Remora

LI, having liberally annointed our back molars with a codeine, or benzocodeine, salve, would like to do a piece on today's big news story. Sorry, the consideration of time as a component of picturing will have to be postponed -- we aren't Boethius, nor were meant to be...

Onto the big story, which as my readers will know by now, is the on-going collapse of National Century Financial Services. Oh, you thought it was the bread and circuses, or rather war games, thing going on in D.C.?

No, today we have an excellent example of why the press can calmly talk about how the "wave of corporate scandals" has broken. That's because nobody wants to talk about it. Plus, no star is involved in this scandal.

The story is in the biz section of the Times.

"The rapid collapse of National Century Financial Enterprises Inc., a large provider of cash flow financing, is sending hundreds of health care companies and their affiliates scrambling to avoid big financial trouble."

Cash flow financing means this. The thirty thousand dollars that X is paying to have his prostate operated on is out there in segments. The insurance is paying for it, but the deductible means that X has to pay for it on credit. Here comes NCF, then, offering to aggregate such debts and securitize them, much as mortgages are securitized. Beautiful, right?

"Two of National Century's largest clients have sought Chapter 11 protection from their creditors, while the dubious status of two of the company's bond deals worth $3.3 billion has set off a spate of threatened legal action against National Century, J. P. Morgan Chase, Bank One and other firms involved in the asset-backed securities. Amid the meltdown, National Century's chairman and chief executive, Lance K. Poulsen, quit both posts on Friday and left the company, which is based in Dublin, Ohio."

Ah, there's a little backstory with this Lance Poulson. And with National Century. But first, here's the fishiness in this creature from the depth. This will tell you pretty much all you need to know about the state of corporate creative financing in this "reform" period:

"This complex brew [of bonds based on hospital receivables] began to boil over in May when the Fitch rating agency warned that it might downgrade National Century bonds, which it did in July. It cited "increasing levels of defaulted and rejected receivables" and a lack of information from the company. This made it harder for National Century to issue new bonds, and the company soon ran into trouble finding the money to pay its clients.

In response, National Century began taking money from the reserve funds of two bond trusts � NPF VI and NPF XII. When J. P. Morgan, as trustee for NPF VI, asked for documentation as to how this was acceptable, National Century stopped taking money from NPF VI and eventually replaced it.

But the trustee of NPF XII, Bank One, is said to have made no such demand, so the company took about $300 million from that reserve fund, draining it to almost zero. At first, bondholders assumed the money went to buy new receivables. But in their motion filed in the Franklin County Court of Pleas in Columbus, Ohio, they say Mr. Poulsen admitted using it for other purposes."

Well, well. It turns out that junior, who flunked eighth grade mass, could have done better than bought the mortgage theory. He could have pointed out that hospital receivables are much more volatile, subject to a much higher percentage of defaults and restructurings. And traditionally, such volatility attracts, well, the loan shark -- because sharks are the type to be able to cover their bets with high interest and the threat of immediate violence following non-payment. Mr. Poulson isn't exactly a loan shark, but according to this account by Doug Noland (who writes the Credit Bubble report for Safehaven, a website for contrarian investors), the history of National Century is spotted with shady characters -- or should we say fly specked?

First, the sentence about the use of NPFXII funds in the Times story is confusing. It implies that the bondholders would be fine with the draining of the reserve fund to invest in further receivables. But of course, that is not what a reserve fund is for -- it is to serve as a barrier against the risk of defaults.

"From Dow Jones� David Feldheim: �No ratings Rx appears in sight for National Century Financial Enterprises (NCFE) amid concerns about revenue streams backing some of its securitizations. In the 11-plus years since its inception, NCFE has become the largest financier of healthcare receivables, according to its spokesman Jim Nickell. Over this period NCFE has securitized in excess of $6 billion of healthcare receivables, and it has bought substantially more than that from providers. It has also drawn recent scrutiny from the ratings agencies who rate those securitizations. Fitch Ratings said over the weekend that it has been informed by interested parties that NCFE directed the trustee to reroute certain funds intended for the NPF XII reserve accounts in order to fund the purchase of new receivables. �The company's apparent willingness to disregard the documents and commit such a serious breach, causes Fitch to question NCFE�s viability.��

Second, how did this company get so big, and why has nobody heard of it? One of the results of "restructuring" investment regulations in the eighties and nineties is that everybody gets to play investment bank. Without any pesky regulators looking at what you are doing. So anywhere cash is being transferred, somebody, somewhere, is trying to get a piece of that. Securitizing, slicing and dicing issues -- it is a wondrous way to make money, as long as you aren't on the other end when the stuff starts coming apart.

