war for the fans

The month began with great, obsequious stories in the NYT about how the war is now over (except for getting the native guards armed and trained) in Iraq. It ends with more than twice the number of Americans killed than were killed in March, with the latest being the four that went down in a single engine plane – bizarrely, the U.S. has apparently decided to outfit the Iraqi airforce with planes that you can also rent for birthdays and holiday travel. Must mean, according to the wondrous pretzel logic of the Pentagon, that we are winning. This logic has two sides. When casualties go down, it is obvious that we are winning. And when casualties go up, it is obvious the other side is desperate.

This logic is also used by six year olds to explain why they don’t want to eat the vegetables.

In fact, this has penetrated the Times enough that they are starting to question their own ludicrous headlines of last week. Remember that 40,000 Iraqi troops were supposed to be sweeping Baghdad this week. A week later, the wakeup is setting in – hey, they don’t have 40, 000 troops. Well, gee, that was hard to figure out.

In other post Memorial military news – there is a fascinating story in the Globe about Col. David Hackworth. He’s being buried at Arlington. One of the most decorated American soldiers, and one of the most hated by the Pentagon. He’s the guy who appeared on Dick Cavett in 1971, in full dress uniform, and said, hey, we should get out of Vietnam. We’ve lost. He’s also the guy who pulled the plug on the wearing of fake medals by chief of naval operations, Admiral Jeremy M. ''Mike" Boorda. Boorda committed suicide over the charge, showing – to put it delicately – that this was not a man one wanted in command of a unit that could come under fire.

“He earned a a chestful of medals, including two Distinguished Service Medals, 10 Silver Stars, eight Bronze Stars, and eight Purple Hearts. His adversary became the US military bureaucracy, which he railed against for 30 years on grounds that it failed to put the troops first. He also opposed military action in Bosnia, Kosovo, and especially Iraq.But while the military leadership may be absent from the funeral, hundreds -- and probably thousands -- are expected to attend. The numbers would be larger, except that many who consider him a hero aren't in Washington. Hackworth became a touchstone for soldiers in the Middle East who questioned the Pentagon but didn't feel comfortable raising complaints with superiors.''He had an incredible communication line to the barracks and the trenches," said Roger Charles, president of Soldiers for the Truth, Hackworth's organization, which has a website that averages about 1 million hits a day.

''He answered all the e-mails."

Soldiers for Truth is an interesting site. It is written in that Military Speech so popular in paperback romances about Navy Seals and such –yes, there is a whole genre out there. And, of course, it bristles with conservative biases. But it is also informative. This article about deserters, for instance, is well worth reading. The author can’t understand why the army and marines aren’t going after deserters. LI can. This is an unpopular war already. Its continuation is built on what might be called the Memento premise. Assuming that America is subject to short term memory loss, the Bush agenda is to exploit the diminishing attenting span for maximum gain. Thus, the planned program of non-sacrifice – as long as the American population can be insulated enough to neither feel nor think about Iraq, it will begrudge the Neocon adventure. That means no draft, and no going after deserters in such a way that it would make the news. It means no pictures of coffins or the wounded. The whole point of the Bush administration is to coddle its constituency, which will ultimately be the victim of Bush policies, by moving the impact of those policies forward into the future. The IOUs for the tax giveaway to the rich and the abuse of the national and state guard are products of a unified political logic. In a sense, the Bush administration wants to make the war like a specialized cable channel – an ESPN war. In America, the war is only supposed to be for its fans.

the national imaginary

LI wrote a friend last night that we were proud of France. And indeed, we are. From the U.S. perspective, it might seem that the oui vote was a sad necessity. Creating a counter-balance to the mad, bad power of the U.S. seems like a good idea, if you live in a place where they broadcast excerpts of speeches by Bush on the radio. I was vaguely of that opinion. But a less heated perspective is in order. The peculiar U.S. move for a harsher and more direct hegemony is meeting its natural limits already. It isn’t just the fact that the U.S. economy is fueled by an unsustainable explosion of private and public debt – there is also the very real regionalisation of America’s natural peripheral economy, Latin America, with its tendency to turn its back on the U.S. and its face towards China – it is the fatal overstretch of military power, rapidly coming to the point at which Bush will have to decide whether to pull back or destroy his popularity by asking for (gasp!) such sacrifices as a draft would entail. And there is the silent, spreading collapse of pension plans, from the 300 billion dollar deficit for public employees in the states to the crisis in GMFordDaimlerChrysler. Plus, what does it mean to “create” a counter-balance? This is the kind of things elites jump on. So – the non campaign in France, as one sifts through the data, seems to have localized in the old left.

When the Left’s incubus, France’s answer to Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin, jumped in to support Chirac, it was a sign that the constitution was doomed. But the dooming of the constitution was merely a sign of a much deeper discontent with the dirigiste class. In truth, the consensus among Left and Right policymakers since around 1985 has been that Europe must adopt Thatcher lite policies. Which is why you could put in your input – vote – for either party, and you’d get the same output – liberalization. That nobody wanted it didn’t matter – the elites, who will benefit the most from it, decided that it was good for you. The Left honchos decided to disguise their adoption of the economics of Thatcher by annexing the ideology of a charity. In this way, not only could they destructure working class culture and destroy its economy, but they could also shame them for being racist. A moral two-fer! And thus was born that curious bird, the upper middle class liberal – absolutely passionate about preserving, say, Aborigine cultures in Australia, while at the same time profiting hugely from the destruction of manufacturing culture here at home.

While LI is on board with the civilization project – the destruction of racism, homophobia, sexism and the rest of the Unbehagen in our culture – we are maximally suspicious of the emigration of liberating rhetoric to support liberalizing (read – anti social insurance) projects. The winner in France could be the Fabius wing of the PS. It was Fabius (a sort of PS John McCain) who said the obvious about the constitution last year – what kind of constitution goes to five hundred pages? If only the PS can break with the essential defeatism of its leadership – who still dream of being the Third Way, Blair’s partners in an Anglo-Saxon Europe – they can fill the vacuum between Sarkozy (France’s scariest politician) and Le Pen (an old clown whose moment of prominence in the last election disguised the fact that he received pretty much the vote he always received – it was the Socialist collapse that made it appear new and startling). The two English analyses we liked best were by Larry Elliott and Will Hutton.

However, as a sample of elite opinion, we recommend, for those of you who read French, this article that first appeared in Liberation last year. “Derriere la social, la nation” by Francois Dubet is a perfect expression of elite contempt for the working class – time to liquidate the rednecks – in the form of a diagnosis of the ‘non’ mentality. For the elite, labor mobility is an essential and non-problematic part of capitalism. LI actually thinks that this is probably true – but we also think that it is a truth from which the elite is comfortably insulated, since, somehow, French companies don’t look for cheaper CEOs among Algerian immigrants. That the sector of society most insulated from competition is always urging the sector most exposed to it to just get over it somehow, gosh, gets the peons mad. Imagine that! The keynote of Dubet’s analysis is struck, here: “Everywhere [in Europe’ things seem “normal” save in France, where there is installed a no of the left identified with resistance to savage liberalism, the defense of public services and social attainments uprooted from the thread of its history and its struggles. In France, the claims and social worries traditionally borne by the left tip towards the defense of a national identity: the social becomes national. One could think that French particularity is enough to understand and justify this weirdness. [I can’t translate the full, rich flavor of that last sentence. In the French it is “On peut penser que la « spécificité française » suffit à comprendre et à justifier cette bizarrerie.”]

Having embraced the jet and been to New York, how are you gonna keep em down on the farm in Poitiers? seems to be the underlying message. The weird idea that you should defend a – shudder – nation, of all things, percolates through Dubet’s sociologue’s soul like a laxative. Everything is here. Professor Dubet would, himself, definitely be throwing caution to the wind and climbing the barricades himself, but alas, the ‘revolutionary project’ is dead. Rather convenient, actually. It means that the defense of the left’s successes, the social democratic state, can only be undertaken by a mutton headed left that doesn’t understand this central point and is obviously latently racist. The proof? Why, the incomprehensible idea that the scale of governance should be at the level of the traditional nation:

“Beyond the critique of liberalism, of which a constitution could always protect us more than an accumulation of free exchange treaties, the no of the left expresses the defense of a national republican model anchored in the heart of our “imaginaire politique.”” Actually, the first clause of that sentence is absolutely bogus. But the main thing, here, is the socio-psychoanalysis a la Lacan’s imaginaire – a handy scalpel suddenly appears in Dr. Frankenstein’s hand, and now he can go to work. “

"The sage alternativist appeals to international economic regulation don’t resist a radical anti-capitalism that is not even associated to a revolutionary project. Under the pretext of refusing ultraliberalism, all the “others”, from within or without, appear as potential enemies. The cultural claims are rejected from the outset into the hell of communitarianism, even if we become, us too, more and more communitarian, as a good part of the left finds itself silent in the face of demonstrations against “anti-white” racism or the banal xenophobia against the entry of Turkey.”

Never has the appeal to one’s virtuous adherence to the “revolutionary project” served a more abject goal as the shoring up of the constitution of Valery Giscard D’estaing. It is, depressingly, but not surprising, that this stuff was reprinted in Multitudes, the on-line outlet for the Badiou-wing of radical philosophy. This is Rawlsism with a Che Guevara face. And it stinks.

