When Did Immigration Turn Bad?

Opponents of immigration reform seem to take the position that immigration is bad. That raises the question, when did it go bad? Was it 1970? Or 1912? Or 1848? Or 1630? Or maybe 11,000BC?

OrinKerr.com and Class Discrimination

Orin Kerr has set up shop separately from Volokh Conspiracy and posts here

"It’s always hard to second-guess a state sentencing decision based only on press reports. You don’t know the details of the sentencing scheme, or the details of the factual findings. But I wonder what sentence this defendant would have received if she had been an African-American male who had dropped out of high school?

UPDATE: Brooks Holland weighs in with a very helpful comment here."

The comments suggest that the defendant (a college grad white millionaire's daughter) profited from having a good lawyer and access to therapeutic programs but not from a racial bias in the system.

A thought on blogs and Orin's move: Bloggers want an audience. One way to get one is as a cooperative enterprise. But there's always the free rider problem--some in the cooperative are going to be more productive and more attractive than others, so there's often an incentive for people to split off and go on their own. Eugene Volokh has seen that happen with Tyler Cowan and now Orin (others I think, but I don't remember their names).

"Low-Skilled/Unskilled Immigrants"

The debate over immigration is heating up. People, mostly on the restrictive side, often refer to "low-skilled or unskilled immigrants". We need to be careful of context--there's two societies involved: the U.S. and the country of origin; so comparisons and social ladders in one society don't match up with those in another.

My impression is that the vast majority of immigrants of working age have to come up with a fair amount of money in their native country in order to get into the U.S. Indeed, illegal immigrants probably have to pay more than legal immigrants. (A "coyote" on the Mexican border costs more than an airline ticket from whereever.) That assumed fact leads me to believe that the future immigrants, while in their country of origin, had skills. They weren't the "lowest of the low" there. They may be doing jobs "Americans won't do" here, but that reflects the differences in the two societies and is not a basis for looking down on them. [ed.--do I heard a comment that of course we don't look down on people? Remember the Bible's beam and mote in the eye.]

Why the Estate Tax Helps Our Competitiveness

Mr. Mallaby in today's Post didn't intend to endorse the estate tax in his column lauding American superiority over Europe in productivity, but I think he did in this excerpt:

Why U.S. Business Is Winning:

"The next explanation for American superiority is a healthy indifference to first sons. Bloom and Van Reenen report that the practice of handing a family firm down from father to oldest son is five times more common in France and Britain than in the United States. Not surprisingly, this anti-meritocratic practice does not always produce good managers. So even though the best European companies are managed roughly as well as the best American ones, there's a fat tail of second-rate firms in Europe that's absent in the United States."

As for the overall column, I'd apply a large grain of salt. Over the last 55 years I remember the many enthusiasms the chattering class had for the superiority of this system or that. As far as I can tell no one system maintained an edge for the whole time. That suggests to me that the factors that seem to make for greater productivity ebb and flow. It's like saying the CAA is better than the Big East in basketball based on this year's NCAA tournament.

Those Ivied Walls Are Falling Down; Meritocracy and Institutional Imperatives

An interesting op-ed in today's Times: To All the Girls I've Rejected,
by Jennifer Delahunty Britz, director of admissions at Kenyon College:

"The elephant that looms large in the middle of the room is the importance of gender balance. Should it trump the qualifications of talented young female applicants? At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a 'tipping point,' where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you'll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.

Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive."

Link this to the thesis of The Chosen, by Jerome Karabel, a good book, recently published, which reviews the history of admission policy at Harvard, Yale and Princeton from 1920 to now. He traces the different criteria for admission used and not used: academic promise, SAT scores, personality, extra curricular, legacy (descendant of alumni), athletic ability, race, religion, geographic diversity, international diversity, etc. Sometimes "diversity" was used to keep Jews out, sometimes to get African-Americans in; "legacy" has always been important because it ties directly to alumni support (giving).

Karabel barely touches on the new controversy--whether affirmative action should apply to males over females. Twill be interesting--will Bill Buckley be happy if Yale is 80 percent female? Will the stalwart proponents of merit-based admissions change their positions when the issue is not black versus white but male versus female?

FEMA and Multiple Layers of Contractors

The Washington Post had an article, Multiple Layers Of Contractors Drive Up Cost of Katrina Cleanup on the 19th:

"Four large companies won Army Corps contracts to cover damaged roofs with blue plastic tarp, under a program known as 'Operation Blue Roof.' The rate paid to the prime contractors ranged from $1.50 to $1.75 per square foot of tarp installed, documents show.

The prime contractors' rate is nearly as much as local roofers charge to install a roof of asphalt shingles, according to two roofing executives who requested anonymity because they feared losing their contracts. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the contractor heap, four to five rungs lower, some crews are being paid less than 10 cents per square foot, the officials said."

A bunch of bloggers were attracted to comment on this obvious example of governmental inefficiency. I want to be contrarian.

First, government bureaucracy in the U.S is weak. In a typical bureaucracy (think Catholic Church, Army, GM, Starbucks) you have a pyramidal organization--the "operators" at the local level (churches, platoons, dealerships/factories, coffee shops), then a management hierarchy, often geographically organized. This is the way you combine local knowledge and ability to act with centralized management. FEMA and other governmental organizations don't have this complete hierarchy. What tends to happen is FEMA, or Department of Education, or whatever provides the centralized management, but the lower layers are State and local governments or nonexistent.

In the specific case described by the Post, there was no expertise on temporary covering of roofs (though it doesn't seem to require much expertise). So FEMA, through the layers of contractors as is right and proper in a nation so firmly convinced of the merits of private enterprise, created a temporary bureaucracy with the ability to cover roofs. Contrast this approach to disaster to that of USDA. USDA has a network of county offices throughout the country. When a disaster occurs or Congress authorizes a new disaster relief program for farmers, this existing bureaucracy springs into action and delivers the checks.

The USDA model works much more efficiently than the FEMA model but it also works much more often. It's like the old Maytag repairman ads--do you want to pay FEMA to have people sit around and do nothing for years? Or can you find enough other duties for a permanent FEMA bureaucracy to do (as USDA offices have ongoing farm programs to justify their existence)?

BCC Follies--How Not To Manage

John Tierney in today's Times (subscription required) has a column discussing the buck-passing that preceded the Iraq invasion. Summary: no planning because no one saw it as his responsibility.

