Remora
LAT's Megan K. Stack reports on Arizona killings Sunday. Here's the key graf:

(you will probably have to register at the LA Times -- which is no big deal).

"Eight migrants have been shot dead since March in a desolate patch of rattlesnake holes and scraggly paloverde trees where Interstate 10 rolls west out of Phoenix. Their hands were pulled back and bound with handcuffs, duct tape or the waistband of their own jockey shorts. They were shot at close range, their bodies left to mummify in the sun."

Last week, LI wrote a review, for the Christian Science Monitor, of journalist Charles Bowden's new book about casualties of the surface in the "drug war." We couldn't really say too much about the drug war itself -- because we had too much to say. One can't absolutely overrun a review with one's own ideas. You have to operate homeopathetically...

No such restraints bind me on this site. So let's get into it.

The migrants in Phoenix, the murder rate in Tucson, the border patrols and the shadow patrol of vigilantes -- these are the stray glass bits in the kaleidoscope. You can see an image, and then it is gone. You can see a system, you can see the breakdown of a system, and then it is gone, and it is time to go to work, bury the dead, or track down their names.

But the system is insane. The bodies in Phoenix are connected, by myriad threads, to the bodies in Medillin. Here's the NYT on the latest 'crackdown' in one of Medillin's poor quarters:

"...Colombia's new law-and-order president, �lvaro Uribe, has embarked on a pacification of Comuna 13 that officials say could become a model for other big cities hard hit by a 38-year-old conflict. The operation began on Oct. 16 when 3,000 troops, in what was called the largest urban offensive in Colombia's history, launched an assault that brought Comuna 13 under control in 48 hours.

"Days later, with guerrillas striking back with car bombs here and in Bogot�, the army raided poor neighborhoods in Bogot� and in the nation's third largest city, Cali. Similar raids, searching for guns, explosives and rebels melding into the civilian population, continued here this week with the help of paid informants. The United States-backed army, which is receiving training and intelligence information from American forces, is promising future operations."

The NYT editor tries to fit this into the standard law and order framework, ending the story with the kids playing soccer in the street -- as if they hadn't been doing that during the "bad" period previous to the military incursion. But, like a fly in the soup, or rather like the monster from the Black Lagoon, the system keeps popping up:

"The attack on Comuna 13 has also cast in doubt the state's commitment to fighting paramilitary groups. Most of Medell�n's slums are controlled by the paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, illegal antiguerrilla groups that often work with rogue military commanders."This army operation was not evenhanded," said Nacho Arango of the Popular Institute for Capacitation, a human rights group here. "Everybody says everything is fine. We do not see it that way."

"Indeed, high-ranking paramilitary commanders from two different groups said in interviews that they welcomed the operation. The absence of the rebels could allow the paramilitaries to control drugs, extortion rackets and corrupt politicians in Comuna 13."

What is the idea behind the drug war? Bereft of its ideological disguises, the drug war is an attempt to suppress a market that generates 400 billion dollars world wide. It is an attempt to suppress, theoretically, the whole market -- the producers, middlemen, and consumers.

LI believes that this is an example of New Deal Liberalism gone mad. The premise of liberalism is that the state can successfully regulate the market to achieve a certain set of goals. That is, the inefficiencies that might be associated with regulation are compensated by the greater social good accomplished by the regulation. Although Chicago economists are always bitching about this, there are strong reasons to think that this is, actually, how regulation works -- that is, the compliance of the regulated, while grudging, doesn't require violence on the part of the state because the regulated believe the story of regulation too. Their arguments against this or that regulation aren't that regulation creates inefficiency per se, but that this or that regulation is unfair, or doesn't serve a good purpose. Often there is an indirect reference to the inefficiency argument -- namely, that the costs of regulation are going to be passed along to the customers -- but on the whole, the arguments are couched in terms of liberalism.

That liberalism isn't a matter of the state operating with unilateral coercive power -- contra the Chicago boy toy model of it. A good example of the state using its ultimate power -- that is, to ban a product -- is given in the story of the banning of DDT. The contrast between DDT and cocaine is instructive.

The story of DDT's invention and use is detailed in this fascinating article from Hyle: the journal of the philosophy of chemistry (and have you been keeping up your subscription, camper?) DDT and the Dynamics of Risk Knowledge Production, by Stefan B�schen takes the story from the publicity surrounding DDT during WWII -- when DDT solved a grave military problem in the Pacific and Asian wars by temporarily eliminating the anepheles mosquito, the carrier of malaria -- to its widespread use in agriculture, and the gradual awareness of the risk it posed. That awareness exploded into public view when Rachel Carson (one of LI's heros) published Silent Spring. Rachel Carson is still routinely savaged by right wing publications, for whom she is the devil.

What was wrong? Among the excellencies in Boschen's article is his firm rooting of the problems associated with the bioaccumulation of toxic material in research that paralleled the chemical research of the golden age of medical and agricultural chemicals -- the thirties to the sixties.

"With regard to these insights [into the potential human toxicity of pesticides] the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had to deal with certain regulatory problems, because action was only possible at a moment of proven damage to human well-being (White 1933, p. 623).

The FDA was founded in 1927, when the old Bureau of Chemistry in the USDA was reformed. By this reorganization on the level of Bureaus, the USDA wanted to channel the conflicts of interest between the insecticide industry and farmers lobby on the one hand and the interests of the consumers on the other. The FDA was responsible only for regulations concerning the Pure Food and Drug Act � therefore the spray residue problem was one of the firsts to be solved by the FDA. Paul Dunbar, later vice president of the FDA, wrote: "Soon after it began operations, the Food and Drug Administration became involved in the spray-residue project, an activity which in varying phases claimed major attention throughout the ensuing years. (...) The project was loaded with political dynamite" (Dunbar 1959, p. 128). Therefore, the FDA attracted a lot of public attention in its first years. However, people did not really discuss the spray-residue problem before the beginning of the New Deal.

During this time, the formation of a problem-centered community began. This type of community augmented the �scientific communities� in the context of risk debates by including political and decision-related aspects. Typically, a problem-centered community emerges to analyze the different unexpected side effects arising from the evolution of technology and systems. The debates in these social places are necessary to the development of problem-solving capacities (e.g., to fix thresholds) and are oriented towards certain aims of protection. They are scientific debates that accompany regulation processes. Thus, it is not surprising that the administration frequently instigates important initiatives that are then elaborated in its regulatory units (see B�schen 2000, p. 323). The problem-centered community �Pesticide Regulation� was confronted with a particular conflict of interest between the fruit farmers, their lobby in the Congress, and the USDA on the one hand and the FDA and some physicians on the other. Furthermore, and for the first time in history, there was a great public interest in a scientific and regulatory debate (Jackson 1970, p. 108). Finally, there was a reform of the legislative foundations by the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FDCA) in 1938."

LI loves the Latourian beauty of "problem centered community." It expresses, exactly, the sense making mechanism that actually exists in most regulatory situations. What happened with DDT is that it suffered a drastic public relations change. From a miracle product, it became a killer. Carson documented the probable correlation of DDT use with the disappearance of a variegated bird population. From its deleterious effects on the laying of eggs, it wasn't far to go to its deleterious effects on the human body, especially as it persists with extraordinary stubborness in the human body.

"Under these conditions, the balance between the two discourses was adjusted anew. The ecological effects of DDT were now recognized as a serious problem, and new examples became part of the risk research program. Before the ban of DDT, the discourse on potential damage gained strength. At a summer school at MIT in 1970, scientists stated: "We recommend a drastic reduction in the use of DDT as soon as possible and that subsidies be furnished to developing countries to enable them to afford to use nonpersistent but more expensive pesticides as well as other pest control techniques" (SCEP 1970, p. 25; emphasis in the original). However, the more the discourse became politically influential, the more did it focus on selected research topics, with particular emphasis on cancer. Cancer research was widely compatible with many research strategies, like in molecular biology, and cancer was one of the main issues in the political arena. This reduced the problem field �chronic toxicity� in part to the issue of �cancer by pesticides�. That was also an outcome of the political debate after Silent Spring, because the topic was already dominant in Carson�s book (Marco et al. 1987, p. 195). Now the general public gained a significant impact on the definition of problems regarding environmental or health issues."

B�schen thus foregrounds William Ruckleshaus' decision in 1972 to ban DDT.

Now, the ban itself is interesting. Did the ban lead to huge illegal uses of DDT? Did the U.S. have to create a DDT Enforcement agency to fight DDT cartels world wide? In a word, no. The reason is that the problem centered community was firmly sited in the market. The makers of pesticides were not ultimately threatened by the ban because a., it at first included only the U.S., and more importantly, b., there were substitutes for DDT. DDT is an interesting pesticide because it has a rabid fan club. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, as well as conservative groups like the American Council on Health and Science (an organization that is well quoted in right wing journals -- you can spot the ACHS speaker from the frequency of the phrase 'junk science,' which has achieved mystical authority in these venues)
are apt to write things like: the ban on DDT is equivalent to genocide. Seriously. Here's an excerpt from a Fox News transcript:

DDT Ban Is Genocidal

By Steven Milloloy
Fox News
December 1, 2000 DDT Ban Is Genocidal Friday, December 1, 2000 By Steven Milloy As First-World children eagerly anticipate the holiday season, millions of Third-World children are about to be condemned to certain death from malaria by international environmental elitists. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Greenpeace, Physicians for Social Responsibility and 250 other environmental groups will advocate the insecticide DDT be banned at next week's United Nations Environment Program meeting in Johannesburg. The meeting's aim is a treaty banning or restricting so-called persistent organic chemicals. Malaria control experts oppose a DDT ban, arguing that spraying DDT in houses is inexpensive and highly effective in controlling malaria � especially in sub-Saharan Africa where 1 in 20 children die from malaria. Unfortunately, the eco-elites have out-maneuvered and outgunned public health advocates.

