is with this bias in mind that I happened to find the article above by Rabbi Simon Maslin so interesting, as for the first time I found in it a thoughtful articulation of a contrasting viewpoint from the one implicit in the commonplace view of Orthodoxy as being somehow more intrinsically "Jewish" than Conservativism or the Reform school.

As the Rabbi points out, modern Orthodox Judaism is itself a direct descendant of a reformist stream of Judaism, the Pharisaic school that reformulated the religion around the study of the Torah and the synagogue, even as Sadduccee and Maccabean traditionalists continued to insist on the primacy of the sacrifical rites centred on the Temple in Jerusalem. Furthermore, some of the very greatest scholars esteemed by the Orthodox themselves were hardly the unworldly figures many of their admirers aspire to be in our day - men like Maimonides and Judah HaLevi were not merely narrow pedagogues of Talmudic learning, but also individuals who were deeply interested in the contemporary world about them, in its peoples, its literature, its history, its arts and its sciences. Even the Hasidic insistence on such supposedly "Jewish" dress as the black caftan and the round fur hat, and on long sideburns and side-curls, are not in the least rooted in ancient Jewish practice, but relatively modern accretions that have since hardened into symbols of "authenticity" and an imagined antiquity of tradition.

With all of this in mind, the Reform and Conservative schools of Judaism, when looked at objectively, are no less deserving of the mantle of "authenticity" than the Orthodox variety - and in fact, even the very label "Orthodox" slants the playing field from the very start, as if something is "orthodox", it is almost by definition the "right" or "proper" way of doing things. Modern day Orthodox Judaism is in many ways no more "orthodox" than the other two main varieties, and all of these offshoots of the Pharisaic tradition could in their turn be viewed with some justification by the Karaites (who acknowledge only the Tanakh, and reject the Mishna and the Talmud) as so much modernist straying from the path of "true" Judaism to which they alone continue to adhere. It should be clear that my point in mentioning the Karaites is not to alight on yet some other group as being the sole, authoritative bearers of the Jewish religious tradition, but simply to illustrate how the pointless game of religious one-upmanship in the name of "authenticity" can be carried on ad infinitum.

Of course, much that I have said here about "authenticity" and traditionalism also applies to the Christian and Islamic religious traditions, when rephrased in slightly different language - for instance, despite the Vatican's insistence on its primacy as a bearer of the Christian religious tradition, the same claim can be made, with an equal weight of antiquity behind it, by the Eastern Orthodox Church as well, while Protestants are substantially correct in condemning icon-worship and the institution of sainthood as wayward developments away from the path established by the early church. All of these branches of Christianity can in turn be condemned as polytheistic heresies by those who continue to reject a divine trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit - and on and on it goes ad nauseum.

I suppose if there's anything to be taken from all this, it is always to resist the temptation to believe that some strain of a religious tradition is more "authentic" simply because it has a more ancient look and feel to it, or claims to have a stricter interpretation of what the religion requires of its believers. If one absolutely must decide upon some single branch of a religion as being authoritative, one might as well go with the branch that has the most members, and in the case of American Judaism at least, that would not be the Orthodox variety (nor would it be Southern Fundamentalism in the Christian case).

Self-Appointed Voices

Samizdata's Perry de Havilland has an amusing piece up about the adventures of he and a couple of other Samizdatistas in Geneva, where they crashed the 57th WHO assembly. A detail mentioned in the piece that I found particularly telling was the following:

Crasher Niger Innes asks why, given that the panel was representing itself as the voice of the poor in Africa, there were no Africans on the panel? Ouch.

As a certain law professor likes to say, indeed. There's something outrageously presumptious of people, most of whom have never so much as stepped foot on African soil, deigning to speak on behalf of the rights of people whose desires they've never bothered to have articulated to them. To hear anti-globalizers go on about the harm done to Africans by capitalism and westernization, one would never know that in a recent worldwide poll, the most favorable attitudes towards these two bogeymen were to be found in ... Africa.

How a Math Nerd became a Pornstar

The things you'll find on the web! Did you know, for instance, that Asia Carrera, of adult film fame (or, depending on your value system, infamy) was a onetime USA Math Olympiad contestant? And that she played Carnegie Hall while she was still in her early teens (performing Bach's 13th Invention), and later went to Rutgers as a National Merit Scholar? At least, so it says in her website's biography section (just in case you're wondering, I did not get there while looking for pr0n - a page that links to it is number one on the actual search I did run - not that there's anything wrong with surfing for pr0n on one's own free time ...).

I know that resume inflation is par for the course on the internet, but reading Carrera's account* of how she got to where she is today, I don't see anything that sticks out as implausible. Certainly, the pushy parents she talks about were characteristic of more than one American student of Asian extraction I knew during my college days. One could say that Ms. Carrera's life just goes to show that the Asian cultural emphasis on academic success cuts both ways, as it is possible to push children too hard to study subjects for which they have no natural affinity, even if they're able to grind out good results nonetheless. That said though, on balance I still think the Asian-American attitude preferable to that of many other American subcultures, in which academic success is either seen as irrelevant, a cunning plot by TheMan™ to keep one down, or else entirely a matter of genetic luck, and nothing one has any ability to exert personal control over.

*I've got to say, though, that for someone who's supposedly so smart, the low-contrast choice of light green text on a white background isn't exactly the best demonstration of the veracity of such a claim. As it turns out, the mistake was on my part - the background is supposed to be black.

More Mathematics Puzzles

Since it looks like quite a few of my readers are a lot sharper than the average Joe, I feel liberated to step up the difficulty slightly this time round. Here are three questions that are easy enough to state so that anyone can understand what they're about, but tough to take a bit of effort to solve.

1. The product N of three positive integers is 6 times their sum, and one of the integers is the sum of the other two. Find the sum of all possible values of N.
2. Let N be the greatest integer multiple of 8, no two of whose digits are the same. What is the remainder when N is divided by 1000?
3. Define a good word as a sequence of letters that consists only of the letters A, B and C - not all of these letters need appear in a given sequence - and in which A is never immediately followed by B, B is never immediately followed by C, and C is never immediately followed by A. How many seven-letter good words are there?

Well then, are you tough enough to handle my little challenge? Think you've got what it takes? I promise not to reveal the answers within the next 48 hours, to give everyone interested time enough to put up a decent effort.

ADDENDUM: To quell the appetites of those who feel the problems above were not in the least challenging, here are two more for your consumption. If these ones strike you as being as easy as the previous ones, I'll be extremely impressed!

1. Find, as a function of n, the sum of the digits of
   9 x 99 x 9999 x ... x (10²ⁿ-1),
   where each factor has twice as many digits as the previous one.
   
2. A computer screen shows a 98 x 98 chessboard, colored in the usual way. One can select with a mouse any rectangle with sides on the lines of the chessboard and click the mouse button: as a result, the colors in the selected rectangle switch (black becomes white, white becomes black). Find, with proof, the minimum number of mouse clicks needed to make the chessboard all one color.

Octopus Ink

One of my favorite turns of phrase that I've often been surprised to find raising puzzlement in others has been to describe some obfuscatory or distractive action or other as so much "octopus ink"; as it turns out, PZ Myers has a post up on this very phenomenon at this moment, describing vistigial ink sacs in blue-ringed octopuses in the context of evolutionary theory. From here on out I'll just send anyone who's puzzled by my use of the phrase to this Pharyngula entry - hopefully they'll not only gain an appreciation for a metaphor I think particularly appropriate for describing the evasive techniques of many a public figure, but they'll also learn one or two interesting things about the natural world while they're at it.

Incestuous Navel-Gazing as a Business Strategy

Personally, I can't stand Gawker,Wonkette or any of the other gossip and buzz-driven sites operated by Nick Denton, and this article linked to by Brad DeLong illustrates why.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm one of those people who still believes in the virtues of technological innovation as a driver of economic progress, and guys like Denton represent for me the sorts of smooth-talking free-riders who did so much to discredit this engine of growth during the great IT bubble of the late 1990s. Denton's success with his stable of blogs indicates that there's clearly a market out there for media properties that cater to the New York and Washington DC elite's penchant for self-referential navel-gazing, but I'm doubtful that this is the sort of stuff of which an entire media empire can be built. Vacuous celebrity-worshippers around the world will shell out $3 for a copy of Hello! or OK! to read about the latest exploits of Gwyneth, Madonna or some other entertainment press darling, but beyond the small circle of megastars of worldwide interest, things get too fractionated for any small stable of writers to cover in the insider style that has worked so well for Denton thus far; for instance, most Americans have probably never heard of Amanda Holden, Ulrika Jonsson or any of the other TV celebrities that are the stuff of daily fodder in the British press, while the average German celebrity could probably spend a month walking the streets of London without ever being recognized by a single stranger.

To be honest, there's something about celebrity chitchat that really gets on my nerves, especially when it's of the self-referential sort so beloved of Manhattanites and DC talking heads (let's be honest here - outside of a small coterie, who really gives a sh*t what Tina Brown's up to?); as such, I wouldn't be in the least aggrieved if I were to learn that the Denton empire had gone belly-up someday. In the meantime, I can at least take solace in the fact that the man's failure to appreciate that good writers aren't quite as repleacable and interchangeable as he imagines, in combination with the virtually non-existent barriers to entry in the niche he's currently attempting to monopolize, ensure that any profits he currently enjoys are likely to be extremely shortlived.

Blah Blah Ginger Blah Blah

The much maligned Jon Katz of former Slashdot infamy is back, this time with an article in Slate, in which he argues that there is no such thing as a perfect dog:

The peddling of Perfect Dogs amounts to a multibillion dollar business in the United States. You'll never see images of ugly dogs vomiting in the living room or terrorizing the letter carrier on dog food commercials. Those dogs—the ones we want—are always adorable. Their happy owners are not holding pooper scoopers.

Because people have such ill-informed and unrealistic expectations, dogs often suffer when their true hungry, messy, and alien natures are revealed. They get yelled at, irritated by studded chains and zapped by electronic collars, tethered to trees, hidden away in basements and back yards, or dumped at shelters and euthanized.

[............]

Some romantics see the match between a human and dog as kismet; If they're "right" for one another, or destined to be together, they'll fall in love at first sight. But most puppies are cute. And few humans like to accept the idea that the affectionate puppy is as drawn by the food he smells on your hands as by some mysterious ethereal connection. (emphasis added)

I'm inclined to agree with Katz, and my agreement with him is why, despite my own fondness for dogs, I can't see myself ever actually getting one of my own. Dogs are basically poop factories with appealing demeanors, and the prospect of spending 10 years or more scooping up some animal's fecal matter doesn't in the least agree with my constitution.

Then there is also the matter of fertility to consider - dogs can be incredibly prolific, given the rapidity with which they reach sexual maturity (within a year of birth), the large size of the average litter, and the fact that female dogs come into heat twice a year, while males are fertile all year round. In light of the sheer number of animals that end up being abandoned or mistreated all over the world, it is incumbent on most dog owners to get their animals "fixed" rather than allow them to bring yet more unwanted puppies into the world. Still, there's something about the notion of adopting an animal with the aim in mind of spaying or neutering it that makes me flinch.

The final point mentioned by Jon Katz, and one that I think especially worth keeping in mind, is that most of us who are fond of domesticated animals tend to project unto them mental qualities they almost certainly don't have. I won't go as far as the Cartesians would, to say that dogs are merely stimulus-response machines, with no real emotions beyond those they project to us in their search for rewards, but I think that this picture of how things work is probably a lot closer to the truth than the sentimental worldview that tends to be prevalent amongst dog-owners. Not to put too fine a point on it, but these animals have evolved to game us into looking after them, and when you're doting on Lassie and mouthing baby words to her about her being such a good doggie, all she's probably really hearing is "snack coming, snack coming, snack coming!"

If one wants a truly reciprocal emotional relationship, one's best off looking for it with another human being. It's a lot more work for most people, it's true, and it's also a fact that dissimulation for the sake of pecuniary or other rewards is hardly unknown amongst our own species; nevertheless, it is genuine often enough that we as a species are still here - how many of us do not love our parents or children, despite the flaws they have? No dog is going to grieve for its owner after his or her passing, even if it shows some frustration that the doggie treats no longer fortuitously appear at the usual hour.

Hell and the Cartel of Good Intentions

Those who aren't looking to pick up a copy of William Easterly's book could do worse than take a look at this Foreign Policy article of his on the foreign aid bureaucracy, which gives a much more critical take on the realities of foreign aid disbursal than one might get reading only the New York Times and assorted advocacy pieces. I think articles like this one ought to be recommended reading for those who tend to mistake the mere fact of having (or, often, simply claiming to have) good intentions for the far too infrequently realized goal of seeing those intentions come to fruition.

One thing that Easterly's article above doesn't get around to mentioning, but which I think important to mention, is that as hard as it may be for a lot of people to believe, it is possible to kill with kindness, even when none of the cynical shenanigans outlined by Easterly come into play. An example of what I'm talking about can be seen in many a historical food aid program. Given a situation in which millions are starving in, say, south-eastern Africa, it is only natural, and thoroughly commendable, that one should seek to help these unfortunate people. Fired up by a genuine and admirable concern for others, activists organize fund-raising efforts, accumulate thousands of tonnes of grain, and ship them off to the starving poor half a world away. The aid is disbursed by yet other selfless souls on the ground in the afflicted region, the immediate problem of mass starvation is solved, and everyone can feel good about what's been achieved. Problem solved, one might think, but one would be wrong, for the end result is that famine returns yet again once the foreigners' attention has waned, and it does so with even greater force than before they arrived!

What rationale could be given for such a development, one might wonder? Is it a matter of fecklessness on the part of the recipients of food aid, or has a curse been laid upon them by some angry deity, which any efforts by men to overcome must ultimately prove futile? No, all that has happened is that the free food aid was so plentiful, and was disbursed for so long, that it completely priced the local farmers out of the market. Fields ceased to be cultivated, farmers drifted off to other occupations or became aid recipients themselves, and all the while no one noticed what was happening behind the photegenic, beaming faces of well-nourished youngsters to be seen in the aid project reports. Once another disaster struck somewhere else in the world, as they always do, and the foreign dole was withdrawn, the destruction of local agriculture that had taken place was suddenly revealed, and - voila! - hunger and desolation returned with a vengeance.

It's tempting for people reading this to imagine that I'm only outlining a hypothetical scenario here, but the truth is far more depressing: just such a chain of events has played itself out not once but several times across the globe. It happened in Somalia in 1992, it happened in India in the 1970s and 1980s, it happened in Guatemala after the earthquake of 1976, and it is still going on in Bangladesh as we speak, with the country's more privileged classes enjoying access to free food (which was given with the intention that it would be destined for the truly indigent) even as native Bangladeshi farmers are deprived of a market for their crops: in a commodity market, how can anyone hope to compete with "free?"

Even as a self-admitted libertarian, I'm not going to claim that all foreign aid is either useless or harmful, as that is clearly not the case, particularly when government participation is excluded to the maximum possible extent on either side; people in rich countries have every right to voluntarily donate their own money and time to helping those who live in poorer nations, while the best and often only way to ensure that foreign aid does any good for those it is ostensibly intended for is to ensure that the assorted political "big men", bureaucratic functionaries and other government parasites looking for baksheesh/cadeaus/dash/mordida have as little say as possible in the means, location and timing of aid dispersal. No, it is a fact that voluntary private party-to-private party foreign aid, if clearly thought through, can do a tremendous amount of good, but the for this to be true, the emphasis must be on the if clearly thought through. In particular, more foreign aid is not always better, at least not for those targeted to benefit from it; for empire-building staffers in aid organizations, the benefits of ever larger sums to play with are not at all in doubt.

Liberals are wont to criticize more tight-fisted types for being "heartless" and "insensitive" to the sufferings of others, but given the way in which most aid is currently being used, it is clear, to me at least, that the greater sin in our day is an excess of "sensitivity" and "compassion", which prevents well-meaning people from holding the distributors of their largesse more to account, and actually demanding a more hard-headed, longer-term accounting of results before agreeing to give more. Any organization that continues returning cap-in-hand, year after year, decade after decade, seeking ever larger sums in aid of the same cause, deserves to be cut off for having failed in the more important mission of attempting to fix the root problem, rather than rewarded for perennial failure with an ever larger budget and an ever higher media profile.

POSTSCRIPT: Here's a link to the actual policy paper on which the Easterly Article that appeared in Foreign Policy was based. Reading through the paper ought to prove an eye-opening experience: contrary to what some might claim, it simply isn't at all "contrary to voluminously documented fact" that "WB projects have a poor record of achieving their project goals." Easterly is a long-time World Bank employee, and as such he's in as good a position as anyone to know the truth about the World Bank's success rate, yet here he is presenting us with detailed evidence, from the World Bank's very own records, that, all spin aside, the successes of that organization have been rare indeed.

It would be nice if alleviating suffering in the developing world were simply a matter of dumping ever larger sums of money into the laps of those who rule them, as that is easy enough to do, provided the necessary political will exists. Unfortunately things aren't that easy - as far as anyone who's looked hard at all the cross-country data can make out, there aren't any cash substitutes for stable government, a functioning judiciary, an honest and tightly-circumscribed bureaucracy, and economic policies that reward entrepreneurial success rather than punish it. All of these things are what make the difference between wealth and poverty, but they're a hell of a lot harder to get right than simply doling out cash.

A Master Salesman of Ideas Which Look Sensible but Aren't

Daniel Davies (aka Dsquared) has a remarkable gift for wrapping terrible ideas up in fetching garb, and it is hard to find a more striking example of this gift on display than in this Crooked Timber post rubbishing World Bank President James Wolfensohn's push for "rights-based lending", i.e, rewarding good government instead of corruption and ineptitude in the lending process.

“Rights Based Lending” is what used to be called “Politicisation of the Aid Process”, but with the cuddly face of a modern humanitiarian intervention. The idea is superficially plausible; that the World Bank should only lend to countries with a good human rights record (or in its stronger form, only to actual democracies). It’s an idea which has a certain amount of support, usually from dissidents in middle-income countries and it appears to be gaining some traction on the soft left in the developed world.

As the title above implies, it’s an idea which looks sensible but isn’t. “Don’t lend to tyrants” is a good slogan, but that fact is that tyrants are the government of a very large proportion of the poorest people in the world. If anyone is seriously advocating rights-based lending, then they have to look through this list and tell us with hand on heart that they think the world would be a better place without some or all of these projects.

In a masterful use of the appeal to emotion, Davies then proceeds to give a laundry list of projects with titles guaranteed to tug at the humanitarian heartstrings of his readers. Nowhere in his writeup do we see any questioning of the notion that just because a project claims as its goal "tuberculosis control in China" or "earthquake-proof houses for the poor" in Algeria, it necessarily means that the money will get used for any such purpose, or that even if it is, the unforeseen negative side-effects of the project won't end up outweighing any good done by it. For Dsquared, one can simply take it for granted that any money lent with good intentions will be used honorably and to good effect. What makes this all the more unfathomable is that he's more than willing to acknowledge that there are severe difficulties in trying to ensure that aid money is responsibly used once disbursed:

The reason that Wolfensohn’s suggestion of a rights-based approach to lending has been opposed by “countries as diverse as the UK and Chile” every time he has mentioned it in the past is that it is a bad idea. In principle, one might be able to design an approach which carried some element of rewards for reforms without making people suffer (although the IMF would be the more obvious vehicle for this, as it makes policy loans to governments rather than project loans). But such an approach would require very careful design of a specific proposal, coupled with the very best possible political will in the world to make it work as a force for human rights rather than an instrument of the foreign policy of the largest World Bank board members. Such a proposal and such political goodwill is entirely lacking at present.

Are we then to proceed on the assumption that such World Bank lending as does presently occur does so without any regard for "the foreign policy of the largest World Bank board members?" This is clearly an absurdly false claim, and we already are living in a state of sin. It is a pipe dream to expect nations with leaders accountable to electorates to lend billions at sub-market rates to other countries, without expecting anything on behalf of their voters in return. Attacking performance-based lending on the basis of a spurious "politicization" is nothing more than a red herring.