The blame is that of Bush/Cheney/Card--the managers in charge. One thing any bureaucrat learns when you're dealing with an effort that spans multiple units is that your major effort must be to ensure that things don't fall through the gaps. You can trust people (almost all the time) to try to do their jobs. What you can't trust people to do is to define the boundaries of their jobs.

Astro-physicists talk of "black matter"--stuff they can't see or sense but which must exist because of the way the visible universe behaves. Similarly, there's dark matter in the social universe, a dark matter called fear of failure. An easy way to fail is to try something new, something chaotic, something undefined. So let people define their jobs and they'll define away any responsibility for things they don't know or they haven't done (successfully) before. Conversely, they'll devote their effort to the things they've done before, what they've trained to do.

So managers, like BCC, must constantly ask questions to see that their bureaucrats cover the gaps between units, use imagination to think ahead and around. Alternatively they may follow the FDR precedent--assign multiple bureaucracies to overlapping tasks, resulting in conflicts that must be resolved in the White House. But one way or the other Bush did it wrong.

When an Op-Ed Makes No Sense--Harvard for Free

Yesterday the LATimes published an oped, How Harvard could share the wealth,
proposing that Harvard use the income from its endowment to make itself free to all students. (The figures seem to work.) The writer's key point was the contrast between Harvard's wealth and the $41K it charges for tuition, suggesting that it needed to be accessible to the poor. But then the writer says:

"Two years ago, Summers took action to make Harvard more accessible. He declared that parents of undergraduates with family incomes less than $40,000 a year would no longer have to pay anything for their children's Harvard education. The expected payment from families with incomes under $60,000 would be cut greatly as well.

Summers said his initiative sent 'a powerful message that Harvard is open to talented students from all economic backgrounds.' The university reported that the enrollment of students in those income brackets rose 18%. But the 18% growth, when you do the math, means only an additional 45 students.

Harvard's message needs to be more powerful — at least as powerful as one ought to expect from an elite, 370-year-old, $26-billion institution. Dropping tuition, room and board charges for all students would be a gesture worthy of the institution."

So the bottom line is that Harvard is already free to students from families under $40K. So what's the effect of the writer's proposal? To make Harvard free for rich kids!!

Not something I want to support.

Family Ties

An interesting article in today's NYTimes on John Githongo, Kenyan whistleblower. What I found particularly fascinating were the allusions to the role that family and tribal ties played in corruption in Kenya.

On the one hand there's a pattern here, strong family ties tend to hold back "progress". Those who try to get ahead are obligated to take care of families. This is true in the Caribbean (see a book called "Crab Antics" (?to be checked), with Hispanic immigrants in the US, and apparently with Africans.

In the US corruption has often linked to family ties. Think of the Bolgers in Boston (although that's not corruption, but the relationship between the killer and his university president brother evokes the Godfather I.

My impression is that the pattern of family ties leading to corruption has not been true for WASP Americans. We're the greedy SOB's who're in it for ourselves, to hell with the rest of the world. Maybe that's why WASP's dominated the class system for so long

Benefits of Cruise Control

One of my beliefs is that Hegel was right, that thesis and antisynthesis is the way of the world, that physics is right--the equal and opposite reaction law, whichever one it is. Freedom often requires a countervailing force. Hence, my paean to cruise control, a feature on my new car with which I was previously unfamiliar. In taking a long drive yesterday, I found one of its benefits was to keep me to the speed limit (or a tad above) in situations where I'd usually find myself doing well above the limit. For example, on route 15 below Harrisburg the speed limit goes from 65 to 55 to 50 and I'd always have problems keeping my speed down in the 55/50 zones. After all, it was divided highway, the traffic was a bit heavier and access was less limited, but I tended to keep up with the locals. But with cruise control, I could make a decision and cut my feet and my irrational side out of the loop. Without cruise control, freedom was too much for me.

Implanted Patient-Data Chips--Ugh Factor and Who Benefits

The Post today has this article--Use of Implanted Patient-Data Chips Stirs Debate on Medicine vs. Privacy:

"The two D.C. residents are among just a handful of Americans who have had the tiny electronic VeriChip inserted since the government approved it two years ago. But the chip is being aggressively marketed by its manufacturer, which is targeting Washington to be the first metropolitan area with multiple hospitals equipped to read the device, a persuasive factor for Fischer and Hickey.

There's an "ugh" ("ick"??) factor to such chips. But there's also an overly easy knee-jerk reaction:

"...the concept alarms privacy advocates. They worry the devices could make it easier for unauthorized snoops to invade medical records. They also fear that the technology marks a dangerous step toward an Orwellian future in which people will be monitored using the chips or will be required to have them inserted for surveillance."

The question that needs to be asked is "why?", what is the motive, the potential gain for someone to snoop? People don't do things for no reason, so how would they gain from snooping into a 77-year old's medical history? I'm sure I'm not being imaginative enough, but as of now I don't see a big potential threat.

Why DC Cabbies Don't Come from Latin America

John Kelly had a column in the Post about the origins of DC cabdrivers. (Not sure the link to the list will work.) Here's an excerpt. Driving Around the World in D.C.: "Topping the list is Ethiopia. Of the 4,990 drivers that the commission has information on, 1,383 were born in that East African country. Next up was the United States, with 1,047."

What's notable, given that Latinos dominate in our immigrant population, is the absence of countries below the border. Why is that, I wonder?

Kelly's column suggests one answer is education/language. My impression is that most Hispanics who emigrate are lower middle class (they've got enough money to pay the coyotes but not much more). They might be uncomfortable navigating the bureaucratic ropes needed to learn to drive and get a cabbie's license, and dealing with customers. At least one driver he rode with had a college degree and suggested it was a good stopgap job.

Another answer might be the first-mover phenomena: an initial pioneer comes to the U.S. and finds a job, he tells his relatives and neighbors back home and they follow. That's one reason for Irish cops in NYC, Koreans in groceries and dry cleaning, and Patels in motel ownership.

Immigration and Crime

Tyler Cowan at Volokh.com links to an op-ed in the Times on the relationship of immigration and the crime rate. The professor says that studies show that immigrants have a lower crime rate than natives, more generally that Hispanics do better on socio-economic indicators than would be expected at the gross level. (i.e., many immigrants are young males living apart from women, the group we'd expect to have the highest crime rate.)

As I said in comments there, I think the professor oversells his thesis, but it is a reminder not to generalize. It would also be interesting to look at the cultural patterns related to years of residence of family (i.e., obesity, cancer rates, etc. etc.)