Formally, LI's point is not that DDT should or shouldn't be banned. We should, however, make clear that the bizarre conservative crusade for DDT has a tendency to concentrate around phrases like "malaria control experts." That malaria control experts have found better malaria fighting processes goes unreported (nor the fact that more money is spent researching cures for male pattern baldness than for malaria -- one of the epiphenomena of world wealth inequality). Ann Platt McGinn, in an article in this summer's World Watch, (which can't, alas, be accessed on the Net) presents a reasonable case for banning DDT in most cases, although reserving it as a possible pesticide in emergency situations. The Milloloys of the world have no patience for real science, or they would consider the reasons that DDT was abandoned in the late sixties and early seventies outside of the US as the major pesticide in the struggle against malaria carrying mosquitoes. Here is what McGinn says about the first stages of the Global Malaria Eradication Project:

"The malaria eradication strategy was not to kill every single mosquito, but to suppress their populations and shorten the lifespans of any survivors, so that the parasite would not have time to develop within them. If the mosquitoes could be kept down long enough, the parasites would eventually disappear from the human population. In any particular area, the process was expected to take three years-time enough for all infected people either to recover or die. After that, a resurgence of mosquitoes would be merely an annoyance, rather than a threat. And initially, the strategy seemed to be working. It proved especially effective on islands-relatively small areas insulated from reinfestation. Taiwan, Jamaica, and Sardinia were soon declared malaria-free and have remained so to this day. By 1961, arguably the year at which the program had peak momentum, malaria had been eliminated or dramatically reduced in 37 countries."

So why not, on balance, keep using the DDT? Well, the ban in the US happened in 1973. Between 61 and 73, what happened was that DDT produced resistance in the mosquito:

"With the miseries of malaria in full view, the managers of the eradication campaign didn't worry much about the toxicity of DDT, but they were greatly concerned about another aspect of the pesticide's effects: resistance. Continual exposure to an insecticide tends to "breed" insect populations that are at least partially immune to the poison. Resistance to DDT had been reported as early as 1946. The campaign managers knew that in mosquitoes, regular exposure to DDT tended to produce widespread resistance in four to seven years. Since it took three years to clear malaria from a human population, that didn't leave a lot of leeway for the eradication effort. As it turned out, the logistics simply couldn't be made to work in large, heavily infested areas with high human populations, poor housing and roads, and generally minimal infrastructure. In 1969, the campaign was abandoned. Today, DDT resistance is widespread in Anopheles, as is resistance to many more recent pesticides."

That doesn't mean that DDT is completely worthless. What has prompted the recent spate of headlines about the pesticide is that it is a UN treaty, POP, which schedules a worldwide ban on the substance. As McGinn writes, there are much more successful strategies against malaria:

"And yet Africa is not a lost cause-it's simply that the key to progress does not lie in the general suppression of mosquito populations. Instead of spraying, the most promising African programs rely primarily on "bednets"-mosquito netting that is treated with an insecticide, usually a pyrethroid, and that is suspended over a person's bed. Bednets can't eliminate malaria, but they can "deflect" much of the burden. Because Anopheles species generally feed in the evening and at night, a bednet can radically reduce the number of infective bites a person receives. Such a person would probably still be infected from time to time, but would usually be able to lead a normal life.

In effect, therefore, bednets can substantially reduce the disease. Trials in the use of bednets for children have shown a decline in malaria-induced mortality by 25 to 40 percent. Infection levels and the incidence of severe anemia also declined. In Kenya, a recent study has shown that pregnant women who use bednets tend to give birth to healthier babies. In parts of Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Senegal, bednets are becoming standard household items. In the tiny west African nation of The Gambia, somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the population has bednets."

LI could go on -- we've written about evolutionary medicine before, in the Austin Chronicle. Go to our site on the Auschron in the archives and look up the article, Surreal Science. The point, however, is that POP, unlike the treaties banning narcotics, will do a fair job of eliminating DDT. That is because the market has internal inducements to cooperate. The problem centered community makes sure of that. The makers of DDT, and its users, were not imprisoned, for one thing. That is, the level of regulatory enforcement was elevated above the police. This is crucial -- the police are the regulators of the last resort. They are the most ineffective regulators, for a number of reasons we won't list here.

Second, the makers, dealers and users all had a system of substitutes they could use.
Now, in effect, this is partly true with narcotics. But because the desired physiological effects of these substances are substantially different, the substitutions have never really diverted users. They won't, of course, divert hardcore users at all.

Finally, resistance to the ban was taken seriously. DDTs banning, in other words, achieved critical mass outside the problem centered community. The pro-DDT element in that community was never able to acquire the political power to counter the ban. And that element acceded to that failure -- they had no incentive to start a black market in DDT. While the Steve Milloloys of the world talk of genocide, they don't, of course, mean it -- that is, LI doubts, seriously, that Milloloy is going to finance a covert DDT making factory.

The paradox of the ban on narcotics is that it has created an unregulated market in narcotics. LI thinks this is very interesting, and relevant to the real limits of government power -- which, contrary to libertarian ideology, have no natural scale. That is, small government isn't best -- nor is large government. The scale of governmental power can't be determined beforehand, for simple, devilishly Hayeckian reasons. We will go into that in some future post.

Remora

LI rather trailed off on our post before the last post -- as you might have noticed, LI is an incorrigible meanderer. This is, we suppose, a vice, but surely one of the salient differences between weblogging and real commentary, such as is published in a newspaper, is that the endings aren't so neat. The topics, too, are a bit more variegated. For instance, I imagine the local rag would not publish an op ed piece that begins with a consideration of Bishop Butler's Analogy. Yes, they are warned about such things by the marketing department.

In any case, we were talking about Diane Coyle's exhibition of the deficiencies of common sense and the excellencies of economics -- which exhibition, we claimed, was marred by a severe misconstrual of categories, and a parochial vision of economics. (Coyle's comments, on the Financial Times website, has now been closed off to non-subscribers). Ms. Coyle is a great one for tearing down tariffs and promoting the benefits of free trade. It is, in fact, her grand solution to the chronic problem of poverty. She explains this in an essay in the Guardian, the premise of which is that the anti-globalizers have it all wrong. Protestors should be out there demanding more free trade, liberalization on an international scale, rather than supporting the multitudinous corruptions of protectionism.

"If the moral outrage at the extent of poverty, hunger and disease in the world, and the political momentum for change generated by the campaign movement of recent years, are to achieve anything worthwhile, outrage will need to be informed by evidence on the economic effects of globalization. In many developing countries the best response to the problems that emerge because of globalization is hardly ever a retreat from global integration.

On the contrary, this would often harm growth and make the problems of poverty harder to solve.In our report we address the charges that command widespread support among anti-globalization protestors. A commonly held belief is that globalization has caused extensive poverty. While it is true that 1.3 billion people currently live on less than $1 a day, this number has not changed much since 1950 and has actually fallen sharply as proportion of the world population to 24% from 55%. The recent era of rapid globalization has improved the living standards of many of the poorest, not worsened it."

There are many things to say about the above paragraph. One of them is to ask about the absolute fetishization of the $1 a day standard. This is not a good standard for what the world population could live on. It skews the conversation about poverty and inequality to the cases on the bottom, and their miserable, incremental improvements, rather than to the cases on the top, and their baroque, excessive expropriation of resources.

But leaving that aside, we should note that that all the measures of world poverty are subject, at the moment, to heated debate, which tends to get very technical. The International Monetary Fund hosted a debate on the question of whether world inegality is rising between the left, middle and right which has been posted here. The neutral observer's first reaction to it is that much of the debate degenerates into much mumbo jumbo about methodologies. The right wing is represented by an Indian economist, Surjit Bhalla. Bhalla will surely be touted by rightwingers the way Bjorn Limborg achieved celebrity. Bhalla says, at one point, that the issue of inequality is basically driven by envy. This is the essence of the right wing polemical position. It is rather stupid, since the essence of the right wing polemical position about capitalism is that greed is good. The latter is a position that goes back a long way, in economic literature, to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees -- our individual vices are woven, by the mysterious work of the Invisible Hand, into public goods. Well, envy is as good an individual vice as any. More seriously, Bhalla contends that all around the world -- except for Sub-Saharan Africa -- the figures point to this conclusion:

"Essentially, regarding growth, what we find is that the developing countries grew at about one percentage point lower than the developed countries during 1960 to 1980, and the numbers are 2.1 and 3.3, respectively. But during 1980 to 2000, the developing countries far exceeded the growth rate of the industrialized West and grew at 3.6 percent rather than 2 percent for the West.So first piece of evidence, and these are national accounts data, which is what the World Bank uses, the IMF uses, the countries themselves use, that growth rates of the poor countries far exceeded the growth rates of the West during the so-called globalization period. So that's evidence number one.

