Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

I just came from a good lunch with Profs. Epling and Gupta. An interesting question came up. The South progressed remarkably economically and intellectually 1950-2000, integrating with the rest of the US more than it ever had. Was this due to the end of segregation? Or was it due to air conditioning? Both are plausible theories.

How would we test this? One way might be to regress per capita incomes on a time trend, percentage of houses with air conditioners, and voter turnout among blacks, using county level data, if it is available. I wonder if it’s been done.

Remember: the most important thing about the Plame-Wilson kerfuffle is not those two rascals but their supporters in the CIA, the Press, and the Democratic Party. Mark Steyn
writes well about John Kerry:

And what about John F. Kerry? Joe Wilson campaigned with Kerry in at least six states, and claims to have helped with the candidate’s speeches. He was said to be a senior foreign policy adviser to the senator. As of Friday, Wilson’s Web site, restorehonesty.com, was still wholly paid for by Kerry’s presidential campaign.

Here is the crucial paragraph:

Some of us are on record as dismissing Wilson in the first bloom of his
unmerited celebrity. But John Kerry was taken in — to the point where he signed
him up as an adviser and underwrote his Web site. What does that reveal about
Mister Nuance and his superb judgment? He claims to be able to rebuild America’s
relationships with France, and to have excellent buddy-to-buddy relations with
French political leaders. Yet anyone who’s spent 10 minutes in Europe this last
year knows that virtually every government there believes Iraq was trying to get
uranium from Africa. Is Kerry so uncurious about America’s national security he
can’t pick up the phone to his Paris pals and get the scoop firsthand? For all
his claims to be Monsieur Sophisticate, there’s something hicky and parochial in
his embrace of an obvious nutcake for passing partisan advantage.

That puts it well: Kerry and his advisors have been fooled and embarassed by an opportunist, because they wanted to make America look bad to help win an election. The thought of a President Kerry is scary. We’ll go back to the Clinton days of CIA chiefs and National Security Advisors who care so little about security that they even break federal laws by taking classified materials home with them. (Sandy Berger stole 9-11 documents, and is the subject of a criminal investigation right now.)

I’ve used this weblog mainly as a commonplace book, a place to record my
thoughts. At the same time, I like having other people see my ideas, especially
if they disseminate them to others. And, I would like to be able to use my
audience to get comments on my ideas and to ask questions.

For example, I am just working on a paper on optimal parking lot size, and I just
thought of an idea that might be worth mentioning. A classic example in some
branch of mathematics is a hypothetical town in which the opening of a new
connecting road slows down traffic immensely, because of the bottleneck it
creates. But I can’t remember the source. Do any of my readers? If I had the
readership of Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, I could probably find a reference.
This is a great advantage of weblogs, because a magazine writer with a
readership of a million would *not* be able to get that kind of help from his
readers.

So, I would like more readers. But at the same time, I want to write about
things that interest me, and not many people have the same interests as I do.
How many people combine conservatism, Calvinism, economistical thinking,
Midwestern pride, and pleasure in statistics? Three, maybe?

So I will try a test. I will set up a second weblog. One weblog will be for
current affairs, and the other will be for everything else. I intend to try
doing some cross-listing, but we’ll see how well that works. The original weblog
address at

http://www.rasmusen.org/x/

will be for Everything Else, and a new address at

http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/c/

will be for Current Affairs.

The search engine box for each will search both of them (which is why I have the
peculiar URL for the Current Affairs blog).

I’ve used this weblog mainly as a commonplace book, a place to record my
thoughts. At the same time, I like having other people see my ideas, especially
if they disseminate them to others. And, I would like to be able to use my
audience to get comments on my ideas and to ask questions.

For example, I am just working on a paper on optimal parking lot size, and I just
thought of an idea that might be worth mentioning. A classic example in some
branch of mathematics is a hypothetical town in which the opening of a new
connecting road slows down traffic immensely, because of the bottleneck it
creates. But I can’t remember the source. Do any of my readers? If I had the
readership of Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit, I could probably find a reference.
This is a great advantage of weblogs, because a magazine writer with a
readership of a million would *not* be able to get that kind of help from his
readers.

So, I would like more readers. But at the same time, I want to write about
things that interest me, and not many people have the same interests as I do.
How many people combine conservatism, Calvinism, economistical thinking,
Midwestern pride, and pleasure in statistics? Three, maybe?

So I will try a test. I will set up a second weblog. One weblog will be for
current affairs, and the other will be for everything else. I intend to try
doing some cross-listing, but we’ll see how well that works. The original weblog
address at

http://www.rasmusen.org/x/

will be for Everything Else, and a new address at

http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/c/

will be for Current Affairs.

The search engine box for each will search both of them (which is why I have the
peculiar URL for the Current Affairs blog).

Here’s a post from
HREF="http://junkyardblog.transfinitum.net/archives/week_2004_07_18.html#003295"
>Junkyard Blog speculating on who in the CIA might be giving Joe Wilson
quote to the press.

Googling
Valerie Plame, the top two sites I found were
The Nation article and
Mark Kleiman, both from 2003. They make amusing reading now that Wilson’s credibility has been busted.
The Weekly Standard has an excellent summary of his lies.