Memorial Day

H.R. 1815 SEC. 1223. WITHDRAWAL OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES FROM IRAQ. It is the sense of Congress that the President should-- (1) develop a plan as soon as practicable after the date of the enactment of this Act to provide for the withdrawal of United States Armed Forces from Iraq; and (2) transmit to the congressional defense committees a report that contains the plan described in paragraph

LI got this from Scratchings. The resolution was defeated, 128 to 300. However, it is the first time this kind of resolution reached the floor. Plus, the Republican who is most famous for having French fried renamed Freedom Fries not only voted for it, but he spoke for it. This is from Truthout:

Perhaps the most important speech in favor of an exit strategy came from Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC). His district in North Carolina is one that is very supportive of the military. His opposition to the continuation of the war is of interest because he had been a supporter of the war, a point he highlighted in his opening: "This is about a policy, that I believed when I voted 2 years ago to commit the troops that I was making my decision on facts. Since that time I have been very disappointed in what I have learned about the justification for going into Iraq." He explained:
" . . . all this amendment does is just say that it is time for the Congress to meet its responsibility. The responsibility of Congress is to make decisions whether we should send our men and women to war or not send them to war. What we are saying here tonight is we think it is time for the Congress to begin, to start the debate and discussion of what the exit strategy is of this government . . ."

If the antiwar movement – what there is of it – could just overcome its delusion that it should be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and work for, well, the end of the American involvement in the war – work, that is, to create an anti-war wing in both parties, which we believe would be relatively easy to do – who knows, we might be able to save a ten thousand plus American lives, plus God knows how many Iraqi ones.

Our government knows what it is doing

In the great tradition of American government, only the truly important things get rushed though. Hence, the bankruptcy bill was the first thing herded through this year. It was an emergency. Credit card companies had recorded a mere 30 billion dollars in profits last year. Many of them, out of pure humanitarianism, were charging their customers a mere 29 to 34 percent after the inevitable late fees that did not have to be late fees on a specific card, but late on any payment. This is almost 0.5% percent less than the going rate Al Capone charged. We are, after all, talking about active Christians.

Then there were the earthshaking investigations into steroid use among home run hitters. America simply stopped in its tracks, since, as is well known, nothing effects every household in America like a distorted home run record. It causes little children to cry and grown men to hurl themselves from tall buildings.

But though grave issues require speed, other issues – like paying the trash that die or are wounded in Iraq and can’t figure out how to game the system like our President once did – can go on the backburner.

Here’s a story from the Boston Herald – a two bit paper obviously so desperate for news that it pays attention to a wounded military guy

“Winthrop Marine Lance Cpl. James Crosby's effort to give combat-wounded soldiers special pay while they recover moved closer to becoming law with a U.S. House vote last week.

``It will make such an impact,'' said Crosby's father, Kevin. ``My son is in constant pain 24 hours a day. No amount of money can ever make up for that, but at least there's something for these people and their families who have been torn apart.''

A rocket attack in Iraq last year left the younger Crosby, 20, paralyzed from the waist down. When he left Iraq, his combat pay was cut while he fought for his life.

The measure, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Malden), would give $430 a month to soldiers who are wounded and evacuated from the combat zone.”

Supposedly, if it goes through in the House, the Senate might debate it in July, and who knows, Bush might even sign it by September, if he has nothing better to do. That will be after another, say, 800 to 1,000 are wounded in the war for our wonderful freedom lovin’ Iraqis, trusting the averages from the Iraqi coalition casualties page.

It is a bit much to give to the trash. On the bright side, what with the new tools given to the Credit card cos. in that Bankruptcy bill, it will probably be absorbed as late fee detritus by the investors in Discover, Visa, MBNA, Citibank and Bank of America who could really use it. Who says America isn’t still the land of opportunity? It's the ownership society, baby.

Atlas finally shrugs

Last night LI wrote Paul a semi apology. Starting this series of posts three days ago, we intended to obliquely angle into Paul’s post on ethical individualism. However, we admit the degree of obliquity seems a bit, well, excessive. An unkind critic might call it multitudinously losing the point. Paul wrote back:

“Yeah, I was gonna write you an email from work today, with the subject of "Atlas - start shrugging"! I'm not sure what crazy scheme you have in mind - neither, apparently, do you (though your daimon does!) - but I look forward to reading the resulting opus.”

LI will sniffily ignore the reference to that appalling novel and try to get down to brass tacks in this post. Paul’s post is an enthusiastic appreciation of a book by David L. Norton entitled Personal Destinies: a philosophy of ethical individualism. We thought this was among the best bits we’ve ever read on his site:

“Of especial interest is the fact that Norton understands his account to ground a kind of individualism - an "ism" in disrepute with both Left (collectivism) and Right (communitarianism). Those two poles are often likeminded in taking individualism necessarily to be of the "atomistic" (Hobbesian; sc., merely numerical) variety. Norton's eudaimonism claims to establish "qualitative" individualism: each person, ex hypothesi, is obliged to actualize an excellence uniquely his own; to live in truth to his daimon. The social entailment of this doctrine is the "complementarity of excellences," implying the need for counterparts. Hence an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.”

Our response to this has been to consider a certain set of adventures of the concept of the “ratio,” (oops -- the Germanic amplification of the genitive -- the curse of philosophical class. Sorry) insofar as the human individual is supposed to embody it. If one is to “live in truth” to one’s daimon, it is important to think about the various ways one usually lives – unlike some purists, we like Weber’s term, “lifestyle”, for this. The truth, here, seems to do double duty: it implies, on the one hand, some standard of authenticity to which one can compare one’s lifestyle, and on the other hand, it seems performative – the criteria of authenticity is not prefigured, but is constituted in the living. That doubleness isn't incoherent -- a set of truths can be constituted over time in such a way that future acts can be judged against it -- but it does imply a limit on one's liberty that may, in time, become onerous. No more lighting out for the territory, no more second acts.
…
One of the perennial philosophical worries is the degree of error inherent in these various lifestyles. This is why we think the match between Gigerenzer vs. Tversky and Kahnman is fascinating, and casts a certain light upon the qualitatively different points of view that are each haunted, in Paul’s view, by a daimon.

Now, this idea of the daimon is interestingly ambiguous in terms of its site. Where, exactly, is it? this parallels the question we have been pursuing – where exactly is the innate tendency to error – if there is one? Where, that is, is its systematic place?

The early moderns were all very anxious about error. However, until Kant, error was conceived as a thing exterior to the subject. Among other of his functions, Descartes malin genie embodied the exteriority of deception. Hume inflected this line of thinking in a way, insofar as he showed that induction was not logically grounded. However, his intent wasn’t to delegitimize induction – rather, it was to estrange us from our mania about the framework of error and falsity. Induction, being on the side of life or habit, couldn’t be turned off, or doubted in any practical way. All of which went into Hume’s project of showing that reason was and should be the slave of the passions. It is important to note that at the same time that the natural philosophers were worried so about the Pseudodoxia Epidemica, the rising merchant/professional class was increasing sensitive to original sin. But let’s bracket that circumstance.

It was Kant, I think, who first interiorized error as an inevitable formation of the reason itself. There’s a famous passage in the Critique of Pure Reason from the section on the transcendental semblence (Schein). That semblence is the idea that one can deduce how the world is (for instance, whether the world has a beginning or not) from what I would call logic – that is, a conceptual analysis of beginning. Kant writes:

“The cause [of the transcendental semblence (Schein)] is this, that in our Reason (perceived, subjectively, as the human capacity to know) lie fundamental rules and maxims of its use, which have the total appearance of objective principles, and through which it appears, that the subjective necessity of a certain conjunction of our concepts, supported by the understanding, can be maintained. This is an unavoidable illusion, as much one as the illusion, that the sea seems higher on the horizon than on the shore, because we see the former through higher beams of light than the latter; or, even more, so little as astronomer can keep the moon from seeming greater in its setting, even if he is not deceived by this appearance.”

It isn’t surprising that Gigerenzer, too, uses visual illusion as an analogy for cognitive illusion. In Gigerenzer’s work, the necessity he is looking for is ecological – what living function does illusion serve? – rather than metaphysical.

The notion of an error inside (the logical equivalent of Jim Thompson's Killer Inside Me) might seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with Norton (and Craddick’s) qualitatively different demon. And yet that demon seems inherited from the most famous of all daimons – Socrates. And Socrates is definitely a corrective daimon – a negating spirit. It is not a constructive one:

In the Apology, Socrates says: “…something divine and spiritual comes to me, the very thing which Meletus ridiculed in his indictment. I have had this from my childhood; it is a sort of voice that comes to me, ("some divine (theîon) and spiritual (daimónion) [thing] comes to me...")
and when it comes it always holds me back from what I am thinking of doing, but never urges me forward. This it is which opposes my engaging in politics. And I think this opposition is a very good thing; for you may be quite sure, men of Athens, that if I had undertaken to go into politics, I should have been put to death long ago and should have done no good to you or to myself. And do not be angry with me for speaking the truth; the fact is that no man will save his life who nobly opposes you or any other populace and prevents many unjust and illegal things from happening in the state. A man who really fights for the right, if he is to preserve his life for even a little while, must be a private citizen, not a public man.”

If Socrates is speaking truly, then perhaps the daimon is insufficient to ground Paul’s desire that “an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.”