"Number two, what happened to inequality? I find that inequality has been on a steady decline�world inequality has been on a steady decline, reversing almost a 200-year trend, peaking in the mid-1970s, and today inequality in the world is at its lowest level for possibly 100 years.What is the counter-evidence to that? There are two or three sets of studies, one which states that basically inequality flattened out during the last 30, 40 years, and another one from the World Bank which states that inequality increased at an absolutely unprecedented pace between 1988 and 1993. I find, as I said, just the opposite. "

Basically, Bhalla is claiming that the golden Keynsian era was a bad time for developing countries, whereas since the mid 70s -- since, that is, the beginning of the conservative rejection of Keynsian liberalism -- developing countries have been catching up. Partly, of course, as you can see from his figures, this stems from the developed countries slowing down -- the 2 percent growth rate for the West is much lower than it was in the 50s.

The transcript of the IMF debate is lively, but often veers off into incomprehensible disagreements about survey results and purchasing power comparisons. LI wants to make a simpler point about what Ms. Coyle has called living standard. I think the living standard, if properly fleshed out, gives us a sense of what is wrong with that version of globalization that emphasizes privitization and tearing down barriers to trade and capital flows.

If you will recall the post before last, we started with a quote from Adam Smith. Smith's idea has been a powerful one in economics. Here it is again:

"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements." This is, by the way, from Smith's A Theory of Moral Sentiments, in Part IV, Of the Effect of Utility upon the Sentiment of Approbation

As Aristotle might put it, there's a sense in which Smith is correct, and there is a sense in which he is incorrect. What Smith meant was that dwelling in a costly pile was merely a highly ornamental way of keeping out of the rain. You can keep out of the rain, as King Lear learned, in a hovel for less cost. Similarly eating peacock's eyes and eating chicken eggs is eating; clothing yourself in silk, or in flannel, is clothing; etc.

However, this absolute way of looking at consumption was suspect even in Smith's day. From, say, the point of view of energy use, the rich consume vastly more than the poor. Smith felt that this was covered by the fact that the consumption of the rich is the employment of the poor -- which still doesn't make his precept true. What made Smith's general point plausible, however, is that, in a relatively technologically primitive society -- and the eighteenth century was still that -- the fine differences between rich and poor are evened out by the gross similarities. The rich in their Georgian mansions were apt to be as bothered by dampness and drafts as the poor in their hovels. They were apt to die of untreatable illnesses, like the poor, with only the advantage that their money hired the best chirugeons and doctors to torture them before that blessed terminal event. The food the nabob ate and the water he drank -- on those rare occasions when gin wasn't available -- was apt to be as contaminated as the beverages and victuals of the poor.

This is no longer the case. Ah, but I am going on and on, here. LI will continue this at some future point.

Dope

Last night, LI's friend S. came to the door with two pumpkins. S., I think, likes the ritual of carving the pumpkin because of it seems so American to her -- and thus, slightly outlandish, the way American names are outlandish -- all those first names that don't mean anything, unlike Turkish names. It is an American habit to assume that our rituals are self-explanatory, whereas in other cultures the rituals are often all about explanation, are occasions in which memory is culturally ritualized. For Americans, a memory that is transmitted by ritual is, by its very nature, inauthentic. We mourn the lack of the individual rememberer -- we want experience to be located, and we think that location is in the individual.

For LI, carving a jack o lantern is the kind of thing associated with childhood's clumsy arts and crafts -- fitting stubby fingers into dull scissors and snipping out circles from orange construction paper (ah, the feel of construction paper! its distinct roughness, its graininess, the crayon box colors it comes in, the way tiny, curved bits of it would escape from the scissors and float down to the linoleum tile floor; the way it would darken around a drop of glue, a dab of paste; the way you sprinkled it with glitter to enliven its stubborn drabness; the way it dominated all other media of art until about the sixth grade! LI, a childless bachelor, alas, wonders if construction paper still exists, somewhere -- if, yesterday, there were third grade classrooms where boys and girls were hunched over their orange and brown and black and red paper, inexpertly scalpeling out the outline of witch's hats and broomsticks and cats and ghosts, some teacher -- there were so many for whom LI's heart, at that age, throbbed, Miss Eberhardt, Miss Smith -- making her way down the aisles, the slight smell of her perfume as she bent over you, commenting on your childish assemblage -- but LI digresses).

So, after fortifying ourselves with margaritas at a Mexican restaurant we returned to my place and fortified our fortifications with vodka, then commenced to serious surgery on the pumpkins with the four knives I was able to round up. LI created one of his wobbly eyed jacks, with a big honker nose, the jumbled mouth, and a few artistic touches -- this year, we tried to inscribe something that looked like a skull and crossbones on a cheek, as though the jack had tatooed himself. S., working on more classic lines (plenty of triangles, well wrought), made a more traditional jack. We named our pumpkins, lit candles and put them inside, and turned out the lights. S. had put on the Moulin Rouge CD, so we toasted our little creations and then sang along to the tango version of Roxanne.
And thus we ushered in another Halloween.

Remora

First, a note. LI begged the Enigmatic Mermaid to post about the Lula election. She did so. In Brazil, we believe, the feuilleton is called the cronica. It is a form known to Americans from the translation of Clarice Lispector's cronicas, of which a review is here. Well, we don't want to flatter the mermaid (well, maybe we do, a little), but while we sometimes find Lispector's cronicas a little, shall we say too caught up in their own sentimental intelligence? a bit too self appreciative? we feel that E.M. would rather buy a used Che Guevara bikini than aphorize hollowly.

Although perhaps we are being unfair to Lispector. Someday we are going to do a post about the influence of Jules Renard's writing, especially the journals, on the cronica/personal essay format.

And now for our feature presentation.

"The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species." -- Adam Smith


LI was agreeably surprised to see the Arts and Letters website back on-line, thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education. We've taken a lot of links from that site.



The one we are taking today is to Diane Coyle's column in the Financial Times, which presents a skewed and problematic defense of economics as a science. LI uses problematic in the sense that someone might say, the verticality of the Tower of Pisa is problematic. Or, the election of President Bush is problematic. There�s a telling strain, in other words, between semantics and reality. Coyle�s defense is flawed both in the main line of its attack and in its examples.

As in, primero: Coyle is defending economics against common sense. This is much like a biologist defending biology against the amorous habits of the toad. Common sense, whether deluded or not, shapes organized social behavior. This is, in fact, the whole import behind the work of Kahneman and Tversky, which we have been discussing lately. The resistance to experimental work in economics is quite hard to root out. It isn�t resistance to economics � it is the data to which economics must attend. This is how Coyle puts the issue:

"The trouble with this chasm between the economist and the ordinary person is that when economics and common sense conflict, common sense is almost always wrong. This signals a profound failure in the typical education. Most people - even, I daresay, some readers of the Financial Times - are economic illiterates. Education authorities would do a great service to future generations if they ditched woolly lessons in citizenship or even worthy ones such as geography in favour of economics."



Now, that first sentence is a disaster from every point of view. What Coyle probably means is that conventional assessments of the economic situation at various points in the business cycle are usually wrong -- or at least that is how LI read it, at first. But of course those assessments drive the expectations that create economic activity. Economists are notoriously bad predictors. The Economist annually summarizes the correctness, or lack of it, of the collective predictions of economists, and what they find, usually, is that those predictions are pretty startlingly off. It is for this reason that economics is not considered a real science by, say, your usual physicist. It has the trappings of a science -- that is, it can produce thoroughly mathematized models -- but it can't seem to produce a good model of the real system that it supposedly studies. It is as if we had a science of water that couldn�t explain ice.



However, LI's first reading of Coyle's paragraph was wrong � it isn�t the economic errors of businessmen to which Coyle is pointing, but to the opponents of free trade between nations. Let�s grant Coyle this much: there are reasons to think that this is the core of economics -- after all, Adam Smith's book was about the wealth of "nations" -- but Coyle's example shows a peculiar blindness to variability of models. It is, in fact, an excellent proof that economics, divorced from common sense, is blind.



"Take one area where common sense and economics often clash: international trade. To the economist, the point of trade is imports. The more of them, the cheaper they are, the better for the nation's welfare. Exports are simply what the country has to do to pay for imports, just as work is what the individual has to do to pay for food and clothes. Thus unilaterally reducing tariffs on imports, even if no other country reciprocates, can be a sensible policy.



To the earthling, though, the point of trade is exports: national strength rather than the welfare of citizens. As Paul Krugman has so often and so eloquently pointed out, most discussions of trade policy even fail to acknowledge that the balance of payments has to balance (so that one country cannot be simultaneously swamped with cheap imports and exporting its jobs to sweatshops abroad)."



Well, yes, reducing tariffs can be a good policy. But Coyle's argument is, I think, fundamentally flawed for a common-sensical reason -- she assumes that the economic constitution of nations is scale invariant. In other words, what works for the United States should, pari passu, work for Argentina. This simply isn't true, as any objective survey of nations would show you. No other nation could maintain both a crushing trade deficit and a high currency as the U.S. does -- and the reason for that is that the US economy is of a much larger scale than the Argentine economy, for instance. General laws still apply -- eventually, the dollar will crash in value, all things being equal -- but because general laws apply more slowly in the case of the dollar, it is always possible that the US can leverage its scale to prevent an abrupt crash of the value of the dollar, or even pre-empt it. It is hard to see how any other country at the present time could do that.