The reality of the World Bank's lending, as attested well enough by William Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth, is that not only has World Bank lending been underwhelming in its effects on the performance of its recipients, but that the perverse terms under which the World Bank has lent money to poor countries have served to encourage the very unaccountability and tyranny that Davies gives a rhetorical shrug of the shoulders to as simply being one of the givens of life. Nothing is more fungible than raw cash, and when World Bank loans are given to dictators and kleptocrats, they simply free up other funds for looting and for building up the Eternal Leader's state apparatus of terror. Indeed, implicit in Davies' own argument is the idea that rotten Third World governments cannot be counted upon to look after "tuberculosis control", "slum upgrading" and "polio eradication" on their own initiative and without the carrot of aid to prod them into doing so; if Davies believed otherwise, he wouldn't be opposed to rights-based lending. But then the question arises - if you lend General Akasombo $200 million for literacy projects and fail to penalize him for spending it all on marble palaces and whores flown in from Paris, why do you expect that he'll do any better when he comes around asking for the next tranche of $200 million?

William Easterly has done a far more thorough job in his book of outlining the various ways in which institutional lending by the likes of the World Bank have rewarded failure than I could ever do in the space of a single blog entry. I'll make do with saying that the interests of rulers and the ruled aren't always necessarily aligned, and that this is particularly the case when the rulers are tyrants and cliques of thieving oligarchs, and to expect such elites to use foreign loans and aid to pursue policies like mass education and commercial prosperity that might serve to weaken their hold on power is a sign of either extreme stupidity or optimism of a religious quality. If foreign loans were as effective in alleviating suffering as Daniel Davies makes them out to be, Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria ought to be veritable paradises by now, but nothing of the sort is true. On the contrary, when we look at the histories of these countries, we see that what foreign loans have made possible is the imposition of even more suffering on those who were intended to benefit from them. Foreign loans financed hare-brained economic and social schemes that would have collapsed far earlier, and with much less ruinous consequences, without the borrowed cash to keep them propped up, and when the "visionaries" who launched these crazy schemes were gone from office, it was their impoverished, illiterate masses who had to bear the burden of servicing all those debts that had been accumulated buying Mercedes Benzes and apartments in London's Knightsbridge and Kensington suburbs.

If Daniel Davies had devoted his talents to pleading for the abolition of all subsidized foreign lending, not only would he proffered a far more effective solution to the problem of "politicization" about which he claims to be so concerned, but he also would be advocating on behalf of a policy proposal that stands a chance of doing far more real good for the suffering poor than the status quo, which despite its beneficial effect in salving the consciences of rich Westerners, actually serves to help keep millions of people in misery, in so far as it gives us a situation where perpetual spendthrifts and paupers like Tanzania get far more aid over the decades than more responsible ones like Taiwan. In a commercial situation, a bank manager who gave bigger and more generous loans to the customers who were known defaulters would soon be out of a job, but we are somehow supposed to believe that the normal rules of incentivization are magically suspended once we turn to government-to-government lending. I say abolish the World Bank and be done with it.

New York Times - A New Way to Combat Online Piracy

The method outlined in this article is guaranteed to fail, and the countermeasures required would be trivial to implement. In fact, I believe that most file-sharing systems have already implemented the solution I have in mind - file hashing.

DOWNLOADING music, movies or software illegally might become less appealing if every third song or film scene was suddenly interrupted by white noise or worse, announcements urging "next time, pay for what you take!"

This "gotcha" technique - circulating flawed or reproving digital copies of songs on the Internet - has been tried in some form by a few pop stars hoping to thwart online music piracy. Two weeks ago, a University of Tulsa professor and a former graduate student of his won a patent for software that analyzes and monitors illegal music swapping on file-sharing networks, and then systematically inserts decoy files into the mix.

Prof. John Hale and Gavin Manes invented a system with decoys that appear real but contain either poor-quality recordings, buzzing or advertisements. The friendliest decoy might hold samples of songs for sale, while the most irritating could cause extremely long download times.

The inventors intend them to frustrate people who infringe copyrights when they take artistic content free from peer-to-peer networks, like the music Web site Kazaa. No longer will they get free-and-clear copies of individual songs or CD's. Instead, they will get corrupted songs filled with random noise and interruptions.

I'm surprised that a computer science professor and a PhD in the subject should be pushing such a worthless scheme; how is their method going to deal with the fact that MD5 and SHA-1 hashes of files are integrated into the file-sharing mechanisms that are most popular? The odds of obtaining a collision (i.e., getting two files to hash to the same value) are only 1 in 2⁶⁴ with MD5, and 1 in 2⁸⁰ with SHA-1, and the alteration of a single bit in a file would be enough to ensure that its hash value would be very different from an unaltered file. Consequently, all it would take to get around this antipiracy measure would be some means of disseminating information as to which hash values are those of reliable files, and which ones aren't; the thing is that there are a multitude of ways in which such things can (and already are) being done, whether through email, through online warez sites, or through IRC channels. The patent of Dr. Hale and Dr. Manes is of essentially zero value - though I wouldn't mind them making a few bucks off the ignorance, greed and fear of the big record companies.

POSTSCRIPT: After a little investigation, I've learnt that Kazaa, which is by far the most popular file-sharing system, only bothers to hash the first 300KB or so of any file, making it trivial to corrupt files that are longer than this without anyone catching on. As a result of the Kazaa programmers' boneheadedness, this antipiracy patent isn't quite as worthless as I thought it would be. Nevertheless, any utility it has will only be fleeting, and the more effective the technique turns out to be, the shorter the period in which it will enjoy success: all the more recent file-sharing networks, like eDonkey and Shareaza, carry out full file hashes, and frustration with Kazaa will only drive its users into the arms of these newer alternatives.

POSTSCRIPT 2: Something else just occurred to me - in this age of broadband connections, what is to stop determined Kazaa users from initiating 5 or 10 simultaneous downloads of different versions of the same file at once? What with the typical music file being between 3-5 MB in length, this wouldn't take very long, and as long as even 1 of the lot was the correct item, the goal would be accomplished, and the rest could then safely be deleted. I think the music companies will find that the technique outlined in this patent will prove a lot more expensive to successfully implement than they might have imagined.

Help!

Anyone in need of some light relief has to read this article: I haven't laughed this hard in ages!

Fascism as a Family Business

This Guardian story on Jennifer Griffin, daughter of notorious BNP thug-führer Nick Griffin, really has to be read to be believed. The naiveté of the girl is really something! One almost (with the stress on almost) feels sorry for the poor sheltered creature for being so taken in by her father's claptrap.

Were it not for her ambition to lead the British National Party, Jennifer Griffin would be a typical 17-year-old girl, preoccupied with fashion, cosmetics and a boyfriend who makes her blush every time she mentions his name.

But Jennifer is not typical. As the eldest daughter of Nick Griffin, chairman of the BNP, and Sharron Edwards, a powerful party campaigner in her own right, Jennifer has been raised in a household thick with politics.

[............]

'The Welsh language and identity is being threatened by the white flight of native-born Britons who are moving to Wales to escape the growing number of immigrants entering England,' she says, thumping her Coca-Cola back down onto the table.

'One day I want to lead the BNP or at least have a high position that enables me to help them. I only decided that for certain last year though; before that, I wanted to be a vet but because I don't like blood and hate seeing animals in pain, I thought I would take the easy path and go into politics.'

When pressed as to how her beliefs can co-exist with the findings of the latest census showing that the only population transfer threatening Wales is that of outward migration, Jennifer flushes. 'Really?' she says in amazement.

When told that 22 per cent of those classifying themselves as Welsh now live elsewhere in Britain, with the greatest loss being the decision of the young and university-educated to move to the south east of England, she fiddles with her pink mobile phone.

'If that was true, I am sure my father would have told me,' she mutters. 'The Daily Mail seems sure that illegal immigration is causing terrible problems across the country. [See, what did I tell y'all about the Daily Wail?] I am only 17. I can't be expected to know all the facts.'

[............]

Jennifer rejects any comparison between herself and Stowe, claiming that she has made her own political decisions. At the same time, however, she dismisses the idea that Britain benefits from migrant labour because, she says, her mother told her that only 8 per cent of nurses are foreign-born. (According to the Home Office, 47 per cent of nurses and 23 per cent of doctors are foreign born.)

She admits that despite her claims that Britain is the land of milk and honey for asylum seekers, she has no idea how much they receive in benefits each week. When told that adult asylum seekers exist on £37.77, 30 per cent below the poverty line, she is genuinely shocked.

'They should receive more than that,' she gasps, then pauses and adds quietly: 'Of course, dad would not agree.' She glances into the backroom of the pub where her father is sitting out of earshot. 'I guess there are a few things he and I disagree on after all but I decided the BNP was for me at the age of 14 and I will never change that view. It guess it is just in my blood.'

Those final two paragraphs give some indication that the young Ms. Griffin hasn't actually absorbed her father's viciousness into the marrow of her being. Here's hoping it's just a phase of parental approval-seeking that she's going through, and that she'll find the strength to look on her father with a more detached eye and reject his politics. If that bit about deciding that "the BNP was for me at the age of 14" is like most schoolgirl promises to remain "bestest friends forever", it won't be more than a year or two before the break with Griffin pere comes along.

Young Men in Shorts

An engaging article by Christopher Hitchens on Robert Baden-Powell can be found on the Atlantic Monthly website. Hitchens manages to cram in references to Flashman, masturbation, Hitler and Pink Floyd, and in so doing, he manages to give one much food for thought.

There is something alluring about the message of scouting, with its emphasis on a code of honorable behavior, physical activity and life outdoors - I can attest as much at first-hand, having at one point been an avid scout myself - but there is also quite a great deal that is disturbing about the whole thing, especially in the cold light of history. There's nothing like watching Triumph of the Will and seeing those enthusiastic youths singing "Uns're fahne flattert uns voran ..." to bring home to one the potential of the scouting movement for indoctrinating impressionable young boys in militarism, nationalism and the police state; nor is there anything at all surprising about this, given the historical pedigree of the scouting movement, as made clear by Christopher Hitchens.

The Difference Between Us and Them

This BBC story on the muted Arab reaction to the Berg beheading illustrates perfectly the difference between the sociopolitical culture of the Arab world and that of the United States, and why those who are tempted to circle the wagons around Rumsfeld and company would be mistaken to do so.

For many, both in the Arab world and in the West, morality is merely a matter of what is convenient for one's cause, and anything that reflects badly on "our side" ought to be swept under the rug. The key thing is that in the Arab world, those who think this way seem to hold all the reins of influence, while over here those of us who don't subscribe to such moral relativism can still make our voices heard.

Reaction to the video of the beheading of Nick Berg has been muted and cautious in the Arab media.

After the horrifying pictures first appeared on an Islamist website on Tuesday, the main Arab satellite TV stations, al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, did not follow their Western counterparts by leading with the story overnight.

Both showed short items on the killing, but did not dwell on its consequences. They chose instead to lead with the latest on the situation in Gaza.

On Wednesday, they did show longer items on the killing, but still placed considerably less emphasis on it than the Western media.

Some other Arab satellite stations like the Lebanese-based al-Hayat-LBC did lead with the story early on, but did not run long items on it.

[............]

None of the major satellite and national channels showed the moment of the beheading - saying that the story was strong enough without those images and it would have been indecent to show them.

Anyone who believes that last bit about "decency" should come take a look at this bridge I've been meaning to sell for a while ... "Decency" had nothing to do with it - the killing makes Arabs look bad, even in their own eyes, which is why the Arab press has bent over backwards to spare its audience the gruesome details. No such restraint has been at work whenever a chance to lambast the Great Satan has presented itself.

The Arab press followed the pattern of the TV stations in reporting the story but giving it limited coverage in their Wednesday editions.

[]

There was a mixed response in the national press in the Arab world. Many newspapers in Lebanon and Kuwait put the story on their front pages with a photo taken from the video. But newspapers in Syria - where the government controls the press - did not run the story at all.

The leading newspaper in Egypt, al-Ahram, had nothing on the beheading on Wednesday, but ran a story on page four with no photo in its Thursday edition. Other pro-government newspapers in Egypt gave the story cursory coverage.

Is there really any more evidence needed that Mubarak's Egypt is hardly an American "ally" by any meaningful description, and is simply a free-rider going along for the $2 billion in annual aid, even as it uses anti-American incitement to distract the discontent of its masses?

In its commentary, the well-regarded Lebanese newspaper, al-Safir, said the beheading "was not an eye for an eye. It was a scene for a scene." The paper continued: "Competition has begun between the disgusting pictures from Abu Ghraib prison and the one of Nick Berg's slaughter - just like advertisements marketing various products."

This expands on a point made by several Arab commentators in interviews given since the killing of the young American in which they expressed their concern that it would distract attention from the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in a war of extreme images. (emphasis added)

That may indeed have been the case in the Western media, but not in the Arab world where the focus has remained firmly on the torture scandal and the latest events in Gaza.

We finally get to the heart of the matter: with the Arab press, objective standards of moral behavior simply play no role whatsoever in determining whether or not an event is newsworthy. All that matters is how it affects their ability to extract political leverage against America. Beasts like Saddam and Assad kill thousands of fellow Arabs, even hundreds of thousands, and not a word issues from the Arab press against them; Israel kills 56 "freedom fighters" in Jenin and all of the Arab world laments in unison the "massacre" that has taken place. A savage like Abu Musab Zarqawi chops off the head of an idealistic young American trying to do his bit to put Iraq back on its feet, and the news is buried in the inside pages of the Arab newspapers, while the humiliation (though not the physical torture) of Arab prisoners, many (though not all) of whom are guilty of far worse crimes, sparks an orgy of recriminations.

It is this difference in attitudes that give one the confidence to say that we are obviously better than our opponents, and it is precisely to the extent that we allow our press and media to call for the heads of those responsible for the Abu Ghraib fiasco that we are better than what passes for government in most Arab countries. Conservatives of the John Derbyshire persuasion who lambaste the "liberal" media for focusing relentlessly on the abuses at Abu Ghraib have it exactly backwards when they accuse the press of being "anti-American"; on the contrary, they are the ones who seek to betray everything that is best about America, by advocating a descent to the same calculating level that is so repulsive when viewed at work in the Arab world.

BBC - Paris wakes up to English radio

Frankly, I'm shocked that there weren't any English-language stations available in Paris before now; that must really have taken some doing on the part of the French government. What's even stranger about this is that it's easy enough to hear French, German and even Dutch radio stations from the heart of London - though whether these stations are actually being broadcast from London is another matter. Anyway, how are the Parisiennes receiving this new broadcasting facility?

Parisians woke up to a new sound this week - Paris Live Radio, the city's first commercial English-language radio.

The French capital already has a vibrant radio spectrum, offering everything from Jewish radio to Serbian and Arabic stations, but until now nobody had thought about the needs of its 400,000 English-speaking expatriates.

But what do the French themselves make of it? Is this yet another example of the creeping Anglo-Saxon challenge to the French language, French music and French culture?

On the Champs Elysee, Parisians of all ages seemed surprisingly keen on the idea.

"It's necessary in Paris, because French people don't speak very well English," says one smartly-dressed French businesswoman. She says she may well listen in to improve her own English.

"Personally, I prefer English to French music," admits one Parisian in his mid-thirties.

"I am in favour of a strong Europe, and more cultural exchanges between different countries so having an English-language station here is great news."

New music

One French teenager also seems enthusiastic, though for rather less exalted reasons.

"It could bring more English girls to France, " he says with a hopeful look. "And that will make Paris a more cosmopolitan place."

[............]

Founded by an Australian barrister, Renzie Duncan, it's aimed mainly at expatriates, and the millions of tourists who visit each year.

Fans of English-language music, though, may be disappointed. By law, radio broadcasters in France have to play a minimum of 40% of their music in French - a law passed to protect French pop from being swamped by Anglo-Saxon imports.

Paris Live says up to half its music will be in French - including show-casing young up and coming French bands. The station's staff are just as international as its potential audience - with presenters from Britain, Australia, France, Japan, and Ireland.

Judging by Parisians' enthusiastic response to the idea, Paris Live could prove a surprise hit in this usually rather conservative city.

One can't help laughing at the explanation offered by the quoted teenager about his enthusiasm for the new radio station: "more cosmopolitan" indeed! There's nothing quite like the prospect of sex, especially with "exotic" (and therefore presumably "easy") partners, to render a new development favorable in a young man's mind.

One thing that does irritate me about this article, and which I think illustrates perfectly the dirigiste cast of mind that is par for the course with BBC reporters, is the fact that Caroline Wyatt, the author of the article, sees fit to mention that Paris Live could prove to be a "surprise hit", when in truth there's nothing really surprising about it: if the French authorities weren't aware of their own countrymen's strong preference for Anglo-Saxon programming, why would a 40 percent native music quota be necessary to begin with? Linguistic and cultural protectionism are the marks of weak cultures, rather than vibrant and confident ones. You won't see Japanese politicians legislating how much gaijin programming should be allowed on their airwaves.

A Quick Puzzle

A little something to jog the old brain cells on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

You are presented with a list of all the numbers from 1,111,111 to 9,999,999, all neat and in order. Thanks to an accident involving a hypnotist, you have taken against the digit 5, so you assiduously strike out each number in the list that contains a 5 anywhere in it. Estimate what fraction of the original numbers remains.

Absolutely Ridiculous!

Found via Fark, of all places, this NY Post article, which alleges that Pfc. Lynndie England ... well, I'll let the article do the explaining:

Shocking shots of sexcapades involving Pfc. Lynndie England were among the hundreds of X-rated photos and videos from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shown to lawmakers in a top-secret Capitol conference room yesterday.

"She was having sex with numerous partners. It appeared to be consensual," said a lawmaker who saw the photos.

And, videos showed the disgraced soldier - made notorious in a photo showing her holding a leash looped around an Iraqi prisoner's neck - engaged in graphic sex acts with other soldiers in front of Iraqi prisoners, Pentagon officials told NBC Nightly News.

"Almost everybody was naked all the time," another lawmaker said.

Many members of Congress left the 45-minute viewing session early, thereby missing the porno performance by England, but there were enough other images of torture, humiliation and intimidation to sicken anyone.

"It was pretty disgusting, not what you'd expect from Americans," said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.). "There was lots of sexual stuff - not of the Iraqis, but of our troops."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who also characterized the photos as "disgusting," agreed, noting, "It's hard to believe that this actually is taking place in a military facility."

[............]

In another video clip, she said, a group of men were shown masturbating.

Before the pictures of England's sex romps were shown to Congress, the 21-year-old reservist from West Virginia tried to portray herself as a reluctant participant who was just following orders.

"I didn't really, I mean, want to be in any pictures," England told a Denver TV station.

"I was instructed by persons in higher rank to 'stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera,' and they took picture for PsyOps [psychological operations]," she told KCNC-TV.

England acknowledged "it was kind of weird" when she was photographed smiling, with a cigarette in her mouth, as she leaned forward and pointed at the genitals of a naked, hooded Iraqi at Abu Ghraib prison.

England has refused to identify who gave her the orders, saying only that they came from "persons in my chain of command."

I'd say these latest revelations seem to have put paid to any hopes Pfc. England might have entertained of having her "just following orders" excuse believed; as methods of "softening up" prisoners go, having sex in front of them hardly seems all that effective. I think what we have here are people with a pre-existing disregard for conventional norms of behavior, who just happened to have been given life and death power over others, without adequate supervision to accompany it. The events that occurred in Abu Ghraib are now looking a lot less likely to have been sadism initiated from above, and more likely a case of incompetence on high.

NB - Those with an appreciation of gallows humor in a situation like this will probably find the Fark responses to this news rather amusing.

What it Means to be Black

I don't like to spend too much time discussing issues of black identity and the like, partly because, coming from Africa, I know all too well that there is no single "black" identity to speak of, except in so far as that identity is defined in response to the prejudices of others. Nevertheless this post by Prometheus 6 is simply too good to pass up, and I think the following excerpt especially noteworthy:

Over at Blogcritics, I asked

What problems does racism cause you, a reasonably well-educated white male from a fairly upper middle class background?