So -- this is the end of this series of posts. A null-set end? An irony? Not really. LI is neither playing the village explainer or the answer guy, here, but simply responding to an interesting idea with a bunch of his own questions.

clearing the table

Yesterday, we lined up things for Gigerenzer’s first shot.

Okay, to briefly reprise – although to follow this post, you will have to read yesterday’s post: Tversky and Kahnman claim to have shown a pattern of illogical response to problems that transform sets into the language of probability. The conjunction problem, or what’s wrong with Linda, was one of those conundrums.

Here’s the problem as T and K present it:

Linda is 31, outgoing, single. She majored in philosophy in college. As a student she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination.

Which of the two alternatives is more probable:

Linda is a bank teller
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement?

The b is, as Gigerenzer points out, rather like the question Piaget posed to children: here is a picture of flowers, 6 of which are daisies and four of which are not. Are there more daisies or flowers in the picture? In the Piaget case, by the time children are eight, they recognize that the daisies are flowers, and that the confusing thing in the question is really that it makes it falsely appear like daisies are categorially equal to flowers, instead of a subset of them. (well, they realize this in child-brain speech, as in, that’s a trick question). But T and K consistently found that college students would chose b. So what gives?

“I argue that the irrationality is not to be found in adult reasoning but in the logical norm. Consider what the norm is: the probability of an event A is larger than (or equal to) the probability of the events A and B, that is, p(A) > P(AAB). This conjunction rule is used as a
content-blind norm for judgment: the content of the As and Bs is not considered relevant to evaluating good reasoning. All that counts is the mathematical probability p and the logical '^ and correct judgment is attested when people use the English terms probable and and in this and
only this way. This amounts to a purely syntactic definition of rational reasoning, and therefore, of an error in judgment.”

Putting his money on the table, so to speak, Gigerenzer rearranges T and K’s question to this one:

“Consider the following version of the Linda problem. Here the polysemy of the word probable is eliminated by using the phrase how many:

There are 100 persons who fit the description above (that is, Linda's). How many of them are:

Bank tellers?

Bank tellers and active in the feminist movement? '^

This change is sufficient to make the apparently stable cognitive illusion largely disappear. In one experiment, every single participant answered that there are more bank tellers {Hertwig and Gigerenzer, 1999; for similar results see Fiedler, 1988; Tversky and Kahneman, 1983). The
experiment also showed that the majority of participants interpreted how many in the sense of mathematical probability, but more probable as meaning "possible," "conceivable," or one of the other nonmathematical meanings listed in the OED.”

If Gigerenzer is right, he is onto something major – like, Meno style major. Like, maybe education is actually possible – confounding the cynics among you. Alas, T and K have tinkered with rephrasing the question in terms of “how many,” discovering that simply changing the b phrase slightly (to “bank tellers and active feminists”) can again dramatically change the responses.

All of which leads Gigerenzer to ask whether the problem, here, is that T and K are abstracting the mind from our ecology. This is how the Great G puts it:

“What have we learned from some 20 years and hundreds of experiments on the conjunction fallacy? We have leamed more about the limits of logic as norms than about the workings of the mind. In fact, I do not know of any new Insight that this activity has produced. Logical norms distract us from understanding intelligent behavior.”

At this point, LI is tempted to go down the trail, shooting up the Bush age obsession with testing as education, and the foreseeable result (further cretinization of a vulnerable population) by the No Child having anything to think with but their Behind Act. But we will simply lay down a marker for future reference.

To return, however. Our topic, in our last post, was supposed to be the individual, considered as an autonomous thing – the person, in short. Since Kant – at least, that is how the intellectual history story goes, but in actuality Kant simply codified what was in the child-speak of the Western mass mind for a long time – we’ve operated on the assumption that the autonomy of the individual is the bedrock of ethics. Philosophy’s safecrackers – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, etc, etc – have found it pretty easy to break into that concept and show up its flaws, just as Marx found it easy to point to the historical trajectory of class interest that produces the “character mask” of the subject under capitalism. Old Kant’s original formulation of the autonomy thesis is notably eccentric, since it excludes the sensibility – the animal collective that howls around the noumenal X that we proudly bear through our trials and temptations. While Gigerenzer is no overt Kantian, his theory does lend credence to the idea that the sensibility can, indeed, breach our autonomy – or, to put it another way, that the way in which we perceive things is so framed by elements given by the sensibility that “logical norms distract us from intelligent behavior.” To illustrate which, Gigerenzer cites a psychological experiment created from a cliché:

“Consider an experiment in which a full glass of water and an empty glass are put in front of a participant (Sher and McKenzie, 2003). The experimenter asks the participant to pour half of the full glass into the other glass, and then asks the participant to hand him the half empty glass. Which one does the participant pick? Most people picked the previously full glass. When they were asked, however, to hand over the half-full glass, most participants picked the previously empty one. This experiment reveals that the two statements are not pragmatically equivalent (see also McKenzie and Nelson, 2003). People extract surplus information from the framing of the question, and this surplus information concems the dynamics or history of the situation, which helps to guess what is meant.”

Okay, one more post on this topic, tomorrow.

Linda you sly fox

Lately, LI has been a little baggy and disorganized. Unfortunately, I foresee this post straying into chaos too – I can feel its edges, even now, being pulled towards some strange attractors -- but I will try to be a bit more disciplined.

See, I want to write about two different things. I want to write about my web pal Paul’s post on the daemonic interpretation of the person – which rings some bells with me. And I also want to write about Gerd Gigerenzer’s essay in the new issue of Social Theory, I think, therefore I err. And at some point I wanted to use Schopenhauer’s image of the Veil of Maya to talk about traffic fatalities.

Uhh, right. Okay. Three things.

As fans of prospect theory know, Gigerenzer plays Moriarty to Kahneman and Tversky’s Holmes and Watson. Prospect theory – which takes the datum from psychological testing to understand patterns in how people make decisions according to their perspective of the probabilities involved in adopting a course of behavior – has busily revamped the way economists think of the rational agent. Kahneman and Tversky found that certain patterns of logical error occur across groups. For instance, given a constant probability of a course of action, one can manipulate responses to that course by framing it in terms of gain or loss. K and T developed what is called the Asian disease problem. Using students and professors as their pool of respondents, they posed this problem:

Imagine that the US is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimates of the consequences of the programs are as follows:

If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved.

If Program B is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.

72 percent chose A, 28 B. Then they proposed this problem:

Problem 2
If Program C is adopted 400 people will die.
If Program D is adopted there is 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 people will die.
Which of the two programs would you favor?”
22 percent went for C, and 78 percent went for D.

The first question was framed in such a way that it brought out risk averseness: “the prospect of certainly saving 200 lives is more attractive than a risky prospect of equal expected value, that is, a one-in-three chance of saving 600 lives.” The second question brought out risk taking: “the certain death of 400 people is less acceptable than the two ­in­ three chance that 600 will die.”

Gigerenzer’s essay begins by showing that the paradigm within which Kahneman and Tversky are working is one that assumes that the brain is a logic machine. This goes back, according to G., to Piaget’s work. Piaget showed that children, as they get older, get better at answering questions that are, basically, about sets. For instance, children are shown a picture with ten flowers, of which five are daisies. They are asked if there are more daisies or more flowers in the picture. Eventually, by the age of eight or nine, they click to the fact that daisies are a subset of flowers, and thus, naturally, there are more flowers. But K. and T., those devils, upset this neat pattern by transposing the terms into probability terms with the famous Linda problem. Linda is 31 years old. Linda was a philosophy major. Linda is outspoken. Now, which one of the two is more probable? A. Linda is a bank teller. B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement? People match Linda’s characteristics to b., and so choose b, even though – by the laws of probability – the conjunction of the probability of two states is less than their separate probabilities.

(The conjunction fallacy, by the way, was rife during the early days of the Iraq occupation, as LI liked to point out at the time. But I’m not going off in that direction today.)

So: what? Tomorrow I will write about Gigerenzer’s problem with the Linda problem.

Doing our share

LI has been contemplating one of the latest developments in the War.

“In a joint statement at the end of a three-day visit by the Iranian foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, the new Shiite-led Iraqi government said that Saddam Hussein, the overthrown Iraqi leader, and other officials in his government must be put on trial for committing "military aggression against the people of Iraq, Iran and Kuwait," as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes.”

Given this statement by our ally officially making that war a criminal offense, and given LI's well known sense of patriotism, we thought we'd start the ball rolling by fingering a few collaborators that the Iraqis might want to pick up in this country.

For instance: Weinberger, Caspar W. Description: lunatic, former Secretary of War under Ronald Reagan (president, U.S.A.). In his memoirs, written in 1990 “Weinberger holds the Ayatollah responsible for the war with Iraq, even though Iraq attacked first. Moreover, he asserts that Iran was able to hold its own in the war only because Iraq had decided it did not want to commit the substantial resources required for a military victory. The former secretary conveniently forgets that Iraq resorted even to chemical weapons.”

There’s a rundown of the dog’s criminal activities here.

Current resorts: “Cap” has been seen in Washington D.C. Method of capture suggested: ambush at meeting of the Forbes magazine board of directors, of which he is chairman; also can be picked up at the Winston Churchill Memorial Fund annual pigsticking hunt, or, if 20 to 30 thousand dollars is available, can be lured to speak at any event involving making money from the commerce of mass murder, i.e. defense related industry.

Rumsfeld, Donald. Description: lunatic, current secretary of War. Record: There's a rundown of beast's criminal role here.