These are the factors that make the unilateral decision to drop trade barriers at all times in all places (or, its equivalent, the decision to cancel governmental supports of national industries and agriculture) a bad policy. It can lead to a quick boom and a deep 'recession" -- as we now call what we used to call, with more sense, a depression. Argentina is a wonderful example of how liberalizing an economy can lead to disaster. You will notice that no economist is urging the Argentine government to run a deficit in order to get out of its current horrible situation. You will also notice that economists of both the left and right are urging the U.S. to run a deficit in order to get out of its current pretty bad situation. The reality is, IMF strictures on the American economy, if structured along the lines of Coyle�s scale invariant model, would lead to a global depression.

So, are there positive reason to have tariffs, or to have the government support industries and agriculture? Yes, there are. The reason is similar to the reason governments allow inventors to monopolize an idea for a certain period of time. Tariffs allow indigenous industries, and agriculture, a zone of inefficiency within which they can innovate, in the same way that monopoly allows inventors a zone of inefficiency in which they can get a fair return on their investment. One has to remember that all economic events happen along some time-line. Argentina, by liberalizing the economy in the way the hotshot, neo-liberal ministers did, ignored the patterns endemic to that time-line � that is, the unavailability of deficit spending in times of business retraction, which is, after all, inevitable. Economists from America, always on hand to advise governments to privatize, consistently ignore the time-line, and the conditions inhering on small scale national economies in times of recession. In fact, they are like gamblers who think they have devised a system that will guarantee a permanent lucky streak. Which is why a pattern has been established that seems to have escaped Ms. Coyle�s attention: advisor from Harvard or MIT or Chicago goes to Third World Country x; advisor gets president of x to liberalize the economy; a boom follows liberalization, greatly increasing spending power of the top ten percent of the population; a devaluation of the currency follows, as the boom proves to be shallow and unsustainable; advisor, from tenured position at Harvard, et. al., writes op ed in Business Week or Forbes listing reasons liberalization didn�t go far enough, and blames collapse on these reasons.

Differences in scale also lead to deviations between the measure of income inequality and the measure of inequality in real purchasing power. Tomorrow, LI is going to expand on this little thought with regards to Coyle�s remarks in the Guardian.

Remora

There's an election day coming up -- which fills LI with about as much enthusiasm as an arachnophobe contemplating a new species of tarantula. The election process this year has been particularly grim, seemingly run by the utterly braindead for the utterly braindead, and processed by the utterly smarmy. In the meantime, the electorate is completely left out. DC decides what is important -- the war with Iraq, for instance --and decides how people should feel about it, and then gets all surprised when they don't feel that way. Wellstone, before he died, was pulling ahead of his opponent partly because of the war issue -- Wellstone voted against it. Now, to you and me, that might mean he'd tapped into ambiguity, to say the least, about the upcoming war. But not for the press. No, that was about Wellstone being kinkily independent, and people voting for him expressing himself, in spite of their own limitless enthusiasm for what DC decided about Iraq. For the DC line is that the war is wildly popular. Any evidence to the contrary is, well, a problem with the country. Just as the country had this wierd problem with impeaching Clinton -- DC decided this was just the thing to do, and just the thing to obsess about, and the country, for some reason, had other problems.

On the smarmy front, we have William Saletan -- the man who proclaimed Bush "toast' in the last election. Impeturbably pompous, a man who has the cleverness of that college room-mate that freshmen learn to dread -- you know, the one who just talks on and on, mostly about his own magnificent accomplishments -- this is the man is gracing Arkansas this week for Slate. Of course, it is an effort for a man of Saletan's rare sensibilities to have to encounter the gross flesh of Arkansas. He discovers a man missing teeth in a diner, as well as a man who is unshaven. He goes to hear Hutcheson, the Republican incumbent, make a speech:

"I do want to introduce my wife Randi. She's right over here," he says. With a giant whoosh, every head in the room turns. This is no ordinary political wife. This is the former staffer Hutchinson married a year after divorcing his wife in 1999. Around the room, dozens of people stare at the new Mrs. Hutchinson and mentally subtract 50 rosaries from the senator's penance. She isn't the bimbo they expected. She's pale and bulky with a weak chin. She's wearing almost as much makeup as the Fox News correspondent. She looks older than her age. "How old was his first wife?" one reporter asks. "Older," says another."

Wearing too much makeup, is she? Bulky, is she? Ah, not up to the exacting standards of our ace reporter! Poor Saletan, who sees the stye in his neighbor's eye, but doesn't see the redwod tree sized log in his own!

LI is reminded of what George Bernanos's says about imbeciles in Les Grands Cimetieres sous la lune, the book in which he decisively broke with the far right over the Spanish Civil War. It is 1937, and Bernanos had been very close to Action Francais, the proto-fascist group. But as he watched the right drift into supporting Mussolini and Hitler, he begins to rethink his position -- which was always based on a very Pascalian Christianity. He remarks that, in a previous book, he had vowed to move the reader, "to anger or to affection, I didn't care." Now, he says, moving the reader, at least to anger, tires him out:

"The anger of imbeciles has always filled me with sadness, but now it fills me with horror. The whole world echoes with this anger. What else? They like nothing better than understand nothing at all, and they will even gather themselves in groups to do that, for the last thing man is capable of is being stupid and mean all alone, a mysterious condition reserved, no doubt, for the damned. Understanding nothing they assemble together, sorted not by their particular affinities, which are feeble, but after the modest function they hold from birth or chance, which entirely absorbs their little life. For the middle classes are the only ones to furnish forth the imbecile; the superior classes monopolize the fop, a genre of useless stupidity, while the inferior classes only suceed in manufacturing sketches of a gross and sometimes even admirable animality."

Yes, Saletan is an exemplar of this imbecility, right down to the faux Mencken attitude. Multiply this attitude by his cohorts and fellow travellers -- the media, the political consultants, the politicians themselves -- and you have a perfect machine for destroying the motive to vote. To vote is a contract, a way of sealing a pact with the nation. It is, after all, our nation -- that is the story. But the idea that the average voter is a species of dog to whom galvanic shocks are administered every six years, via tv ads, to get him to salivate in the voting booth -- this is the entire attitude of DC. Look at the funny dental work! Look at the makeup! Am I funny now?

Disgust, disgust, disgust -- the great enemy of vision. The Saletans of the world really do fill me with horror.

Dope

LI moves slowly but surely � admittedly, sometimes we go off the track all together, but it is all in the interest of the Grand Plan. Not to worry, gents and ladies. Our consideration of Bishop Butler, in the next to the last post, was meant to tie in to the our criticism of Christopher Hitchens � hard as that may be to see.

What Butler�s Analogy has to do with the upcoming war in Iraq, or at least the arguments that are being made about it in the American and English press, will become clear in good time.

Let�s go back to the Butler quote, with its play on likelihood. What Butler is doing here is at the heart of one of the great controversies about probability. Is probability about events themselves, or is it a measure of the observer�s consciousness of events? Is it true that, in some non-subjective sense, tomorrow�s sunrise will be like today�s � insofar as it is a sunrise? Are conditions of identity dependent on a likeness of events in nature, or is this likeness merely the impression of an observer that is unconsciously projected onto nature? The latter question is complicated by the slight bias infiltrated into the problem by the word �nature� � as if the consciousness itself were somehow extra-natural. Let�s naturalize the consciousness � by fiat � and make it this question: is there something in the consciousness that makes likenesses, or does it make sense to say that even for sunsets that are not observed, one is like the other?

This is the question posed by the work of Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In 1998, when Tversky died, the editors of Cognitive Psychology brought together a special issue in his honor, that has some interesting essays � although not, alas, available on the web. We�d especially recommend Eldar Shafir�s overview of Tversky�s work. He introduces it adducing four axioms of probability theory:

�The normative approach to probabilistic reasoning is constrained by the
same rules that govern the classical, set-theoretic conception of probability.
Probability judgments are said to be �coherent�, if and only if they satisfy
some simple conditions: (1) no probabilities are negative, (2) the probability
of a tautology is 1, (3) the probability of a disjunction of two logically exclusive
statements equals the sum of their respective probabilities, and (4) the
probability of a conjunction of two statements equals the probability of the
first assuming that the second is satisfied, times the probability of the second.�

The reason the emphasis is on normativity, here, is that Kahneman and Tversky were concerned with how closely the assumptions of utility theory, which depend upon judgments of probability in order to calculate the maximum benefits attendent upon actions, correlate to what we know about how human beings really do form Bishop Butler�s likenesses. This, in turn, provides a nice twist in the debate between the psychological school of probability and the realist school. What Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated is that people make judgments of probability based on the way the likeness situation is framed. Here�s how Shafir puts it:

�Consider a set of propositions each of which a person judges to be
true with a probability of .90. If the person is right about 90% of these, then
the person is said to be well calibrated. If she is right less or more than 90%,
then she is said to be overconfident or underconfident, respectively.
A great deal of empirical work initiated by Tversky and Kahneman has
documented systematic discrepancies between the normative requirements
of probabilistic reasoning and the ways in which people reason about frequencies
and likelihoods. In settings where the relevance of simple probabilistic
rules is made transparent, subjects often reveal appropriate statistical
intuitions. Thus, for example, when a sealed description is pulled at random
out of an urn that is known to contain the descriptions of 30 lawyers and
70 engineers, people estimate the probability that the description belongs to
a lawyer at .30, in line with prior probability. In richer contexts, however,
people often rely on judgmental heuristics that do not obey and can distract
from simple formal considerations and these can lead to judgments that con-
flict with normative requirements.�

One of the most famous of the TK abnormalities has to do with conjunction, and the almost universal tendency to make wobbly judgements about the conjunction of probabilities. In a Discovery Magazine article that lists seven problems with probability judgments (which LI has found on a site that does not cite the author of the article � naughty, naughty � it was by Kevin McKean,) they quote the most famous confusing instance of this:

1. Linda is 31, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy in college. As a student, she was deeply concerned with discrimination and other social issues, and participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which statement is more likely:
2. a. Linda is a bank teller
3. b. Linda is a bank teller and
4. active in the feminist movement.