What problems does racism cause me, a 6'2" 185 lb Black male, self-educated, no degree, had to work up from messenger to Assistant VP at a bank, father a farmer, mother a laborer that eventually got a nice safe civil service job?

Mere inspection shows we're going to be talking about two sets of issues…but consider what it means that we're going to call those two separate sets of issues by the same name.

It means confusion. It means error. And it means it will probably be a while before folks are up on it enough to sort out words from events.

Being a fairly tall, black (and therefore supposedly "menacing") male myself, I have a little personal knowledge of what P6 is getting at here. There are a large number of people in the world who like to make a big hue and cry about "racism" under the slightest pretext, but the pretence that racism is either dead or now mostly a problem of black racism against whites, while having obvious attractions for conservatives, simply has no basis in reality. I'm glad that we no longer live in the 1950s, and grateful that my personal encounters with hardcore prejudice are now rare enough as to be noteworthy when they do occur, but the truth is that such encounters do still happen, and with enough frequency that one can't be blamed for being "oversensitive" at times, as certain self-styled champions of truth against the might of "political correctness" like to put these things. I'm physically imposing enough that most bigots have to think hard before trying it on, but the petty manifestations of prejudice - like people ostentatiously avoiding sitting next to one in a train, merchants doing everything they can to make physical contact with oneself alone when returning change, being spoken to slowly and with a vocabulary thought best suited to an idiot, even being accused of looking "sullen" (as if one were a child!) or "frightening" for having a worried expression on one's face - are things white people who whine about how bad they now have it will never have to live with, but which I have to deal with on a weekly basis at the very least.

A Farewell to Movable Type?

This Metafilter entry makes for eye-opening reading, and I for one am glad in retrospect that I never made the jump to using MT. The 1-CPU licence restriction is particularly galling, and high-profile blogs with multiple contributors (examples of which can be found here, here, here and here) really need to start thinking hard about future possible alternatives: is $599 an acceptable price to pay for a 20-author limit on contributors? Does the fact that the licensing terms give no indication of whether the price covers any future upgrades or even how long support will last give no room for pause?

If these sorts of questions aren't a problem, and if group-bloggers aren't perturbed by the prospect of doing all their own code maintenance from this point onwards, then by all means I say stick with Movable Type; as for myself, if I do ever get around to moving to a self-hosted setup, it will likely be either Drupal or WordPress, both of which are licenced under the GPL, and both of which support XHTML 1.1 out of the box.

Matthew Yglesias - How to Get Out of Iraq

Matthew Yglesias has a roundup of suggestions by various individuals (11 at last count) about how a US disengagement from Iraq might be effected. I've linked to only one of the posts, but the rest should be easy enough to find from there.

The good thing about Yglesias is that while he's a partisan Democrat, and does hold more than a few statist views that make me cringe with horror, he is at least the calm, reflective sort, open to empirical facts, rather than an ideological attack-dog like Atrios and company. In particular, he doesn't let his hatred of an administration cloud his ability to appreciate that whatever policy America decides upon will have major effects on the lives of Iraqis, and that a hasty American pullout with tail tucked between legs is not going to magically make everything better.

As for myself, I'm not going to claim that I know for certain what course would be best to follow in Iraq, especially as I am neither on the ground there nor endowed with access to comprehensive information about what's going on in the country. What I can say with absolute certainty is that given what we know about ethnic fractionalization and governance, an Iraq that is not partitioned into at least a Kurdish and an Arab portion, or, failing partition, governed as a loose confederation, is destined to fall either into another round of absolutist despotism or into civil war. Why the administration feels obliged to prostrate itself before the false god of a unitary Iraq is completely beyond me.

John Derbyshire is a Vile Bigot - Part CXII

Andrew Sullivan again leads me to an interesting tidbit; this time the tasty snippet is courtesy of the infamous Mr. Derbyshire:

My mental state these past few days: 1. The Abu Ghraib "scandal": Good. Kick one for me. But bad discipline in the military (taking the pictures, I mean). Let's have a couple of courts martial for appearance's sake. Maximum sentence: 30 days CB.

I already know what the Derbyshire apologists are going to offer as excuses for this sort of rubbish: that he was just joking, that he has a "provocative" style, etc, etc. Let me say right now that I don't buy a word of it. The statements above are of a piece with much of what John Derbyshire has said in the past, whether it be about gays, blacks, Irish catholics or some other group that doesn't meet his criteria for civility; this isn't irreverent "political incorrectness", it's sheer prejudice.

There comes a time when intellectual honesty requires even the most hardcore "Derb" fans to admit to themselves that the man they're cheering on is a bigot - unless they're bigots themselves, that is. I rather suspect that most of those who like the man's writings do fit into that category.

Those Awful Americans!

Via Andrew Sullivan I came across this blog entry by an Iraqi named Ali, discussing the experiences of his relatives. It's something to keep in mind when one reads posts from the "River Bend Blog" guy exhorting no-good Americans to pull out ASAP. Iraqis, just like Americans, are by no means monolithic in their opinions, and it's sheer stupidity to take one guy's outpourings as the definitive truth about what's going on over there.

Some of the readers may remember me saying something about my uncle. Before the war he was in the same job and he was paid about 15 thousands Iraqi Dinars that was equal to about 7 US$ a month. His wife, who is also a teacher, was paid a little less than that. He has 5 children; one in primary school three in high school and a girl in college. Of course that salary couldn’t help him support his family, yet he didn’t quit it. He always hoped that things would change for the better. In order to meet life's requirements and offer his kids a proper education, he had to work after school. He worked in every kind of business; a taxi driver, a grocer and opened a small shop for a while, but things didn’t go quite well.

He had to sell his car first, then his ‘extra’ refrigerator, then the only refrigerator, then the TV and then and then…. The last time we visited him, I had to hold my tears when I entered his house. There was virtually no furniture there, no chairs, no TV no tables, as they had sold them all, but what shocked me more is that there were no inside doors. He had to sell those too. I mean his house was literally bare. His kids were ashamed of showing because they had nothing proper to wear. It was amazing how he kept honest and didn’t accept bribery from his rich students’ families.

My young cousin is a religious Sunni who goes to the mosque and listens to the cleric there every Friday and believes whatever he says, as he’s still young. My uncle always teased his son about this but never prohibited him from doing that. We were talking about different stuff; the kids’ needs, clerics, Americans and the increase in the average income of most Iraqis. My uncle has a somewhat unusual sense of humor that doesn't fit quite well in his somewhat religious family. He winked at me and turned to his son My uncle had some unusual sense of humor that didn’t fit quite well in his somewhat religious family. He winked at me and turned to his son and asked him "What do you think of the Americans?" His son answered,
"They are occupiers".
"So you think we should fight them?" his father asked.
Ibrahim said "No, but I don’t like them". My uncle said, pretending to change the subject
"Do you like your new computer that no one shares with you?" "Yes of course dad". "Ok, are you satisfied with the satellite dish receiver we have or do you need a better one?"
"This one is fine but I heard there’s a better one that gets more channels"
"ok I’ll get you that next week". Then he said, "Is there anything else you’d like to have son?"
"No dad I have all that I need".
"Ok but how about a car?"
Ibrahim was astounded and said "Really? a..a CAR.. for me!?".
"Of course for you! I'm too old to drive now and my eyes are not that well and you are the older son. So whom else would it be for!?"
"Oh, dad that will be great! When will that happen?"
"Just finish you’re exams and you’ll have it".
"I will dad".
"Are you happy now son?"
"Yes dad, sure I am!"
"Then why do you hate the Americans you son of a b***h!? I couldn’t get you a bicycle a year ago, I could hardly feed you and your brothers and sisters. You didn't know what an apple or a banana tasted like, I couldn’t buy you a damned Pepsi bottle except in occasions, and now you can have all that you wish, and a car of your own! Who do you think made that possible!?"
My cousin's face turned red and didn’t answer as we laughed and I said "What do you think Ibrahim?"
He said, "Well it’s true but it’s our money. They are not giving us a charity" and I said "Of course it’s our money, so let’s forget the Billions of dollars they are giving to rebuild Iraq and the efforts they are making to cut down our debts and lets talk about our money.
Why didn’t your father, I, my brothers and all the Iraqis have anything worth mentioning before the Americans came?"
He said, "Because Saddam used it to buy weapons and build palaces".
"There you have it Ibrahim, but Americans are not touching our money. Can you tell me who’s better; the ‘occupiers’ who are helping us or the ‘patriot’ who did all that you know to us?"
He said in a faint voice "They are better than Saddam but still they are not Muslims".
"So do you want them to be Muslims?" "I wish they were." "Will you fight them to that?" he said, "No, of course not. I don’t like fighting."
We didn’t want to pressure and embarrass him further and didn’t go further, as he’s still young but he’s smart and good-natured and will get it soon.

Amen to that. Reading the New York Times and watching atrocities like the beheading of Nick Berg, it's tempting to come to the conclusion that all Iraqis are just a bunch of savages not worth expending lives and energy on behalf of, so we might as well bring the troops home straight away and leave them to sort themselves out. That sort of thinking is tempting, as I've said, but it is also deeply mistaken. Things in Iraq clearly aren't going as well as one would like, and the failure on the Bush administration's part to come to grips with the implications of the country's ethnic fragmentation is storing up serious trouble for the future; that said, the impression one gets from many on the left of a completely chaotic situation in which things are rapidly going downhill is also far off the mark. Everything must be done to make sure that abuses of the sort documented at Abu Ghraib are not only severely punished but also prevented from happening anywhere again in Iraq, whatever barbarisms might be committed by al-Qaeda and its supporters; but those who shrilly demand that we pull out ASAP must also come to terms with the fact that there are a great many people in Iraq whose well-being will be put in jeopardy should we heed their cry, as all a hasty evacuation would achieve would be the surrender of Iraq's future to the likes of Moqtadr al Sadr and al-Qaeda, which would be a dubious achievement indeed.

More on the "Jack" Pornography Case

Via The Register, I've just come across the above article, which provides more details about the Wired browser-hijacking issue I mentioned previously. If the story laid out by Brian Rothery is accurate, this "Jack" fellow really does seem to have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice, a poor sap victimized by a vindictive employer and overzealous law-enforcement agents.

Our two UK experts have now helped to establish the following. The arrest warrant used to raid Jack’s house contained a list of nudist web sites, mainly Russian and Eastern European, none of the models from which were engaged in sex acts. There was a separate single image of a sex act in which the girl had small breasts, which was the only basis for assuming that she was under 18. These images on the search were not however used as a basis for the charges and conviction. Before leaving them, however, readers might be interested to know that our UK expert recognized many of the nudist URLs as those being used in arrests and convictions in the UK, so these naturist sites, while not the reason for Jack’s conviction, are being used in the UK for arrest and conviction.

In Jack’s criminal complaint report the police used 60 pictures from unallocated clusters. Twelve of these were recovered from his personal laptop, bought secondhand from Ebay, and forty-eight were recovered from the Mitsubishi laptop. Some of them were tiny. The prosecutors said that there were twelve images from a well-known child porn series, created before computer generated porn was possible. Apparently, sixty images were from 1940s porn magazines, scanned into a computer, none full size. Interestingly, the main proof used that the Mitsubishi laptop was his was his job resume found on the hard drive.

Returning to the URLs in the search warrant, some warnings. Some images, such as those in the Russian naturist site ‘Holy Nature’ are also in books available on Amazon, so what may appear legal in a book may not be deemed legal if accessed over the Internet. The other URLs had ‘lolita’ or ‘preteen’ or ‘angels’ or similar in the titles. [This is standard operating practice with porn site operators - these and words like "amateur" and "XXX" are bound to come up on even the most vanilla sites.] Some also had indications that they were Eastern European or Russian. [And therefore illegal by definition?] What may be dangerous for viewers is that all of the sites in question had a disclaimer saying that they are legal under Federal Code 18. One of our UK experts expressed the opinion that on the face of it this appeared to be entirely reasonable, given the wholesome nature of the images, but these were both on Jack’s warrant and are being used for prosecution in the UK, where it seems that nudity now equals indecency.

Both The Register and the Rothery article make the same point I did about the implications of the recovered images being found in unallocated disk space, i.e, there aren't any. I can't avoid the conclusion that the Wired "experts" quoted had simply proceeded on the all-too-common assumption that the mere fact of being accused of a sex crime is evidence in itself of one's guilt, and then struck out for some way to rationalize this gut assumption.

I have no time for those who are actually guilty of sex crimes against children (or adults, for that matter), and I think it's a waste of effort to try to "reform" individuals who've been caught molesting children - forget the psycho-babble, I say, and just lock them up and throw away the key. Having said that much, I do think there's an atmosphere of hysteria at work across much of the English-speaking world where these sorts of crimes are concerned, and that politicians, in an effort to avoid accusations of "coddling" perverts, have set into motion a great deal of poorly thought out administrative and legislative machinery that is now being used to destroy the lives of ordinary people who are entirely without guilt. Those who engage in sex with children are depraved animals, but how sensible is it really to criminalize the (often merely alleged) viewing of images, especially when there are people out there doing their damndest to push such images in one's face?

It is a fact that there are money-hungry vermin out there pushing adverts for l0l1ta* and h3nta1* sites into everyone's inboxes and browsers, and even those of us who are technically skilled enough to protect ourselves can't always do so, especially if we work for employers whose IT policies demand the use of Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook, with all alternatives verboten. As such, this issue isn't one most of us can tell ourselves is of no personal concern and worth pushing aside. One never knows when some adversary might decide to plant "evidence" on one's person for whatever reason. Along these lines, I am reminded of Cardinal Richelieu's supposed statement, which went "If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him"; for the Internet age, perhaps we ought to update this to "If you give me six months of the browsing history of the most upstanding citizen, I will find enough evidence in there to get that person a sentence of life without parole."

*These words have been altered from the original post in order to avoid an influx of unwelcome visitors. I'm not interested in competing for an entry in "Disturbing Search Requests" ...

Nigerian Muslims Rampage for Second Day: Over 30 Dead

We've seen this story before all too many times. In a strange way, it mirrors what's going on in Iraq at the moment.

Muslim mobs brandishing machetes and clubs attacked Christians in the streets of Kano on Wednesday as security forces struggled to quell a two-day rampage to avenge a massacre of hundreds of Nigerian Muslims.

Police confirmed at least 30 killed in strife engulfing this northern city, where thousands -- mostly minority Christians -- cowered in army barracks and police stations as mobs attacked victims outside. Witnesses spoke of scores more slaughtered.

"I saw them put an old tire on his neck and set him ablaze," said a 30-year old Christian, Barry Owoyemi, of a dead Christian neighbor. Owoyemi was whisked to safety by police who fired guns in the air to scare away the attackers.

Authorities ordered police to shoot rioters on sight.

The rampage exploded Tuesday following a demonstration by thousands of Muslims protesting the slaying of up to 600 Muslims by a predominantly Christian ethnic group last week in the central Nigeria town Yelwa.

The latest rioting threatened to send violence spiraling further. In an apparent response to Muslim attacks, a group of young Christians in one Kano neighborhood fired shotguns Wednesday at groups of Muslim men accused of torching houses.

[............]

Police commissioner Abdul Ganiyu Daudu confirmed 30 people dead. Rioters were torching buildings and blocking residents from escaping, he added.

A leader of minority Christian Ibo-speakers in Kano, Boniface Ibekwe, asked police in the presence of journalists to "stop this killing today or give us six months to leave Kano peacefully."

By Wednesday evening, security forces fired tear gas and shot into in the air to disperse crowds ahead of a dusk-to-dawn curfew.

On Tuesday, Kano's most influential cleric launched the Muslim protest from the main mosque, telling protesters that the Yelwa killings were part of a supposed Western conspiracy against followers of Islam.

The May 2 and May 4 attacks on Yelwa by ethnic Tarok Christians left 500 to 600 dead in the largely Muslim Hausa-speaking town, according to a Red Cross official who traveled there. Nigerian officials -- who routinely play down violence to avoid inciting revenge attacks -- put the death toll at half those figures.

In February, Muslim militants were blamed for the slaughter of almost 50 people in Yelwa -- including Christians who took refuge in a church.

It's tempting to say, in the name of fairness, that what's happening here is a straightforward case of tit-for-tat, with Christians killing Muslims and vice versa ad infinitum; at this point, one usually throws in some bit of pabulum about a "cycle of violence" before shrugging one's shoulders and moving on. That variation on an old theme is not what I intend to play out here.

The first thing to note about this latest violence is that the massacre which set it off was itself in retaliation for an earlier Muslim slaughter that seems to have been what touched off the bloodshed in Yelwa; no one atrocity ever justifies another, but the reality is that until this bout of Muslim rioting in Kano, what was going on in Yelwa was a localized ethnic conflict, which only secondarily took on a religious cast because of the religious affiliations of the majority of members of the competing ethnic groups. Yelwa's "Christians" are themselves less than exemplary representatives of their religion for choosing to butcher 600 people to death in revenge for the violence they suffered, but they could at least make a claim to be attempting to pay back their aggressors, even if outsiders would think their retribution vastly disproportionate. Kano's Muslims have no such excuse, as their Christian neighbors had nothing whatsoever to do with what was going on in distant Plateau State.

The second critical point here is that the ongoing rampage was launched by a Muslim cleric, and in fact the most prominent such individual in Kano State. Christian priests aren't always the advocates of peace one would expect them to be, as the events in Rwanda and Yugoslavia make abundantly clear, but in this particular case the religious incitement has been entirely in one direction; there are no pastors to be seen either in Yelwa or in Kano urging vengeance in the name of their co-religionists. Christianity has an ugly past, and in many ways it still presents an ugly picture around the world, but in terms of sheer propensity for violence in the name of religion (and I'm not just talking Bush-style, occasional vague mutterings about "The Almighty"), currently Islam simply has no real competitors. Even Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, for all their malignance, aren't to be found on television urging good Christians to kill as many Muslims as possible for the sake of Jesus.

IE Considered Dangerous

I'm not about to say that those who insist on using Internet Explorer deserve whatever comes their way, but I will say on the record that this story shows why one has to be a moron to go on doing so. It isn't merely a matter of patching the odd security hole, either: ActiveX, Microsoft's in-house replacement for Netscape's plugins, has a fundamentally broken security model. To make things worse, rather than simply creating a browser API and providing Internet Explorer as a default, replaceable implementation, Microsoft decided to build the damn thing into the operating system, making it impossible to completely nullify the risks that come with using Internet Explorer.

Browser hijackers are doing more than just changing homepages. They are also changing some peoples' lives for the worse.

Browser hijackers are malicious programs that change browser settings, usually altering designated default start and search pages. But some, such as CWS, also produce pop-up ads for pornography, add dozens of bookmarks -- some for extremely hard-core pornography websites -- to Internet Explorer's Favorites folder, and can redirect users to porn websites when they mistype URLs.

Traces of browsed sites can remain on computers, and it's difficult to tell from those traces whether a user willingly or mistakenly viewed a website. When those traces connect to borderline-criminal websites, people may have a hard time believing that their employee or significant other hasn't been spending an awful lot of time cruising adult sites.

In response to a recent Wired News story about the CWS browser hijacker, famed for peddling porn, several dozen readers sent e-mails in which they claimed to have lost or almost lost jobs, relationships and their good reputations when their computers were found to harbor traces of pornography that they insist were placed on their computers by a browser hijacker.

In one case a man claims that a browser hijacker sent him to jail after compromising images of children were found on his work computer by an employer, who then reported him to law enforcement authorities.

"The police raided my house on Sept. 17, 2002," said "Jack," who came to the United States from the former Soviet Union as a political refugee, and has requested that his name not be published. "Nobody gave me a chance to explain. I was told by judge and prosecutor that I will get years in prison if I go to trial. After negotiations through my lawyer I got 180 days in an adult correctional facility. I was imprisoned for 20 days and then released under the Electronic Home Monitoring scheme. I now have a felony sex-criminal record, and the court ordered me to register as a predatory sex offender for 10 years."