Method of capture suggested: Rumsfeld, known to his associates as Babbling Don, is known to frequent a building on 1000 Defense, where he hangs out with various shady cronies. Warning: suspect is armed and should be considered dangerous.

Bush, George Herbert. Description: records show that the suspect may have been president of the United States. Information is considered highly unreliable, as it is unlikely a person so egregiously unpleasant could have been elected to position of dogcatcher, even among kaf'r. Record: partial list of crimes committed in La Times article here

Method of Capture suggested: last seen looking like prune went wrong way down windpipe in tsunami aid photo-op in Thailand. Likely to be anywhere wife is not in vicinity. May be lured by set up involving search for new spokesman for viagra related product, for which see Dole, Robert.

PS - Since we are doing our share in the Great Bush War Effort, we felt like sharing some more of the good news in Iraq.

Ali Hameed quit his job as a taxi driver because he no longer felt safe on Baghdad's streets. Increasingly desperate for money to help him get married, he hit on a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity - selling one of his kidneys.

Last week, in a shabby ward in the city's Al Karama hospital, he lay bandaged on a bed, one kidney lighter and $1,400 (about £765) richer after a three-hour operation.

In a nearby room, his body similarly bandaged, lay the man who had paid for it - the other player in a grim new black market trade in organs that is one of Iraq's few growth industries.

LI read a fascinating article by Mary Morgan in the Winter Philosophy of Science journal, and we want to write about it. Mary Morgan, Margaret Morrison, Nancy Cartwright, and Ronald Giere form, in LI’s mind, a sort of collective that bridges the distance between the Latourian Science in Action school and the last gasp tradition of the Popperians. Significantly, many come out of the London School of Economics, long a stronghold of the late Popperian school.

As philosophers of science know, the first thing that scientists will mention when asked for a philosophy of science is falsification. This is less a thoughtful judgment of the practice of science as they have observed it than boilerplate. As is well known, the falsification criteria comes from the Logical Positivist school in the twenties. More specifically, it comes from Karl Popper, as a leading thesis in the investigation of the “logic of discovery.” What those scientists usually don’t know is that the leading thesis was part of a program that claimed to offer a devastating and final refutation of induction in science.

The idea that science could be captured in a logic is an essential move in the logical positivist program of reducing all salient questions of knowledge to questions of formal language. This inflation of the notion of language signals the lineage of the philosophy: language functions, here, much as Kant’s reason functions in the Critiques. We won’t go over the adventures and impasses of this program. Suffice it to say that Popper’s picture of science was confessedly abbreviated. It didn’t tell us much about how statistics decisively changed the practice and meaning of experimentation in science. It didn’t tell us much about models. It made assumptions about hypothesis building that isolated that activity from science practice. But, mainly, it was aimed at telling us about the truth – with the idea that science is ultimately constructed around the truth. Other Popperians – Lakatos, Feyerabend, Kuhn, etc – extended to Popperian impulse to larger views of research programs, and in the process destroyed Popperian rationality. It was self mined from the very beginning. But the essential idea – that at the heart of science there is a wholly deductive program that is theoretically capturable in a formal language – still remained, yearly becoming much worse for wear. As, indeed, the original and simple thesis of falsification proved itself unable to account for large swatches of science, and fell into logical difficulties of its own (Hempel’s White Raven paradox).

Actually, in LI’s eyes, the logical positivists simply encoded, in a new form, the reaction of philosophy to science that arose during the early modern period – notably, the Cartesian idea that science advances by the hypothetico-deductive method. It was that idea which Newton fought against from the correspondence around his first paper, the great 1676 letter on light and color, to the Opticks which he published after the death of his inveterate enemy, Robert Hooke. Newton’s entire seriousness in not “framing hypotheses” was a great step towards separating, utterly, physics from metaphysics. It is a step the philosophers have never wholly forgiven him – or even wholly understood in him. Hence, the perennial urge to annex the natural sciences as a branch of logic.

Where does this leave philosophy of science, then? PoS has an uneasy relationship with Sociology of Science, insofar as it gives up the pretence of deducing the principles of science and applies itself to the observation of scientific practice. In one way, this makes PoS a very exciting field. Where other branches of philosophy amuse themselves with dubious thought experiments, PoS observes real ones.

Morgan’s paper takes a case from Economics – a model called the Edgeworth Box – and shows how it permutated over the course of a century, as economists mathematized their discipline. The Edgeworth Box (see this history by Humphrey ) was invented by Francis Edgeworth in “his now famous Mathematical Psychics ([1881] 2003), a book of almost impenetrable erudition from this Irish economist. For Edgeworth, mathematics was a form of expression, a language, and because of its special qualities it was a tool or instrument both for expression of economic ideas and for reasoning about them. But in Edgeworth's mind it was also an instrument of imagination.”

Edgeworth imagines two individuals with two goods to exchange. The world of these individuals is closed, to an extent: the traders do not have competitors. But they are free to contract or not. In other words, the Robinson Crusoe story so savaged by Marx. As Morgan puts it, the Edgeworth box “defines the locus of points at which exchange might be contracted as those where, whichever direction a move is made away from that set of points, one trader gets more and the other less utility. This set of points is termed the "contract curve.’” From Morgan: “Edgeworth's diagram refers to individual traders alongside their goods, and provides an indifference curve for each individual and their contract curve. And while it seems initially that the whole space is open for trade as in Marshall, the argument defining the contract curve in conjunction with the indifference curves through the origin (i.e., points at which utility is equivalent to that obtained from zero exchange) rules out some areas of the ninety-degree total space. Edgeworth is so impressed by his own diagram and the way that it allows him to work out some results which had previously failed to yield to general analysis, that he writes that his figure "is proved to be a correct representation" and that the diagram provides "an abstract typical representation" of a process (Edgeworth [1881] 2003, 36; my underlining).”

Now, the interesting thing about this abstract typical representation is that it represents a dynamic – although Morgan doesn’t mention it, surely there is some slight reference, here, to Maxwell’s fields, which are also constructed to capture trajectories. Morgan, instead, references Marshall’s theory of trade between two countries as the template for Edgeworth. LI notes this as a limit to exploring model building with an exclusive endogenous focus.

Morgan points out that Edgeworth’s original representation is not a box: “What might now be taken as the irreducible shape of the Box--namely, a closed set of two amounts of exchangeable items represented by the sides of the box, and two traders at opposite corners, each with two axes of potential commodities to trade with--are not there from the beginning.” Yet by 1950, the standard form of the Edgeworth diagram was a box. LI won’t reproduce Morgan’s history. But we are interested in the conclusion of that history: “For the economists in my case, learning to represent the economy in new ways was drawing new things. The mathematically expressed economic elements inside the Edgeworth Box--the indifference curves, the contract curve, the points of tangency and equilibrium, etc.--are new, mind's eye, conceptual elements, not old, body's eye, perceptual elements. Scitovsky's 1941 use of the diagram provides an excellent example of this point. The critical point of his article is the difference between allocative efficiency in which the total resources in the economy are fixed (denoted by a fixed size box) and those in which the resources change (denoted by a change in box size). The representation of the effect of this change proves to be quite difficult to understand for the modern user of such boxes. It is tempting for the reader of the diagram to suppose that, by expanding the box, there are just longer axes, more goods (for example, cheese and wine) to be exchanged for given indifference maps (representing tastes, which have no reason to alter). But of course these indifference lines represent contours in conceptual space, and increasing the total resources effectively expands the box from the middle. As the axes are lengthened, perceptual space expands, but so does the conceptual space, so that the original contract curve opens out to provide a region in the middle through which the new contract curve runs. This distinction between conceptual space and perceptual space also helps us to distinguish when a diagram is doing any work in the argument. If the diagram is about perceptual space but the argument about conceptual space, the reasoning will take place, as Mahoney describes it, "off the diagram" and the diagram will be, at best, an illustration, rather than a tool for experimentation and demonstration. (9)
Yet, as we know from Humphrey's 1996 history, during the early-twentieth-century period, the Edgeworth Box diagram was a creative tool used to derive propositions and prove theorems in economics. It was indeed a tool for reasoning about the economic world using the conceptual resources of the diagram.”

To evoke an entirely different philosophical tradition – the notions at play here, in Derridian terms, subsist in the gap between language and text. Those who read Derrida as collapsing text into language – as a run of the mill social constructionist, with the usual language idealism -- don’t understand him at all. The Edgeworth box is an excellent example of the trajectory of signs that constitutes a “text”, in Derrida’s terms. And what Morgan says, finally, about the ontological status of the Box is exactly what deconstruction would predict:

“I should be careful here to point out that when the Edgeworth Box is described as a mathematical model, it is not only made of mathematics. We can illustrate this best by considering the allowable movements or manipulations which can be made in the model. The notion that the two traders will be at some kind of optimum when their indifference curves meet at a tangency makes use of mathematical concepts and logic. But the apparatus of offer curves, indifference curves, and so, for example, the spaces in which trade is ruled out, depends on understanding the conceptual content of the elements in the model. Thus, Scitovsky's diagram showing the implications of increasing the resources requires manipulations of the diagram which are determined by the economic meaning of these curves, not by the logic of geometry. Both mathematical and subject-matter conceptual knowledge constrain the details of the representation and define the allowable manipulations. This is surely not particular to models in the form of diagrams, and indeed it seems likely that most if not all "mathematical" models in economics depend on economic subject information to constrain or define their rules of manipulation. From this point of view, there would be as much difficulty in "translating" the Edgeworth Box into "just mathematics" with no subject content as into "just words" with no mathematical content. The Edgeworth Box diagram carries an independent representational function: (10) it contains conceptual apparatus which could not be represented, or manipulated, in verbal form and indeed cannot be entirely expressed in purely mathematical terms.”