According to Noland, the company, founded in 91, has ties to a group of other companies, many of them connected to one Steven Scott. Scott ran a company called PhyAmerica Physician Group, which was delisted by the NYSE when its stock plummeted to pennies. PhyAmerica seems to be running on money loaned to it by NCF. In 2000, this became an issue, as stockholders sued Scott and Poulson for, as they put it, draining the company: "They alleged that Scott and Lance K. Poulsen, National Century�s president, had an agreement: Poulsen would fund Scott�s spending while Scott �looks the other way while Poulsen improperly diverts the company�s cash into NCFE�s coffers.� Even as the company�s finances deteriorated, PhyAmerica bought one corporate jet for $6.6 million and leased another for $848,000 -- expenses that benefited Scott because he owned the aviation company that provided the jets, shareholders said.� Also from the article: �There was a report on �60 Minutes� accusing�Dr. Steven Scott, of hiring doctors who had been disciplined or sued for malpractice.�

Forbes profiled the 'bearded" Poulson, and found him to be sanguine about NCFE -- at least in October. From Risky Business, on Friday October 11, By Seth Lubove:

"In between the court appearances Poulsen has thrived in his niche, making himself and his partners comfortably wealthy, though in ways that might raise eyebrows among traditional lenders. Poulsen, his wife and other company executives, for instance, have occasionally taken personal stakes in NCFE's borrowers. In addition to lending $107 million to something called Med Diversified as of the end of last year, NCFE also owns 6% of the company, or 5 million shares, while Poulsen personally controls another 109,000 shares of preferred stock. Med Diversified also acquired a company that was 22% owned by Donald Ayers, an NCFE cofounder and Med Diversified director. Med Diversified is dependent on NCFE in more ways than one. It derived $4 million in revenues in its 2001 fiscal year from NCFE for various "consulting services," in addition to being owed another $4.3 million in unpaid invoices from NCFE. Another $2 million in revenues during the same period came from an outfit called Millennium Healthcare, a company owned "indirectly" at the time by NCFE. Med Diversified fared badly anyway. It was delisted from the American Stock Exchange in July after losing $605 million in the past two fiscal years on sales of $296 million."

Medicine, attracting only the most sterling kind of entrepreneur! Noland's Safe Haven articule digs up some other intricate connections between NCF, Poulson, and various schemes, in twisted deals that have the involute structure of Jacobean drama, without the pretty poetry. This comes on the heels of two other medical scandals: one at Health South, and one at Tenet. Well, if hospitals start going bankrupt due to this Ohio case, the newspapers might even have to pay attention to it. We'll see.

Notice

I am not going to be as regular in posting this week, due to a toothache. Actually, three of my back teeth are in death star mode, causing me to suffer the pangs of hell in regular cycles. Like after I eat. Alas, having no money, what is LI to do? Well, this morning we called up the Texas Dental Examiners, who referred us to Texans for Healthy Smiles, who referred us to a clinic that will supposedly process us through the dread labyrinth of paperwork so that we can actually get these teeth extracted. Whether this will work or not is hard to say. If it doesn't, we'll rob a store and give ourselves up, and enjoy the amenities of prison dentistry. Anything to get rid of these molesting molars.

In the meantime, here's a thought from our friend, Tom. He sent us a little Moby Dick like medley of quotes, except not about the great fish. Here's the joke on the board above his office desk.

"The physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizacker told Heideggar the story of a man who spent all his day in a tavern. Asked why, the man replied that it was because of his wife: 'She talks and talks and talks and talks." He was asked, "What does she talk about?" He replied, "Ah, that she doesn't say." Heideggar is supposed to have said, "Yes, that is how it is."