Framing the Issue--Ports Versus 3 Percent of Terminals

The administration lost its battle when the issue was framed as "UAE taking over 6 US Ports" instead of "Control of 3 Percent of Terminals Transferred". From today's Post: Dubai Firm to Sell U.S. Port Operations:

"DP World acquired management control of 24 of 829 container terminals at the ports of Baltimore, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Miami and New Orleans. Terminal operators are primarily responsible for transferring containers from ships to railroad cars and trucks, administration officials have noted, while port security is the responsibility of the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection."

ex-Mayor Barry, Playing Again

The Post reports Marion Barry Sentenced to Three Years Probation:

As a bureaucrat, and therefore partial to the IRS, I find this depressing.

"Assistant U.S. Attorney James W. Cooper, the lead prosecutor in the case, said Barry violated the spirit, if not the letter, of his plea agreement by dragging his feet to file necessary paperwork.

Barry did not file his tax returns until the day before the original sentencing date, and then waited a month, until yesterday, to have his accountant contact the Internal Revenue Service to initiate negotiations about a payment plan."

Twill be interesting to follow when and if he pays any of his back taxes.

Michael Collins, Revolutionary as Bureaucrat

Found this New Republic review of the new biography of Michael Collins, an IRA leader after WWI, interesting because of the use of "bureaucrat" throughout. (Free registration required.)

Who was the real Michael Collins?:

"Irish nationalism had always had a surplus of dreamers, poets, visionaries, rhetoricians, and idealists. What it lacked was bureaucrats. Collins became the indispensable man of the Irish revolution because he knew how to run things.

The guerrilla chief who demanded that his subordinates supply reports 'done in tabular form and furnished in duplicate' was simply a grown-up version of the boy in the Post Office Savings Bank, where hundreds of thousands of transactions had to be recorded accurately every day and clerical errors were not tolerated. The earnest, punctual Collins who earned a reputation as 'the speediest young clerk in the Savings Bank' was, in embryo, the leader whose favorite terms of castigation were 'lazy,' 'inefficient,' and 'unbusinesslike.' Obscured by the legend of the trickster-terrorist is the real Collins story: the literal treason of the clerk. "

Crap and Discrimination--A Moral

There's an interesting piece at Slate.com: The Crappiest Invention of All Time - Why the auto-flushing toilet must die. By Nick Schulz:

He includes this bit:

"Hands-free toilets and faucets are certainly smarter now than when they first came on the market. Pete DeMarco [an engineer and expert] told me that when automatic fixtures first got popular in the early 1990s, they had difficulty detecting dark colors, which tended to absorb the laser light instead of reflecting it back to the sensor. DeMarco remembers washing his hands in O'Hare Airport next to an African-American gentleman. DeMarco's faucet worked; the black man's didn't. The black guy then went to DeMarco's faucet, which he had just seen working seconds before; it didn't work. This time DeMarco spoke up, telling him to turn his hands palm side up. The faucet worked."

While Schulz tosses this off as human interest, it might really represent how some "discrimination" works. I suggest what happened is that the engineers who initially designed the faucet tested it out rather thoroughly. They probably used themselves as guinea pigs. And the faucet worked, so it was put on the market. But guess what, it just so happens that none of the engineers were dark skinned. Result: something that would appear to many like discrimination. And in a way it is. No one intended the result, but it was the by-product of the fact that blacks haven't been well represented in engineering. I'd suggest this sort of interrelationship is quite common, if you look hard.

Splitters and Lumpers/Bugs and Terrorists

The release of the names of the prisoners at Guantanamo (see Monday's papers and today's NYTimes editorial: They Came for the Chicken Farmer reminds us of the dangers of lumping--when DOD said the prisoners were "terrorists", we (i.e., any reasonable person) are led to visualize a bearded violent man (somewhat as the pirate Blackbeard was pictured in my youth). When you know the names and backgrounds you see a much more disparate group than you visualized, differences that inevitably increase the odds that mistakes were made in their capture and retention.

On the other hand the New York Review of Books has an article by Tim Flannery, reviewing 3 books on nature, including David Attenborough's latest venture on insects. He found spiders of the same species seeming to display personality differences, leading Flannery to this statement:
"The fact that invertebrates have characters seemingly similar in their fundamentals to those possessed by ourselves is a theme to which Attenborough returns repeatedly, and as he does so the gulf between the least and greatest of living things diminishes."

So it goes, the back and forth between lumping and splitting, on which see wikipedia.

Limits on Bureaucratic Rules--Basketball and Immigrants

Two articles over the weekend showed the limits on bureaucratic rules--they aren't self-enforcing:

• Basketball players need to receive valid high school diplomas and college educations? No. Players at major college programs attend paper high schools and have problems reading at the fourth grade level says this Washington Post article: A Player Rises Through the Cracks.
• You can't get a job unless you're in the country legally? Of course not. Employers don't try to enforce the rules, even when you give them access to a database to check says this NY Times article: The Search for Illegal Immigrants Stops at the Workplace.

The common thread is collusion--the wink, wink between college coaches and aspiring players (and their mentors, pushers, etc.) or between employers and employees. The bureaucracy that is supposed to police the rules (NCAA and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement respectively) are far away. There's little incentive for anyone to report violations. Even the media gains--they get the opportunity to win journalism prizes by doing the occasional piece on the issue.

(A nod to Professor Robin Williams, who long ago pointed out this sort of process at work in his American sociology class.)

Signs and Signifiers--Restroom Signs

Eszter Hargittai has an interesting discussion of signs on restroom doors at Crooked Timber � � Dress optional,
which leads to interesting commentary. I'm vaguely aware of post-modernism (don't understand it but I've heard of it) and a couple of the comments veer into that, or parodies of that, I can't tell which. Anyhow it's a fun Saturday morning read.

Bush and Competent Executives

The new videotape of President Bush meeting by teleconference with emergency officials before Katrina struck has drawn lots of comment.

Eugene Robinson at the Post: This Is 'Fully Prepared'?:

"At least now I know why the White House is so obsessively secretive about its decision-making process. The leaked videotapes and transcripts of pre-Katrina briefings that were obtained this week by the Associated Press leave in tatters the defining myth of the Bush administration -- an undeserved aura of cool, unflinching competence and steely resolve. Instead, the tapes show bureaucratic inertia and a president for whom delegation seems to mean detachment."