Most people give a higher probability to the fourth statement than the third statement, even though, if you analyze it, you can see that it has to be less probable � insofar as the set of bank tellers is larger than the set of bank tellers active in the feminist movement. In other words, conjunction here, unlike addition, narrows the set, instead of expanding it. It is hard to get this through one�s head, however. The additional information about Linda moves us to suppose that, if she is a bank teller, surely she is a bank teller in the feminist movement. There�s an essay by Stephan Jay Gould, which, in the course of explaining the miraculousness of Joe Dimaggio's hitting streak, explains how Tversky showed that streaks, or �hot hands,� in baseball or basketball don�t exist � or at least not the way we think they exist. Here's how Gould makes the point about our perception of streaks, and what it says about our perception of the probable and the improbable, using the Linda example.

"Amos Tversky, who studied "hot hands," has performed a series of elegant psychological experiments with Daniel Kahneman.[5] These long-term studies have provided our finest insight into "natural reasoning" and its curious departure from logical truth. To cite an example, they construct a fictional description of a young woman: "Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations." Subjects are then given a list of hypothetical statements about Linda: they must rank these in order of presumed likelihood, most to least probable. Tversky and Kahneman list eight statements, but five are a blind, and only three make up the true experiment:
Linda is active in the feminist movement;
Linda is a bank teller;
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
Now it simply must be true that the third statement is least likely, since any conjunction has to be less probable than either of its parts considered separately. Everybody can understand this when the principle is explained explicitly and patiently. But all groups of subjects, sophisticated students who ought to understand logic and probability as well as folks off the street corner, rank the last statement as more probable than the second. (I am particularly fond of this example because I know that the third statement is least probable, yet a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down, shouting at me�"but she can't just be a bank teller; read the description.")"

Gould also gives a nice summary of Kahneman and Tversky�s conclusions about �natural reasoning.� Gould, of course, like the counter-intuitive feel of the experiment, because he was always, famously, on the lookout for false patterns. Like Gould, LI has read more than his share of Karl Marx, so we have an abiding suspicion of the ulitilitarian definition of rationality and the systems built upon it. TK gives one the feeling that, finally, here's proof that the whole neo-classical economic thing is a hoax. Well, that, too, is a misprision of a pattern. But to continue with Gould:

�Why do we so consistently make this simple logical error? Tversky and Kahneman argue, correctly I think, that our minds are not built (for whatever reason) to work by the rules of probability, though these rules clearly govern our universe. We do something else that usually serves us well, but fails in crucial instances: we "match to type." We abstract what we consider the "essence" of an entity, and then arrange our judgments by their degree of similarity to this assumed type. Since we are given a "type" for Linda that implies feminism, but definitely not a bank job, we rank any statement matching the type as more probable than another that only contains material contrary to the type. This propensity may help us to understand an entire range of human preferences, from Plato's theory of form to modern stereotyping of race or gender.�

Tomorrow we will finally get around to why we think this almost instinctual process of matching to type explains the way the pro-war faction is framing our choices about Iraq.

What to say?
Wellstone is dead.

Dope

Who among us, droogs and stooges all, remembers the mighty Bishop Butler, the Anglican divine that, of all churchmen, retained the admiration of David Hume, even � who was otherwise impatient of the breed? Yes, well, we admit to having neglected Butler�s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, for more frivolous works, mainly those by Sir Thomas Browne. What can we say, the sins of our youth, the mark of Cain on our accent, the frittering away, seeds and husks of seeds, of our days and ways, that organic time passing from sleep to sleep, the question of money, that slight but annoying sense that we aren�t alone here, there is always someone by you, the porno that smells like rancid butter, and the things undone world without end that no recording angel will record and yet we swear, to the beating of wings and the feel of the talons closing about us, these were the causes and reasons of our very heart, Lord thou know�est.

We�ve been thinking of Butler because he, like Pascal, was ambitious to annex probability theory to the Christian apologetic. This was a bold undertaking, and you can see how Christian theology, by then, what with the seemingly real threat that an explanation of the world was possible without God � the cogito ergo sum extended, mathematically, over the endless graph of the world, a spectre is haunting Europe and it is the European man, the white mythology � you can see how probability starts turning up, the ace that was neglected, like Jesus himself..For one thing, there�s suddenly the sense that the proposal that there is a life after death is actually a statement about what the world is composed of, the basic blocks, and those blocks aren�t made of matter or spirit but events. The possible, the impossible, and the compossible, that�s the spirit here. A life suddenly means an event among other events, and having to be consonant with other events � in fact, a life it turns out is rooted in a world, and the world is a series of probabilities that radiates out from some dark center of certainty, the convergent point. The terror of the actual. This was, for Leibnitz, the supreme problem, from which the entire Monodology flows.



That�s the one side of it, the intellectual side. The political side, the economic side, the sociological side, whatever you want to call it � we�d guess that the impulse to import into philosophy and theology the methods of the gambler probably says something about the relationship between shifting forms of the social organization of expectation in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. A person's global expectation is an important, but hard to capture, aspect of social stability. It is about what seems walled up and what doesn�t. The directions one goes in, or one doesn�t. One of the effects of the "pure" market -- the financial market -- that are often remarked upon in its being introduced to traditional societies -- that is, those marked by evident and legal distinctions of class, with a strongly developed system of legal and social obstacles to confine and regulate the free flow of goods and services -- is that that social organization is felt to be a threat to the very marks of identity that define the basis of traditional social power -- those bases being inheritence, class position, gender, and some order that maps degrees of separation from a charismatic figure (the sovereign) onto social reputation. The threat that the illegal drug market poses to American society is of this type. However, the dissolution of identity is also a strong temptation to that traditional order, which is maintained by an ethos of boldness, of honor. Honor without the test of honor is simply laziness, complacency, the lukewarm that the lord spits out at the end of days. The aristocrat is always, in the literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a heavy gambler. Perhaps this is because a social order that is slowly being liquidated by changes in the economic reality in which it exists -- as the landed aristocracy was being liquidated by the increasing reach of the commercial system --finds its interest less in a compromise, or integration into that system, which would mean becoming merchants themselves, than into countering the novelty with its extremest expression. That expression is, of course, gambling -- the most developed form of speculation at the time. Although there were irruptions that presaged other forms of speculation -- Law's Mississippi Bubble, which was much more extensive and ingenius than just speculation in shares of land, and the English South Sea Bubble are the two most famous instances.



Enough, though, of this and that. Let's get to what Butler has to say, and tomorrow to what Amos Tversky, the non-Nobel winner, dead and so out of luck, has to say, too, about luck, chance, and its perception.

This is the good Bishop:>


"That which chiefly constitutes Probability is expressed in the word Likely, i. e. like some truth or true event; like it, in itself, in its evidence, in some more or fewer of its circumstances. For when we determine a thing to be probably true, suppose that an event has or will come to pass, it is from the mind's remarking in it a likeness to some other event, which we have observed has come to pass. And this observation forms, in numberless daily instances, a presumption, opinion, or full conviction, that such event has or will come to pass ; according as the observation is, that the like event has sometimes, most commonly, or always, so far as our ob-servation reaches, come to pass at like distances of time, or place, or upon like occasions. Hence arises the be-lief, that a child, if it lives twenty years, will grow up to the stature and strength of a man; that food will contribute to the preservation of its life, and the want of it for such a number of days, be its certain destruction. So likewise the rule and measure of, our hopes and fears concerning the success of our pursuits; our expectations that others will act so and so in such circumstances; and our judgment that such actions proceed from such principles; all these rely upon our having observed the like to what we hope, fear, expect, judge; I say, upon our having observed, the like, either with respect to others or ourselves. And thus, whereas, the prince* who had always lived in a warm climate naturally concluded in the way of analogy, that there was no such thing as water's becoming hard, because he had always observed it to be fluid and yielding: we, on the contrary, from analogy conclude, that there is no presumption at all against this: that it is supposable there may be frost in England any given day in January next; probable that there will on some day of the month; and that there is a moral certainty, i. e. ground for an expectation without any doubt of it in some part or other of the winter. "

Remora

LI�s editorial philosophy (besides �a sera sera) is to ignore the exaggerated attention given to the standard controversialists of the governing classes. In Hitchens� case, we�ve torn up many rabid commentaries on his various contemporary meanderings, because we just didn�t see the need to add another comment about the guy. But LI's patience is at an end with the guy, and we want to say something.

