Best Use of Money--A Distressing Liberal

I'm pleased with the Buffett/Gates story. (Andrew Carnegie, whose Gospel of Wealth was mentioned in some stories, was raised a Presbyterian.) I was distressed though to read the following comment from History Net news:

"My only problem with the countering illness angle [i.e., Gates foundation focus on malaria, TB, etc.] is that it seems reactionary and addressing the problem on the periphery instead of at the core...when we address the issues that create the conditions that allow these illnesses to run rampant (denial of rights, ignoring the rule of law and international legal authority, illegal wars, insistence on sovereignty, etc), then we will be practicing adaptive management and proactive advocacy and will be able to make more of a difference."

Sounds to me like his brain's been in academia too long.

Quiz--Which Story Belongs to Which Paper?

Quiz:
One of these stories is on today's NYTimes front page; the other on the Washington Times front page. Which is which?

"Amid Iraqi Chaos, Schools Fill After Long Decline

Enrollment in Iraqi schools has risen every year since the U.S. invasion, reversing more than a decade of declines."

Iraq's best, brightest flee from violence

"Rasha Tamimi sits comfortably in the luxurious lobby of the Millennium Hotel in Sharjah, part of a line of skyscrapers that stretches the length of the United Arab Emirates -- a world away from the bloodshed of her old Iraqi neighborhood."

Answer: First
Second

Media Must Help the GWOT

Power Line is, as usual, absolutely right with respect to the latest Times article on the Bush administration tracking money transfers: "It is unfortunately past time for the Bush administration to enforce the laws of the United States against the New York Times. The Times and its likeminded media colleagues will undoubtedly continue to undermine and betray the national security of the United States until they are taught that they are subject to the same laws that govern the conduct of ordinary citizens, or until an enraged citizenry decides, like Bill Keller, to take the law into its own hands and express its disagreement some other way."

Unfortunately they don't go far enough. After all, by definition "terrorism" is a war on public opinion. That means the media are the front line troops in this war. If they would simply stop giving any publicity to terrorist successes they would undermine the whole basis of terrorist tactics. If no one knows of kidnapings, murders, IED's, suicide bombers, they can't be terrorized by them. By the same token, if the media publicized our successes, it would terrorize the terrorists. For example, everyday troops come home from Iraq alive and well. Why shouldn't the lead on the evening news and the top news spot in the papers be a report of this good news.

To clinch my argument, I only observe that Saddam Hussein never allowed the media to report any bad news--just remember his Information Minister in Baghdad. We should do the same.

Fighting the Last War

Haven't read the new Ron Suskind book but the reviews stimulate me to a defense of the Bush administration. First, we should remember that our leaders, of any party, are just poor sods heir to all human ills. They learn from experience, meaning they fight the last war. This seems to be what they did in Iraq.

Remember the first Bush administration was severely embarassed by its failure to anticipate Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Later, they discovered they didn't have a good picture of his WMD programs. And this was after 10 years worth of Republican leadership of the CIA.

So what happens when they come back into power. After 8 years of Democratic leadership of the CIA they can't trust it, even if they were inclined to. This explains Cheney's close scrutiny of CIA product, and the establishment of alternative channels for intelligence in DOD. It also explains why he worried about not knowing, and decided that even a low likelihood of danger (1 percent) justified action.

Then the Bushies fought a dandy little war in Afghanistan, which went much better than I expected and enabled them to laugh at the doubters who had started to emerge over the first 2-3 weeks of combat. (I started writing this yesterday, then saw this report this morning, which supports my argument.) Consequently they were over-confident in taking on Saddam. What Cheney and his team can justly be criticized for is not applying their logic across the board. Yes, the CIA and intelligence establishment couldn't be trusted to give a fully accurate assessment of the WMD danger. And one can argue for acting now to avert possible future danger (that's the form of the liberal position on global warming, after all). But similar logic would say that the intelligence establishment doesn't understand the dangers of a postwar Iraq, so the cautious position is not to break the pottery in the first place.

Overconfidence is a disadvantage in war, finds study

From the New Scientist - Overconfidence is a disadvantage in war, finds study:

"A further analysis showed that people with higher self-rankings ended up worse off at the end of the game. “Those who expected to do best tended to do worst,” the researchers say. “This suggests that positive illusions were not only misguided but actually may have been detrimental to performance in this scenario.”

Men tended to be more overconfident than women. But the study found nothing to back up the popular idea that high testosterone causes confidence and aggression. Saliva tests showed that, within each gender group, testosterone level did not correlate with how participants expected to perform in the game."