John Dickerson at Slate:

"It's [the video] a blow to a key Bush myth. The Bush management philosophy relies on him as an interrogator. He delegates, but that's OK because he knows how to question those he empowers to make sure they're focused. Question-asking is also a central public tool in the "trust me" presidency. We aren't supposed to worry that the NSA wiretapping program goes too far because the president has asked all the questions. When the president was wrong about the level of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the strength of the insurgency, it wasn't because he didn't ask enough questions, we have been told, it was because he was given the wrong answers."

But maybe Steven Pearlstein inadvertently had the best take in his discussion of the Rudman report: Fannie Mae Report Is Long, but It's Not the Whole Story:

"As I was reading through that and other chapters of the Rudman report, I had a nagging feeling that I had read the story before. And then I realized where: in a management book about blowups of other once-successful corporations, written by Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business.

Finkelstein's insight is that big corporate mistakes aren't caused by stupidity, or venality, or by an unexpected bit of bad luck. Nor are they the result of flawed strategy or inability to execute, although those may sometimes appear to be the cause.

Rather, Finkelstein says, the most spectacular corporate failures occur in companies that are so blinded by their own competence and past success that they instinctively tune out legitimate outside criticism. Inside, a positive can-do culture tends to snuff out criticism, dissent or negative feedback. Executives at these companies tend to be obsessed with the company's image, underestimate major obstacles, assume they have all the answers and stubbornly rely on what worked for them before. [emphasis added]

The reasons behind most corporate collapses, according to Finkelstein, entail the deep-seated psychological need people have at all levels of a company to belong and get along, to rationalize what has already been done or decided, and to put off loss or failure."

You don't need to ask questions if you assume your team has all the answers.

My New Car

I discussed buying a new car here but didn't say what I got. It was a Toyota Corolla. (Bought a VW Beetle in 1966, and Corollas in 78, 91, and 2006.) Each time I've bought I'm struck by the improvement in the cars. Cars don't improve on the same time scale as PC's, but they do improve. Of course, not everything is an improvement, just like with PC's and software. The manual is bigger for my new car and I feel more need to study it. There are "features" that I doubt I'll use (like the I-pod connection socket), which is certainly true of software.

I recommend Henry Petroski's books--he teaches engineering history at Duke, writes on the history of technology, like pencils, paper clips, bridges, and a very nice memoir on growing up as a paper boy on Long Island. One of his themes is the need for tradeoffs, which I do see in the new car. For example, the back seats now have the head/neck rests, a safety measure. However they reduce the visibility for someone who learned to drive by craning his neck instead of checking the nonexistent right side mirrors. Another of his themes is that we learn from failure, which I firmly believe.

Some Days I Feel Like Preaching

There's several Presbyterian ministers in my ancestry, which may explain why today I had a moralistic reaction to the conjunction of these two items in the NY Times:

[With regard to the US/India deal on nuclear power] Dissenting on Atomic Deal

"The Defense Department issued an unusually explicit statement hailing the deal for opening a path for more American-Indian military cooperation.

'Where only a few years ago, no one would have talked about the prospects for a major U.S.-India defense deal, today the prospects are promising, whether in the realm of combat aircraft, helicopters, maritime patrol aircraft or naval vessels,' the Defense Department statement said."

Report Warns Malnutrition Begins in Cradle

"Some of the facts about malnutrition, familiar to experts but not widely understood, seem counterintuitive. For example, rates of malnutrition in South Asia, including India, Bangladesh and Nepal, are nearly double those in sub-Saharan Africa, which is much poorer.

India's programs to feed children in school have multiplied in recent years, but its nutrition program for preschool children mainly assists those between the ages of 3 to 6 — too late to prevent the stunting and damage to intellect that occur by age 2, bank nutritionists and other experts say.

A spokesman for the Indian Embassy in Washington said yesterday that he had not yet read the report and could not comment on it.

The problem of malnutrition in India, known for its well-educated, high-tech workers, is striking. Almost half the children are stunted by malnutrition, but the problem is not limited to the poor. A quarter of the children under age 5 in the richest fifth of the population are also underweight and nearly two-thirds are anemic, the report says."

So we'll sell arms to India to offset the arms we sell to Pakistan to get their aid against Al Qaeda while half their children are malnurished? [From the article, the malnutrition isn't from lack of food, it's from lack of knowledge.]

Modernity Means Loss of Privacy?

I often read pieces which seem to imply there's a tradeoff between modern life/globalization/the new and privacy. That we lose privacy whenever we use credit cards, surf the Internet, talk on cell phones, use Onstar-type navigation systems, and so forth. There might be a little truth to this--certainly lots of data on us is recorded on various hard drives. But there's a big difference between having data stored away and being observed by living people. (Grow up in the country and you'd know what I mean.) An example was buried in a recent NYTimes article on those Indians who are returning to India to enjoy and exploit the new opportunities there.

A Reversal of the Tide in India:

"The cultural impact on their nation is visible and visceral. The New Delhi suburb of Noida boasts a collection of luxury homes known as an 'NRI Colony.' Meanwhile, returning stay-at-home spouses confess they miss the freedom and distance of America, far from the prying eyes of in-laws and nosy neighbors."

The writer observes someone who in the U.S. enjoyed driving herself now has a chauffeur to drive her. Nations with a servant class have a whole etiquette governing how they should act and be treated. If I can trust British movies and tv shows it boils down to the idea that servants are invisible--see Gosford Park.

Buying a Car, Now and Then

Bought a new car yesterday (the reason I didn't post Monday or Tuesday). It's the first one since October, 1990. As I waited for the paperwork yesterday I thought about the differences. (My memory of 1990 may not be totally reliable.)

• Dealership--it changed ownership and is in a new building. It now claims to be the biggest Toyota dealer in a wide area.
  
• In 1990 the showroom had 3-4 cars on display, yesterday none. Does that mean the sales experience is less about flash and glitter?
• In 1990 the showroom had 4-5 white salesmen standing around, yesterday maybe 10 salespersons, mostly male, mostly, maybe even entirely minority, sitting at desks in the "showroom". (At the other dealership I went to in my shopping, the two salesmen (used and new cars) were both minority.) The minorities represented all the continents, except Antarctica. Management may not have been as integrated as the sales/finance staff. I wonder whether such sales jobs aren't particularly attractive to people who are aggressive, work long hours, have people skills. As such, they may be one of the ways for the upwardly mobile to bypass the need for credentials (i.e., college degrees).
  
• In 1990 my purchase started by walking in the door, in 2006 it started with an Internet search and query.
  