Jack originally believed that the images found on his computer were from a previous owner -- he'd bought the machine on an eBay auction. But he now thinks a browser hijacker may have been responsible.

"When I used search engines, sometimes I got a lot of porn pop-ups," Jack said. "Sometimes I was sent to illegal porn sites. When I tried to close one, another five would be opened without my will. They changed my start page, wrote a lot of illegal porn links in favorites. The only way to stop this was turn the (computer's) power off. But when I dialed up to my server again, I started with illegal site, then got the same pop-ups. There were illegal pictures in pop-ups."

[............]

Security experts who were asked to review Jack's claims said it is possible that a browser hijacker could have been the reason porn images were found on Jack's computer. But they also pointed out some discrepancies in the story.

Some of the images were found in unallocated file space, and would have to have been placed there deliberately since cached images from browsing sessions wouldn't have been stored in unallocated space.

[............]

Telling people that "the computer" is downloading pornography on its own often provokes smirks and disbelief.

"I have to say it's like insisting the dog ate your homework," said Jeff Bertram, a systems administrator in New York City. "Are you going to admit that you downloaded porn to your pissed-off spouse or employer? Or to a judge? Hell no, your honor, it wasn't me. The browser did it."

Jack said he would like to appeal his conviction, but knows it will be difficult to convince people that he didn't download the pornography found on his machine.

"The police found nothing in my house, you know, not even a Playboy magazine," he said. "Only in the computer. But most people do not understand that such a thing is possible, that the computer could have made this happen. Plus, with child pornography, people's reaction is only emotions and no thinking."

"I advise Internet users to be very, very careful," Jack added. "Committing a felony is very easy; it just takes one click."

Sure there's a chance that this "Jack" guy is lying, and he actually did visit those illegal links intentionally, but the scenario he outlines is hardly farfetched, and he did send in his testimony of his own volition and under the cover of anonymity, meaning that there isn't obviously anything for him to gain by lying.

The "discrepancy" pointed at by the so-called "experts" interviewed by Wired is actually nothing of the sort; if Internet Explorer couldn't have stored images in unallocated file space, neither could the average individual, as the sheer act of saving a file to one's hard drive prompts the operating system to allocate file space. I think what really happened here is that the images at issue were initially stored on Jack's drive - whether by Jack, the machine's previous owner, or by a hijacked Internet Explorer - and then an attempt was made to delete them. Unfortunately for "Jack", the way in which Window's FAT and NTFS filesystems deletes files is simply to remove the pointers to them, leaving the actual data still on the drive until the filespace is reallocated for some other purpose and overwritten. With all of this in mind, it ought to be clear enough that there is no way Wired's "experts" could possibly draw any worthwhile conclusions about Jack's culpability from this fact.

Getting back to the central issue, it cannot be repeated often enough that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is not just a horribly outdated, standards-ignoring piece of crap, but a serious financial and legal hazard to boot. Those of us who have the misfortune of having to run Windows can at least minimize the risks we take by getting ourselves a real browser, one that doesn't download ActiveX controls and doesn't require a 250 MB patch to prevent it spawning popups like so many toad's eggs. Installation of the excellent Spybot Search and Destroy is also a must for getting rid of spyware on those occasions when disaster strikes. It would also help matters tremendously if Windows 2000 and XP users could run their machines as members of the ordinary Users group, rather than being Administrators, but a lack of awareness of security is so ingrained in the mindset of the typical Windows developer (even within Microsoft!) that this last hope is a stillborn one.

Hitlers Zweites Buch

Randy McDonald has an interesting post up on Hitler's Second Book, and he also provides an excerpt from an Omar Bartov article in TNR that points out the continuity, even rigidity, in Hitler's thought from the time when he dictated Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess while in prison, through 1928 when his reborn NSDAP began to enjoy its first glimmers of electoral success, right on to 1939 and his initiation of a completely unnecessary Second World War. Hitler was a flexible tactician, particularly in the years before the adulation of the German Volk had gone completely to his head, but a man of original ideas he certainly was not.

Anyone interested in getting a feel for Hitler's view of himself, his "enemies" and the ideal embodied in his "New Order" could do worse than also taking a look at Hitler's Table Talk, a record of informal conversations he had with various dignitaries of the Third Reich. The conversations span from July 1941 when it seemed the war in Russia was already won, and Hitler was consequently at his most voluble and expansive, to November 1944, by which point all of Hitler's grandiose visions of himself and his place in history seem to have disappeared, leaving behind only the ugly old residue of virulent anti-semitism he'd carried within him from his time as a lowly corporal recovering from the effects of nerve gas in Pasewalk.

Much of what Hitler has to say in the course of the Table Talk is banal in the extreme, and the "Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten" ("Greatest Field Marshall of all Time", or Gröfaz for short) displays a weakness for pseudo-scientific theories, like the "World Ice Theory" that puts to rest any notion that his was in any way a penetrating intellect. What is clear from reading the Table Talk is that Hitler very much thought of himself as an apostle of Reason and Science, a true child of the enlightenment, working against the machinations of obscurantist priests and spoilt princelings who would like nothing better than to keep the ordinary man under the heel and in ignorance. I think many a budding social-engineer who takes pride, in our day, in his contempt for religion, and his (mostly supposed) high esteem for science, would be surprised by just how comfortably Hitler's own views on such matters would fit into his milieu. As someone said of the Randites, repeatedly claiming to worship science and reason, and actually paying obeisance to these two ideas, are not at all the same thing.

It is often said that Hitler had no positive ideas for what his ideal world to come would look like, other than that it would be free of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and others he deemed "racial undesirables", but reading the Table Talk makes clear that this such claims are not rooted in truth. The Führer dreams of setting up an astronomical observatory to impart to men an appreciation of (in his own words) "the greatness of our universe"; he expounds the artistic glories of Florence and Siena; he lays out his vision of the coming land of milk and honey, in which 100,000 acres of the finest soil will be devoted to the cultivation of rubber, gigantic hydro-electric installations will be erected to provide cheap, clean and virtually limitless power, tidal energy will be harnessed to lighten the face of Europe's cities, vast seas of grain will sway golden in the breeze of the Ukraine's black earth, and along the shores of the Volga; a paradise on earth will come into being - just as soon as the hard and brutal (if, most regrettably, necessary) work of "cleansing" the Reich's new conquests of Jews, bolsheviks, "intellectuals" and other assorted troublemakers is completed.

With Hitler, always, right beside the pretty words about Art, Reason, and the European Mission, we see also the brutality, the viciousness, the assertion that cruelty is actually kindness when properly considered, and the insistence that this, that or another people are unfit for nothing more than lives of slavery, merely by virtue of their "inferior" blood - and the Jews, it goes without saying, are the absolute worst of all. A measure of the depth of Hitler's hatred for Jews is that he even manages to find a kind word for lowly negroes, saying at one point

The precept that it's men's duty to love one another is theory - and the Christians are the last to practise it! A negro baby who has the misfortune to die before a missionary gets his clutches on him, goes to Hell! If that were true, one might well lament that sorrowful destiny: to have lived only three years, to burn for all eternity with Lucifer!

while in another discussion he states that

Dirt shows on black people only when missionaries, to teach them modesty, oblige them to put on clothes. In the state of nature, negroes are very clean. To a missionary, the smell of dirt is agreeable. From this point of view, they themselves are the dirtiest swine of all. They have a horror of water.

yet, in all of the 710 pages of recorded discussions in the book, not once does he have the slightest thing positive to say about Jews. Hitler's brand of racism was a most peculiar thing, in as far as it branded Poles and Russians - who tend on the average to fit even more closely than the Germans the "Nordic" ideal he claimed to worship - as untermenschen deserving of extermination through starvation and slave labor, while exalting the martial and artistic qualities of the darker-skinned Italians and Spaniards, and even paying obeisance to the valor the non-white Japanese; even so, no one would claim that Africans occupied anything other than the lowest rung on the Hitlerian chain of being. The natural conclusion one arrives at is that where Der Führer was concerned, Jews simply weren't human beings, even if of an inferior sort.

Uganda's HIV Epidemic Wanes: Word of Mouth Leads to Safer Sex

This is wonderful news, if true, and I'm chagrined that I failed to spot this article earlier.

There are 70% fewer cases of HIV in Uganda now compared with ten years ago, research reveals. It is a success story that highlights the power of local communities to initiate change and shows how prevention strategies can work.

The disease is less prevalent because people are limiting their number of sexual partners, says Daniel Low-Beer from Cambridge University, who co-authored the research. He believes this has happened because friends, family and social networks are talking about HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and spreading the word about preventing infection.

The researchers studied the medical and behavioural records of thousands of pregnant women and army recruits in Uganda and neighbouring Malawi, Kenya and Zambia. Extrapolating from those figures to the whole population, the team report in Science that half a million Ugandans are HIV positive now, compared with 1.5 million a decade ago.

"It is a massive decline," says HIV researcher George Rutherford from the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study. "It is unprecedented in the developing world." The survey also reveals that there is 60% less casual sex in Uganda now than ten years ago.

Uganda's achievement is something of a one-off in a continent where the HIV epidemic is still growing. Success is in part due to rapid response mass media campaigns.

Twenty years ago, when infection was at its peak, billboards, radio shows and concerts shouted a coordinated anti-HIV message. Public figures, including politicians, religious leaders and health workers, promoted safe sex and people began to use condoms more often.

But similar strategies in other African countries did little to lower the prevalence of HIV. So why was Uganda so successful?

[............]

The difference is that in Uganda people became engaged with the epidemic at the community level, says Low-Beer. Local care groups, religious movements, non-governmental organisations and care networks all spread the message. Families, friends and neighbours began talking about HIV prevention and care, and sexually transmitted diseases stopped being a taboo topic.

The issue also became personal, says Low-Beer. Most people now know someone who has AIDS or has died from the disease and this has motivated people to change their behaviour.

The situation echoes San Francisco in the late eighties when HIV had a stranglehold on the gay community. The best predictor of behavioural change back then was knowing someone with HIV or AIDS. (emphases added)

Following is a critical sentence from the abstract of the actual study that I think particularly worthy of note:

The Ugandan success is equivalent to a vaccine of 80% effectiveness.

There are a few things that need to be noted here. The first is that, as wonderful as this news may seem, the methodology employed in the study is one that has had problems in the past: pregnant women and soldiers by no means constitute a random subsection of any population. One hopes that this is an issue that has been dealt rigorously dealt with by the authors of this study, but I don't have access to the full article to confirm this myself.

Proceeding for the moment on the assumption that population sampling issues aren't important, the second, and undoubtedly the most important, issue that one must pay attention to is the causal factor to which the decline in HIV-infection rates is attributed - a decline in the number of sexual partners Ugandans are having. In other words, instead of relying more heavily on condoms, people in Uganda are abstaining from sexual promiscuity.

I'm no puritan, and don't at all buy into the notion that sex is "evil", but I've always found it curious that so many supposedly "open-minded" people should be dismissive of efforts to encourage abstinence. Even if one doesn't like the people who advocate such messages for their religious and social views, that still doesn't give one licence to dismiss anything they have to say as false by definition. The empirical reality in Uganda seems to indicate strongly that a reduction in sexual promiscuity can lead to dramatic drops in HIV prevalence rates: if we were to hear on the news tomorrow that someone had come up with an HIV vaccine that was 80% effective, most of us would be jumping for joy.

The final thing I'd like to point the reader's attention to is the statement by Daniel Low-Beer about the personal impact of actually having acquaintances who are either suffering from or have died of AIDS. If Low-Beer's insight is correct, it indicates a possible silver lining: there is a chance that the HIV epidemic will become self-limiting, as increasing familiarity with the disease dispels tbe complacency that has allowed the virus to spread so widely across Africa and South Asia. Given the extremely high HIV prevalance rates in Southern Africa even under the lowest projections, I don't know to what extent such a hope will be borne out, but it does seem a reasonable enough possibility on the face of it.

Where's the Catch?

This is the sort of news one would be a fool to take at face value. The EU's southern members are simply too addicted to subsidies for them to agree to any proposal of the sort outlined below. Here's betting that there'll be a poison pill of some sort buried within the proposal, just as contentious proposals on intellectual property were cynically utilized to sink the last round of talks.

KILLARNEY, Ireland (Reuters) - The European Union is ready to eliminate its lavish subsidies on farm exports to galvanize sluggish world trade talks provided its main partners do the same, EU trade chief Pascal Lamy said on Monday.

Details of the proposed move, long demanded by critics of its generous farm subsidies, have been sent to members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) just days before ministers from several WTO states hold a potentially crucial meeting in Paris.

The EU spends some 43 billion euros a year on its farm policy, nearly half of its entire annual budget. By far the largest proportion of this goes to France. It has faced mounting pressure to abolish its export subsidies.

Lamy said the offer depended on the EU's WTO partners matching their move, which the United States has indicated it is willing to do.

It also required progress in the two other key areas of the farm negotiations, domestic farm support programs and market access.

``If an acceptable offer emerges on market access and domestic support, we would be ready to move on export subsidies,'' Lamy said in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.

Up to now, European unwillingness to eliminate these subsidies by a set date has been a major obstacle to reaching a deal on agriculture, widely viewed as the key to unlocking the WTO's troubled Doha Round of trade liberalization talks.

The round, whose successful conclusion economists say would give a huge boost to the world economy, was supposed to have been wrapped up by the end of this year.

[............]

The bloc insists it has already made massive strides in reducing the worst of its trade-distorting farm support -- market price guarantees and export subsidies -- in two reforms in 1992 and 1999 and also in major changes agreed last June.

On market access, Lamy said the EU was sticking to its guns for a ``blended'' formula, which would allow the 25-nation bloc and countries like Japan with expensive domestic farm industries to keep high tariffs on some politically sensitive goods.

But the G20 group of developing countries, led by Brazil, India and China, has firmly rejected this approach because it says it would asks too much of the developing countries and too little of the richer states.

The formula for market access, the extent to which countries open their markets to the goods of others, will be at the center of talks in Paris at the OECD, which kick off on Wednesday with meeting of technical experts.

What's most infuriating about all this is that it isn't just the farmers of the Third World who suffer from these protectionist policies, but the poor of the EU as well. It's easy enough for well-paid politicians and bureaucrats to blame the European working-classes for pigging out on McDonalds Happy Meals, but one thing the elitists who go in for this sort of thing fail to realize is that the poor go for such food largely because eating healthily in Europe can be much more expensive. When decent-quality bananas go for $2.00 for a bunch, a small basket of nectarines can only be had for $4.80, and Indian basmati rice costs $3.60 a kilo, is it any surprise that people on marginal incomes opt for fried spuds and milkshakes instead?

Changes

I'm taking advantage of the new capabilities being offered by Blogger, by updating my site template. This has two benefits:

1. Permalinks will now have human-readable names.
2. Comments will now be hosted on Blogger, so there should be no more occasions on which the site is available but commenting facilities aren't. From now on, they'll both go down together ... :-)

Unfortunately, it will take a while for me to figure out a way to import all the old comments from Haloscan, so I hope no one takes it personally that their masterpieces of insight aren't available for the world to see in the interim ...

NB - Links on other sites to my older posts should still continue to work, so access to old comments will still be available through that route.

POSTSCRIPT: It's been pointed out to me that the Blogger commenting facility has an annoying limitation - one either has to log into a Blogger account or post anonymously. I'm trying to see if something can be done about this, and if I can't figure something out within a day or two, I'll switch back to the Haloscan commenting facility instead.

POST-POSTCRIPT: I've decided not to bother waiting for Blogger-hosted comments to be fixed. It's back to Haloscan for now!

Only the Lonely

Not everything to be found on the pages of the Grauniad is tripe of the sort put out by Jonathan Watts. This profile of Edward Hopper's life and work by Annie Proulx is particularly good. Hopper rates very highly in my personal pantheon of great artists - much higher than either Picasso or Norman Rockwell, for sure. Maybe it's just me, but there's a certain commonality I see in the works of Edward Hopper and James McNeill Whistler, another American who transcended the conventional wisdom that "great" art must inevitably issue from the hands of European artists.

John Singer Sargent also rates very higly in my eyes, but more for the sheer beauty of his work and his ability to capture the feel of life amongst the upper classes of the Edwardian era; his art does not inspire in me the same sorts of contemplative moods that Hopper and Whistler's best paintings do. In any case, one could plausibly argue that the only thing that was American about Sargent was his passport.

Typical Grauniad Stupidity

Only in the Grauniad can one come across an article supposedly meant for a "mainstream" audience in which the China of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution is painted as some sort of golden era of workers' rights, as opposed to the "ruthless" capitalism the oppressed masses must endure today:

Overworked, underpaid and about to lose his job, Huang Zungkun must wonder how the socialist revolution in China ended up creating one of the world's most ruthlessly capitalist states.

Not that he has any time for reflection. Like many of the 100 million workers who have powered China's spectacular economic growth, Huang spent his days from dawn to dusk on a construction site for less than 30p an hour.

But - just as typically - the 37-year-old carpenter was laid off, victim of a labour market so overflowing that employers wait months to pay wages, ignore safety regulations and discard workers at will.

In a sign of the transformation that has enriched - and unbalanced - the world's most populous nation, Huang's last day at work was May Day, once a celebration of the peasant movement that propelled the Communists to power in 1949.

This month, president Hu Jintao visited a factory to praise 'model workers' for their contribution to China's development. But the party's roots are increasingly belied by a divided society closer to Engels's reports of sweatshop industrialisation in 19th-century Britain than Mao's vision of a proletarian utopia.

[............]

Every revision of the constitution since the start of free-market reforms 25 years ago has shifted the balance to capital. In 1982, the right to strike disappeared on the grounds that everyone was employed by the state, which represented the people.

Aaaaargh! This is just so braindead I don't even know where to begin! Does the fool who wrote this article think the days when tens of millions of Chinese starved to death while working value-destroying "jobs" was some sort of heaven-on-earth or something? No doubt the years of famine under Chairman Mao had all the "balance" that today's China is supposedly lacking. As for the "sweatshop industrialisation" set up as a contrast to "Mao's vision of a proletarian utopia", perhaps we ought to look at how things really were under the Chairman's watch, rather than what his "vision" of how they ought to be was?

The Jonathan Watts character who authored this piece of crap is so lacking in historical perspective, and is so obviously working overtime to portray today's China in the worst light in comparison to an idyllic communist past that never existed, that I have to wonder if he isn't a fully-paid up member of the Chinese Communist Party. Hell, I bet he's a more genuine believer in the glories of communism than the mass of Chinese communists, if only because they, unlike useless Western idiots like him, have actually had to live through the damn thing. If Mr. Watts imagines that the "right" to strike was anything other than theoretical in pre-Deng China, I'm sure there are any number of veterans of China's "re-education" camps who will be quick to disabuse him of such notions. The fact of the matter is that all the supposed measures to which desperate workers are supposedly being forced to resort would have been unthinkable in the days when the Chinese secret police could round up hundreds of thousands on the turn of a dime.

Zensiert, verhaftet, exiliert: "In meinem Weblog fühlte ich mich frei"

An interesting article by Der Spiegel on the experiences of Iranian weblogger Sina Motallebi's been making the rounds of the German-language weblogs. As much as I'd like to put up a translation of the whole thing, I don't have the time to do so, but I'd recommend anyone with decent command of German to at least give at a look.

Weblogs sind im Iran populär - und potenziell gefährlich. Sina Motallebi saß für sein Netztagebuch im Gefängnis. Dank Protesten aus der internationalen "Blogosphäre" kam er frei. "Die iranische Regierung kann Weblogs nicht stoppen", sagt er. Nur die Menschen dahinter.

English-language translation:

Weblogs are popular in Iran - and potentially dangerous. For his online diary, Sina Motallebi sat in prison. Thanks to protests from the international "Blogosphere", he was released. "The Iranian government cannot stop weblogs", he says. Only the people behind them.