Dope


We know for certain that sight is one of the most rapid actions we can perform. In an instant we see an infinite number of forms, still we only take in thoroughly one object at a time. Supposing that you, Reader, were to glance rapidly at the whole of this written page, you would instantly perceive that it was covered with various letters; but you could not, in the time, recognise what the letters were, nor what they were meant to tell. Hence you would need to see them word by word, line by line to be able to understand the letters. -Leonardo da Vinci

Seeking some calm from the excitements of this week � the injustice meted out to Winona! the latest report on the distribution of stock options during the 90s! und so weiter -- LI has been reading Leo Steinberg�s marvelous essay, Leonardo�s Incessant Last Supper. Steinberg is, as he calls it, a Leonardista. Among the splendors of the book are the photos he has taken, over the years, of the Last Supper. These photos record the changes made to that painting as its slow, inexorable restoration moved glacially forward. Frankly, if the restoration does look like the end page fold-out � and we have no doubt it does � LI suspects that, in another twenty years, we are going to be talking about the Last Supper Disaster. One has only to compare James Major, the second figure to Christ�s left, as he has been �restored� to earlier pictures. The restoration seems to have sentimentalized the painting, and to have created a muddiness where, before, there was a decay. I agree with Jacques Franck:"Ninety per cent of the work has disappeared, and the fact that you repaint 90 per cent is to me something that has not much sense."

This is not, I think, Steinberg�s opinion.

But what interested us, among other things, about Steinberg�s essay was the comparison of readings of the Last Supper. As Steinberg demonstrates, from the eighteenth century to quite recently, a secular interpretation prevailed. The �moment� portrayed in the painting, on this interpretation, was Jesus� revelation that he was going to be betrayed. Goethe was one of the great institutors of this interpretation � although, as a dissident pointed out, in 1903, Goethe depended on a reproduction of The Last Supper by Raphael Morghen that left the wine out of the painting � the wine in the glass before Jesus� upraised right hand. This is crucial to the counter-secular reading. This is how the scene is reported in Matthew, 26:

�19: And the disciples did as Jesus had appointed them; and they made ready the passover.
20: Now when the even was come, he sat down with the twelve.
21: And as they did eat, he said, Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.
22: And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began every one of them to say unto him, Lord, is it I?
23: And he answered and said, He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me.
24: The Son of man goeth as it is written of him: but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it had been good for that man if he had not been born.
25: Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master, is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said.
26: And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body.
27: And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it;
28: For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.
29: But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.�
which was that the consternation at the table was provoked by Jesus�s pronouncement, this is my body, take eat, this is my blood.�

Steinberg traces the rise of the secular interpretation, buoyed by the spirit of Goethe, until the early sixties. But then the second, eucharistic interpretation began to emerge and contest the secularists. The salient fact about the Last Supper is that, at both ends of the table, the disciples register some kind of shock, while, at the very center, Jesus looks preternaturally mild. So what is this contrast? The secularists think that Leonardo has painted a Shakespearian tableau. Jesus� pronouncement, which could be uttered with cunning, or with anger, is uttered, by the son of man, with a sort of shame for the traitor � while the disciples, human all too human, have fallen to debating, among themselves, the crucial question of cultic loyalty. The eucharistics, according to the secularists, can�t account for the appearance of shock among the disciples. But this is because the secularists are thinking of the eucharist as it has been normalized for the last two thousand years. The eucharistics, however, think Leonardo has transported us back to the initial, shocking moment in which a man who these twelve men regarded as the son of God said to them, in effect, this bread, here, and this wine, over here, represent my body and my blood. And I want you to eat these things in order to remember me.

This is a shocking thing to hear. It is so very sexual, so very intimate, it releases a train of wild images in the mind that are normally repressed. It goes way back, saying something like that. There are stone floors of caves, there is firelight, there are night sweats, there is struggle. It forces the person who hears it to really look at the flesh saying it , and know that flesh is the world � that we live in a fully carnal world. The cannibal�s speech is that the mouth that speaks eats other mouths that speak. Words turn flesh, and flesh turns into words, feverishly. This is the effect caught in John 6, where Jesus says:

51: I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
52: The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying, How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
53: Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.
54: Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

The effect of this speech on the disciples is remarked on in verset 60:
60: Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?

So, this is the eucharistic case. But, as the saying is, sometimes Hegel happens. That is, sometimes the thesis and antithesis really do form a synthesis. Steinberg claims that the current consensus has moved to the conjunction of the secularist and eucharistic versions � that in this instance, as the hands go out for bread and wine, as the disciples cluster, as Thomas raises a finger and James Major spreads his arms in amazement, what is happening is a dream condensation, in the classical Freudian sense, of these two events � a Verdichtung. Steinberg does not make the Freudian detour, tempting as it might appear. LI is going to avoid it too � merely referring readers to the Chapter on Dreamwork in the Interpretation of Dreams. http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/chap06a.htm

We are after a different subject, which is: how exactly do we analyze the temporal element in the pictorial? In other words, how is time constituted in the picture?