• In 1990, my salesman stumbled in using the computer terminal, yesterday every salesperson had a PC and seemed reasonably proficient (though I did see one guy about 50 typing with 2 fingers).
• In 1990 I consulted Consumer Reports and still felt at a loss. In 2006 a salesperson printed out data from Edmunds to compare the Honda and Toyota I was considering. He was open about the change in the power balance between salesman and buyer because buyers have access to lots more information now.
• In 2006 there was more paperwork, including more concern for identification and consumer rights and information.
  

Of course, the biggest difference was in the car I was buying.

If a Tree Falls and There's No One But a Microphone?

The NY Times had an article on data mining Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data which includes this quote:

"But by fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance, high-tech data mining raises privacy concerns that are only beginning to be debated widely. That is because to find illicit activities it is necessary to turn loose software sentinels to examine all digital behavior whether it is innocent or not.

'The theory is that the automated tool that is conducting the search is not violating the law,' said Mark D. Rasch, the former head of computer-crime investigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company. But 'anytime a tool or a human is looking at the content of your communication, it invades your privacy.'"

If a tool is doing the looking, is that the same as a having a microphone in the famous forest where the tree falls? I disagree. It's when a human eyeball sees the content or a human ear hears it that there may be an invasion of my privacy.

Mr. Broder's Column, Revisited

Having done my mea culpa, let me take another crack at the plans of Secretary Leavitt for four "breakthrough projects" in health care and the column written by David Broder here.

1. Either Leavitt or Broder gets the genesis of the projects wrong--they aren't HHS initiatives; they're done under direction from President Bush with HHS as the "managing partner" with OMB's Tim Young as "portfolio manager".
   
2. The column reveals what may be a problem--according to Broder: "worthy as these big projects may be, it is clearly the New Orleans challenge that stirs Leavitt's juices." Why is this a problem? Leavitt may be doing NIH (not National Institutes of Health but "not invented here"). The four projects evolved over years and HHS got the job of managing them back when Tommy Thompson was the Secretary. (See the April 2004 Executive Order.) Assuming that Leavitt has the healthy ego of most successful politicians, Satan will tempt him with the idea that he will do more for the world by his work in the Big Easy, rather than supervising the four project effort. If Bush is a lame duck, so is Leavitt, so he may be tempted to push hard to get the Big Easy project done. Pushing hard is incompatible with maintaining good relations with DOD and VA. It's also likely to take people and money away from the four projects.
3. Another problem may be Broder's. In the piece he says Leavitt is "modest," "creative," "attacking the problem," "experienced", and interested in "empowering" people. Quite the description of the modern Presidential candidate.
   
4. It certainly made a better story for both Leavitt and Broder to slight the involvement of White House, DOD, VA, state and local government, and private "stakeholders" in the four project effort. I'm sure as good bureaucrats the members of the various workgroups will soldier on regardless of how much credit they get in the Post. But an effort as complex as this has low odds of success in any case and doesn't need any more straws added to its back.
   

Why I Got It Wrong

My post on Mr. Broder's column was wrong, at least in part. Why did I screw it up?

1. Impatience. As I grow older I seem to be more slapdash, meaning I focus on some things and miss others. I read the piece as Secretary Leavitt pushing his four "breakthrough projects" and missed the segue into the fact that he's more interested in treating New Orleans as a clean slate to redo healthcare.
2. Laziness. In my defense I flagged the fact I hadn't done research, but that's hardly valid in the days of Google. Just a minute of drilling down the http://www.egov.gov site brought up lots of background on Leavitt's four initiatives. The effort began in Clinton's time, includes an executive order from Bush, and this American Health Information Community (the Community) Workgroups Web site.
3. Misplaced self righteousness. Because I knew so well the problems and processes of trying to redo areas of USDA, I thought the same was true of Secretary Leavitt's effort. I jumped to conclusions--taking a couple bits of information from Broder's column and fitting them into an overall structure derived from past experience. I didn't allow for change and difference.
   

These faults are characteristic, both of me and often I think of others on the Internet.

Invading Privacy II

The Post reprinted this article from the Chicago Tribune | They've got game--and hijab " discussing Muslim girls playing basketball in the Chicago area.

"Duaa Hamoud holds a basketball to her hip. She is standing in a long blue gown in a gym at Bridgeview's Universal School. Her head is covered in a white scarf pulled tightly around her neck. Not a wisp of hair is showing.

Around her, other high school girls dressed in similar flowing robes shoot a few casual baskets while they wait for practice to begin. There are no men in the gym--no male coaches, no boys from school, no dads or brothers in the bleachers.

So when the coach arrives and the real training starts, they can peel off their Islamic dress, exposing their sweat pants and short-sleeved T-shirts underneath."

What interested me was the accompanying picture, taken by a woman, which showed some of the girls on the court, most of whom were in the robes, but one of whom was in sweat pants and shirt. It's not clear whether that was a mistake, whether the particular girl was less particular about the rules, or what. Anyhow it raises the subject of Islamic privacy and the rules of the various bodies within Islam as to what is appropriate dress in which contexts. I take it as saying that Islam wants its adherents to control their privacy, to be able to say how much of their body/face is revealed to which others. This seems to me to be an attractive metaphor for overall issues of data privacy. We as citizens want the ability to control how much data is visible to different groups.

David Broder and Why Government Doesn't Work (Revised)

David Broder's column today in the Post illustrates why government has problems working effectively. Mr. Broder writes in praise of an initiative by HHS secretary Leavitt to set up four sets of standards.

"One would standardize systems for registering patients and listing their prescriptions and other basic medical data so they would not have to be entered on separate clipboards with each visit. A second would set standards for equipment allowing remote monitoring of chronic illnesses, such as the blood sugar tests required by diabetes patients.

A third would focus on systems for exchanging medical test results from office to office. And the fourth is a 'biosurveillance system,' designed to alert public health officials to any change in the pattern of reported illnesses that could be an early warning of a pandemic.

Once the standards are set, he said, they will be applied in the purchase of systems by Medicare, Medicaid and the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, creating a market that the private sector is likely to follow."

All of this seems praiseworthy; certainly it did to Mr. Broder. So why do I take a contrarian position? It's not simply my advancing years, although to be truthful my problems are specifically with the first and third and are not based on any particular research.

[Updated--what follows is in error and will be revised. Meanwhile ignore it.]