School "Resegregation" is a Load of Bunk

As I suspected, the conventional wisdom that American schools were undergoing racial resegregation, thanks to the undermining of Brown v. Board of Education by dastardly conservatives, turns out to be a load of horse manure:

As the 50^th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision approaches, numerous media reports have stated that our schools are in the midst of a massive resegregation movement, compromising the achievement of the 1960s and 1970s. This is the conclusion reached by Gary Orfield, Co-Director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project and author of many books, articles, and reports on school segregation. “We are losing many of the gains of desegregation,” he is quoted as saying (The Washington Post, January 18, 2004). “We are not back to where we were before Brown, but we are back to when King was assassinated” [in 1968].

The chief evidence in favor of this thesis is the declining share of black and Hispanic students in majority white schools since 1990. But is this trend caused by resegregation or by broader changes in the American population? Our analysis points to the latter, demonstrating that whites did not move toward increasingly white schools as minorities increasingly attended minority schools. Instead national demographic shifts involving all racial and ethnic groups have resulted in schools with lower shares of whites and higher shares of black, Hispanic, and Asian enrollment. It is misleading to label these trends as resegregation.

Specifically, we find:

• White students make up a declining share of public elementary enrollment due to rapid growth in the number of Hispanic and Asian students.
• There has been an overall shift in the composition of elementary schools, with declining numbers of students of all races in schools that are predominantly (more than 90%) white and growth especially in majority minority schools.
• White students have shifted from schools that are predominantly white, increasing their representation in schools that are moderately (50-89%) white or moderately (50-89%) minority.  Black, Hispanic and Asian students have shifted from schools that are moderately white toward those that are moderately or predominantly minority.

In other words, statistical illiterates who have bought into the notion that "integration" is identical with minority dispersal into a sea of white faces have taken what they ought to have regarded as a positive development and interpreted it as a negative! The trends described here are exactly what we'd expect if white Americans were taking racial integration in their stride, and to describe a situation in which the disproportionate expansion in the numbers of Asian, black and Hispanic students - thanks to the younger demographic profiles of those groups - has led to an increasing number of "majority-minority" schools as evidence of white racism, is to set up the argument in such a manner that one cannot ever lose. There are straightforward ways of measuring heterogeneity, like the Herfindahl index, that avoid making ridiculous errors of this sort, but why look deeper into such matters when it is so convenient to be able to argue that the right-wing racists on the Supreme Court want to take us back to the dark ages, by repealing the laws that are the only means of keeping white America's bestial impulses in check? It seems that for many on the left, the notion that all white Americans are just itching to institute apartheid, if only the judiciary can be gotten out of the way, is as unquestionable an article of faith as the belief of many on the right that all men would flee their wives in an instant if offered the prospect of rampant gay sex.

UPDATE: This OpinionJournal editorial is also worthy of a read.

Resegregation Hysteria Overblown

In light of my suspicions about the claims of resegregation leveled recently by Bob Herbert, it's especially fortunate that I've just run across this intriguing Brookings Institution study on changes in ethnic residential patterns in the 10 largest US metropolitan areas over the last decade and half. The Brookings Institution is no bastion of firebreathing reactionaries, but a left-of-center think tank, and as such no one can glibly put forward the argument of an ideologically motivated bias to the paper in question. Indeed, the paper's authors don't let their own good news get in the way of their suggesting that it "calls out for examining how policy might foster racial and ethnic integration, and encourage positive social outcomes in an increasingly diverse society."

An analysis of the changing racial and ethnic profile of neighborhoods in America's 10 largest metropolitan areas between 1990 and 2000 reveals that:

• The number of predominantly white neighborhoods fell by 30 percent during the 1990s. Neighborhoods with a mixed white and Hispanic or Asian population replaced predominantly white communities as the most common neighborhood type by 2000.
• Nine of the 10 metro areas saw an increase in mixed-race neighborhoods. In Boston, Chicago, and Detroit, neighborhoods with a mix of whites and Hispanics or Asians fueled this increase. In Dallas, Houston, New York, and Washington, D.C., neighborhoods with a mix of blacks and Hispanics or Asians multiplied most rapidly.
• Over the decade, whites and blacks became less likely, and Hispanics and Asians became more likely, to live in neighborhoods in which their group predominated. In 2000, about equal proportions of whites, blacks, and Hispanics (41–42 percent) lived in predominantly white, black, and other race communities, respectively.
• Neighborhoods that changed from homogeneous to mixed-race were often suburban, but patterns varied widely among metro areas. In Washington, neighborhoods with a mix of blacks and Hispanics/Asians grew rapidly in once-predominantly black suburbs. In Chicago, formerly white communities in the central city and older suburbs attracted significant numbers of non-black minorities.

Of course, there's far more to America than its largest cities, so it is not entirely out of the bounds of logical possibility that the rest of America really is undergoing rapid racial resegregation even as its biggest urban centers are desegregating. Nevertheless, such an argument becomes much harder to make, as not only must those who would advance it explain the existence of any supposed bifurcation in attitudes towards racially integrated residential areas, but they must also demonstrate that the alleged resegregation is taking place with such an intensity elsewhere that it swamps the integration going on in the top metropolitan areas, which constitute a substantial fraction of America's total population.

I can see a Herbert-supporter trying to "nuance" a way out of this difficult situation by indicating that Herbert was actually going about American schools rather than places of residence, but given that most American children still attend public schools, and that which public school one attends is a function of where one lives, such an exercise simply won't fly. To be blunt, I think Herbert was pulling "facts" out of his ass when he claimed that America was rapidly returning to the pre-Brown v. Board of Education status quo, and that there is no empirical evidence to be found in support of such a contention.

The Draft is a Stupid Idea

Julian Sanchez (whose enthusiasm for Howard Dean made me extremely suspicious of the soundness of his libertarian credentials) is too kind to advocates of the draft in this article of his up at Reason. Anyone who advocates a return of the draft, under any conditions short of grave and imminent national peril, is at best a misguided idiot, and at worst a totalitarian thug.

From the point of view of military effectiveness, there are myriad good reasons that the Pentagon itself prefers a volunteer force. Whatever the advantages of having more warm bodies on the field, they're almost certainly outweighed by the benefits of a willing, well-trained, professional force. Rather, a large part of the appeal of the draft seems to have its root in an egalitarian impulse. Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.) sponsored the Senate version of the Universal National Service Act of 2003, and said of the bill: "We all share the benefits of life in America, and under this plan, we all help shoulder the burden of defending our freedoms." That logic has been echoed by liberal bloggers such as Daily Kos, Matthew Yglesias, and Max Sawicky, who writes:

You could argue that it's wrong to force people to serve against their will. But nobody volunteers for the military in order to get killed or maimed. Those with any sense enlist hoping they never have to shoot a bullet. Once you're in, you are no longer a free agent. You do not have the luxury of changing your mind in the face of changes in circumstances.

A draft is more democratic because it subjects everyone to these constraints on individual choice. The class bias in recruitment of volunteers could not be more obvious. It would be wrong to imagine volunteers are impoverished and join out of some economic desperation. But there should be no question that prospective recruits do not have the same life and career choices as those (including women) who would be subject to Charlie [Rangel]'s draft.

To be willing to support a draft on these grounds, one must ultimately believe that paying volunteers is more coercive and inequitable than quite literally forcing them on pain of punishment to take up arms. Something about that argument calls to mind that episode of The Simpsons where town officials plan to combat a plague of lizards by releasing Chinese needle-snakes. And when the snakes get out of control? Carnivorous gorillas.

Any time a wage is offered for a job, the people who take it will tend to be those who don't expect to make a great deal more doing something else. But if those with fewer options are "coerced" into taking (what they regard as) the best option available, then all employment, not just military service, is coercive. If that were right, it might constitute an argument for redistribution to relieve this "economic duress." But it could scarcely be an argument for trying to even out representation in the armed forces, for trying to ensure that those who would choose military service as their best option, all things considered, stay home while the unwilling are shipped off to basic training.

Max Sawicky once again shows why he is so richly deserving of the low opinion I hold of his ability to reason. There are class biases in every dangerous job in this world: should we then institute the draft for fire brigades, police departments and loggers as well?

One important thing that tellingly isn't even mentioned once, either by Julian Sanchez or by draft advocates is that for every gutless punk who signs up for military benefits and hightails it to Canada when called upon to meet the terms of his enlistment, there are large numbers of people who sign up precisely because there is nothing else in the world they would rather do than fight; as hard as it may be for peace-loving libertarians and liberals to grasp, there really are people in this world who crave the excitement of battle, and who would rather die violently on some godforsaken foreign battlefield than live their lives out in what seem to them to be boring and pointless occupations. A "fair" draft would deny many of these individuals just the sort of outlet they crave while coercing just the sort of conflict-averse types who loathe fighting the most into becoming that which they most despise.

Appeals for the reinstatement of the draft are symptomatic of what it is I find least attractive about liberalism, the attitude that not only should the state treat all its citizens as equals before the law (an unexceptionable notion), but that all individuals are interchangeable for any purpose whatsoever, like pawns on a checkers board. Only under such a worldview does the reinstatement of the draft, in an America not under peril of imminent destruction, make the slightest bit of sense as a policy proposal. The draft is a reasonable idea for a small state like Israel which is surrounded by enemies - or at best "friends" like Egypt that might as well be enemies - and even there it is arguable that its practical benefits are now outweighed by its drawbacks; for countries like America and the rest of the membership of NATO, however, it is nothing more than a politically correct name for indentured servitude.

Filings by US Jobless Plunge; Productivity Up in Quarter

This is excellent news, even if we've had to wait an exceedingly long while to hear it; it also means one less headache for the Bush administration to worry about come election day. I can only conclude that the forthcoming election will revolve around one issue alone: the ongoing situation in Iraq.

WASHINGTON, May 6 (AP) - The productivity of American companies rose solidly in the first quarter of this year, and new filings for unemployment benefits plunged last week to their lowest level in more than three years, according to government reports released Thursday.

The Labor Department reported that productivity - the amount an employee produces for every hour on the job - rose at a 3.5 percent annual rate in the January-to-March quarter, up from a 2.5 percent pace registered in the previous quarter. The number matched the forecasts of analysts.

In the quarter, companies increased output at a 4.9 percent rate, up from a 4.2 percent pace in the previous quarter. Workers' hours, meanwhile, rose at a 1.3 percent rate in the first quarter, after a 1.6 percent growth rate in the previous quarter.

[............]

The economy grew at a 4.2 percent rate in the first quarter of this year, a slight improvement from the 4.1 percent pace registered in the previous quarter. Economists say the economy is expanding at about a 4.5 percent to 5 percent pace in the current quarter.

In a second report from the Labor Department, new applications filed for unemployment insurance dropped by a seasonally adjusted 25,000, to 315,000, for the week ended Saturday, the lowest level since Oct. 28, 2000. Economists had forecast claims to drop to about 335,000.

After months of sluggish payrolls gains, the economy added 308,000 jobs in March, the most in four years.

Caesar's Wife ...

It's farces like this one that demonstrate the need for America's troops in Iraq not just to adhere to a standard of conduct that is better than that of those who they've displaced from power, but to abide by rules of conduct that are above reproach, regardless of how well or how poorly other nations' soldiers approach such standards themselves.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Sudan won re-election to the United Nations' main human rights watchdog on Tuesday, prompting the United States to walk out because of ethnic cleansing in the country's Darfur region.

Sudan's envoy immediately accused the U.S. delegation of "shedding crocodile tears," and said the United States had turned a blind eye as Iraqi prisoners were mistreated and civilians were harmed in battle.

In the African regional group, Sudan, Guinea, Togo and Kenya, were chosen for three-year terms on the commission, beginning in January.

Sichan Siv, the U.S. delegate to the council, accused Sudan of having no right to sit on the rights commission because of ethnic cleansing in Darfur where government troops are accused of backing Arab militia which pillage black Africa villages, raping and killing. The Khartoum government denies it is involved in ethnic cleansing.

"The United States will not participate in this absurdity," said Siv before briefly walking out of council chambers. "Our delegation will absent itself from the meeting rather than lend support to Sudan's candidacy."

He also walked out a year ago when Cuba won a seat on the commission.

Sudan's deputy U.N. ambassador, Omar Bashir Mohamed Manis, said the United States had no right to accuse anyone of human rights violations after the allegations of mistreatment of Iraqis held in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.

Images of the Iraqi prisoners "are fresh in the minds of all justice-loving people around the world," he said.

The U.S. military is investigating the prisoner abuse after news reports and photos broadcast by CBS last week showed Iraqis stripped naked and tormented by U.S. captors.

[............]

A coalition of 10 human rights groups complained on Monday that too few democracies had been nominated to the commission. It said that among the four African countries only Kenya was a democracy and that Pakistan had serious human rights problems.

In response, Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, Munir Akram, told reporters, "We are fairly comfortable with the fact that the international community views us as a state which is responsible, ruled democratically and has rule of law despite all the challenges and difficulties we are facing." (emphases added)

Nobody but the seriously morally confused would ever mistake Sudan's criticisms for legitimate arguments, but the fact of the matter is that the idiots whose misbehavior has been so incriminatingly disseminated across the world in photographs have given a propaganda bonanza to all those who would like nothing better than to blur the difference between the actions of United States and those of tyrannical regimes like China and Sudan. Those who were involved in these misdeeds must be severely punished, not just given a slap on the wrist, and simply going after a few grunts at the bottom of the heirarchy will not suffice. People high up on the chain of command need to demonstrate their willingness to accept responsibility for the actions of their underlings by falling on their swords, instead of simply pleading ignorance. Frankly, even a slave taskmaster like Albert Speer showed more integrity in his willingness during the Nuremburg trials to own up to "collective" responsibility than I've seen so far from the American high command.

While we're at it, does anyone else other than myself find the Pakistani ambassador's reference to his nation as one "ruled democratically" laugh-out-loud ridiculous? Since when have successful coup-plotters (which is all Musharraf really is) been able to make claims to any sort of democratic mandate?

The Gorilla in the Room

Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber links to a Daily Telegraph article on a study I was already long aware of, but which still left me feeling a sense of amazement when I read about it again.

Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with another demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.

Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.

However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.

Amazing, isn't it? The way in which our focus on certain things can blind us to others is something I feel deserves greater recognition; often, the more you look, the less you see.

Britney is NOT so Hot ...

Not in in real life, anyway. Anyone who doubts that what we see on the air is a testament to the wonders of cinematography and the makeup artists' craft ought take a look at the pictures on this forum; let's just say that I wouldn't look twice at at the girl on view if I saw her walking down the street; heck, who knows, I probably have seen her walking around the Union Square area at some point and simply failed to realize who I was seeing.

A Rare Day of Insightful Commentary at the NYT

What's gotten into the New York Times editorial staff today? First they put out an article acknowledging that Schwarzenegger is proving to be a successful governor, then they publish a column critical of the overeagerness of European leaders to get cozy with Ghaddafi.

Some European leaders seem unduly eager to welcome Libya's bloodstained dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, into respectable international company. They ought to restrain themselves. Colonel Qaddafi's police state is a prime example of the kind of autocratic, erratic and incompetent government that has led most of the Arab world into a dead end of economic and political stagnation, blighting millions of lives and stoking rage across the region.

Colonel Qaddafi's agreement last December to dismantle Libya's unconventional weapons programs made the world safer, and justified the easing of American economic sanctions explicitly linked to those programs. A strong case can now be made for easing Libya's economic isolation and improving the lot of its people — so long as Colonel Qaddafi refrains from channeling the proceeds into financing weapons programs or terrorism.

While doing so, however, democratic leaders need to maintain a healthy distance from the man responsible for the deaths of so many innocent people as he prepares to celebrate the 35th anniversary of his absolute rule.

For most of that period, Colonel Qaddafi has used Libya's oil wealth to finance his fantasies of international revolutionary leadership by sponsoring coups, invasions, assassination attempts and terrorist atrocities across the world. Americans got a taste of his methods in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, an attack that killed 270 people. A year later, another Libyan terrorist bomb killed 170 people on a French airliner over Africa. Libyans have endured decades of assassinations, abductions and torture.

In recent years, Colonel Qaddafi has withdrawn from direct involvement in international terrorism, and he has now ended his unconventional weapons programs. Still, lengthy arbitrary detentions and other human rights abuses continue at home.

Yet earlier this spring, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, who insists that the civilized world was right to confront the murderous Saddam Hussein, allowed himself to be entertained by Colonel Qaddafi in a tent in Tripoli. Mr. Blair's principles should have kept him away.

Last week, Colonel Qaddafi met with the European Commission in Brussels, his first visit outside Africa or the Arab world in nearly 15 years. After sharing an elegant lunch with the commission's president, Romano Prodi, he made it clear that his views on violence and politics have not fundamentally changed. Characterizing past Libyan terrorism as "armed struggle" in support of freedom fighters, he darkly warned that "hopefully, nothing will force us to go back to the old days when we used our cars and explosive belts." (emphases added)

Wise words indeed, especially from the NYT, which is more usually to be seen peddling the faux-wisdom that the Europeans know everything best. The fawning that Tony Blair has been doing over Ghaddafi has been difficult to watch; there is a difference between providing a rogue with a carrot and treating said rogue like a long-lost son, and Blair and Prodi seem not to recognize that. The ongoing situation in Iran, in which new agreements on nuclear research are made by the Iranians only for new violations to follow quickly on their heels, is yet another example of a toothless and feckless European "multilateralism" in action.

Buthelezi Does Something Positive for a Change

Over the years, Mangosuthu Buthelezi's mostly been in the news for some bit of trouble or other he's had a hand in fomenting, but for once, news coverage of his actions actually has him doing something positive: breaking the taboo amongst prominent black South Africans about discussing the personal impact of their country's AIDS epidemic on their own lives.

The leader of South Africa's Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party, Mangosuthu Buthelezi, has revealed that his son Prince died of Aids.

"I reach out to all the other people who died of HIV/Aids. My son did," the country's Sunday Independent quoted the former home minister as saying.

The comments have been hailed as a move which could help break the stigma surrounding the disease.

About 5.3 million South Africans live with HIV or Aids.

"I feel the pain for the many children of Africa who are now dying an untimely and terrible death. I am in mourning," Mr Buthelezi said at his son's funeral.

"We are a nation which ought to be in mourning."

A spokesman for the Aids Unit in KwaZulu-Natal said he hoped Mr Buthelezi's comments would "go a long way in what we have always asked for - that we should not stigmatise HIV and Aids".

Chris Mokolatsie told the Pretoria News paper they might help to "accept the reality of the illness in our homes".

Poor record

With one of the highest prevalence rates in the world, the South African government has been accused of dragging its feet on the issue of Aids.

Last year President Thabo Mbeki denied knowing anyone affected by the disease.

And at one time he questioned the link between Aids and HIV.

Aids campaigners and opposition parties have criticised Mr Mbeki for the reappointment of the country's controversial health minister in a recent cabinet reshuffle.

Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has suggested that those with HIV should eat beetroot and garlic.

Her department has been attacked for blocking the roll-out of Aids drugs and sending out confusing messages on the illness.

Given the prevalence of HIV in South Africa even under the most conservative estimates, the likelihood that Mbeki was being honest with himself when he claimed not to know a single person suffering from AIDS is essentially zero. As for his "health" minister, Manto-Tshabalala-Msimang, the fact that Mbeki could keep on a crank crazy/stupid enough to suggest beetroot and garlic as AIDS remedies strongly suggests that South Africa's President continues to harbor the same old doubts that have already cost so many of his citizens their lives.

With the way things are going, it isn't out of the question that future generations of South Africans will look upon Mbeki's record in office and decide that his negligence on this one issue far outweighed all the positves of his tenure in office. Does Thabo Mbeki really want to join Nongqawuse in the ranks of those whose names are cursed by black South Africans?

The Chairman Smiles

For all lovers of Socialist-Realist agitprop, an online exhibition of posters from China, Cuba and the former Soviet Union.

Long live the great Stalin!"

Enthusiastically welcome the victorious opening of the Fourth National People's Congress, carry forward the struggle for Chairman Mao's revolutionary line!

Long live our glorious leader! Down with the capitalist exploiters! Smash the running dogs of imperialism!