Well, more on that tomorrow.

Remora

LI was walking up near the University yesterday when we heard our name. It was an old friend. We said, conventionally, how are you doing, and our friend said well, what did you think?
The news had depressed her utterly, she said.
We said, yeah, it sucked.
What are we going to do, she said? I want to move out of the country!
Well, we said, we don't feel that strongly about it. But we are pretty blue all the same. Damn blue.
How about the arctic wildlife refuge, she said.
Uh, we said, just because they are putting Winona in jail shouldn't effect Alaska in particular.
I'm talking about the elections! she said.
Oh, we said.

Yes, LI, with our inverted sense of historical events, was much more impressed by the railroading of Winona Ryder on a trumped up shoplifting charge than by changes in that other factory town, DC.

LI has never found Winona Ryder a fascinating femme de film. But her singling out for this ludicrous circus trial because she looked like she was going to steal items from Sachs Fifth Avenue -- this strikes us as an intolerable injustice. Or rather, it is justice with klieg lights, the justice that comes from lynching a name victim for political effect. And now she faces three years. What did Millikan serve, five? What is Ken Lay going to serve? What is Buddy Ebbers going to serve? Winona's mistake was not to have plundered systematically, with Sachs Fifth stock, rather than purloining a dress and a scarf.

The LA times gives an in-depth, and very industry perspective on the Ryder dust up:

"Actress Winona Ryder may be in for a white-knuckle ride over the next few months, but experts across Hollywood said Wednesday morning's conviction for grand theft and vandalism will not have a long-lasting impact on her career."

Here's the meat of the story:

"Alan Meyer of Sitrick & Co., one of the biggest crisis management firms in the country, said the "injury day" was emblematic of how poorly Ryder's ordeal has been handled from the beginning.

"She was only charged with shoplifting, not felony hit-and-run or child molestation. It should have been a 48-hour story, not a six-month story. Why this wasn't resolved very quickly, I don't understand," Meyer said, adding that the pair of convictions were "a real blow."

"The easiest way out of something like this is to acknowledge you did it and throw yourself on the public's mercy. Show remorse. Be contrite. People love that," he said."

People do love that. The contrition. The talk shows. Barbara. Jay. The recollection, in tranquility, of one's motives in that vague moment. The moment the cops caught one being sucked off in a car. The moment one was found with some crack rock. The moment one drove, drunkenly, in the wrong lane on the Sunset freeway for eleven miles. Those breakdowns, so helpfully glossed by the talk show host, the p.r. guy, the studio head, the compliant Vanity Fair interviewer. The return to grace.

But there are other people -- LI is one of them -- who want our Winona to be defiant. Remember Robert Mitchum. He did his time and implied, at every turn, screw the bastards. So screw Sachs! But W.R. 's Free Winona campaign, and her obvious disdain for the charges, is not going down well in the Industry. The honchos are speaking. The honchos want contrition. They want the image to be, depression, she was out of her mind, the transition between this wierd Beetlejuice girl, this vulnerable punk, the black clothes, and the woman, we've watched her grow up. That is the image. We've watched her, she's part of the family. And so she gets the kleptomania out when she is seventeen. Not thirty one. The honchos want the therapeutic talk ladled on. and this is what they are saying:

"Her publicist, Mara Buxbaum, insists business is booming, but the claim that Ryder was approached this year to star in at least one film could not be independently confirmed.

Buxbaum said Ryder will "definitely not be doing the talk show circuit" after the trial, although the actress probably will sit down at some point for the obligatory tell-all interview."

We were reminded of Zola's Au bonheur des dames, his novel about a Paris department store. If someone is smart -- if LI was smarter -- someone would do the op ed piece, or the column piece, this Sunday in the LA Times, with the potted story of kleptomania. Its origins in the 19th century, the discovery that this, like breast cancer, was a disease of upper class women, and the inference that it must be related to some vice, some decay. All the anger of which upper class women are the recipients from the great mass -- from me, from you -- and the way it forms a warp of unconscious energy, and like all energy sooner or later finds a form. In art, in the novel, in a D.A.'s brief, in a psychologist's treatise.