Which last sentence opens up a few too many vistas.

Ruins and monuments of the Bush age

The week was pleasantly full of Bush age ironies. There was, first, the curious silence of the Bush administration regarding aging LBO king Perelman’s winning approximately 1.45 billion dollars from Morgan Stanley. Trivial law suits? Misuse of the courts? No, it is a misuse of the court when a man gets his arm sliced off in a meat factory and wins a million bucks from the jury. This is because the man is, originally, shit. Low class. A man who couldn’t make second place to a doorman position at one of the clubs Perelman belongs to. Basically, Bush’s liability reform is class warfare in the raw. Reform, whenever it comes out of the mouth of one of the Bush-ites, means entrenching and legalizing some corruption. Invariably. As anybody who pays attention knows, the big court losses are not to slaughter house workers or Mickey Dee’s customers assaulted by palsied clerks with hot coffee – they are to big corporate players. However, since the money circulates among the upper 1 percent income bracket, which is (to a degree of exclusion that would astonish Ronald Reagan) the only class that Bush cares about, there isn’t going to be any dickering with this system. Well, Morgan Stanley might, rightly, use one of their pawns in Congress to reverse the verdict, but shark fights are never about damaging the real interests of the pool of sharks. Their interest, actually, is to do what they do best – which is to bully. Now, LI recognizes that in every society, the bully rises to the top, and that inhuman cruelty is part of what makes this such a rich country for one and all. They may be sons of bitches, but at least they are our suns of bitches. But that Perelman can coolly extract 1.45 billion for the “bad advice” he got from Morgan Stanley about not pouring money into a company, Sunbeam, is a joke. Perelman, in this scenario, is a naïf. A poor shoeless billionaire. He invested in a company that a half hours acquaintance with any Business news index would tell you had basically come to the limit of its market. How did Perelman figure on making a return? He wanted the spoils that would accrue from sending in a criminal named Al Dunlop as CEO to screw those who had spent their lives working for the company while taking apart the infrastructure of the place – in preparation for daisy chaining it to some other company. Who knew that, in spite of his reputation as a thug, Dunlap was also an incredibly incompetent thug. Perelman should know the m.o. – he helped invent it in the eighties. See under Marvel.

But if sharks eat sharks, is a minnow like me going to shed a tear? Not really. Still, one should put down x-es – the best way to trace the intellectual corruption that puts its spurs into our sides at the moment.

Then, of course, there was a more traditional crushing of minnows into fishmeal, with the “bankruptcy” of United Air. There is no God, otherwise, just for amusement, he would have arranged the news for this to arrive the week Bush signed the new Bankruptcy bill that he has so drooled over. The very thought that some low caste widow of one of the suckers who died in Iraq going bankrupt and skipping those wonderful credit card payments – 40 percent and mounting, all usury, all the time – sends a black arrow through the heart of the worst and the vilest. The worst and vilest, while headquartered in the Pentagon, do have branch offices: Congress, the Treasury department, etc. So that widow is going to pay through the nose for the vacuum cleaner, the groceries, the new tires for the care (strumpet luxuries!) On the other hand, contractual obligations that have extended for fifty years can go out the window without a blink from Treasury Secretary Snow. Of course, only a raving Marxist would mention the 15 to 17 mil that United CEOs have received (keeping the company competitive in the labor marketplace) in compensation for their amazing leadership abilities. Those leadership abilities consisted of tracking their options in the high nineties. LI has already written a lot about the catastrophe in the private pension funds that is ticking away – funds that, hey, were not kept in a locked box but invested, just like Bushites want Social Security invested. That equity market, man. It just goes up. It is riskless. Shoe shine boys become millionaires on it. Or executives in companies with advance advice that the company’s profits are going to tank, as Bush did when he was finally skyhooked out of the series of small companies he ran into the ground and put in an essentially harmless position from which he could operate as a rentier. It’s the Ownership society – they own you. If there is ever a “truth in mottoes on coins” law, surely that should be the consensus choice.

Then, the lie that runs through the administration like the Nile, fertilizing every branch, there was the news from Iraq. Seems that a sovereign cabinet member had let the wine of power get to his head and banned raiding mosques. As if the little Mesopomoron didn’t know how business was run in fully democratic Iraq. It is run much as it was run by the Soviets in fully democratic East Germany.

The NYT sank this little jewel of a paragraph in one of their schizo news stories – a week ago Rumsfeld wasn’t bothering to even call the command in Iraq except on alternate Sundays, and only then to discuss the weather and fishing. This week the command is talking about another three, four years meatgrinding Americans – castoffs all, late on their credit card payments – and Iraqis – about which, do we care? Surely they will provide a few more purple thumb moments for us to smile about. And then we get this:

“Another problem cited by the senior officer in Baghdad was the new government's ban on raids on mosques, announced on Monday, which the American officer said he expected to be revised after high-level discussions on Wednesday between American commanders and Iraqi officials.”

LI likes the Soviet sound of this. The high level discussions. The consultation. The our fellow democracy. The brothers in the eternal struggle of liberty lovers.

So: all in all, a banner week.

odd man out at the orgy

Once, long ago, LI allowed ourselves to be talked into seeing one of the Star Wars series. We must have been in the late teens, early twenties. The blurry memory seems to indicate the talking into was done by a date. So we dipped our toe in the Great American Madness, and picked up from the experience a raging headache, aggravated by the squeals of Wookies. Besides those squeals, we have, honestly, no recollection of the business of the film whatsoever – the humans acting in it, the plot, if any, the S/FX justifying the whole sorry sequence. That we had watched a movie in which the dramatic momentum depended on things named Wookies seems, in retrospect, to eminently justify a little pain.

Every time one of that series comes out, there is a rush of interest, a true and naïve interest, in a thing that has such an intrinsically uninteresting story line, and has such a taste for visual gimmickry wholly separate from a taste for visual beauty, that we… can’t figure it out. It makes us feel a little alien – which, I suppose, is a sci fi sentiment in itself. Since this gives a pleasure that we can’t participate in, the human all too human thing is to think that it must be a lesser pleasure – or maybe a vicious one. We are enough of a puritan and a prig to measure our superiority on the gaps in our sensibility – and to label those gaps good taste.

Well, as Nietzsche once said, good taste be damned. The perdurably alien Philip Dick wrote an essay about Sci Fi which is much on our minds, lately: “How to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later.” Obviously, the perennial life of the Star Wars serial has accomplished that task – but Dick says something interesting about his title:

“So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe— and I am dead serious when I say this— do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things are born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves will begin to die, inwarrdly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”

Dick says a lot of things in this essay that are a bit crazy – for instance, he finds such intensely meaningful and accidental parallels between his book, Flow my tears the policeman said, and the Book of Acts that he is forced to draw conclusions that are stretchers: “So my novel contained material from other parts of the Bible, as well as the sections from Acts. Deciphered, my novel tells a quite different story from the surface story (which we need not go into here). The real" story is simply this: the return of Christ, now king rather than suffering servant. Judge rather than victim of unfair judgment. Everything is reversed. The CORE message of my novel, without my knowing it, was a warning to the powerful: You will shortly be judged and condemned. Who, specifically, did it refer to? Well, I can't really say; or rather would prefer not to say. I have no certain knowledge, only an intuition. And that is not enough to go on, so I will keep my thoughts tc. myself. But you might ask yourselves what political events took place in this country between February 1974 and August 1974. Ask yourself who was judged and condemned, and fell like a flaming star into ruin and disgrace.”

I rather want to be Isaiah myself. Unfortunately, the flaming star from Crawford who I want to see fall into ruin and disgrace seems to blithely escape my prophetic mental ray gun.

On the other hand, Dick earned the right to his stretchers, if you ask me. But this is getting off the track. What impressed me most about the essay was how it captures the sci fi moment that encloses both the work and the reception of the work. Or, to be less mysterious about it – Dick gives us a sense of how the science fiction of something like Star Wars lies not in the series itself, but the viewing and buzz around the movies. That great machinery of commerce and p.r., dovetailing with these passionately awaited and debated story/games, makes it hard to know what is going on here for someone like LI – who, when all is said and done, is just your typical boojwah symbol pusher, thinking to put himself in a one on one with the great works – or the video, or the novel, or the poem. Thinking that the orgy is all about himself.

One more passage from the Dick essay, just for the hell of it. I love this: “If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence "I am the word." That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity which made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself: I am the brand name. Had he translated the Gospel according to Saint John, I suppose it would have come out as: When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.”

poetry and rent seeking

Poetry is a mysterious thing. It can go underground for a century – as it did in eighteenth century France. In the U.S., poetry has always been capricious. What happened in the twentieth century was in some ways miraculous – yet, after the major poets of the forties generation started dying out, they weren’t replaced. Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill – there’s no American poet, at the moment, of a remotely similar stature. There’s a factory mindset that worries about this – it is as if there were some production quota for sausages, lawn mowers and poets.