Hitchens is a instructive case of the way the felinities of the polemicist can give way suddenly to the scurrilities of the flak. His essay in the Sunday Washington Post, So Long Fellow Travellers (actually, it should have been entitled the Long Goodbye, so much copy has Hitchens squeezed out of quitting his column at the Nation), is typical of the new, belligerant Hitchens. The piece distorts the positions of his opponents, the anti-war Left � a venal sin, to which controversialists are prone; and then distorts the position of his own party, which is a much worse sin, even mortal. It is the end of one�s intellectual integrity, which is really all the writer has to offer. The barrage method of insult can't disguise the inglorious intimations of flakhood: the impossible pomposity, the apology for established power, the tone of privileged resentment. .

His criticism of the anti-belligerent case is -- to summarize not unfairly -- that they are cryptic reds, that they �fawn� over Saddam Hussein (disguising this, of course, by pretending to disapprove of gassing Kurds and such), that they mistake George Bush for the aggressor in the current affair, and that, when pretending to make a practical case against the war, they add to their record of mistaken prophecies by contending that war with Iraq would be a quagmire, would entail massive casualties, and a widening war � prophecies that were not realized in Afghanistan and Kosovo. He also makes the astonishing claim that Ramsey Clark is the �main organizer of anti-war propaganda� (all arguments against the war are propaganda, just as all critics of George Bush �smirk,� according to the new Hitchens) � which is about as credible as the claim that Hitchens has changed his political bearings due to a large bribe from the Heritage Foundation.

Briefly, we�d say that the case against the war does not relate to having a soft spot for Brezhnev; that it does claim George Bush is the aggressor in the current affair � this might have something to do with pre-emptive military action, as the very definition of it seems to indicate taking the position of an aggressor, or being aggressive �resisting threats,� which is what every aggressor has claimed to be doing ; that the record of failures in forecasting the course of wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan has little relevance for Iraq; and finally, that the claim that Iraq would be a quagmire, which LI takes to mean would cost one hundred billion dollars and entail leaving an occupying army in Iraq for at least a year -- is buttressed by recent announcements from the administration itself, which forecasts just these things.

Something should be said about the forecasting the course of wars. The great military fact of the nineties was the astonishing success of TAC � the integration of tactical air units into the battlefield. While LI supported the American fight in Afghanistan, we did think that it would be bloodier and longer. The fall of the Taliban, in hindsight, shouldn�t have been so hard to predict � they had conquered only a brief time before, and they were relatively new to real military engagement. However, TAC so far has been successful against small conventional armies, or disorganized armies. It hasn�t been successful against Al Qaeda. Undoubtedly there is a strong chance that the new structure of military engagement will be overwhelmingly, and quickly, successful against Saddam Hussein � but the argument depends more on the previous Gulf war than Kosovo or Afgahnistan, which were much different political and military situations. But even if Hussein�s forces are rolled, the occupation of Iraq looks very, very different than the occupation of Afghanistan. Afghanistan, frankly, is of very little value in the world economy. Iraq is very valuable. It is surrounded by countries with very strong ambitions and plans for that section of the world. It is composed of several ethnic groups that are held together, in the country, by main force. The situation in Iraq looks more like the situation in Lebanon in 1983 than Afghanistan.

Worse than Hitchens dishonesty about the anti-war Left � or just the anti-belligerents, since Left here is pretty much a red herring � is the distortion of his own party of belligerents. He makes no reference both to the recent history of Iraq, which is the background against which we can judge his claims for the Iraqi opposition, nor does he make any references to the administration that is, after all, going to enact his war. That Hitchens wants democracy is a fine thing � we weep for the nobility of his sentiments, and he does too, as often as possible. That he doesn�t mention the political history of Northern Iraq, a safe zone for almost ten years, in which we can see the politics of Kurdish groups played out, is unscrupulous to the highest degree, insofar as he knows what that politics is about. One very strong argument against war with Iraq, from the point of view of the democratic cause in the Middle East, is that it is not in the American interest to allow a high degree of autonomy or democracy to Northern Iraq, especially in the case that it is integrated into an American led state, as it would be after the war. The coming war will collapse a situation that has emerged, after several years of violence, in Northern Iraq. The violence has been between Kurdish war lords, who have not hesitated to ally themselves with Saddam Hussein to establish an advantage with regard to one another. The PKK, the Kurdish guerilla group that terrorized Turkey, and was in turn subject to Turkish terror, is another war lord group that has made certain claims on Northern Iraq. Luckily, the structure of the PKK has collapsed, and the hostilities of the war lords have toned down, recently. There are reports of a free press, elections, even tolerance. These have emerge unexpectedly from a chaotic situation that was never intended to encourage political liberalism. Hooray that such liberalism, however fragile the shoots, has emerged. But don�t look for it to survive a war. What it needs is the preservation of its present circumstances. And that, in turn, will operate as a strong attractor for Iraqi opposition to S.Hussein that is democratic in nature.

The pretense that opposing the war is opposing Hitchens friend in the Iraqi administration is silly. We can understand Venn diagrams. We can understand that two sets that share some members don�t necessarily share all members. LI opposes the war in Iraq that Bush is going to make. We don�t oppose the war Hitch�s friends are going to make, because they haven�t made a war yet, and it doesn�t look like they ever will. Hitchens himself has written in the past that the administration has ignored his Iraqi friends. In the WP essay, however, this caveat vanishes. The implication is that the D.C. belligerents and the Iraqi oppositionists are synonymous. They aren�t. Hitchens rhetoric is the verbal equivalent of the way the CIA gamed the Kurds in the late seventies. It makes a false promise, it uses a group to achieve an end, and then it betrays them. The upcoming war will be about America�s interest, not Hitchens. It is a blow to the ego, but that�s how it will be.

Well, we hadn�t meant to work up a lather about H. Tomorrow we want to move onto a more interesting topic � which is about how distortions inherent in argument might be related to Tversky�s work on the psychology of risk.

Remora

"Now, this bill also represents the first step in our administration's comprehensive program of financial deregulation. I particularly want to commend the leadership of the chairman, Senator Garn, and Chairman St Germain, along with Secretary Regan and his fine team at Treasury. They did a remarkable job forging a consensus within the Congress and among affected industries in favor of the bill's deregulatory provisions. I'd like to also thank Congressmen Stanton, Wylie, and LaFalce for their assistance.

What this legislation does is expand the powers of thrift institutions by permitting the industry to make commercial loans and increase their consumer lending. It reduces their exposure to changes in the housing market and in interest rate levels. This in turn will make the thrift industry a stronger, more effective force in financing housing for millions of Americans in the years to come."

These words of Ronald Reagan's, spoken at the signing of the Garn-St. Germain act, have echoed down the years, much like the last words of Kim Novak going through Jimmy Stewart's brain in Vertigo. Andrew Sullivan recently observed that Bartlett's Book of Quotations had too few Reagan quotes, proving an underlying left leaning bias. Surely, If LI were to edit a book of quotations, we'd select a few choice R.R. quotes. The lines from the speech above, for instance, would be place, on thematic lines, in the same section that included Willie Sutton's famous dictum that he robbed banks because that's where the money is. Yes, wasn't "reducing their exposure" and "expanding the powers of the thrift institutions" a nice way of saying, we're putting the tommyguns in the hands of the bank presidents? No need for a getaway car when you can't get the company to buy you a nice, corporate Lear jet. Indeed, it was that lot, from Charlie Keating to Herman Beebee, who proved that Sutton was a piker in the way of all freelance robbers. What you really need, when it comes to looting on an imperial scale, is friends in high places and a seat at the board. The best part is the lack of punishment. Not even lack -- the rewards that are heaped upon the larcenous are rich, rich indeed. Because bank robbery by bankers is met not with that ultimate social disapprobium, pinstripes and legchains, but by bail-outs, Reagan's stirring words eventually cost about 32 billion dollars a year to American taxpayers.

For the act that Reagan called the greatest "reform" of the financial industry in 50 years operated, as deregulatory reforms have operated since then, to create systemic problems, both in the S&Ls and then, by an easily tracked contagion, to the composition of corporate ownership as a whole, that eventually brought about a collapse. It was a collapse that, as conservative commentators like to say, was due to the government. Although what they don't say is that it was due to the Government deregulating an industry in a manner that was corrupt at the very root.

We bring up ancient history -- LI was once told we were all woulda, shoulda, coulda cause we keep bringing up ancient history, but you know what? We like it that way -- because we think the shape of the S&L crisis is very similar to the shape of the current crisis of confidence in the market, especially as it has to do with regulatory oversight, or the lack of it. LI wonders if there is a wave pattern here that speaks to a greater structure -- a long-term pattern of corruption that indicates structural invariants extending from the beginning of the Reagan years to now -- extending, that is, through the length of the post-Keynsian era. The contours of it, and the mechanisms that brought it about, have very little to do with the categories that are tossed around in public discourse. Especially unhelpful is the idea that the "government" is somehow opposed to "private enterprise." What happens in capitalism in our time is that alliances of interests, cutting across government and private lines, will marshall resources -- rule changes in regulatory agencies, Senatorial pressures on individual regulators or regulatory bodies, capital from banks, offshore entities, gaps in corporate governance, disguises made available by creative accounting, etc., to create systems of malfeasance that push great amounts of money into the hands of a few. Borrowing a term from Burroughs, let's call this the capitalist Interzone. This machinery is such that it can't last forever. It eventually implodes. The periodic crises in the system are explicitly linked to the high degree of inequity in the system, the corruption of the electoral process, and the inability to replace the money taken out of the system. The moment of implosion, though, will be unevenly distributed throughout the system, burdening those who benefitted least from it by way of taxes, looted pensions, firings, etc. During the S&L crisis, there was a window during which the D.C. co-conspirators of the process were actually held up to the light. Well, a few of them -- the infamous Keating five. This was entirely inadequate, of course. Everyone knew that the legislative orignators of the S&L deregulation process, Fernand St. Germain and Jake Garn, had benefited in the most outrageous ways from S&L largesse. But back then, there actually were symbols that represented a crucial part of the system.