Au bonheur des dames -- which we can translate, approximately, as What the Ladies Like -- is Zola's novel about a department store. The manager of the store, the insufferable Mouret, has already featured as the boarding house stud in Pot-Bouille -- which outgrosses even contemporary novels. Zola saw that between matter and woman there was a suspicious relationship -- something like love. This has already been castigated in our good old Western tradition -- the horror that accrues to matter as matter was once called idolatry. The idea that a thing possesses a divinity -- the psychological roots of this anxiety aren't explored enough. We are palmed off with stories of human sacrifice, or demons, or whatever -- but didn't Jehovah himself appear in a flame? Actually, a flame, through its de-materializing power, is a brilliant vehicle for a God as schizophrenic about matter as the one in Genesis -- the world is good, but evidently, the genitals of two of his creatures, revealed in all their interesting possibilities by munching on a fruit, are another matter. There's a little pussy and dick in every thing we buy, you know.

So Zola scoped out the buying scene. His klepto is a very proper bourgeois with a name that should remind us of Madame Bovary: Madame de Boves. She has a cowlike presence, and discovering Au bonheur des dames, she is ravished -- raped -- by the material on display -- the silks, the lace, the sheets, the textures, the textiles.

Here's how Zola describes her:

Mme de Boves venait de d�passer la quarantaine. C'�tait une femme superbe, � encolure de d�esse, avec une grande face r�guli�re et de larges yeux dormants, que son mari, inspecteur g�n�ral des haras, avait �pous�e pour sa beaut�.

(Madame de Bove had just passed forty. This was a superb woman, with the mane of a goddess, a large face with regular features, and large sleepy eyes, whose husband, a general inspector of horse stables, had married her for her beauty.)

Zola was nothing if not a gross painter of signs. Boves is close to bovine. Her husband is an inspector of haras -- the stables in which horses are kept. The large sleepy eyes -- the eyes of a cow -- seal the deal: this is one of Zola's animal-people.

She can be aroused, of course. But unlike Nana, she is not a woman of mouth and ass, a woman who, superbly, leaves an odor. Rather, to come out of her animal entrancement, she needs things. It is the store that excites her. It is the department store that eventually leads to her doom. At the end of the book, she is shopping with her daughter. As a clerk goes to take apart a packet of lace, Mme de Boves's daughter turns to speak to her:


Mme de Boves ne r�pondait pas. Alors, la fille, en tournant sa face molle, vit sa m�re, les mains au milieu des dentelles, en train de faire dispara�tre, dans la manche de son manteau, des volants de point d'Alen�on. Elle ne parut pas surprise, elle s'avan�ait pour la cacher d'un mouvement instinctif, lorsque Jouve, brusquement, se dressa entre elles. Il se penchait, il murmurait � l'oreille de la comtesse, d'une voix polie:
- Madame, veuillez me suivre.

(Madame de Boves didn't reply. It was thus that her daughter, in turning her soft face, saw her mother, her hands in the middle of the laces, engaged in making them disappear into the sleave of her coat, this Alencon pattern. She didn't appear surprised, she went forward, instinctively, to hide her mother, when Jouve, brusquely, stood before them. He leaned forward and whispered politely in the ear of the countess: 'Madame, if you could please follow me.")

Those Jouves! Just doing their jobs. But there's something dirty in the whole Sachs deal. We hope, when W.R. does the "obligatory tell all interview," that she doesn't grovel. She was the victim of a put up job, and she should imply that at every turn. And damn the honchos.

Remora

The Election.

LI, of course, hoped that the Republicans would not triumph at the polls. At the same time, LI did not much feel like voting himself. I did. I even voted for Democrats. But I did it with a rotten feeling inside, as though I�d compromised myself. In Texas, the two big dem candidates, Kirk and Sanchez, were nearly unbearable. Kirk ran at times to the right of his opponent, and spent much time attaching himself to Bush � a sort of disavowed, mutant twin to the Commander in Chief. I actually wanted to vote against Bush. I wanted, in other words, a second party to vote for.

Perhaps that is not going to happen in my life time. LI read, on the TAP Blog, a nasty little item about how the election might hinge on the guilty conscience of those who voted for Nader. This is just the kind of DC talk that makes one think of what Napoleon said of the monarchists: they have forgotten nothing, and learned nothing. Or was it Tallyrand? In any case, while Republicans do, indeed, stand for things, the very awful Democratic party got a deserved drubbing for standing for nothing.