In the absence of great poets, the American community has great poetry cabals. There’s a very nice article about this in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Thomas Bartlett. Alas, the article is entitled Rhyme and Unreason, instead of (dream on!) Poetry and Rent-seeking. And double alas, Thomas Bartlett, the author, didn’t seek out any economists for comment. But he nevertheless untangles a wonderfully tangled tale.

The tale in short goes like this. Foetry, a website dedicated to getting to the root of corruption in poetry contests, appeared on the web last year. It was run anonymously. Eventually, that anonymity was penetrated – it turns out the site is run by a librarian named Alan Cordle, who is married to a poet. Cordle felt a burning sense of injustice about the world in which his wife was trying to make it as a poet, and so decided to attack the backscratching and numerous collusions that make poetry contests as fair as a Florida election.

Rent-seeking is a term invented by Anne Krueger to denote behaviors that are advantage-oriented but unproductive. It is an oblique acknowledgement by neo-classical economists that the model of enterprises fairly competing with each other to achieve advantage doesn’t really take into account the enterprises knowledge of the system – that, in other words, the path to profit needn’t be a matter or services, prices, or innovation, but can consist in gaming the system. In fact, the impossibility of creating a system that would block incentives to game the system is the reason that neo-classical economics is the economics of a vacuum in search of a reality. And the term “unproductive” is, shall we say, debateable – for economists, outputs from the government, such as environmental protection, can be seen as “unproductive”, while the output from a small movie company making snuff films can be seen as “productive.”

As you can see, the roots of the notion are embedded in the usual conservative world view that establishes absolute differences between the state and private enterprise, or bureaucracy and management, and so on. The usual unjustifiable intellectual cockledoodledoo. But there is a nugget of sound common sense here, as long as one is not carried away by the normative overtones. Andrew Hindmoor published a nice knockdown of rent seeking in the Journal of Political Philosophy in 1999. He provides a useful summary of the rent seeking concept:
“(i) Rent seeking is extremely common. Within the political arena where attention remains largely focused, examples of rent seeking are manifold.(n4) Interest-groups invest resources in an effort to extract favourable legislation from government. Utilities invest resources in an effort to capture their regulator and so ensure the erection of barriers to entry which will stifle competition. Bureaucrats invest resources in an effort to persuade government that budgets should be increased and political parties invest resources in an effort to capture the monopoly rent of government itself. Whilst efforts to quantify the volume of rent seeking remain in their infancy, one recent study concludes that as much as one-quarter of American gross national product is devoted to rent seeking and rent protection.

“(ii) Rent seeking is pernicious. Rent seeking may be individually rational but it is socially costly because it occurs at the expense of productive investment. Consider the following `clear cut' example offered by Tullock.(n6) In an effort to increase its profits, a struggling American steel company invests resources in an effort to secure a ban on the imports of a rival Korean firm's goods `on the purported grounds that [they are] environmentally dangerous'. Not only will the price of steel rise but money invested in this way cannot then be spent in other more productive ways. Resources invested in an effort to secure an import ban cannot be invested in new machinery which will reduce costs and improve quality.

“(iii) Rent seeking should be eliminated. For Rowley and Tullock, it is an item of political faith that `for those concerned with advancing the nation's wealth, the elimination of rent seeking ... is on a par (almost) with support of the flag, motherhood and apple pie'. It may not be possible to eliminate rent seeking but it is possible to reduce it. Reform is often envisaged as occurring at the constitutional level. Proposals are varied and include the imposition of tighter party discipline, rules limiting the size of government and a requirement that legislation be non-discriminatory.”
Interestingly, the political economy of poetry in the U.S. is very like the political economy of a particularly corrupt third world country. For instance, take the poetry contest. As Bartlett puts it:

“Poetry contests -- particularly the prestigious ones -- do more than boost the egos of the winners: They often make a poet's career. The winners get published; the losers are left to enter another contest. Published poets are first in line to get university teaching jobs, which is one reason they spend a lot of time and money (contests often charge "reading fees") trying to win big-name competitions. The contests also matter for established poets, who are seeking to publish their books and strengthen their reputations.”

So far, so good. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with contests making a poet’s reputation. The problem comes from the fact that the reputation does not then get out in the world, so to speak. Poetry doesn’t sell. Here’s where the kicker comes in:

“But the fact is, poetry books don't sell, and so-called reading fees paid by contestants subsidize the cost of publication by small and university presses. That works well for the presses, but for poets it can mean spending a small fortune trying to get their words into print. Mr. Cordle and his supporters see the system as a scheme to defraud naïve poets while judges select their friends, students, and colleagues. Presses argue that it is just a regrettable economic necessity.”

The pre-requisites for corruption in a small undeveloped economy are similar. An economy that doesn’t produce enough saleable product – or that has systematic impediments to the production of saleable goods – which, nevertheless, has an inflow of aid for some reason from developed countries. An oversized administrative structure that sucks out the money and energy that could be spend on removing impediments to native growth. A competition for power-brokering positions, rather than for productive positions – as the latter are not as profitable as the former.
Cordle stumbled upon a great trove of insider dealing when he went after the University of Georgia poetry contest, getting a list of judges for recent poetry contests. The University had not published that information before. It turns out Jorie Graham, who is the poet laureate of rentseeking, happened to be a judge the year the top prize was awarded to a Peter Sacks.

As Bartlett puts it:

On its face, that was a shocking revelation. Ms. Graham and Mr. Sacks are colleagues at Harvard University. They are also married.
“Ms. Graham says it is not that simple. The two were not married in 1999, and Ms. Graham had not yet arrived at Harvard. They knew each other, she says, but not well. They married in 2000, the same year she moved to Harvard.”

The story gets much funnier, as Bartlett gets a series of excuses from all participants that are, truly, the stuff of poetry. Or litigation, or both – this being an American story, the end of it is that all sides are mounting up their lawyers. Graham claims that she had reservations about her role in the UGA contest.

But… “Documents that Mr. Cordle obtained from the Georgia press, however, do not seem to support that scenario. For instance, in a letter Mr. Ramke wrote in 1999 to the director of the press, he says that Ms. Graham "enthusiastically concurs" with his decision to pick Mr. Sacks's work.
Ms. Graham calls that wording a "big mistake" and points to another part of the letter in which Mr. Ramke says he would pick the manuscript "even if I were alone in the wilderness." Mr. Cordle also obtained through the request a page of prose written by Ms. Graham praising Mr. Sacks's book. She says that was nothing more than "jacket copy" that Mr. Ramke asked her to write. Mr. Ramke, however, says that judges -- whom he calls "outside readers" -- are asked to write a page or so about the manuscript "to be used as arguments for publishing the book."

However, the reach of rentseeking as a tool of analysis only goes so far. There is no reason to think Sacks’ poetry isn’t great – LI hasn’t read it. In fact, the universal perniciousness of rent seeking only appears to University of Chicago deluded eyes. Still, there is something enjoyable – something Dunciad like – about this farce.

the sycophants ball

The Washington Post, in its infinite wisdom, decided to send a staff reporter to interview Phillip Johnson, the gray eminence behind the pseudo-science of Intelligent Design. This is interesting. Are they going to start letting the style section do reports on business, now? How about having a sports reporter do the Pentagon beat.

The article, of course, betrays Michael Powell’s powerful eighth grade education in biology, and his charming belief, which probably won him prizes in high school, that a newspaper story doesn’t take sides -- it deals with both sides of the question. He even wrote a very good essay on that in his English class, and Ms. Figworth marked it VERY IMPRESSIVE!

One doesn’t blame poor Mr. Powell – he truly seems prepared, if the question is, say, whether Star Wars one is better than Star Wars three – but the brothelkeeper who sent him on his task. As usual, the Washington Post’s response to the conservative establishment that runs D.C., now, is to fetch the bone. The bone, in this case, is the debasing of American education with nonsense.

We especially loved this sentence:

“Johnson and his followers, microbiologists and geologists and philosophers, debate in the language of science rather than Scripture.”

Because Powell obviously think that science is a debate, with people taking notes out of their files – yes, it is the debate club! He covered the debate club, once! He knows how to do this!

Oh, the Bush age. How I long for it to end.

intellectual scabs

This is the kind of post my friend T. will frown at. Having already violated my vow, this week, to make this blog a Hitchens free zone, I am now going to post about one of the “friends of Hitchens,” Marc Cooper.

However, instead of concentrating fire on Cooper’s brand of Bush era leftism – four parts surrender, one part reminder of what a groovy radical past Cooper possesses, why he was even against Pinochet! – let’s expand the parameters to a broader question: why did the New Left generation fail to socially reproduce? This is the kind way to put it. Another way to put it is: why did the generation of 1968 produce such ace putzes of the Cooper/Hitchens variety?

First, we should briefly review Cooper’s m.o. In the past year, Cooper has bravely unmasked Naomi Klein as a useful tool of Islamofascist terrorists; has sternly criticized the paranoid rantings of the left re Bush; took up the cudgels against world renowned celebrity Ward Churchill and his plan to reduce your mother, dear reader, to sexual slavery; and in various other ways has rightly become the leftist most likely to be linked to by an Instapundit.

His absurd post about Iraq is par for Cooper’s course. Having checked out the tv news and seen that 400 people have been murdered by the insurgents in the past month, Cooper’s humanitarianism is offended. And of course in this mood he can see right through the moral idiocy of calling for an American withdrawal from Iraq. He goes right to work, barking at various leftists who advocate just that.