My reservations are founded on the idea that HHS doesn't have this authority or a government wide mandate. If Bush or Andrew Card had given Leavitt this charge, we no doubt would have heard of it. My bet is that Leavitt is mostly unaware of the e-government initiatives,
specifically the Federal Enterprise Architecture. Leavitt is a policy man. He has seen a need and is moving to act. He's told his policy people to do this and they've saluted and said yessir. But the FEA is a technocrat's dream, which (odds are) Leavitt has never heard of. As the policy people work with the technocrats, they'll bump into these requirements, which will slow progress to a snail's crawl. This division between policy and technology is wide and deep and is always a major impediment to progress. Both Clinton (Gore's "Reinventing Government") and Bush come into office talking big about rationalizing government. But it doesn't happen. (It didn't happen when LBJ tried to apply McNamara PPB system, when Carter tried to apply zero-based budgeting, etc. etc.)

Even if Leavitt is effective enough within HHS to get this done, it's unlikely to work with DOD and VA. They have their own systems (VA at least is getting good press on the effectiveness of its system) into which their people have invested years of work. They will pick holes in HHS's proposals. Result: controversy, conflict and delay.

WSJ.com - How the Amish Drive Down Medical Costs

I don't normally go near the Wall Street Journal, but they do have some free articles and here is an excerpt from one--dealing with how the Anabaptists (Amish, Mennonites) deal with modern medicine.
How the Amish Drive Down Medical Costs:

"Heart of Lancaster is a small hospital, and its case load is fairly conventional. But the Anabaptists weren't looking for anything exotic. They wanted discounts on services such as orthopedic surgery, biopsies and childbirth. The hospital agreed to discounts of up to 40% off its top rates, resulting in prices that would still be slightly higher than Medicare reimbursements, the level most hospitals consider a minimum. Not satisfied, the Anabaptists pushed the executives to go lower. But the hospital said if it dropped prices to levels below Medicare reimbursements, it could be charged for fraud for charging Medicare patients more."

The Amish, and the other Anabaptists, fascinate me. They form a test case for many theories. Are they really American? How should one deal with other cultures (like those who discourage higher education)? etc. etc. In this connection, I strongly recommend the book "The Riddle of Amish Culture"by Donald Kraybill.

"Portgate" and Hutchison Whampoa

There's a fuss about the possibility of a company based in Dubai buying the company that runs a number of major U.S. ports. Critics on both sides of the aisle are yelling about the threat to security. It all reminds me of the 1990's controversy over Hutchison Whampoa and its taking over operation of the Panama Canal. In sum, an opportunity for some demagogery without substance.

Bigshottery, or You The Man

Christopher Lee has a good piece, albeit a bit lacking in cynicism, on backgrounders in the Post: Remember, You Didn't Hear This From Me . . .:

"Agencies cite any number of reasons for keeping names out of the press: allowing lower-level officials to be quoted might steal the spotlight from the Cabinet secretary or other high-ranking official; the briefers are policy wonks who are uncomfortable talking to reporters; the agency is involved in an issue, but in a supporting role; the officials are there to provide context or technical explanations as a courtesy, not to be the face of an agency."

My dyspeptic take: What much of this boils down to is that agency heads are ignorant bigshots. They don't know enough to be talking in detail to reporters and they want all the glory they can get. (It's a truism that the first thing any Beltway type does when picking up a book is to look in the index to find his or her name.) "Heads" want to be the "face" of the agency, not the brains, to be "the man".

But putting on my pseudo-economist glasses: any backgrounder involves a quid pro quo. The reporter likes it because they don't display their ignorance, as they might have to do in an open press conference. The official likes it because their hard-earned knowledge, won by years of toil in the trenches, can at least be flaunted. The agency head will tolerate the backgrounders as long as they don't take away any glory or raise questions about the head. There's also a question of balance--if there are more reporters with more time/space to fill with stories than there are agency heads with knowledge to impart, the reporter goes down the food chain.

Not Surprising, Republican Judges See White Collar Crime as Less Serious

The Post reports on a study of how judges from different parties analyze crimes and sentence criminals here-- NOTED WITH INTEREST:

"Federal judges appointed by Republicans give tougher sentences on street crime, whereas Democratic appointees take a stricter view of white-collar offenses."

The summary could be reversed, as I did in the title. It's the usual problem with many two-sided issues: do you say boys are doing worse in school or girls are doing better in school? It's a reminder of the importance of context and framing.

FEMA and DHS

George Buddy asked about FEMA's proper role, specifically its relation to DHS. I think a part of the problems we saw with Katrina were caused by the DHS reorganization. There's no doubt that reporting lines got confused--Brown felt loyalty to the people who bumped him up from FEMA deputy director to DHS undersecretary, not to Chertoff who arrived later. When Brown had a hot potato, he turned to his friends, not to his new boss. Chertoff, who was relying on Brown to alert him to problems, had his focus elsewhere. Just as we didn't realize before 9/11 that bin Laden could mount an attack much deadlier than any previous one, he (and we) didn't realize that Mother Nature could also mount an attack more devastating than prior hurricanes.

It also seems clear that the Bush administration after Sept. 11 said that the "war" on terrorism was more important than disaster preparations. Congress agreed and pushed the DHS reorg. There was a smokescreen of rhetoric whereby the policymakers tried to convince themselves that DHS would be a more efficient use of resources. There's some logic to this--the response to a natural disaster and an attack will often be similar and the coordination with state and local first responders must use the same infrastructure. But the reality, as any experienced bureaucrat knew, was that creating DHS would cause us to be less prepared over the next few years, both for disaster and terror, than the alternative. The truth is any reorganization uses so much bureaucratic energy that the sum is significantly less than the whole for several years. So we won't know for another 10 or 20 years whether there's a net improvement or not.

Suppose Mr. Negroponte came to the President and said: "Sir, our enemy has dispatched a team that has the capability of killing a thousand people and destroying 50 billion dollars worth of property. Current intelligence shows that the team is likely headed for New Orleans and has a 50 percent chance of carrying out their mission." What would Bush do? He certainly wouldn't do what he did the end of August. (Or maybe I should say--he would do something, not nothing.)

The First Amendment Doesn't Apply Everywhere

This was an amazing story in this morning's Post--read the whole thing.

Policing Porn Is Not Part of Job Description:

"Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words 'Homeland Security.' "

...[further on] The sexual harassment policy forbids the "display of offensive or obscene printed or visual material." But in a library, which is both a public arena and a county workplace, the U.S. Constitution trumps Montgomery's rules.

I was struck by the implication in the last sentence that the Constitution doesn't always and everywhere trump Montgomery County's rules. But I guess it's true--any employer can impose some restrictions not applicable in a public area.

[The men were employees of the Montgomery county Homeland Security Department trying to enforce a ban on accessing porn through government owned equipment.]