To stand for something means that you lose for something. This, of course, seems to elude the thinking of the governing classes. The governing classes, in fact, are convinced, and have been since the seventies, that you have to slip civilization past the yahoos. That is Democratic political thought in a nutshell. The goal of a party should be to generate a set of principles of some sort, so that you can generally predict how the party will act. The goal of the Democratic party, however, has been the opposite, at least for the last twenty five years. Instead, they have pursued the image of the majority. In the pursuit, they have lost their minds. Or rather, among the Democrats, the head long ago seceded from the body. It is a party that expects its grassroots partisans to work ardently for it during election years, so it can betray those partisans the rest of the time. What grassroot Democrat wanted Tom Daschle to roll over for Bush about Iraq? To do that, and then to expect people like Limited Inc to vote for this kind of thing, is rather like inviting one into an abusive marriage, in which years of being beaten up are supposed to be compensated for by flowers on the birthdays. After a while, you drift away. You divorce.

LI thinks that the Democrats have addicted themselves to a delusion that there is a majority. There isn�t. To take positions on an array of existential topics -- and then to figure out how to persuade others to support those positions � that is all there really is to politics. In particular, if your positions are strongly inflected by your sense of justice, the pursuit of the image of the majority is fatal. The leftist party of the future should pursue, instead, its own singularity. When Paul Wellstone paraphrased Barry Goldwater�s campaign autobiography title (The Conscience of a Conservative) for his own campaign autobiography (The Conscience of a Liberal), he was acting on this insight. The whole history of the Democratic Party, however, works against the idea of singularity. The accidental identification of progressive politics and Democrats comes out of the melding together of lefty forces and the Democrats urban and rural patchwork politics under Wilson. As late as 1928, the black vote � or that bit of it allowed through the iron bars of American apartheid � was strongly Republican. The Democrats have always had the managerial, urban view � the view of compromised labor leaders and school teachers � that the important thing is to form a committee and make resolutions. The important thing, that is, is to act in a minor way. To create a little program here, to purvey pills to the elderly. To create a little program there. The incremental mindset is wholly unprepared for the charismatic act � the politics of the acte gratuit. That Bush is not a charismatic man doesn�t matter � he understands, instinctively, the charismatic nature of the times. To oppose him � for let�s be clear, the man is a disaster � requires understanding that landscape. Requires, that is, understanding how to lose. When you stand for nothing, you lose for nothing. Last night, The Democrats lost for nothing.

Remora

Mr. H. Pitt

Harvey Pitt just resigned. And LI would like to find the proper funereal words -- a send-off to this lost soul, whose last week was spent investigating himself, much like a Flann O'Brien character in one of the antsier novels.

Pitt should never have been the head of the SEC. He was not just sponsored by Bush, although the media, painting in black and white -- Whistler's colors -- has painted him as a stooge or crony of Bushism. Actually, he is a stooge or crony of the set of interlocking vested interests that briefly got a free ride in the 90s. The Wall Street brokerage houses, elevated bucket shops all; the banks, freed from the Glass Steagall act and acting, in consequence, like the suburban couples in some Updike novel that have just recieved news of the 'sexual revolution' -- i.e., fucking everyone; and the NY establishment, represented by the ever unbearable Democrat, Senator Schumer. Pitt started out as he was programmed to: the plan was to subvert regulation, as the plan had been since the glorious eighties. Alas, he ran into the brick wall of corporate malfeasance, and had to go against his character and present himself as an advocate for stricter regulation and concentrated enforcement. Pitt's conservative allies put up a fight for the man all through the summer. That Pitt's inclination was to go easy on the Street, to back the investment banks and the brokerages against their investors, was not a trait that could be changed in a political instant. LI is firmly on the side of greater transparency and more intervention in the banks vs. investors struggle -- but this is a hard issue to color, ideologically. After all, the investors are often what Marx called rentiers, not by and large a group with which LI has a lot of sympathy. In fact, the weird thing is that the Republicans have been complacently cutting the throats of their own constituency -- a tribal habit we thought more appropriate to Dems.

What counts, for us, is that the social composition of investor capital -- where it comes from -- has changed, significantly during the last twenty years. Investors include billionaires like Buffett and Pickens -- investors include all the old LBO guys, the Kerkorians and such. But investors also include the people with 401(k)s. If we have made a sullen and provisional peace with capitalism, it is always with the codicil that the mechanisms of enrichment common to large enterprises be fair. The SEC is a small part of making those mechanisms fair.
Pitt didn't see it that way.
So farewell. No doubt, we will see you again, being grilled by some greasy suit in Congress. Soon.

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.