Now, in fact, there is a strict correlation between these deaths and their occurence in those areas where our heroic Uncle Sam has scattered his forces. There is also the little matter of the history of the occupation. Cooper's position seems to be that the occupation was a total disaster, so we should keep on with the occupation. This is worthy of the man. This is how he covers the path that took us to those four hundred murders.

The new tack, as we all must have noticed, is to pretend that now, it is all about supporting democracy. In fact, American newspapers have taken to describing the Bush doctrine, shorthand, as supporting democracy. Which is like describing Bush's social security proposals, in shorthand, as "saving social security.' So we are 'supporting democracy" by transforming our occupying force in Iraq into a weapon used by Talabani's Kurds and SCIRI against their opponents. Let's lift the veil of amnesia a bit. What’s forgotten?

- That, up until the week of the elections, the major coalition of Shiite parties did support a a timetable of withdrawal.
- That even the American propaganda poll, done by the IRI, showed majority support for the timetable.
- That the dropping of that provision was the result of heavy American pressure.
- That the three month lag in governance was the result of the American designed occupation law.
- That the law was designed to maximize the occupier’s power in the country.
- That the law under which the constitution is to be decided in Iraq is an American enforced law, of no real validity.

Cooper’s humanitarianism, while extended to the four hundred killed in one month, is apparently unmoved by the more than one hundred killed in one week by the Pentagon in Western Iraq. This, however, is typical Cooper -- a fine selectivity of indignation. As the Lancet group showed, and as was further shown by the UN study of living conditions in Iraq this week, and what the offensive in Western Iraq showed as well – the majority of deaths in Iraq come by way of American firepower and the semi-criminal attempt, by the COA, to run Iraq as a profit preserve for America's biggest War contractors. A suicide bomber blowing up a bunch of out of work Shi’ites is called a terrorist act by the Coopers of the world. An American plane blowing up a restaurant with a bunch of Sunnis dining in it is called a tactical strike. The insurgents, so far as I know, have not reduced any major city to the totalitarian rule of segregating males and letting them walk in their own neighborhood on sufferance – as the Americans are doing in the ruins of Falluja. Nor have the insurgents dropped bombs from planes on Iraqi cities, nor machine gunned streets from helicopters. This is what Cooper supports.

Now, the truth is, if we hadn’t gone via Harry to the Cooper site, Cooper would not be on our mind. If we want Hitchens, we can get him elsewhere – and Cooper’s much weaker beer. We don’t often look at his weblog. But the larger question is, why did the antiwar movement in this country so politically suck? And why did it never revamp into an anti-occupation movement?

Our own feeling is that this has to do with the ties with the old left – the old communist left from the thirties – having long died out. The anti-war movement in the sixties benefited from the tacit knowledge held by veterans of the thirties. But the knowledge they passed along was, unfortunately, mostly passed to a college educated elite whose basic interests are much closer to the basic interests of Bush’s suburban supporters than they are to the working and lower middle class. In LI’s own terminology – we have been working this out – the difference between the Vietnam era and the Bush era is that the momentum of the movement shifted. There is, definitely, a Movement on the right – in fact, there are converging but separate movements, who have targeted the Republican party as their vehicle.

On the left, the movement is in severe crisis. The Democratic Party continually seeks to exert control over any movement, and has successfully inducted into its orbit the leaders of the Vietnam era. Kerry was, in many ways, typical – a mamby pamby liberal, vain, an instinctive comformist, a showboater, a laughable acolyte at the alter of JFK, elevated by way of the usual path – in the Democratic version of the Beatitudes, it is said that the mediocre will inherit the earth – whose role as most electable was a judgment of the Party professionals – Cooper’s kind of people.

The journalistic camp followers of the Cooper type play the role of movement breakers – intellectual scabs. The scab ideology comes out, among them, as “criticism” – they are all honest to god Orwells, speaking truth to power. In reality, they are speaking half truths in order to render powerless. And they do a good job of it, week after week. This interruption in the progressive line in America – a line that goes back to the abolitionists, and through the Wobblies and to early civil rights activists like Du Bois and Ida B. Wells up through the fifties – has impacted the ability to organize the clear discontent with Bush’s domestic and foreign policies. That is all around. When we go and have our little lunch here – lately, we’ve been going to the new, anti-union Whole Foods and getting sushi and a cup of coffee, since it is cheap – we usually sit out in the patio area. This is a store that definitely caters to the well to do, as well as the aspiring post punker. And we always overhear the same things -- complaints about what is happening in this country. If we go to the Tex Mex place up the street, which is a frat and sorority hangout, we still hear things like that. Unfortunately, these complaints are always couched in party terms – which is a measure of the success of the intellectual scabs. The little enders and the big enders, as Swift put it in Gulliver’s Travels, take up all the political space – rendering it conveniently tedious. In an electoral democracy, the status quo must make politics boring. Otherwise, it can be used as a weapon to exploit the exploiters.

a pleasure-self post

“The Hadza of northern Tanzania publicly marked a boy’s first nocturnal emission by decorating him with beads in exactly the same way as they decorated a girl with beads at the time of her first menstruation.” Charles Stewart, Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present.

"The crocodile signifies a pirate, murderer, or a man who is no less wicked. The way in which the crocodile treats the dreamer determines the way in which he will be treated by the person who is represented by the crocodile. The cat signifies an adulterer. For it is a bird-thief. And birds resemble women, as I have already pointed out in the first book." – Artemidorus, Interpretation of Dreams

Whenever LI hears the phrase “mental masturbation” (and for our sins in writing this blog, we hear the phrase quite a bit), we always wonder what the opposite is. What would be full frontal missionary mental fucking, and how would one achieve it with an organ as marooned as is our poor human brain – which, without the pineal eye that Bataille dreamed would burst someday out of the top of the skull, blinking monstrously in whatever shade of darkness its nerve impulses are couched in, is, in actuality, reduced to living in that darkness familiar from infancy that is enlivened only by the flickers of light coming in from the relatively distant eyes.

Since there is an answer to all questions (although not necessarily a right answer), we turned to the experts. Our readers are probably already familiar with the Zurbriggen and Yost study, Power, Desire, and Pleasure in Sexual Fantasies, published in the Journal of Sexual Research last year. Z and Y brought together one hundred plus persons of both sexes, filtered out the bis and the gays, and had these people write down sexual fantasies. Subsequently, they coded the sexual fantasies. Their conclusions are conveniently summed up in the following reader-friendly manner:

“Men's sexual fantasies were more sexually explicit than women's, t(160) = 4.11, p < .001, and women's sexual fantasies were more emotional and romantic than men's, t(160) =-2.69, p =.008. In addition, men's fantasies involved more interactions with multiple partners than did women's, t(160) = 1.97, p = .05. There were also gender differences in fantasized dominance and submission. Men's fantasies included more portrayals of the self as dominant and in power than did women's, t(160) = 2.45, p = .02. Women's fantasies did not include significantly more portrayals of submission than did men's, t(160) = -1.62, p = .11. However, in a repeated measures ANOVA, the interaction between gender and type of power fantasy (dominance vs. submissive) was reliable: F(1,160) = 7.75, p = .006.

Although men were equally likely to fantasize about dominance and submission, women were more likely to fantasize about submission. Other interesting gender differences involved sexual desire and sexual pleasure. Men's fantasies mentioned a partner's sexual desire more frequently than did women's fantasies, t(160) = 3.09, p = .002. Although men's fantasies were equally likely to include desire-self and desire-other, paired t(84) = -.58, p = .57, women's fantasies were marginally more likely to include desire-self than desireother, paired t(76) = 1.69, p =. 10. Men also described their partners as experiencing sexual pleasure more frequently than did women, t(160) = 3.24, p = .001.

Although men's fantasies were marginally more likely to include sexual pleasure-other than sexual pleasure-self, t(84) = -1.74, p = .09, women's fantasies were significantly more likely to include sexual pleasure-self than sexual pleasure-other, paired t(76) = 2.04, p = .04. In a repeated measures ANOVA, this interaction between gender and sexual pleasure (self vs. other) was reliable, F(1,160) = 7.14, p = .008”

To which one wants to say, Zut alors. But bien sur, this is the way of a man with a woman and a woman and a woman, at least when I shut my how do you say, peepers?

But to tell you the truth, LI felt old and ghost ridden reading Z and Y’s paper. Call us a throwback to that old reprobate, D.H. Lawrence, but we feel something is wrong with handing sex over to multiple digits, pinching and prodding it for gender singularities. So we turned, for a more narrative view, to Charles Stewart’s paper, published by the Royal Anthropological Institute a few years ago, Erotic Dreams and Nightmares from Antiquity to the Present. Stewart combines approaches from Freud and Foucault – still not Lawrence’s cup of tea, but much closer to LI’s way of thinking. Although our pleasure-other quotient might well be –1.74, we feel a little more akin to the Umeda, among whom “a hunter intentionally [sleeps] on a net-bag scented with magic pighunting perfume (oktesap) in hopes of receiving the erotic dream that presaged a successful hunting expedition. Such erotic dreams held out the promise of real sexual consummation, which often followed after a kill was made.”