Participation in Organizations--Hirschman

I've previously blogged on Albert Hirschman's "Exit, Voice, and Loyalty : Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States". I just got through commenting on Caleb McDaniel's blog
using Hirschman's schema in connection with the abolitionists.

There's another aspect, particularly with voluntary organizations, like alumni associations/college trustee elections and homeowner's associations: how many people have to participate to make the election/vote binding on the whole? I just got a package from the Reston Association (the closest thing Reston has to a government) changing the quorum requirement to 30 percent. My cluster association has been unable to get 10 percent participation in the annual meeting. I think Dartmouth is trying to reduce its quorum percentage. Hirschman would interpret all of these as saying "voice" is silent because the members are satisfied.

The Boomers Want Immortality

At least, that's how this web site strikes me, although one could say the same thing of this blog.
FAQ - MemoryWiki:

"Think of the Future

Your experiences are the stuff of history, literally. You may think 'Who would be interested in my experiences of this or that? Lots of people were there, and everyone knows about what happened.' Well, that's true, for now. But all the people, like you, who are alive today and who bore witness to the significant events of our age, will pass on. Our collective memory -- yours, mine, all of ours -- will go into the great beyond with us, vanishing forever. Over the coming decade, century, and millenium, your experiences will slowly dissappear. The past, they say, is a foreign country -- distant, strange, often unknowable. Unless you have a map. Your memoirs, recorded and shared at MemoryWiki, are that map for future generations. Go ahead. Tell the future how it was to be alive now. Your children, childrens' children and all who follow will want to know. You've got a story. Make it history."

Ah, the Romance of the Past is Fading

From a comment to a Joel Achenbach posts--Achenblog: Daily Humor and Observations from Joel Achenbach: "The biggest cross-generational shock when my son became a Boy Scout was the ubiquity of propane camp stoves. It seems so few places allow open fires for cooking, that it has become a necessity."

I remember from childhood the romantic pictures of people around campfires, faces highlighted with the light from the fire. Not that I ever experienced that, although we did cook marshmallows once on sticks over a small fire in the yard. And it was standard practice to burn our paper trash (we lived in the country).

What's the romance in a propane stove?

The Collapsing Bubble

There seems to be agreement that the real estate bubble is collapsing. Here's an interesting site:
How Much Real Estate Can a Salary Buy? - New York Times

Factoids--in the DC area the percentage of income went from 17 to 24 from the late 90's to now. In upstate New York cities the percentage is still around 10 percent.

Tip of Hat to Rep. Tom Davis

I do my best not to compliment Republicans, but Rep. Davis (who once was my representative, before some redistricting) has done a good job as chair of the House Government Reform Committee, particularly in its report on Katrina. The Dems boycotted, saying it would be a partisan whitewash and the White House wasn't particularly cooperative, but the report has gotten respect in the mainstream media. It's perhaps noteworthy that the NYTimes didn't mention Davis' name in its discussion of the report. If I were a Rep, I'd cite it as bias. As a Dem, I'd say it's proof that Davis didn't grandstand.

Handling Future Katrinas--Ideas

As a bureaucrat and experienced Monday morning quarterback, I've some ideas on how FEMA/DHS should handle future disasters. First, I'd acquire ID packages--consisting of a digital camera and laptop with software to work with RFID ID bracelets. Each operative in the field would, as soon as possible (ideally when they first rescue people, etc.) snap digital pictures of the person, provide them with a RFID ID bracelet, and record a conversation with them (hopefully giving name, address, and similar info). The software would associate the ID bracelet to the picture and to the location, such data to be uploaded to a central database when wireless data communications are available.

[updated--published too fast] The recorded conversations could be transcribed into a database that could be matched against public information.

The bottomline is that as the bureaucracy kicks into gear with the provision of emergency help: grants, loans, shelter, whatever, the processing center can read the ID bracelet and match the person to the data in the database. This has many benefits:

1. Finding lost children and reuniting families--because everyone is in the database with some sort of identification (even if only 1-year infant found near X), people could be speedily reunited. That would save much effort and more emotional strain.
2. Avoiding fraud--while there could still be fraud it would remove the biggest causes of abuse in Katrina.
3. Providing information--you'd have a much faster flow of more accurate information as to the extent of the disaster and its impact. That means much better management of relief efforts.

Given the spread of digital equipment, the biggest problem is probably getting people together to agree on the standards for the bracelets, the picture, the recorded conversation, and the database.

1. 
   

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight?

Sorry, I couldn't resist the Cheney story [the title is a reference to an old Jimmy Breslin book]. For a more sober reaction, read the Stephen Hunter take in the Post.

Thoughts on Corn, and Farming

USDA's Economic Research Service does a lot of good publications. From the summary for one--

Characteristics and Production Costs of U.S. Corn Farms, 2001: "Corn production costs per bushel vary considerably among U.S. producers, depending on yields, farm location, tillage practices, irrigation, previous field usage, enterprise size, and weather. In 2001, the operating and ownership costs per bushel for corn ranged from an average of $1.08 for the 25 percent of U.S. producers with the lowest costs to an average of $2.98 for the 25 percent with the highest costs. Heartland corn producers had the lowest costs per bushel on average. Corn producers with small corn enterprises had the highest costs per bushel due to their lower-than-average corn yields. Operators of part-time and low-sales corn farms had higher production costs per bushel than operators of farms with higher sales. In 2001, 59 percent of corn producers earned a positive net return per bushel after covering their operating and ownership costs from the market value of corn. "

My thoughts--note the range of costs. While GM's costs are higher than Toyota's or Hyundai's, there's not nearly the range. The big range means that lots of discussion of agricultural programs is misleading, if not unfounded. There's apt to be a big disconnect between the pictures in our head and the reality.

If the cash price for corn is in the area of $2, how can anyone stay in business if it costs them $3? Obviously government programs help, but since the benefits tend to correlate to bushels produced, and the smaller producers are the high cost ones, that's not the entire answer. Another part of the answer is the older farmers, who have no mortgage, have low out-of-pocket ownership costs for land. That makes a big, big difference. To economist, someone with a million dollars worth of land (which is a smallish field crop farmer these days) needs to account for the cost of that land capital. But to a farmer, cash flow is critical. The fact he could sell out and get $40,000 a year by investing the proceeds is irrelevant.