This time around, nothing like that has happened. That is because the system has become much too pervasive to pick out five senators. There was a halfhearted attempt to hold Bush and Cheney symbolically responsible; it was half-hearted because no Senator or Representative -- nobody on the political scene -- can really afford to go after symbols of the system. This is especially noticeable in the case of Phil Gramm. If anybody represented a point man for Enron in the Senate, it was the horrid Gramm. He seems almost devised by some Dickensian god to recieve the slings and arrows of an outraged society, so porcine are his features, and his appetite, so open are his ties to the most corrupt American business to have gone under since Vesco days of yore. His wife's role in the Enron affair is common knowledge. Yet he's slipped out quietly, with no fuss made about his jumping ship to UBS Warburg.

The first phase of the current crisis is over. There are signs that the second phase has kicked in. In this phase, the system reverts back to its corrupt norm. There was much todo made in the conservative press that the reforms enacted this summer went "too far." This noise provides cover for the actual cutting back of those reforms. A story in the NYT this weekend heralds one sign of the reversion to the corrupt norm: the refusal to adequately fund the SEC.

"WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 � Less than three months ago, President Bush signed with great fanfare sweeping corporate antifraud legislation that called for a huge increase in the budget of the Securities and Exchange Commission to police corporate America and clean up Wall Street.

Now the White House is backing off the budget provision and urging Congress to provide the agency with 27 percent less money than the new law authorized.'

Bush and his congressional allies had no intention of stiffening the regulatory mechanisms that oversee corporate governance, accounting, and the markets until they had to, and they have no intention of seeing those new laws work. The last couple weeks, much has been made of the rollover at the new Public Company Accounting Oversight board. Jane Quinn's story, Is Reform a Bad Joke? is mis-named. It is a very good joke.



"At issue is the new Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, created by Congress and signed into law with a flourish by President Bush in July. It�s supposed to set new and higher standards for auditors, who check corporate books. To succeed, it will need a true reformer at its head.

The Securities and Exchange Commission will name the board�s members. As head, SEC chairman Harvey Pitt chose John Biggs�the respected CEO of the giant teacher�s pension fund, TIAA-CREF�say people in a position to know. But the big accounting firms (yes, like the ones that abetted Enron, Tyco, Xerox and WorldCom) scorn goody-goody reformers, and promptly called their political pals. Rep. Michael Oxley (R-Ohio) complained about Biggs and Pitt pulled back. (Oxley�s House committee just happens to oversee the SEC.)"

The SEC funding storry, coming on the heels of the Biggs debacle, isn't exactly a surprise. What does surprise us is the grossness of the maneuver. The Bush regime has consistently lived up to its coup origins: it's grand gestures are coup-like; it's spokesmen of a type made depressingly familiar in Latin America in the seventies, thuggish, happiest when employing junta-like categories in which a manichean world justifies a manichean hunt for subversives. But juntas usually take three to four years to go completely corrupt -- the Bush people are ahead of the game, here. The open conspiracy between Cheney's office and various energy company bigwigs to subvert environmental protection and rig the market began almost as soon as Bush hit the White House. The current subversion of corporate reform is, like Cheney's meetings with his cronies, covered by tissue thin rationalizations. Here is the reason given by the White house for refusing to fully fund the SEC

"The president does believe the S.E.C. has a substantial mission and we think $568 million is sufficient to carry that out," said Amy Call, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Administration officials say that the budget figure in the law is too high considering the other needs of the budget. They say that the agency would be able to carry out more investigations, increase staff and raise pay levels with the more modest budget proposed by the White House."

The line about other needs of the budget is not quite a lie, but it does creep up to the starting line of falsification and crouches like a racer. For some reason, the article doesn't explain where the SEC's money comes from. Well, it comes from fees taken in by the SEC.

According to Congressional testimony in 2001,

"The current fees the SEC is required to collect � registration fees, transaction fees, and merger and tender offer fees ... will total almost $2.5 billion - an amount more than five times the SEC's current budget."

The Wall Street Journal recently published a five part series on what went wrong in the last three years. Interestingly, especially for a WSJ story, the concentration in the article three days ago was on five instances of either congressional interference, administrative decision, or Fed decisionmaking, that contributed to the slack regulatory posture of the nineties. One of them was Levitt's unsuccessful attempt to get the SEC fully funded -- to get control, that is, over the amount taken in by SEC fees. Phil Gramm quickly put a stop to that. Gramm, who is now going to ex-Enron central (UBS Warburg), is the very spirit of the Bush attitude towards free markets. It is the blind idea that, a., all regulations are the same, and b., that all regulations should be rolled back.

The depressing thing is, the Dems aren't going to fight for SEC funding. What, Joseph Lieberman leaning on his funders to enforce a bunch of pesky rules for the investing rubes? No way.

Remora


Gotzendammerung

The Channel between the French and the English has marvelous metaphysical qualities: as ideas swim back and forth, they suffer a sea-change of sometimes monstrous proportions. French ideas, to the cold Anglo philosophe, at least since Burke, seem like so much congealed vichysoisse: repulsive, illogical, and smelly. Anglo ideas, to the fervent French, are either Blakean visions encoded in logical paradoxes (which is how Deleuze saw Lewis Carroll and Russell) or Benthamite panopiticons -- systems of cruelty diffused by way of capitalist reason, where every man carries to a butcher's market his own meat, and is consequently processed into slices.


Peter Conrad is, I believe, Australian. His review of Surya's book about George Bataille in the Observer is both sympathetic and incredulous. LI think he distorts Bataille, but he makes an arguable case. Conrad does contrive an utterly beautiful summary of Story of the Eye:


"The etchings made by Hans Bellmer in 1944 to illustrate Bataille's scabrous novel Story of the Eye concentrate on the two blind, gaping eyes between the splayed legs of women: sex is a surgical probe, an experimental invasion of the darkness and a foretaste of extinction. Bataille's heroine Simone removes the eye of a priest from its socket and, slicing through its ligaments, inserts it into her vagina. There it can scrutinise the matted jungle of our dreams."


Here's the passage in L'histoire itself:

"Ensuite je me levai et, en �cartant les cuisses de Simone, qui s'�tait couch�e sur le c�t�, je me trouvai en face de ce que, je me le figure ainsi, j'attendais depuis toujours de le m�me fa�on qu'une guillotine attend un cou � trancher. Il me semblait m�me que mes yeux sortaient de la t�te comme s'ils �taient �rectiles � force d'horreur; je vis exactement, dans le vagin velu de Simone, l'oeil bleu p�le de Marcelle qui me regardait en pleurant des larmes d'urine."

Which we won't translate.

He also, LI thinks, rather maliciously offers this view of Bataille's "political economy":



"Surya also fudges the issue of Bataille's affinity with fascism, which in his view concluded 'the decay of mankind' and definitively disproved the humanist faith in our lofty status. Bataille likened Auschwitz to the Pyramids or the Acropolis: it was a talisman of civilisation, a wonder of the modern world. He was equally elated by the instantaneous flattening of Hiroshima, which demonstrated man's capacity to terminate his own history and exterminate the earth itself."



The key words here: civilization, elation, humanist -- have, as Conrad must know, a different tone for Bataille than they have for the average Guardian reader. Although I'm unaware of the Bataillian comparison of Auschwitz and the Acropolis, I'm quite aware of the Part maudite, in which the theme of ritualized cruelty and civilization -- or social organization, which is what Bataille, founder (as Conrad does not reveal) of the College de sociologie, was getting at -- is explained in terms of the discord (and the consequent dialectic) between utility and sovereignty. Bataille's changing position on fascism -- from an early fascination to opposition -- is an arc common to a lot of European intellectuals of the twenties and thirties. The opposition to humanism was an opposition to the easy synthesis of calculation and affection, forged in bourgeois nineteenth century societies, and fatally undermined in WWI. Bataille did not believe that parlimentary democracy would endure because it could not sublimate in any grand symbolic way the violence which, for Bataille, was the suture at the heart of the social -- the trace of a dialectical failure, insofar as the dialectic is, indeed, Hegelian. That violence does have as its ultimate object nothing at all -- what Victor Turner calls the symbolic object, what Lacan (and Laurie Anderson) call x.