Our own experiments with pighunting perfume are for another time. Stewart’s point is that erotic dreams can act as portents – and indeed, isn’t desire a portent laden structure among the best of us? With Foucault, Stewart sees sexuality in the modern epoch as a matter of subjectivication – that is, it is taken as the truth about the subject. In a society as dedicated to sensation as ours is – where we are supposed to judge the merit of, say, Darwin’s theory of evolution on the sensations it evokes of like or dislike among Gallop’s focus groups – sex, being an ultimate of sensation, is going to be a criterion for authenticity.

But of course, there is always killing. This is where the erotic dream and the nightmare intersect. Stewart’s notion is that a change in the hermeneutic value of erotic dreams was wrought by Early Christian culture. For “Artemidorus, the dream of sex with one’s mother, for example, was not problematic, but rather a good dream for politicians. This was because the mother represented one’s native country, and to make love is to govern the obedient and willing body of one’s partner. The dreamer would thus control the affairs of the city (Artemidorus, Interpretation of dreams, 1.79). Hippias, a Greek traitor serving as the Persians’ guide in the landing at Marathon, dreamt of sleeping with his mother and interpreted this to mean that he would return to Athens and recover power (Herodotus, History, 6.107).” However, there was no room in the Christian culture for portents deriving from sleeping with your mother.

Although… surely there are spicy enough stories in Genesis to toss up the problematic, here. Not that the Greeks didn’t put the stamp of their own ethical ideas on sexual dreams. “Some ancient doctors understood ‘gonorrhoea’ to be an involuntary emission of semen, and their term for this ailment, meaning literally ‘the flow of seed’, remains with us to this day. Nocturnal emissions were considered a variant of gonorrhoea, and in his survey of acute and chronic diseases CaeliusAurelianus contrasted the two. Gonorrhoea could occur any time, without imagery, while nocturnal emissions occurred only during sleep and as a consequence of imagining sexual intercourse through ‘unreal images’ (inanibus visis concubitum fingat) (On chronic diseases, 5.71.82). Unlike gonorrhoea, nocturnal emissions did not necessarily constitute an illness. They simply resulted from desire, which could arise either through regular sexual practice or throughprolonged continence.”

Well, enough – we have a few other things to say about Stewart’s article, but we will reserve our shots until another time.

GET OUT NOW

From Today’s Washington Post:

“Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five were wounded.

In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.

Every member of the squad -- one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment -- had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon -- which Hurley commands -- had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.”

From yesterday’s New York Times:

“Mr. Rumsfeld is banking on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan remaining stable enough for him to focus his attention elsewhere. Frequent video-teleconferences with senior commanders in Iraq during the peak of combat operations have dwindled to a few phone calls a week.”

I hope the Great Man calls them up sometime next week (or maybe the week after) and says how super appreciative he is of all the scorched flesh. My goodness. 60 percent casualties. But let’s concentrate on all the Good Things that are happening in Iraq, shall we?

Inspissated cockledoodledoo

LI used to ‘do’ Christopher Hitchens more. After a while, though, it got boring. The man’s defense of the indefensible, his substitution of belligerence for logic, his wavering between complete lies and half truths, became a circus sideshow that indicted those who hooted at it as much as those who cheered it – after all, why were us squawkers still watching? My friend, T., kept pointing this out forcefully. After all, why waste one’s time on Hitchen’s inspissated cockledoodledoo when there were more pressing matters to worry about? Existence itself, my next meal, sex and the lack of it around these parts, etc., etc.

But the sideshow still runs, and is still, occasionally, funny in that “watching-Friday-the-thirteenth” way – watching, that is, the killer resurrect in the midst of ever more bogus S/FX. So we read, with vast amusement, the copping of old Cold War themes in his essay on Abu Ghraib (and how the horrible left is using it as a propaganda tool against the good old Americans) in Slate. We particularly liked this one:

“Abu Ghraib was by no means celebrated as an ancestral civic and cultural center before the year 2004. To the Iraqis, it was a name to be mentioned in whispers, if at all, as "the house of the end." It was a Dachau. Numberless people were consigned there and were never heard of again. Its execution shed worked overtime, as did its torturers, and we are still trying to discover how many Iraqis and Kurds died in its precincts. At one point, when it suffered even more than usual from chronic overcrowding, Saddam and his sons decided to execute a proportion of the inmates at random, just to cull the population. The warders then fanned out at night to visit the families of the prisoners, asking how much it would be worth to keep their son or brother or father off the list. The hands of prisoners were cut off, and the proceedings recorded on video for the delight of others. I myself became certain that Saddam had reached his fin de régime, or his Ceauşescu moment, when he celebrated his 100-percent win in the "referendum" of 2003 by releasing all the nonpolitical prisoners (the rapists and thieves and murderers who were his natural constituency) from Abu Ghraib. This sudden flood of ex-cons was a large factor in the horrific looting and mayhem that accompanied the fall of Baghdad.”

Remember how the Russians used to ‘whisper’ about the Lubyanka? Of course, oppressed people were always whispering to reporters back in the day. That the whispers of the Iraqis wouldn’t, really, be understood by Hitchens, who doesn’t speak Arabic, doesn’t matter. Apparently his translators mimicked the whipering. And the hands being cut off – not like today’s prisons in Iraq. Sure, in Samarra, where the Iraqis are whispering again, to a real reporter, Peter Maass, there might be a little electric prodding to the genitals. There might be the tying to the ceiling – the famous airplane – pulling the arms out of the socket. But of course, it is only used on the ‘sudden flood of ex-cons” – Saddam Hussein’s natural constituency. Funny how debasing the enemy into the purely criminal is part of the organization of torture in Iraq. It is also funny that nowhere in Hitchens essay is there any mention of the, uh, heart attacks suffered by various prisoners of the Americans. Maybe the whispering about that was just too low for him to hear.

Anyway, now we get to the new, improved prison complex – prisons as humane as the ones we have in Ameriiiicaaa:

“Efforts were being made to repaint and disinfect the joint, and many of the new inmates were being held in encampments in the yard while this was being done, but I distinctly remember thinking that there was really no salvaging such a place and that it should either be torn down and ploughed over or turned into a museum.

“Instead, it became an improvised center for anyone caught in the dragnet of the "insurgency" and was filled up with suspects as well as armed supporters of Baathism and Bin Ladenism. There's no need to restate what everyone now knows about what happened as a consequence. But I am not an apologist if I point out that there are no more hangings, random or systematic. The outrages committed by Pvt. England and her delightful boyfriend were first uncovered by their superiors.”

Wow. Their superiors uncovered this, eh? Makes one wonder what Stalin would have found out if he’d just ordered a thorough investigation of what the police were up to. The father of all the Russias might have found, to his disgust, that those labor camps weren’t really rehabilitating his dear children. And the Pentagon bigwigs might have found out that instead of the ice cream and veggies that they had strictly ordered the guards to give the low-lives, the guards were, on their own, staging these orgies. One is just pleased as punch that the superiors uncovered the lot of em. As for the hangings – that is certainly right, and progress we should all be proud of. The body in the bag that Grainer was famously making the thumbs up sign over was beaten to death. Or died of a heart attack -- Ba'athist scum are notoriously prone to heart attacks.

Quite wonderful, actually, how civilization marches on.

Hitchens, who has taken to thinking that his father’s position in the Navy makes him an expert on the army, must be pleased that there are no more messy hangings going on, since it is so against the regulations. He might, however, want to watch some of that American funded Iraqi tv. The popular show in which terrorists confess – and sometimes, after confession, their bodies are found by roadsides. The lot of them were Saddam’s natural constituency, and we don’t want to waste a lot of sob sister sympathy on these impediments to democracy as the Hitchenses see it in the Middle East.

ps: ps – We at LI often feel bad about the number of people coming to this site looking for “sex” “girles” “breasts” and the like. We’ve offered pretty slim pickings. But today we can recommend a link to those surfers: take a look at the hot analingus action over at the NYT, when not one but two reporters stick their tongues and noses as far up the rectum of our Secretary of War as is permitted by the Supreme Court. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker’s article begins in the time honored fashion of the breathless Teen Mag piece about some Britney-ette:

"Ask Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to define his legacy, and he cuts the question short: "Don't. Hold off on it. There will be plenty of time."

Notice how that intimation of intimacy, that dropped “you” in the “ask…” functions. On the one hand, you, too, lucky citizen, could have the earthshaking opportunity to interview the great man! Oh, doesn’t it do something to you that makes you run to the bathroom to change your shorts! But on the other hand – sucker, you don’t have a chance in hell getting within touching distance of Donnie. That’s reserved for NYT reporters, who are specialists in the tongue massage.

Not that they aren’t critical. Why, they went out and found a congressman who put it that some criticize Rumsfeld for not kowtowing in Congress!

As for clichés, we got your clichés right here. For instance, Paul Wolfowitz is a “lightning rod” of controversy. Interesting choice of words, given that this week, the price of going into Iraq has risen to 300 billion dollars, just a tad more than the 10 billion Wolfie projected two years ago. I guess lightning rod means, in Timespeak, dysfunctional liar. But given the adorable Rumsfeld bottom to which our reporters are attached, I suppose these are minor things.

One boner deflator warning, however: the article is about how Rummy is going to finish out his term. Meaning, for those of you outside the NYT orgy – those fans, those “you”’s outside the magic circle – another, what, two thousand, three thousand soldiers dying, adorably, for Rumsfeld’s crackpot ideas. Isn’t that sweet! As for the colored others, well, let’s not even count them.

Another triumph for the free press everywhere!