Meaningless Sophistry

Or, how to destroy your credibility in short order. Does John Kerry really expect anyone to buy this line?

PITTSBURGH (AP) - Does John Kerry, who supports higher automobile fuel economy standards, own a gas-guzzling SUV? He does, but says it belongs to the family, not to him.

During a conference call Thursday with reporters to discuss his upcoming jobs tour through West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, the Democratic presidential candidate was asked whether he owned a Chevrolet Suburban.

``I don't own an SUV,'' said Kerry, who supports increasing existing fuel economy standards to 36 miles per gallon by 2015 in order to reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil supplies.

Kerry also has made rising gasoline prices an issue in the campaign against President Bush. In Houston on Thursday, Kerry said the president broke a 2000 campaign pledge to ``jawbone'' oil-producing nations by pressuring them to increase their output.

Kerry thought for a second when asked whether his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, had a Suburban at their Ketchum, Idaho, home. Kerry said he owns and drives a Dodge 600 and recently bought a Chrysler 300M. He said his wife owns the Chevrolet SUV.

``The family has it. I don't have it,'' he said.

This is really a minor issue, objectively speaking, but of such petty things are political disasters made; remember Dukakis and the tank in 1988, or Ed Muskie's tearful defense of his wife in 1972? Democrats may complain about the unfairness of having minor issues like this one held against their candidate, even as what they perceive to be far more damaging accusations bounce off the incumbent president, but the American people are what they are, and they likely will buy into the message that Kerry is a champion waffler if he keeps on with this sort of thing.

A Time for Retrenchment

It's incidents like this one that indicate the wisdom of Ariel Sharon's decision to seek a complete withdrawal from the Gaza strip, and the stupidity of the obduracy shown by Likud hardliners in rejecting this initiative. It simply isn't sensible for Israel to continue to risk the lives of its soldiers and waste tremendous amounts of resources to defend a few thousand zealots who insist on residing like Lords of the Earth amidst a sea of 1.2 million hostile Arabs.

Palestinian gunmen shot and killed a pregnant Jewish settler and four of her children in Gaza yesterday as Israel's ruling Likud Party was holding a referendum on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to pull out of the area.

Tali Hatuel, who was eight months pregnant, had been driving her Citroen along a nearly empty, palm-fringed road, when the gunmen opened fire on her car with automatic weapons. In the panic, she lost control and lurched off the road.

The two gunmen rushed towards her firing their automatic rifles, shooting through the windows at point blank range. There was no chance of escape for the 34-year-old mother or her young children Hila, 11, Hadar, nine, Roni, seven, and Merav, two.

Some of the children were still strapped to their seats when rescue workers arrived. They found the car riddled with bullets and the carpets drenched in blood. A sticker taped to the car read: "Uprooting the settlements, victory for terror."

It later emerged that Mrs Hatuel, a care worker in a Gaza settlement, had been on her way to protest against Mr Sharon's plan to withdraw from Gaza.

[............]

Militants from Islamic Jihad, Fatah and Hamas all claimed responsibility for what they described as the "heroic" attack. The gunmen were named as Ibrahim Hamed and Faisal Abuntera, residents of Rafah in southern Gaza. Israeli military officials confirmed that different groups participated in the attacks.

It goes without saying that I think the gunmen who shot Mrs Hatuel and her children are depraved beasts - what is so "heroic" about murdering children at point-blank range? I feel especially sorry for the children who had no say in the choice of their mother or the government she sought to pressure as to where they would live. Still, no amount of moral outrage on the part of myself or anyone else is going to change the fact that Israel would be better off without the burden of having to provide costly but imperfect security to a few settlers in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli presence there, unlike the West Bank, does nothing whatsoever for Israel's security, and if loss of face was what was at issue, Sharon was already doing a pretty thorough job of making sure the leadership of Hamas didn't get the wrong message.

UPDATE: Jonathan Edelstein interprets the results of the referendum in much the same way I do, as a potential disaster in the making. Predictably, the armchair warriors at LGF link to this lunatic piece by yet another of those individuals who wish to identify the struggle against Islamic extremism with their dreams of a biblical Greater Israel. Religious fanaticism is by no means a danger confined to radical Islam or fundamentalist Christianity.

UPDATE 2: Actually, the LGF thread I mentioned earlier isn't half as unbalanced as they usually are, thanks in large measure to the participation of actual Israelis who are having to put their own lives on the line defending the settlements. All the emotional blackmail in the world cannot disguise the fact that there is simply no plausible military rationale for Israel holding on to the Gaza Strip.

Culture Considered Harmless

As a defense of the notion of unfettered freedom of speech, Reason's Tim Cavanaugh puts forward the argument that censorship, being based on the claim that there are such things as "dangerous" ideas, is a pointless endeavor, for the simple reason that art is harmless.

Even rockers less embarrassing than Pat Boone are not immune to warnings about free expression's horrors. To Frank Zappa's small but fanatical fan base, the epic story album Joe's Garage is a hilarious send-up of censors and moralists and their campaigns against popular music. But the record's real stroke of genius is that it literalizes the fears of the very prigs it's satirizing: The rock lifestyle really does bring the record's eponymous hero to a hideous end. Nor is this another rock flameout epic such as David Bowie's Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, which stages early death as an act of Byronic heroism. By casting himself as the "Central Scrutinizer," an institutional censor who narrates the story, Zappa gives the game away: The squares are right to worry; rock really does warp kids' minds.

Comical, sarcastic, or absurd as some of these examples may be, they have a virtue that an abstract defense of free expression lacks: They take seriously the idea that there may actually be dangerous ideas, and dangerous artistic vehicles for communicating them. For every kid who watches The Matrix and shoots up his high school, we can cite millions more who saw the same movie and did nothing. Does this demonstrate that art is harmless? And if it is harmless, what's the point of it?

Sadly, I suspect that it is harmless, and that there is no point to it. Even so cold and unsentimental a figure as Flaubert may have been wearing rose-colored glasses when he posited that something as inconsequential as a book could really make a difference in anybody's life. In the fight over Howard Stern's tenuous ability to make a living with his mouth, little attention has been given to the reality that his complaints about President Bush will have about as much impact as the proverbial banana cream pie fifteen feet in diameter dropped from a height of ten feet. If the administration's increasingly apparent incompetence, treachery and criminality are not enough to budge the poll numbers, Howard's shrill rants are utterly useless. The idea that free expression is a dangerous or even powerful tool is a fiction artists and censors alike delude themselves into believing.

Being a great believer in freedom of speech myself, including the freedom to say all sorts of unpleasant things that would probably land one in jail in many continental European countries, I'm sympathetic to Cavanaugh's goal, but I must say that his argument is not in the least convincing. For one to believe that all forms of artistic expression are harmless to the powers that be, one would have to buy into the notion that ideas do not matter, and that what people see and hear has no effect on either their thoughts or their actions, which is clearly an absurdity. Would the likes of Lenin or Hitler have gotten into the position to wreak havoc without tirelessly expounding the ideas in which they believed for years beforehand? Did The Wealth of Nations and Capital have no influence on the world whatsoever? How about One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, or The Gulag Archipelago?

It surely is not an accident that repressive regimes of every persuasion, in every age, have striven mightily to control the the outpourings of poets, philosophers, literateurs and musicians, as even the most callous autocrats can put themselves enough in the shoes of others to recognize that satirical songs and stories are powerful means for undermining the legitimacy of their regimes, especially when they issue from unusually gifted minds. Artistic ideas can indeed be dangerous, often fatally so, as more than one European monarch hasd the misfortune to discover in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Even when we confine ourselves to the less exaulted sphere of ordinary people going about their business, it simply isn't true that exposure to themes in artistic media has no influence on the way in which they behave; it is beyond dispute that Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther had a tremendous (and, in my view, largely baleful) effect on many a young European of the 19th century, while Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel probably did more than any other factor to confer a retrospectively glorious air to the experiences of the First World War in the minds of young Germans; on the British side, Siegfried Sassoon and others like him are also largely responsible (culpable?) for the extreme reluctance of the British to oppose Hitler's aims if that meant risking the lives of their young men in yet another pointless outbreak of bloodletting. Slightly closer to our day, Beat artists like Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac were as much creators of the new cultural zeitgeist as recorders of it.

Clearly, ideas do matter, even if presented in artistic garb, and in fact they matter a great deal. As such, to argue against censorship on the ground that it constitutes a struggle against impotent influences is to adopt a position to blatantly untrue that one's cause is actually set back by the air of mendacity that clings to one's words. If one is to argue against censorship, it cannot be because there are no ideas that aren't dangerous to propagate, but because the potential benefits to be obtained from censorship are far outweighed by the costs of censorship in terms of foregone critiques of smelly orthodoxies, unheard reinterpretations of established ideas, and paths left untrodden because no one was lighted the way to them. Having to listen to the pointless rantings of creationist crackpots, Holocaust deniers and race-lunatics are part of the price to be paid for all the wonderful new notions that are constantly being brought to light.

Google IPO Mania Slows SEC Web Site

It looks like quite a lot of people have failed to learn their lessons from the great IT stock bubble whose bursting we're just starting to recover from. I can understand competitors and financial analysts being interested in Google's S-1 filing, but what point is there in ordinary people wasting their time paging through hundreds of pages of financial documents when the auction process that's been settled on ensures that there's no absolutely no chance they're going to make a killing by being in on the game early?

Intense interest in Google's initial public offering slowed the performance of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Web site, which hosted the search company's financial documents.

Keynote Systems, an Internet performance measurement company, said Friday that Google's IPO registration filing increased traffic to the SEC's site by 900 percent, leading to a significant slowdown. From 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. it took as long as 45 seconds to download the SEC home page compared with the usual four seconds. During that hour, about 80 percent of the Web surfers who tried to download the SEC homepage were unsuccessful.

Scrutinizing the S-1, I'm glad that Google's financial numbers look as healthy as they do, as it validates the belief I've always held, even through the dark days when the Nasdaq was plunging like a stone, that search was the killer application on the web; I'm also certain that Google's financial profitability will continue to shoot upwards for quite a while to come, whatever threatening noises Microsoft and Yahoo may make. Nevertheless, there's a fair price to be paid for anything, and although Google's founders are greatly to be commended for opting for an auction process rather than allowing investment bankers and their favored clients to cream money off by quickly flipping the stock, the downside of this for investors is that this is one stock that ought not to see a meteoric appreciation in price shortly after its listing - if the market in Google stock is dominated by rational investors, that is. It will be interesting to see if that last assumption is borne out.

While we're at it, this is as good a chance as any for me to say that I've always wondered at the stupidity of founders who were happy to see their stock prices streak upwards after a "successful" IPO, as such thinking betrays a complete misunderstanding of what public offerings are all about. The ostensible reason companies give for offering stock to the public is to raise money, and if one's intention is to raise the maximum amount of money for one's firm while selling off the least amount of equity, one ought to be enraged rather than pleased when bankers price one's stock so low that others can double or triple their money overnight simply by holding the stock for a brief while after the public offering. A stock price that shoots up like a rocket after an IPO is a sign of banker failure rather than success, and Brin and Page show a level of financial sophistication in understanding this much that is rare even amongst those who supposedly do this stuff for a living. The traditional IPO system is extremely inefficient and deeply corrupt, and it's well past time that it was done away with in favor of auctions.

For months, investment banks vied to win the job of underwriting Google's much-anticipated initial public offering. But as details emerged yesterday about the unusual auction process that Google's founders have chosen, questions have arisen about whether the scramble for a piece of the action was worth the trouble.

Google hired Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston as underwriters, but it might as well have hired eBay. Gone is the bankers' flashy road show to sell investors on the deal, gone are the complex valuation models that bankers toil on to set the offering price - and gone are the high fees. Executives close to the deal said the banks would get a fee of about 3 percent, or $81 million, of the total offering. Though not small change, that is down from the 7 percent they typically charge - in this case $189 million.

Google's offering does away with all that in favor of an egalitarian auction where investors help run the show, and they do it all online. Investors, in large part, will have to sell themselves on the deal by reading the sales materials online, placing bids that will set the price online and eventually buying the shares online.

Unlike many companies offering stock for the first time, Google is so well known that it does not need brokers to attract investors. Still, while this setup may not work for many other companies, the idea of its being embraced by the biggest and most promising companies is making Wall Street nervous. One banker working on the offering yesterday complained, "Let's hope this doesn't become a precedent."

[............]

As online stock trading has sharply reduced commissions over the last 10 years, the 7 percent underwriting fee is in many ways that last purely high-margin business on Wall Street - and it is a fee that bankers have guarded zealously.

In justifying it, bankers have talked of the costs involved for the research from their high-priced analysts as well as the distribution and sales support needed to make the deal a success.

Google, in rejecting the traditional Wall Street way of going public, has also eliminated the ability of banks to allocate hot shares to their best clients, a practice that yielded windfall profits to favored investors during the technology boom.

"If ever there was a company to take on the cabal of underwriters it's Google," said Andrew Klein, the founder of Witt Capital, one of the first investment banks to advocate the use of the Internet in bringing companies public. "The reality is that there is not much for the banks to do, so why give them $100 million in fees?"

By the way, I once used to work at Credit Suisse First Boston, so I've seen this process from the other side; I'm not some ignorant anti-corporate type bashing bankers whose jobs I don't understand. Not only is a failure to appreciate what makes for a "successful" IPO shockingly common on Wall Street, but the interests of investment bankers and would-be stock-sellers are fundamentally misaligned, particularly when the bankers also have brokerage arms that need to cater to major clients by offering sweetheart deals.

PS: Guess what the exact amount of the Google stock offering is? $2,718,281,828. Does that number look familiar? It ought to!

Zamfara State Government Orders Demolition of all Churches

Maybe this article (also available here) is just another example of me letting my loathing of "anything vaguely resembling Islamic radicalism" get in the way of seeing things clearly ...

Governor Ahmed Sani of Zamfara State, has ordered the demolition of all churches in the state, as he launched the second phase of his Sharia project yesterday.

Speaking at the launch in Gusau, the state capital, Governor Sani disclosed that time was ripe for full implementation of the programme as enshrined in the Holy Quran.

He added that his government would soon embark on demolition of all places of worship of unbelievers in the state, in line with Islamic injunction to fight them wherever they are found.

[............]

It would be recalled that Governor Sani introduced the Sharia Legal Code in the state in the year 2000, despite opposition from the federal government and religious groups.

The implementation of the system led to the amputation of the wrist of a cow thief, Malam Jangedi.

Governor Sani also made the retention of a long beard a condition for securing juicy contracts from the state government.

I'm not about to turn into an LGF imitator and start making the claims that all Muslims are evil, that Islam is inherently dangerous, or even that Islam has a bloodier history than that supposedly peaceful religion called Christianity (going by a purely numerical tally of victims, this is almost certainly false); what I will reiterate that there are serious problems with the way Islam is being interpreted and practiced throughout much of the world today, and that contrary to the claims of some well-intentioned people, these problems are not confined to a "small fringe" of the religion's practitioners. Governor Ahmed Sani, like fellow Islamist and Kano State Governor Ibrahim Shakerau, was popularly elected on a platform promising to do precisely what he's now intent on carrying out, so the word "fringe" has no role to play here whatsoever.

Similarly, throughout much of the Islamic world, from the Sudan to Pakistan to Indonesia, hardline Islamists enjoy bases of popular support that are both deep and surprisingly wide, especially in light of claims that those who subscribe to their ideals constitute a "fringe." Few Muslims may be willing in practice to take up arms and risk their own lives for the sake of violent struggle against "unbelievers", but that is only an indicator that most men are far from willing to pay the ultimate price even for ideas in which they sincerely believe; as such, to say that hardline Islamist notions meet with approval only amongst a marginal number is a gross distortion of the facts. If it is acceptable to point out that America has a problem with a powerful fundamentalist right (and I certainly believe it is acceptable), there's no good reason why pointing out the far more serious issues bedevilling the Islamic world should meet with criticism, as long as it's done in a level-headed manner.

Separatist Dreams and Economic Reality

Via Southern Cross, I came across this story on the launch of an independent currency by the Afrikaner separatist community of Orania.

The white homeland of Orania on the banks of the Orange River will be launching its own currency in the enclave's community centre on Thursday to a cautious reception by the Reserve Bank.

The currency will be known as the "Ora" and consists of a range of four denominations -- Ora 10, Ora 20, Ora 50 and Ora 100 -- Eleanor Lombard, spokesperson for the Orania Movement, said in a statement on Wednesday.

Lombard said that during Thursday's unveiling, special momento packages would be on sale.

"The symbols on the Ora 10 note showed the Afrikaner's history, the Ora 20 note his art, the Ora 50 note his culture and the Ora 100 note depicted Orania," said Lombard.

She said the advantages of the town having its own currency was among others -- available cash being replaced with proof of cash and the cash earning interest in the bank; buying power remaining in the community because the currency was only accepted in the town; because the currency could only be spent locally it was safer than cash.

Meanwhile, Reserve Bank spokesperson Themba Hlengani said the voucher or currency must not resemble the South African bank note, in whole or part.

"For instance, it shouldn't be the same colour or font as any of the South African bank notes," he said.

He said this was regulated in terms of South African Reserve Bank Act of 1989.

[............]

According to Lombard the idea for the currency was first mooted by a Prof Johan van Zyl during a conference by the Orania Movement in 2002.

Van Zyl apparently emphasised that a community which wanted to empower itself needed to do so with as many instruments as possible to further enhance its self determination, and having its own currency unit was good example of this.

Let's leave aside for now all discussion of the rights and wrongs of the attempt by the Oranians to perpetuate the old dream of an Afrikaner-only state; for now, the settlement remains confined to private property, and they ought to be free to do with themselves as they wish, as long as no one outside their community is dragooned into it to serve in some subordinate role. My real interest here is in the economic thinking behind the launch of the "Ora", and what that implies for the future economic viability of Orania.

Analyzing the consequences of the new Oranian currency is pretty straightforward, once we take on the fact that the Ora is actually intended to be non-convertible, which is what all the stuff about it being "spent locally" implies. In the real world, non-convertibility has been a condition that virtually every one of the (exceedingly rare) governments that has desired it has proven difficult to enforce, as all it takes to circumvent such a restriction is some tangible commodity that can be used as an intermediate store of value; if gold and diamonds will not do, vegetable produce like cabbage and potatoes will also suffice, though their bulk will make them less convenient for such purposes. But Orania is a small, remote community of like-minded people, so even if it proves impossible in practice to completely prevent Oras from being traded for Rands, it is likely that the members will be able to get close enough to the goal (at least in the outset) for us to ignore this difficulty in our analysis.

Now, on the assumption that Professor Johan van Zyl's vision of a state in which "buying power [remains] in the community" is achieved, what will this mean for the economic well-being of the Oranians? Will the Ora then usher in a golden age of prosperity for the people who are thereby "empowered" by its existence? I can give an unequivocal answer on to this question, and it is a categorical NO. All that will be achieved by keeping "buying power within the community" will be to shut Orania off from all economic exchange with the rest of the world, a state of affairs better known by the term autarky. It will mean Oranians foregoing all of the benefits of trade with the outer world, including the chance to make use of outsiders' specialized skills and the opportunity to purchase resources unavailable within Orania's borders, and the ability to partake in the advantages of scale that make it possible for most Westerners to enjoy a quality of life even the Caesars and the Pharoahs might envy. Not only will Oranians have to grow all of their own food and make their own clothes, but they'll also have to create the very hoes and ploughs to use in their farming, and set up textile mills to weave the very cloth; worse yet, they'll have to mine the raw iron ore themselves, and even on the unlikely assumption that Orania has great reserves of iron lying about idle, they'll then have to set up their own ironworks and steelmills, and build their own (steam?) engines to power these operations!