Of course, there are some howlers in the review -- you can't discuss philosophy in a forum like the Guardian without getting it through Guardian editors -- and newspaper editors are notoriously prone to make "sense" of philosophical arguments, destroying them in the process. Here's the big howler in this review:







"Being an earnest French philosopher, Surya is obliged to take such assertions seriously, and he sees in them 'the political formulation of a supreme morality'. I suspect that Bataille adopted extreme positions in a spirit of zany, cunning frivolity. As a surrealist, he understood the uses of effrontery, and he is probably best understood as a subversive intellectual comedian - a jester devoted, like Erasmus, to the praise of folly rather than sagacity. He met Henri Bergson on a trip to London, and prepared himself by reading his essay on comedy. Bergson treated laughter as our guide to the abyss, plumbing 'the depth of worlds' and chastising the sedate certitudes of morality; the absurd, extravagant foulness of Story of the Eye - its garrottings, its random couplings, its sacrilegious mockery - filled Bataille with an unholy merriment, a 'fulminating joy, bordering on naive folly'. Like the little boy in the poem, his primary purpose was to annoy."



Surely the sentence starting "Bergson treated laughter..." should read, "Bataille treated laughter..." Anybody who has read Bergson on laughter knows that he conceived it as, centrally, a form of mechanical mimicry, a category mistake, with the categories being life and mechanism. Bataille, on the other hand, called laughter a way of spitting out language itself, the reassertionof the primal, organic mouth over the sense-making tool it becomes in socialization.

Bataille was fascinated by a sort of line that he drew from the pole of the mouth to the pole of the anus. LI used to be fascinated by that line, too. We absorbed Bataille, at one time, into our very bloodstream. It wasn't, in retrospect, a good idea. Or so we have thought for a number of years. Lately, we have been nostalgic for our naughtier years. The peak of our Bataille infatuation probably came several years ago, when we were living in Atlanta, working at a bookstore, and involved with awoman (let's call her X) who was afflicted with bipolar depression and a husband. She came in after we'd been hired. We were sitting in the lunch room, when she and a rather chubby young man, her co-hire, came in and were introduced. She was scrawny, had graying hair, and lively eyes. I came to know and love that scrawniness, but she rang a lot of bells at first. I was the person who was in charge of the psychology books, and the erotica. At the mention of erotica, X came alive. She loved erotica. Well, so did LI. We've always loved erotica, porno, all the trawling through the bodies struggles, pores and marks and moans and disappointments and holes and hairs, all of it, all of it -- but we are no longer so discursive about this. At that time, Bataille's project -- the production of the sovereign human being, one who shucks off the merely human -- seemed absolutely right. X was into it, until X slashed her wrists, and the spiral went quickly down.

So... we have our own personal doubts about Bataille. The way a stockbroker from the eighties might have doubts about cocaine. To produce the strong effect of Bataille's rhetoric, we would need to quote extensively -- we admit that we haven't given up entirely Bataille's absurd project. Here's a passage we often think of:


"A un moment donn�, je suis all� � la fen�tre et je l'ai ouverte ... Dans la rue juste devant moi, il y avait une tr�s longue banderole noire ... Le vent avait � moiti� d�croch� la hampe : elle avait l'air de battre de l'aile. Elle ne tombait pas: elle claquait dans le vent avec un grand bruit � hauteur du toit: elle se d�roulait en prenant des formes tourment�es: comme un ruisseau d'encre qui aurait coul� dans les nuages. L'incident para�t �tranger � mon histoire, mais c' �tait pour moi comme si une poche d'encre s'ouvrait dans ma t�te et j' �tais s�r, ce jour-l�, de mourir sans tarder

Finally, here is a chronology of Bataille's life composed by Surya.

Remora

Nietzsche's birthday (as well as that of one of his commentators, my friend Kathy Higgins) was yesterday. In his honor, here's a translation of one of his Dawn of Day numbers:

"The fearful eye - Nothing is more feared by artists, poets and writers than that eye which sees their petty deceits, and which by and by perceives how often they have stood on the border where the paths led either to innocent pleasure in itself or to the making of effects; which can write up the tab for them, when they have purchased too little with too much, knowing when they have sought to elevate and ornament, without themselves being elevated in the least; which penetrates the thought through all the disguises of their art as it first stood before them, perhaps as a shimmering figure of light, but perhaps, also, as a theft of the common-place, that they have had to extend, abbreviate, color, complicate, pepper, in order to make something of it - oh this eye, which spots in your works all your discomfort, your spying and greed, your imitation and excess (which is just envious mimicry), which knows your embarrassed blushes all too well, as it knows the art you employ to disguise these blushes, and to explain them away even to yourself!"

The evil eye of the critic -- dragging with it that vague,Volkish dread -- is naturally not liked. LI pictures it as one of those symbolist lithographs, an eye floating through space like a big, malign hot air balloon. Something Rops, or Moreau, might have drawn.

Those blushes (Schamrote) -- yes, we know those blushes. LI once wrote several large reviews for the Austin Chronicle. Large in the NYRB scale. They were on various topics -- cancer, the economy, the environment. And every time, some paragraph, some sentence, some word would stand out -- and we would feel intense shame. Because it would be a dumb sentence, the wrong word. Mostly this was our fault -- in the process of editing, we had let it pass.

But let's congratulate ourselves on one thing, shall we? We have not felt the blush that comes from presenting a dishonest argument. Unfortunately, Christopher Caldwell should be blushing this week for his column in the NYPress.

Caldwell is good, as we've said before. Somewhere before, you find the post. While Caldwell is a conservative, he is not dogmatic, or stupid. He is a briliant reader -- we read his book reviews with unmitigated respect. And LI has always assumed that Caldwell has that ineffable quality, intellectual integrity. But this column should bring on a major case of Nietzsche's Schamrote. A lot has been written about the Left's whiny response to 9/11, and how the Left is disconnected from basic human emotions of loyalty to the locale, etc. Well, in our opinion, the proposed war in Iraq has had an amazingly corrupting affect on the Right.

We mean something, well, very Nietzschian by intellectual integrity. The standard comes from science. You can be a pundit, you can be an economist, you can be a journalist, but the standard comes from a discourse that has organized itself around the proof process. That doesn't mean that pundits should experiment, or refuse the evidence of their sensibilities -- that qualitative evidence is what is most valuable about the propos, the opinion column. But opinion has standards. The pundit imagination, like any cognitive effort, should conform to a social duty. This duty is to imagine counter-factuals. Derived from this duty is the duty to understand the selective exhibition of evidence.

These are the first two grafs of Caldwell's column:

"In the days leading up to Thursday�s overwhelming House vote to let the President attack Iraq, consultant Bob Shrum and pollster Stanley Greenberg were sending a memo to Democratic candidates explaining how to handle the vote without getting burned. The stakes were high. Elections are three weeks off, and the public loves the President�s position on this one. If the U.S. has to go it alone against Saddam Hussein, the country will be in favor, by 46 percent to 29, according to a Harris poll. With an okay from the UN Security Council, support for the operation rises to 91-2.

"Shrum and Greenberg proposed to get their guys out of a pickle by having them take both sides of the Iraq issue. Peaceniks could avoid looking soft on Saddam by burying their objections beneath assurances of "support for the war on terrorism in general." But gung-ho warriors should also hedge their bets, since, according to Greenberg�s polling, "the down-the-line supporter of the President in Iraq actually runs significantly weaker than the proponent with reservations."

The public loves the President's position on this one? Caldwell isn't stupid. He knows that the Harris poll he is quoting is one of several polls, and that collectively they have pictured much more ambiguity than Caldwell allows for. He cherrypicked the most gung-ho poll to shore up his position -- for Caldwell does, indeed, love the President's position.

Meaning, LI thinks, the position that he assumes Bush has, which is going in and invading Iraq, rather than the position presented in the Cincinnati speech, which could plausibly be headlined in Europe as backing away from war.

It isn't that LI thinks the anti-war position is popular. Whether it is popular or not, it is our position. But the idea of an aroused populace, which is what Caldwell implies, is a mirage. Here's the latest Gallop poll:

"But the current results suggest a somewhat different scenario. According to the poll, Democrats enjoy an electoral advantage among those who care most deeply about the economy and those most concerned with the possibility of war with Iraq, suggesting that there may be a protest vote on both issues. Likely voters who cite Iraq as the most important issue, for example, oppose invading that country by a two-to-one margin, 66% to 33%. They also indicate they would vote for Democrats over Republicans by a 16-point margin, 56% to 40%. By contrast, among all likely voters, opinion on war with Iraq is evenly divided (47% favor invasion, 46% oppose), as is the vote for the two parties."

Now, Caldwell might think this Gallop poll is wrong. But no poll that I've seen, besides the Harris figures he quotes, would lead anyone to say the public loves the President's position on the war. And that variability of responses, those shifts, tells us that love is precisely the wrong word. The public loved the Afghan invasion. But it doesn't love the proposed Iraq invasion, even though it will support it.

That doesn't mean Caldwell couldn't have made a case from his own impressions that the war will be popular. Or that the Harris poll is necessarily wrong -- I could imagine arguments that would shore it up. But quoting it, as Caldwell does, without referring to the number of other polls that contradict it, is intellectually dishonest. It is the difference between political forecasting and political p.r. -- the latter of whcih consists of trying to make something popular by calling it popular. In the world of stock market speculation, this is known as the greater fool theory -- you buy a stock in order to sell it at a higher price by pumping it up, regardless of its fundamental value. Caldwell should be better than this. But Iraq has this corrupting effect on the right wing. Bad news when we do (and LI thinks we will) invade -- the same meretricious analyses, the same credibility gap opening between what is really happening and the propaganda at home. Vietnam really is looming on the horizon. And it is not going to be good for the Right, we think.