Getting Close to Home--Personal Info Compromised

Thanks to George Buddy, who perhaps has even more eclectic interests than I do, for alerting me to this release from USDA on the possible compromise of personal data at USDA.

Release No. 0214.06: "The personal identity information potentially accessed includes individual's names, social security numbers, and photos. Worksite information that is readily available to the public is also contained within the database. Approximately 26,000 current and former Washington, D.C. area USDA employees and contractors are potentially affected."

I've the feeling of being a target for a knive thrower--the compromise of data at VA seems to have missed me (only veterans in the 70's and later--I got out in the 60's). And the word "former" employees could include me, but I've been gone long enough to hope I've been missed again.

Of course this feeling doesn't make sense--my SSN and other personal data are floating around in many places these days so having data on a hard disk somewheres shouldn't add to my worries. The consensus seems to be that a robber getting laptops is likely after the hardware, and not the data. (But in the case of USDA, USDA computers were hacked, which is likely to indicate a taste for mischief, but possibly data.)

Maybe I'll revive my idea of doing away permanently with Social Security numbers. Or maybe not.

Rational Behavior and Tony Snow

I posted the other day citing Tony Snow as a case in which rational people didn't behave rationally in signing up for a 401K. I got an email (accidentally deleted) suggesting a wider context to his behavior, which is fair. I should have, I guess, admitted that I myself failed to sign up for the government equivalent of a 401K when it was first made available in the mid-80's. Took me about 4 years to do so.

All of which reminds me of a paper on "paternalistic libertarianism" by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, the idea being that society can structure choices in a paternalistic way. For example, in my case if the government had setup the TSP (Thrift Savings Plan = 401K) with all old civil service employees contributing 5 percent of salary as the default position, but with the option to opt out, I would have benefited.

Which leads me to something I saw this morning (via Marginal Revolution) in a discussion of the minimum wage (very against raising it) here, summarizing research in New Jersey that seemed to show that raising the wage might not cause loss of jobs: "“Turnover costs, imperfect information, search frictions, commuting costs, and inertia generate short-run, and possibly long-run, monopsony power for individual firms.” This is not exactly a simple condition, likely to apply uniformly across a huge, diverse country. " To me, "inertia" applies across all human beings I've met. Maybe someone like Bill Gates is relentlessly rational in allocating his time and efforts, but the rest of the species seems to have a little of the couch potato in them, at least metaphorically.

Bottom line--I don't think humans are all that rational, certainly not in maximizing short-term returns. (How much of a pay cut did Tony Snow take to serve his country and a President he admires?)

Typefaces in Baghdad

For some reason, perhaps because they published the image of it, the Post didn't put up a URL to a fascinating story--a memo from the embassy in Baghdad recording the problems and concerns faced by Iraqi employees. (The most disturbing bit--most don't even tell their families who they work for.) You can see the image here--washingtonpost.com: Outlook Image.

As a sidenote, I found it interesting that the memo is not in a proportional spaced typeface, like Times Roman. Despite the fact that a proportional spaced font is easier to read and comprehend, and thousands are available for any PC, for some reason the State Department sticks to the past. (It may be because something like Courier used to scan better than more modern typefaces and that was the way they got typed material into a database before they got halfway modern. Or it may just be inertia.)

Silly Little Errors--NYTimes

Sometimes writers make silly little errors, just because they aren't thinking. Paul Greenbury in today's NYTimes Magazine on the rise of fish farming--Green to the Gills:

"As anyone who has flown over the monocultured American heartland will attest, we have carried out a policy of biological purification with the organisms we eat — an elimination of the random in favor of the predictable. The vast majority of the world's land area has been repurposed to cultivate the several dozen creatures we like."

But the CIA World Factbook says that 13.31 percent of the world's land acrea is arable, with another 4.71 percent devoted to permanent crops. Even in the U.S., the percentage is 18.01.

What he presumably was trying to say is all the arable land is devoted to support of creatures we like, but that's sort of redundant.

Criticism of US Policy on Torture

I found this editorial from the Jewish Week a bit surprising:

"With its extraordinary and tragic experience as a target of terrorism, the Jewish state nonetheless adheres to legal rulings barring torture and the inhumane treatment of terror suspects.

The same cannot be said for the United States, which seeks to spread democracy and its core values around the world and yet refuses to rule out torture in the treatment of foreign detainees."