I think all of the above ought to make it clear that Orania's currency scheme is bound to fail in its current incarnation, as it would lead in the space of a few years to a standard of living so low that even Zimbabweans might start to pity the Oranians' lot. Autarky has failed everywhere it has been tried, and one has only to look at North Korea for one example of how bad things can get even when it is imperfectly applied. There's a good reason why it's been far more common for governments to strive to get their currencies accepted at face value rather than the reverse, and the denizens of Orania are likely to quickly discover that whatever field Professor van Zyl's academic credentials might be in, it certainly cannot be the subject of economics. South Africa's government would be wise to let this harebrained scheme play out to its logical conclusion - just as long as the Oranians pay their taxes of course (and speaking of taxes, how do they propose to pay these to the South African government if their currency isn't convertible?)

On a final note*, I'll also add that it is for the very same reasons I've outlined here that I've always scoffed at those black activists who tell other black people to keep money "within the community" by patronizing black-owned establishments - the idea is just plain stupid. It's true enough that some individuals would benefit from the scheme, but the gains to those individuals who would be able to command higher prices for inferior goods and services would be more than outweighed by the losses incurred by their customers, and the net result would be that the black community as a whole would actually be poorer for keeping its money "within the community" than by just operating as individuals looking for the best value for their money. Anyone who allows himself to be guilt-tripped into patronizing black-owned businesses when better bargains can be had elsewhere is not only a fool, but a traitor to the cause of "black empowerment" he thinks he's serving. Keeping money "within the community" only makes sense if one subscribes to the daft notion that there's only a fixed amount of wealth to go around, and that outsiders' gains can only be at the loss of those "within the community."

*Pun intended.

Up or Out!

Nice to see that the old Europhile penchant for threats and blackmail hasn't given up the ghost. We've already had Neil Kinnock and Michael Heseltine do their best to bluster the strangely unenthusiastic British into supporting the proposed constitution, or else ...; now it's His Serene Highness Jacques Chirac's turn to browbeat the Brits into yielding to the "inevitable."

BRITAIN could be forced to leave the European Union if its voters reject the proposed new constitution in a referendum, President Chirac suggested yesterday.

The French leader, who is resisting pressure to commit himself to a referendum, noted that states that fail to ratify the constitutional treaty would be scuppering the agreement for the whole EU.

At a press conference to convince France of the merits of the expanded EU, M Chirac referred to proposals aired in Brussels and Berlin that would require member nations to ratify the constitution or leave the EU. This could be a “positive solution”, M Chirac said. “I am not against the idea of using methods of friendly pressure with countries that are refusing the constitution because that blocks all the others.”

M Chirac’s remarks reflected his exasperation over Tony Blair’s decision to put the constitution to a risky plebiscite.

Damn that Tony Blair for giving the British people a say! What sort of game does he think he's up to, giving the French canaille ideas well above their station?

Pressure is building from across the French political spectrum for a popular vote on the EU constitution. According to polls, 75 per cent of the public want a popular ballot.

The President is reluctant to hold one because of the strong possibility of a “no” vote from a public that is unhappy with his presidency. But Mr Blair’s pledge of a referendum has raised the stakes for M Chirac, whose personal popularity has sunk 11 points to 44 per cent over the past month.

A more diplomatic version of events than M Chirac’s was voiced in London yesterday by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French President who led drafting of the constitution treaty. In the case of a “no” vote, “Britain will not be in the core of the system, but at the margin”, he said.

Under a “ratify-or-leave” scheme devised by the EU Commission, the 25 member states would first approve and ratify a separate treaty which would give countries two years to endorse the constitution or give up membership. Departing states would retain their existing EU rights on trade and movement as associate members. However, this scheme is highly unlikely to come about because of the initial need for approval by all member states.

M Chirac’s comments followed a suggestion by Chancellor Schröder of Germany that a mechanism must be found for putting the treaty into operation even if Britain or other states blocked it with a “no”.

Herr Schröder tells us that Ordnung muss sein; orders are orders, and once the enlightened rulers of Europe have decided on a constitution, the people of Europe are bloody well going to have it, whatever they might decide to the contrary. Why is it that so many European politicians have difficulty grasping the concept that the larger the EU gets, the looser a body it has to become if it is to prosper in the long run? Why should Spaniards get to legislate on German sausages, or Germans on the constituents of "genuine" British Ale?

To the free movement of people and goods, I say an emphatic yes; to a European "state" with a single foreign policy, a single tax regime and a single criminal code, I say three times no! National laws fit poorly to cover all of the regions they legislate for as it is, and it is the height of hubris and insanity to imagine that Europe-wide laws are going to be any better. Only a fool would think it likely that a union of the sort of which certain federalists dream could act as a catalyst for anything other than greater conflict between the peoples of Europe, seeing as regions like Catalonia, Corsica and Scotland are already thorns in the flesh of the much smaller political units of which they remain parts.

Predictably, in light of how terrible the idea of a European "state" is, the New York Times is only too happy to endorse it, anything that involves the surrender of sovereignty on the altar of "multilateralism" being ipso facto a good thing according to the NYT worldview.

Least Mysterious Development Ever

Via Glenn Reynolds, I came across this story; frankly, the real shocker here is that anyone should have expected something different to transpire.

April 29, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - The vast majority of the United Nations' oil-for-food contracts in Iraq have mysteriously vanished, crippling investigators trying to uncover fraud in the program, a government report charged yesterday.

The General Accounting Office report, presented at a congressional hearing into the scandal-plagued program, determined that 80 percent of U.N. records had not been turned over.

The world body claims it transferred all information it had - including 3,059 contracts worth about $6.2 billion for delivery of food and other civilian goods to the post-Saddam governing body, the Coalition Provisional Authority.

But the GAO report also found that a database the U.N. transferred to the authority was "unreliable because it contained mathematical and currency errors in calculation of contract costs," the report found.

The GAO findings, which were aired at a hearing of the House International Relations Committee, raise new questions about corruption and mismanagement in the biggest-ever U.N. aid program - and what has been called the biggest financial scandal in history. An earlier GAO report said Saddam ripped off over $10 billion.

The "biggest financial scandal" bit only holds if we dismiss all cases of corruption within the constituent members of the UN, as I can rattle off the top of my head more than a dozen countries in Africa and Asia where that figure has been outdone several times over. Still, there can be no doubt that the United Nations is a deeply rotten organization, as is only to be expected of any body the majority of whose membership consists of kleptocrats and strongmen ruling tinpot kingdoms and banana republics.

"Great" Works of Fiction I've Read

Mrs Tilton presents her own list of 100 books and challenges the rest of us to put up lists of our own. In response to the challenge, I present some titles I've read below. This is a non-exhaustive collection of books I've read that I'd think might reasonably be mentioned as "important", either according to literary criteria, or in terms of the impact of the ideas they present of some larger culture (and not necessarily a Western one, either.)

To be honest, I adhere to the old notion that "De Gustibus Non Disputandum Est" - aesthetic tastes are inherently subjective, and not really amenable to simple rank orderings of the "best" anything - which is why I put "Great" in scare quotes in the title of this post. All one sees below is an incomplete record of the idiosyncratic and historically contingent reading of one individual, not some measure by which anyone else's standard of "culture" is to be ascertained.

Achebe, Chinue - Things Fall Apart
Borges, Jorge-Louis - Collected Fictions
Burroughs, William - Naked Lunch
Calvino, Italo - Invisible Cities
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Celine, Louis-Ferdinand - Journey to the End of Night
Chabon, Michael - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Dick, Philip K. - The Man in the High Castle
Dostoevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky, Fyodor - Notes from Underground
Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Brothers Karamazov
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Eliot, George - Silas Marner
Ellis, Brett Easton - American Psycho
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Faulkner, William - Absalom, Absalom
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - Go Down, Moses
Faulkner, William - Light in August
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Last Tycoon
Foster-Wallace, David - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
Foster-Wallace, David - Infinite Jest
Gibson, William - Mona Lisa Overdrive
Gibson, William - Neuromancer
Hemingway, Ernest - The Sun Also Rises
Hesse, Hermann - Siddhartha
Hesse, Hermann - Steppenwolf
Hesse, Hermann - The Glass Bead Game
Hesse, Hermann - The Journey to the East
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ishiguro, Kazuo - A Pale View of the Hills
Ishiguro, Kazuo - The Remains of the Day
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - Amerika
Kafka, Franz - Metamorphosis and Other Stories
Kafka, Franz - The Castle
Kafka, Franz - The Trial
Kawabata, Yasunari - Snow Country
Kawabata, Yasunari - The Sound of the Mountain
Mann, Thomas - Buddenbrooks
Mann, Thomas - Death in Venice and Other Stories
Mann, Thomas - Doctor Faustus
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel-Garcia - 100 Years of Solitude
Marquez, Gabriel-Garcia - Autumn of the Patriarch
Marquez, Gabriel-Garcia - Love in the Time of Cholera
Melville, Hermann - Moby Dick
Miller, Henry - Tropic of Cancer
Mishima, Yukio - Confessions of a Mask
Mishima, Yukio - The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Musil, Robert - The Man Without Qualities
Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita
Nabokov, Vladimir - The Luzhin Defense
Orwell, George - 1984
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Proust, Marcel - Remembrance of Things Past (Start to Finish!)
Ryonosuke, Akutagawa - Rashomon and Other Stories
Saikaku, Ihara - The Life of an Amorous Man
Sartre, Jean-Paul - Nausea
Shikibu, Murasaki - The Tale of Genji
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Soseki, Natsume - Kokoro
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Tanizaki, Junichiro - Some Prefer Nettles
Thiongo, Ngugi wa - Weep Not, Child
Tolstoy, Leo - The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Wells, H.G. - The Time Machine
Wells, H.G. - War of the Worlds
Wright, Richard - Black Boy
Wright, Richard - Native Son
Zamyatin, Yevgeny - We

Do note that I've intentionally excluded all plays and non-fictional works from the list; drawing on inspiration from some titles mentioned by Frank McGahon, I'm working on yet another list of books, this time non-fictional works that I've personally found of world-shaking importance. It isn't likely to be half as long as this list, but my intention is that every item mentioned should be an intellectual gem in its own right, at least by my criteria.

itex2MML 0.8 for Windows

I've just compiled a Windows binary of Jacques Distler's latest revision to the itex2MML program, and the binary can be downloaded as a ZIP archive from this link.

I've also been thinking of distributing the binary as an MSI package, to facilitate an easier and cleaner install/uninstall process, but it isn't clear to me that anyone cares enough for it to be worth the effort on my part. Feedback on this point would be most appreciated.

New York Times - Hyundai Near Top of Quality Ranking

This really is momentous, as it was indeed no more than a decade ago that Hyundai cars were derided as low-quality vehicles. Like Japan before it, Korea continues to climb the quality ladder, leaving behind raw price competition to the likes of the Chinese.

DETROIT, April 28 - For the first time, new-car buyers ranked Hyundai, the South Korean automaker, higher in initial quality than any domestic or European manufacturer, according to a survey released on Wednesday by J. D. Power & Associates

The result was a coup for Hyundai, which has been trying hard to upgrade its image from cheap to classy, or at least respectable, and close the gap between it and Toyota Motor and Honda Motor.

"A decade ago, as Korean manufacturers struggled with a universally poor reputation for vehicle quality," said Joe Ivers, executive director of quality and customer satisfaction at J. D. Power, a research firm, "no one would have predicted they could not only keep the pace, but actually pass domestics and other imports in terms of initial quality."

As a company, Toyota ranked first, followed closely by Honda and Hyundai, tied for second.

There are caveats, however. Hyundai's Kia brand continues to be a subpar performer in the initial-quality rankings. And in J. D. Power's most recent study of long-term reliability, which many in the industry consider to be a more important barometer, the Hyundai brand ranks near the bottom of the industry and Kia is dead last.

Chris Hosford, a spokesman for Hyundai, said improvements in initial quality inevitably contribute to longer-term improvements.

"One leads the other," he said. "We really want people to see us as a great value automobile. Part of value is price. Part of value is getting a lot of features and equipment for what you spend. And part of it is definitely having a great quality car."

So what, exactly, is initial quality? In February and March, J. D. Power asked 51,000 buyers of new cars and trucks in the United States whether they had experienced any of 135 problems during the first three months after purchase.

The most common complaint was wind noise audible inside the car. Poor fuel economy was a top 10 complaint, but less so than in last year's survey, even though gasoline prices are higher now than in 2003.

"It suggests consumers are adjusting to higher fuel prices," said Brian Walters, J. D. Power's senior director of vehicle research.

The annual survey data is closely watched by the auto industry, though the differences between the best and worst automakers have narrowed in recent years.

"Because it's so darn close, I don't think it has the same importance it had 10 or 20 years ago," said Louise Goeser, vice president for quality at Ford Motor.

The range is much wider in long-term reliability, which affects how automobiles retain value. Still, the initial-quality report is an important reflection of how well new cars and trucks live up to customer expectations.

As a group, Japanese brands scored best in the latest survey, averaging 111 problems for each 100 vehicles. Korean brands were next, with 117; European brands had 122; and domestic brands 123. In 1998, the Korean brands were worst, with 272 problems for each 100 vehicles, and European brands best, with 156.

Hyundai and the other Korean car-makers still have quite a lot of work ahead of them to change their brand perception in the eyes of customers in the West, but I have no doubt that they'll succeed on that front as well, sooner or later. Samsung has already shown in the field of electronics that "Korean-made" and "excellent" can be identified in the public eye with enough effort. As for American car-makers, would it be uncouth of me to suggest that they might be better off working on their quality-control problems rather than expending vast amounts of effort whining about and lobbying against foreign competition, as they have over the last two decades?

Libertarian Alliance - Atlas Winced

I've just discovered this lengthy but truly excellent takedown of Ayn Rand's fiction and "philosophy", and I've included some excerpts from the second half below:

The various speeches and allusions in Atlas Shrugged - so obviously far-fetched and logically slipshod, but perhaps defensible as rhetoric within a novel - are themselves quoted at length in Rand's fiction essays on philosophy, art and politics. The horrible, pitiful truth finally dawned: this is all there is to Rand. She really believes that this mouth-frothing sloganeering is philosophy, is reasoning, is the way to persuade rational people.

[............]

Of all modern tendencies in fiction, Rand's novels are closest in spirit to the socialist realist works favoured by the Stalinist regime. Stalin said: "Artists are engineers of the soul." Rand said: "Art is the technology of the soul."

[............]

According to Gait's speech, in a passage singled out by Branden, "there is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non- existence - and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms." This is false. Any class of matter (atoms. crystals. stars, etc.), not just living organisms, may exist or not exist. Galt (Rand) also emphasises that: "to think is an act of choice ... man is a being of volitional consciousness." This too is false. Thinking is involuntary, like digestion or blood clotting. If you don't believe this, try to stop thinking for a few seconds. Galt (Rand) also keeps insisting that "existence exists". This seems to he of momentous importance to Galt (Rand), but in the only sense I can make of it (that 'existence' is something which exists in addition to all the things which exist) it is not evident, and I believe it is false. (If what is meant is that "Things which exist exist' - existence exists - then that is trite and has never been denied by anyone.) And so it goes on, 58 pages of it. one pompous vacuity after another.

[............]

Randism was and is a religious cult. ('Religion' is 'a system of faith and worship'.) Branden has often described Objectivism as a cult, but in this book she withdraws this label. She now states that although Objectivism has some of the features of a cult, it cannot be a cult because of its commitment to reason and individualism (352). Well, there is a lot of talk about reason and individualism, just as among Bolsheviks there is a lot of talk about science. But reason does not consist in shrieking the word 'reason' all the time. It consists in subjecting one's ideas to rational criticism, holding every position tentatively, and being prepared to abandon any position if it is successfully criticised. Reason consists, as Socrates put it, in 'following the argument wherever it leads', especially. of course, if it leads where you don't want to go. There is no evidence that the Randists understood the most elementary requirements of rational discourse. Branden quotes Sidney Hook, from his review of Rand's For the New Intellectual: "Despite the great play with the word 'reason', one is struck by the absence of any serious argument in this unique combination of tautology and extravagant absurdity." (321) That is exactly right. The Objectivists, no less than the devotees of a theistic sect, are engaged in abusing their minds by reiterating articles of faith. As for their individualism, it reminds me of the individualism of the mob in The Life of Brian. Trying to get the crowd to stop worshipping him, Brian shouts: "You are all individuals." The crowd drones back ecstatically. "We are all individuals." Unlike Brian, Rand was addicted to the idolatry of her besotted admirers.

[............]

Rand asserts that ethics is entirely based on reason, and that the supreme moral virtue is selfishness. or rational self-interest. This is developed at times (See the 'Objectivist Ethics' in The Virtue of Selfishness) by biological, or biological-sounding, arguments. What is good for an organism is what contributes to that organism's survival and well-being. This seems clear enough: it is moral to do what is to one's advantage, and immoral to do what is against one's advantage. It follows that it is moral to cheat, murder, and steal, on those occasions where a rational analysis shows this to be to one's advantage. But no such conclusion is drawn by Rand. Respecting other people's lives and property, even when this hurts one's bank balance or survival prospects, is stated to be in one's rational self-interest. From a biological point of view - maximising one's chances of survival, good health, or reproduction - this is obviously not always the case. Rand explains that the standard of ethics is not the individual's bodily or biological survival, but the survival of man qua man", or man as a rational being. Thus, all Rand's biological- sounding arguments go by the board: it may even be 'selfish', in her redefinition of the term, to court death for the sake of a 'cherished value'. But there is no clear stipulation of how the nature of man as a rational being, or the values which it is permissible for a rational egoist to cherish. are to be determined. The outcome is that Rand appears to be urging egoism. but is actually urging unselfish sacrifice of one's interests to what she tells us is the life proper to a rational being. All this terrible confusion and double-talk arises because Rand cannot stomach the manifest truth that it can be to a person's advantage to violate the rights of another person. If ethics is to tell us that people's rights may not he violated, it must tell us that we ought sometimes to do things against our own interests. (emphases added)

A thoroughgoing demolition job, and this, mind you, from a libertarian website, and as such, hardly to be dismissed as motivated by "collectivist" bile. I especially like the fact that the author also noticed the aesthetic resemblance of Randianism to the Socialist-Realist worldview. Objectivism is a steaming pile of extremely contradictory claptrap cooked up by a writer of political potboilers tinged with sadomasochist fantasizing.

One question I can easily envision being asked is why I and other subscribers to libertarianism would be so antagonistic to the work of someone who subscribes to largely the same set of values we do - individualism, a healthy respect for self-interest, and a belief in free-markets as the right way to go. I can't say with confidence that my answer will necessarily be typical of that offered by other libertarians, but for me at least, all questions of literary merit aside, I do not believe that my cause is really furthered in the long-run by fallacious and simple-minded arguments; what is more, I find the cultish tendencies of the Randroids extremely disturbing as a believer in individualism. If I were intent on discrediting libertarianism as a body of ideas, I could think of no easier and surer way to do so than to allow it to become associated in the public mind with Objectivism, neo-Confederate "paleolibertarianism", gold-standard fetishism, and other kooky movements that would give pause to any reasonable person who was exposed to them. The more sensible liberals were wise enough to recognize the folly of the notion that there could be "no enemies on the left", and sensible libertarians likewise recognize that there are movements that aren't worth associating with.

The Fountainhead - A Parody

I've never understood what so many people see in Ayn Rand's fiction, as I found the doorstops she put out as novels unbearably tedious reading, while her claims to originality as a philosopher are extremely overstated, what with her ideas being little more than warmed-over and dumbed-down Nietzscheanism. How is it that anyone who's outgrown his teenage years is able to find an iota of pleasure wading through the pulpy mess that is Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, with their didactic, cardboard cutout figures of impossibly dynamic men and beautiful high-born damsels eager to submit to their brute strength?

Given my intense distaste for both Rand's ouvre and the groupies who worship her, this Fountainhead parody was right up my alley, and while we're at it, lovers of kitsch everywhere will thrill to the sight of this example of objectivist painting (courtesy of Reason's Julian Sanchez.) That Socialist Realis ... ahem, Objectivist aesthetic really is something, isn't it?

Oreo! Hankie Head! Sellout!