The Limits of Libertarianism

I don't know for sure, but I'd consider Ben Stein to be a libertarian type conservative, believing in the virtues of free markets and less government. But current events strain his convictions, as witness yesterday's column in the Times:New Front: Protecting America's Investors.
He writes on executive compensation in Delphi and United Airlines, cites his father-in-law's war medals, then segues to this--

"But my favorite communication, the one that made me stay up nights, was from a United States Army sergeant who has done two combat tours in Iraq and two more in Afghanistan, and is now home in Georgia training others to serve in those wars. I have been pals with this man for a couple of years now, and we talk on the phone. He has been following my articles online, and he simply asked, 'Was this what I was fighting for in Iraq?'

The question haunts me, not only because of UAL and Delphi, but also because there is something deeply broken about the corporate system in America. Long ago, my pop was pals with Harlow H. Curtice, the president of General Motors in its glory days in the 1950's. Mr. Curtice presided over a spectacularly powerful and profitable G.M.

For that, in his peak year as I recall from my youth, he was paid about $400,000 plus a special superbonus of $400,000, which made him one of the highest-paid executives in America. At that time, a line worker with overtime might have made $10,000 a year. In those days, that differential was considered very large — very roughly 40 times the assembly line worker's pay, without bonus; very roughly 80 times with bonus. A differential of more like 10 to 20 times was more the norm.

Now C.E.O.'s routinely take home hundreds of times what the average worker is paid, whether or not the company is doing well. The graph for the pay of C.E.O.'s is a vertical line in the last five years. The graph for workers' pay is a flat line — in every sense.

Now, my fellow free-market fans may well say: 'Hey, stop your whining. This is the free market at work.' Only it isn't the free market at work. It's a kleptocracy at work. (I am indebted to another of my correspondents for the word.) What's happening here is that the governance system for many — by no means all — corporations has simply stopped working."

He concludes with a message from another soldier, making the same point, that the America of Kenny Boy and Tyco isn't an America she feels comfortable fighting for.

If All Else Fails, Read the Manual

I should know better. I sent off a message to Blogger complaining, actually two messages, about missing posts. Then I read their help messages, tried Internet Explorer (instead of Firefox), found that the website worked fine in IE, went to Firefox and cleared the cache per Blogger's instructions and it works fine in Firefox.

Self, read the damn manual.

Immigrants Get Houses

The Post has an interesting article on how recent Hispanic immigrants are buying houses in
American Dreams, Realized:

"The Teoses and many other immigrants see their homes as the physical manifestation of the hope that they carried with them upon arrival in the United States. Home equity accounts for two-thirds of the average net worth of Hispanic households, studies show. According to 2000 Cenus data, 41.2 percent of Latin American immigrants own homes and other real estate, up from 38 percent in 1997.

In the Washington area, Latin immigrants have become active real estate investors with rental properties and well-thought-out strategies, said Jose Luis Semidey, president of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals in Northern Virginia and of the Vienna real estate firm ERA Semidey & Associates. Last year, Semidey's company sold 900 homes; 90 percent of his clients were Latino.

'Our community has been changing, but people have not been realizing that. We are very entrepreneurial, with a lot of expendable income,' Semidey said. 'We are here. We are here to stay. We want to progress and to be successful.'"

The theme seems to be people taking advantage of opportunities. My impression is that homeowning is also furthered because families, relatives, and friends share houses, thus combining incomes and because immigrants can get good deals on home repairs (they know someone who does the work and can and will do a job on the side cheaply).

Revamping Bureaucracies

An earlier post and comments on the Farm Service Agency leads to broader consideration of how you revamp an old bureaucracy.

Via Kevin Drum (Washington Monthly) is a link to a proposed alternative to Rumsfeld's Quadrennial Defense Review. Rummy wants more special forces, but doesn't cut major weapons systems, even though there's no military threat to us in the world.

Meanwhile the State Department is revamping its overseas posts--from today's Post: U.S. to Shift Envoys to China, India: "China and India have emerged as the big winners -- and Russia and Germany as the top losers -- in the first round of a broad restructuring of U.S. diplomatic posts ordered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice."

Oracle is firing 2,000 workers after its takeover of Siebel. (Seems like just yesterday they took over Peoplesoft--what happened to the monopoly concerns?)

The difference is that Oracle's workers have nowhere to go, while the DOD programs (and the FSA offices) are supported by Congress. And of course, there's no Representative from Russia to tell Secretary Rice to what to do. A Senator Helms can play hob with the way an administration wants to run foreign policy, but there's lots more freedom in managing posts in foreign countries.

Searching for the Right Parallels to Cartoons

I posted yesterday agreeing that a parallel to cartoons of Mohammed was the burning of the flag. I post today to disagree with Martin Peretz in The New Republic (registration required).

What the cartoons have revealed: "Muslims are just plain forbidden from depicting the prophet. So, let them not depict him. But Christians and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists are not prohibited, and I assume that the Danish cartoonists were not Muslims but Lutherans (an overwhelming majority of whom assert that they do not believe in God) or from that cool breed of Scandinavian rationalists. Another cartoon shows the prophet greeting some martyrs at the entrance to heaven, and he shouts to them, 'Stop, stop, we have run out of virgins.' When you compare the most offensive of these caricatures to the vile and inciting images of Jews routinely shown on government-owned television all over the Muslim world (forget about the ugly role of caricature in the long history of Christian anti-Semitism) you wonder what all the fuss is about. OK, Bill Clinton doesn't wonder. He's referred to them as 'these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam,' although I myself doubt whether he's ever bothered to look at them. Is he for free expression or for that sloppy multiculturalism that forbids you from raising anyone's hackles? This is the liberal's dilemma. By the way, a European-Arab website--in retaliation, I suppose--has just put out a cartoon showing Anne Frank and Hitler in bed."

I don't agree with his specifics. Offensive cartoons of Jews, whether of Anne Frank or whoever, are parallel to offensive cartoons of Muslims (or Lutherans [by the way, a Lutheran would believe in Christ and God]. Offensive cartoons of U.S. Presidents are parallel to offensive cartoons of Saddam Hussein or the ayatollah. An offensive cartoon of Moses or Abraham or God would parallel one of Mohammed.

I was brought up to be sensitive to others' feelings, but as a liberal I believe in equal opportunity for everyone to offend everyone.

Blogger Problems--Apologies for Duplication

Blogger was having some problems republishing its blogs. That appears to have resulted in two duplicate posts here but I'm not able to delete the duplicates. My apologies.

There also appears to be a problem in counting comments--there's a comment on the FSA post
but the count shows "zero".

Maybe it's time to look at Typepad??