I figured that my earlier critique of Bob Herbert's fetishization of racial integration of schools as an end-in-itself would get one or two fully paid-up members of the Authenticity Police on my behind, and sure enough, that's just what happened:

Foreign Dispatches, shows it's true colors. And seems more concerned with White-Americans reaction to diversity in the schools than education itself.

I've been found out! Yup, that's me, always on hands and knees thinking about what I can do to please The Man™. Hopefully, if I'm good enough, after a lifetime of service I'll get honorary white-man status or something.

Give me a break! I suppose it was my urge to "sell-out" that made me put up posts like this one or this one. Just because I don't happen to believe that every single idea that's on the Democratic Party platform is necessarily good for black people doesn't make me any sort of "sellout" or "Uncle Tom", unless those terms are taken to mean that one has the temerity to do one's own thinking. I've been through too much, and seen too much despair and suffering of a sort most Westerners of any color will struggle to imagine possible, for me to take ridiculous challenges to my motives and loyalties from any quarter as anything more than insults born of profound ignorance. If anyone has a problem with the ideas I put forward, critique them on their own merits, methodically dismantle them, savage them if you're able, rather than indulge in daft insinuations about my motives. Unless you were born and raised in the shanties of Kinshasa or something, you'll never be "blacker" or "realer" than I am.

How Well-Read Are You?

P.Z. Myers and Mrs Tilton both give coverage to the following list of books that's been making the rounds. The idea is to highlight all the items on the list you've read; I find myself faring surprisingly poorly, though I'm not sure I ought at all to be embarrassed, for reasons already well-explained by Mrs T.

Author - Title

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

What can I say? There are some unforgiveable lacunae in my reading, though there are also more than a few items on this list I'm not sure I'll ever get around to reading of my own free will. Some of the titles on this list are tainted for me by their association with Disney animations and children's movies, while others are the sorts of dry 19th century stuff to be found on many a list of "improving works" that are guaranteed to glaze one's eyes over before quickly dispatching one to the land of Nod.

One thing I've just noticed about the volumes I've read is that only a single female writer is among the authors in my set of choices. This is partly an artifact of the arbitariness of the selection offered - for example, I've read Eliot's Silas Marner - but I think it's also partly a matter of my own literary sensibilities. There's just something about the works of the likes of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters that I find impossible to take an interest in; why should I care that Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy is a chap with a handsome fortune and in need of a wife of good family? It isn't that I don't like books about closely observed social situations, as I wouldn't have enjoyed Proust's work so much if I didn't. It's more a matter of my not sharing much in terms of worldview or aspirations with those by and for whom these sorts of works seem to have been written.

When it comes to the output of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, what goes for the Austens and Brontës is twice as applicable. As strange as it may sound, the fact that the former three are closer in time to me than the latter writers actually serves to make their writings more alien to me rather than less. Woolf, like Proust, moved in a very high-toned milieu indeed, but unlike Proust, she seemed to lack a healthy disrespect for her own status pretentions; while Proust knew he was a social climber, was unfailingly kind to menials and willing to exchange confidences with them, and rounded it all off by being a tipper of legendary generosity, Virginia Woolf was an unreconstructed snob. As for Sylvia Plath, patron saint of navel-gazing coeds and angst-ridden teenage girls throughout America, the less said of her self-indulgent scribblings the better. Toni Morrison's books, I've heard, are actually rather decent, but I'm afraid that her association in my mind with a certain sort of hectoring academic political-correctness has always made me averse to making the effort to find out for myself. Why bother when there are so many other books out there, and I've only one life to read them all?

Having said all the above, I'll also admit that I've every intention of reading Edith Wharton's books once I get the free time. First Wharton, then Henry James.

Guardian - Why let in Le Pen but ban Farrakhan?

For once, a Guardian opinion piece I'm in complete agreement with. Here's a clearcut case of a double-standard in operation. What's worse yet is that black separatists constitute a minute proportion of a tiny minority of Britain's population, and that minority is easily outnumbered by the sorts of bigots for whom the message of Le Pen and the BNP are music to the ears.

"At a time of simmering racial tension in some of our northern towns and cities, the last thing Britain needs is a visit from the high priest of racial divisiveness." So read a Daily Mail leader. Sadly, though, this wasn't taken from yesterday's paper, which offered no condemnation of Jean-Marie Le Pen's weekend stay in the UK. The quotation is from August 2001, and refers to the prospect of a visit by Louis Farrakhan, of the US-based Nation of Islam.

Fortunately for the Mail, David Blunkett was also exercised about Farrakhan, and went to the appeal court to ensure that his exclusion order against the American was not revoked. However, in the case of Le Pen, the leader of the French National Front, the home secretary's hotline to his lawyers went cold. Blunkett told Sunday's Breakfast with Frost that "If [Le Pen] behaves himself, he's free to come and go as any other citizen in Europe" - forgetting that he does have the power to exclude EU citizens if their presence is against the public interest.

Both Farrakhan and Le Pen have been rightly condemned for their slurs against Jewish people (though only Le Pen seeks the suppression of millions from minority groups as a point of principle); so why is our home secretary hellbent on ensuring one never gets near our country, and yet so relaxed about the other? Why does one have such powerful enemies, and the other not? Guess which one's black, and which one's white.

When Farrakhan's right to entry was being contested, Blunkett's QC, Monica Carss-Frisk, said: "Mr Farrakhan is well known for expressing anti-semitic and racially divisive views, particularly at a time of unrest in the Middle East. To allow him into the country would pose a significant threat to community relations and public order."

Fine sentiments, you might say, but even more valid in the case of Le Pen, who arrived at a time when the Middle East was more tense than ever. Moreover, he came specifically to gain publicity and votes for the British National party, which is putting up candidates for the European elections. The BNP's Oldham and Burnley strongholds are just miles from where its grinning leader, Nick Griffin, ecstatic at the national exposure he was receiving, welcomed Le Pen.

Phil Edwards, a BNP spokesman, said of Le Pen's visit: "It raises our profile that an internationally important figure is interested in helping our campaign. It shows that we are real and we are significant."

In a region where racial tensions are already high, and in a national climate where the daily tabloid scapegoating of Muslims and migrants has pushed the issue of asylum seekers above schools, health and transport - not to mention Iraq - in most voters' minds, it takes little imagination to predict the impact of this "higher profile". Suffice to say, it goes way beyond votes in ballot boxes. Starry-eyed Griffin had his guest protected by Warren Bennett, formerly of the far-right terror group Combat 18, and would no doubt have introduced him to Tony Lecomber, the BNP national organiser, who has 12 convictions, some under the Explosives Act.

[............]

Unlike Le Pen, who has at least six convictions for racist and anti-semitic incitement, Farrakhan has no criminal record. He has never been banned from any other country - even Israel let him in - and his visits have never provoked violence.

Mr Justice Turner, the high court judge who ruled in 2001 against the exclusion order, said that there was a "complete absence of evidence" of religious or ethnic tension between the UK's black Muslim and Jewish communities to justify continuing the ban.

Blunkett's appeal against this judgment was allowed on the basis that it should be for a "democratically accountable" politician, rather than a judge, to make the exclusion decision. Nevertheless, the appeal judges criticised the home secretary for refusing to reveal the information on which his banning order had been based. (emphasis added)

It's noteworthy that despite the block on Farrakhan's entry into the UK having been made on grounds of his anti-semitism, even Israel, where one would think people would have taken much more umbrage to what he had to say, saw fit to let him in. I say bullshit, opposition to anti-semitism had nothing to do with it, or the UK wouldn't have so many imported radical Islamists openly parading around and calling for "jihad" against "Zionists and Crusaders", even while collecting welfare benefits. Blunkett's action was nothing more than an attempt to appeal to the sort of bigoted "middle England" fools who read the Daily Wail, where it's always 5 minutes before midnight and the imaginary tens of millions of angry negroes are about to Mugabe-ize the Blessed Isle.

Bob Herbert Misses the Point

As usual. His hysterical ranting about federal courts "being gleefully packed with reactionaries" and "a betrayal of America" completely misses the point about the whole education dilemma. Leaving aside the issue of whether things are as dire as he makes them out to be, for Herbert, having black kids sitting next to white kids is in and itself so wonderful and so necessary that all other good things will be added unto black people if only this one goal is achieved; this is a mere fetishization of race, rather than a well-reasoned policy proposal.

One thing Herbert doesn't consider at all is that, barring measures more appropriate to a communist state than to a liberal democracy, all the legislation in the world will not force white parents with the means to choose their places of residence to send their children to schools in which black children constitute more than a small minority, whatever rulings may be handed down by a Supreme Court even to Herbert's own liking; were New York City successful in merging with the white suburbs to form a single gigantic school district, and were it then to mandate busing within said district, what would likely occur would be a flight of parents from the region, and any white parents who couldn't stomach the prospect of having their children in schools full of blacks and Hispanics would simply sell up and move to, say, Scottsdale, Arizona.

But all of this leaves aside an important question, which is, to the degree that resegregation really is occurring, and not just one more piece of statistical sleight-of-hand cooked up by social research Jeremiahs, how do we know that it doesn't owe as much to black and Hispanic desires for schools where "their own kind" predominate as to any white aversion to racial integration? It seems to be an unquestionable assumption on the part of many people who think like Bob Herbert that African-Americans would never willingly congregate together if they were given the chance to join all-white groups, but that is in itself a prejudiced and false assumption. The reality is that there is more to being African-American than just skin-color, there is a well-defined, broad, deep and largely thriving culture as well, and it's eminently reasonable that a lot of African-Americans should wish to raise their families in neighborhoods in which said culture can be expressed freely without fear of misunderstanding by, or tension with, a white majority. If Jews, the Irish and others can have their own enclaves, what is innately so wrong about mostly-black neighborhoods with mostly-black schools, assuming such neighborhoods voluntarily come into being?

One final factor for the (hypothetical) resegegration that Herbert fails to address is the possibility that even if it may be occurring, and even on the assumption that it isn't simply a matter of different groups wanting to live and study amongst others who share their cultures, it may be that there is something at work driving many white parents to move their children out of predominantly black schools, even when said parents have the most liberal impulses towards racial integration: the fear of crime, violence, drugs and poor school performance. The unpleasant truth is that the difference between good and bad schools is often as much a matter of the makeup of the student body as that of the teachers, both of which matter far more for educational purposes than, say, the quality of the physical plant, or any of the other purely material things that liberals often prefer to look at to the exclusion of more human matters.

It's one thing to put a handful of poor children from the projects in a middle class school, and quite another to expect middle-class parents of any hue to wish to keep their own offspring in any school in which such children are to be found in sufficient numbers to set the tone. Like it or not, middle-class norms and those of the urban poor are often very different, and at least for the purposes of learning, the former are much to be preferred to the latter; and if there's one area in which one can expect empirical facts to defeat ideological hopes even in the most committed of white liberals, it's in the matter of doing well by their own children. Even if John and Jane Doe marched in Selma and were hosed down by Bull Connor himself, only a fool would imagine that they'd sacrifice their children on the alter of integration if ghetto kids were beating the stuffing out of them on a daily basis.

I'm not going to make the claim that the last factor is the most important one in any resegregation that may or may not be occurring, though I'm sure many on the right will leap to it as the only possible answer; for one thing, it isn't at all clear to me that the phenomenon identified by Herbert is real, and even if it is, I don't know that it isn't more a case of even prosperous racial minorities looking to be with others who look like them. What I do know is that merely sitting next to a white child isn't automatically going to do anything to increase the educational prospects of black children on its own, and that chasing after this false god is likely to prove little more than a distraction that only serves to unnecessarily inflame racial tensions. Racism isn't dead by any means, and Rehnquist is no "friend of the coloured folks", but the makeup of the Supreme Court isn't what we ought to be looking at to fix problems with American education.

Is Obesity an Overhyped Threat?

This Guardian story provides much food for thought, and the criticisms it has to make are actually rather convincing in parts, but the sheer breathlessness of the reporting, and the ease with which misconceptions about the effects of obesity are attributed to an Evil Corporate Conspiracy™, make me hesitant to buy into the thrust of this story just yet.

Sure, BMI is a hopelessly crude way of measuring obesity that fails to distinguish between muscle and fat, as anyone who's ever engaged in weightlifting would already be well aware, and it makes plenty of sense that the mere fact of carrying extra body-fat isn't likely to be dangerous in itself, since fat isn't some sort of poison that must slowly kill off those who have plenty of it in their adipose tissue. The emphasis on sheer weight-loss as opposed to increased physical activity is also clearly wrong-headed; for example, liposuction in of itself does nothing to improve the health of those who undergo it if unaccompanied by changes in behavior. This article is right to stress all of these points, but it also strikes me as disingenuous to some extent to pretend that carrying around lots of excess body fat won't prove an extra disincentive to a more active lifestyle, while even a marginal increase in physical activity, if sustained over the long term, will likely lead to a great deal of weight loss in those who undergo the behavioral transition. As such, there's something seriously out of whack about speaking of a "fat con" as if obesity and activity levels could so easily be disassociated.

I may turn out to be wrong, but I suspect that this is one of those supposed shockers that will wither into nothingness under the sustained scrutiny of experts.* In the meantime, it will be received extremely favorably by a lot of people who would like to deceive themselves that their ballooning waistlines are of no consequence for their health.

POSTSCRIPT: After carefully rereading the article, I noticed that the piece is actually an excerpt from a book called "The Obesity Myth" that's about to be published in the USA. That is the explanation for the paranoid and accusatory tone; like a Naomi Klein of the weight-loss industry, the author is in intent on selling lots of books by getting us all to think that we've all been had by a gigantic swindle being dished out to us to force us to consume things we don't "really" need.

*In fact, though I'm hardly an expert on the issue of obesity, I can already see one glaring error in the reasoning employed in the article; that deaths from heart disease have been "plunging" even while obesity rates have continued their rise does not in itself disprove the notion that increased obesity is linked to higher levels of heart disease, as it is possible (and as an empirical matter, I'd say almost certain) that what is going on is that the rate at which medical treatment of cardiac problems has been advancing has simply outpaced the rate at which self-indulgent lifestyles have been pushing Americans to the brink of coronaries.

"Compensated Dating" in Japan

Here's an interesting RealMedia BBC Report on the Japanese phenomenon of "enjo kosai" ("compensated dating"), a euphemism for schoolgirl prostitution. It's one thing for young women from Third World countries to migrate to Europe in search of easy money, and something else again for teenage girls from well-off homes, living in one of the world's most affluent countries, to be selling themselves in order to buy frivolous items like Prada bags and Malono Blahnik pumps.

Although one of the girls profiled in the report began participating in such activities at the age of 14, and two of the others are 16 and 17 years old respectively, one can't really call this "underage" prostitution, as Article 177 of the Japanese Penal Code sets the age of consent for sexual activity at 13 years. Many from English-speaking countries will likely feel uneasy that the age of consent should be so low, but one can argue that the Japanese way is actually better, in so far as it acknowledges that few people wait till they're 18 to engage in sexual activity, and it is better not to needlessly criminalize large numbers of people for deeds participated in willingly. In any case, the age of consent in 15 in France and Sweden, 14 in Iceland (as long as neither partner is older than 24) and Canada, and 13 in Spain, so this isn't a matter of exceptional Japanese sexual attitudes at work. If anything, the American tendency to set the age of consent at 18 strikes me as deeply unrealistic, and a reflection of the same puritan ethos that has young people unable to legally drink until they're 21.

Unbelievable!

It's articles like this one on the vote by the UN Human Rights Commission that strengthen me in the conviction that the United Nations is absolutely the last organization anyone should be looking up to as some sort of moral exemplar.

Dramatic new allegations have been made about a massacre allegedly committed by pro-government forces in western Sudan.

New York-based group, Human Rights Watch says it has established that pro-government militias executed 136 men in a coordinated operation last month.

The allegation comes as the United Nations Human Rights Commission adopted a watered down statement on Darfur.

The United States had pushed for a much harder hitting resolution criticising Sudanese government abuses.

Unlike the original draft resolution, the text does not go into details about the targeting of civilians by the Arab militias in Sudan, or mention rape, sexual assault and forced removals of black communities in the area.

Rather than condemning Sudan, it expresses solidarity with the country in overcoming the present situation.

Critics say this is a considerable climb-down by the UN and the resolution was voted against by the US.

"We fear a terrible famine to come when tens of thousands may well perish," the US envoy Richard Williamson said. "The commission so far has failed to meet its responsibility today." (emphasis added)

Absolutely incredible! Instead of condemning Sudanese actions, the UN "Human Rights" Commission actually decided on a message of solidarity with the Sudanese government! Tell me why I should give a damn what the UN says about absolutely anything ever again? The United Nations is a worthless organization.

UPDATE: This VOA article entitled "Human Rights Commission Losing Credibility, NGOs Warn" is also worth reading; frankly, I'd say the Human Rights Commission and the parent UN lost their credibility a very long time ago, and only now are the NGOs belatedly waking up to that reality. The wonder is that anyone should have expected better from an organization in which the great majority of members are dictatorships or kleptocracies of some form or another; just because a thing is "international" or "multilateral" doesn't magically make it virtuous or worthwhile.

The Top 100 German-Language Blogs

According to Blogstats anyway (found via Heiko Hebig.) It really is amazing how little overlap there seems to be between the German and English-language blogging worlds, though thanks to a few highly connected individuals like Jeff Jarvis, the separation isn't actually total; for instance, I've been aware of Hebig's blog for some time, mainly through reading tech-oriented bloggers, while I've read Der Schockwellenreiter ("The Shock Wave Rider") in the past on more than one occasion. Still, the blogosphere demonstrates in a powerful manner the importance of language in connecting people together: the average British, Canadian or American reader is probably exposed to more of the output of bloggers from Britain's former colonies in Africa and Asia than he or she is to what is going on in the Continental European blogging scene.

A noteworthy oddity of this top-100 list is that one German blog that is widely-read by English-speakers isn't even mentioned: Davids Medienkritik, which almost certainly deserves the No. 1 or No. 2 spot on that list. I suppose the secret to popularity for German-language bloggers is to write from a right-wing perspective for an English audience.

Things are Different in Norway

Very different. I just came across this Nettavisen story by following a link put up by Tyler Cowen that will no doubt confirm many sexually-deprived males that all their Scandinavian sex fantasies have some basis in truth.

26 seniors from two high schools in Oslo are going to participate in a porn film staring Norwegian porn actor Rocco in order to finance their end of the year parties.

Two of the girls are going to participate in a sex scene which will be taped in the girl’s bus, according to the Norwegian paper VG.

It is a Norwegian tradition that high school seniors, so-called russ, throw themselves into a month of partying to celebrate the fact that 13-years of schooling is drawing to an end. Many graduating russ buy old vans or buses which they drive during the month of partying, but everything has its costs and it is far from cheap. It’s common for students to acquire sponsorships from local business by putting their logos on their means of transportation in order to help finance their partying.

The girls have signed a contract with 21-year-old porn star Thomas Rocco Hansen to tape a scene for a porn film in their own bus as they lack other types of sponsorships to finance their party costs. They are also going to be interviewed regarding their sexual habits and sex fantasies. The girls will be paid about NOK 20,000 (USD 2900).

«We are in a hard spot, and I’m doing it for my friends,» explained the 18-year-old girl who has agreed to participate in a sex scene, to the paper VG. «I felt that some of us had to do a sex scene because then we would get more money to the bus. I have an agreement with the girls that the money will be used for the bus.»

She is aware that the sex scene may mean that she must have sex with Rocco.

«Yes, I am. I have really never viewed the porn industry as a filthy industry, but I sort of feel the pressure now,» she said to VG. «I am one of the few girls who dare to do this, and I will do it to help my friends. We need the money.»

Hey, the girls want make money to party by ... partying! There's a certain consistency in that - party girls will be party girls after all. Anyway, it would be interesting to see what native Norwegians make of all this, particularly with regards to the way in which it seems to confirm all the old clichés.

PS: Those looking for fodder for their onanistic daydreams will enjoy reading this Aftenposten article from September 2003, according to which Norwegians are world-beaters (pun intended) in terms of one-night stands, bested only by the Vietnamese and their fellow Nordics in Iceland.