In May,
I commented on the
atrocities by Canadian and Belgian U.N. peacekeepers in Somalia, which were
markedly worse than what American soldiers did in Abu Ghraib prison. Now, in
the Congo,
yet another example of atrocities by U.N. peacekeeping forces is ignored by the
mainstream press. Via Instapundit comes
HREF="http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/Politics/0,,2-7-12_1556446,00.ht
ml"> this story:

Johanneswburg - The defence ministry says it has no knowledge of a United
Nations report detailing sexual attacks on minors by South African soldiers
stationed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

There have been allegations of 50 cases of sexual attacks on minors carried out
by Monuc, the United Nations mission to the DRC, in Bunia in the north-east of
the country over the past year.

…

The Star newspaper reported on Monday that a South African colonel in Goma
allegedly sexually molested his young male interpreter. Investigations by the UN
found that he had requested male interpreters under the age of 18 since the
start of his mission.

He was repatriated to South Africa, but there was no indication that he was
investigated or prosecuted on his return.

The UN probe follows an investigation by The Independent in London, and a cable
sent last month from the Monuc office in Kinshasa to the UN headquarters in New
York detailing sexual abuses against minors.

As always, whether we’re looking at HREF="http://rasmusen.org/x/archives/w/04.06.22a.htm ">Catholic priests, bad
service by an airline, the Waco massacre, Ruby Ridge, or HREF="http://rasmusen.org/x/archives/w/04.06.16c.htm"> Abu Ghraib, the thing
to focus on is not the evil or incompetence of those doing the bad things, since
all large organizations will contain bad people. Rather, we should focus on the
response of the organization– whether it punishes the evildoers, rewards them,
or does nothing. South Africa and the U.N. are looking bad in this respect.

I was in Urbana-Champaign over the weekend for the HREF="http://www.paultravis.com/four-square/register.htm">Worldwide Foursquare
International Conference, or, more accurately, the 2004 Uni High Reunion
for the classes of ‘76 to ‘87. I’ll post more on that later, but it being
Sunday, I’ll try to post on a religious theme before I go to bed. We went to
the
Hessel Park Church (Christian
Reformed), since it had a nice website and the Christian Reformed Church is
fairly sound, despite its unfortunate concession to feminism a few years of
allowing women to be elders. Either Pastor Bossenbroek or somebody else there
has administrative talent, I deduce from numerous details such as photos on
the wall, an elaborate website, the idea of people bringing up food offerings,
page numbers for bible readings, a lady bringing pictures books for my girls to
look at during the service, dual offering plates for church and deacon’s,
unusually beautiful but inexpensive art features, etcetera, all unusual in a
small church with a congregation of only about 60.

The sermon was pretty good. It was on the Martha and Mary story in Luke 10 [+/-]ERROR: You have exceeded your quota of 500 requests per day. Please contact the developer of this application if you have questions. (If you're the developer and have questions about this error message, please contact Crossway.)
:

38 Now it came to pass, as
they went, that he entered
into a certain village: and a
certain woman named Martha
received him into her house.
39 And she had a sister
called Mary, which also sat at
Jesus’ feet, and heard his
word.
40 But Martha was
cumbered about much
serving, and came to him, and
said, Lord, dost thou not care
that my sister hath left me to
serve alone? bid her therefore
that she help me.
41 And Jesus answered and
said unto her, Martha,
Martha, thou art careful and
troubled about many things:
42 But one thing is needful:
and Mary hath chosen that
good part, which shall not be
taken away from her.

This is a profound story, as worth writing a book about as the Abraham
Sacrificing Isaac story that is behind Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
I hadn’t made the connection with the two episodes immediately preceding it in
Luke 10 [+/-]ERROR: You have exceeded your quota of 500 requests per day. Please contact the developer of this application if you have questions. (If you're the developer and have questions about this error message, please contact Crossway.)
, which are the Certain Lawyer and the Good Samaritan:

25 And, behold, a certain
lawyer stood up, and tempted
him, saying, Master, what
shall I do to inherit eternal life?
26 He said unto him, What is
written in the law? how
readest thou?
27 And he answering said,
Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and
with all thy soul, and with all
thy strength, and with all thy
mind; and thy neighbour as
thyself.
28 And he said unto him,
Thou hast answered right: this
do, and thou shalt live.

These are all closely connected to the fundamental issue of Faith versus Works.
The first command is to love God, but the second command is to love thy
neighbor, and they are both commands. Moreover, “If you listen and don’t act on
what is said, then you didn’t really hear it,” something very akin to the idea
of Jonathan Edwards that communication requires not just that the Sender
transmit some information, but that the Receiver care enough to receive what is
sent. How can anyone tell whether the Receiver has done that? — By how the
Receiver behaves after the information is sent.

I thought about two personal applications. One is the giving of an
economics seminar. Suppose I am presenting a paper at Anonymous University, and
they treat me royally, picking me up at the airport, feeding me caviar, and
housing me in a five-star hotel– but although they clap after my seminar,
nobody asks a single question or argues over a single point in my paper. I will
feel deflated, not elated. They weren’t listening. But if at Unknown University
they take me to McDonald’s for the seminar dinner, house me at the Motel Eight,
and cut off the discussion at exactly 5 p.m. even though I’m not finished, but
they argue every point and ask all the right questions, then I will feel my trip
was worthwhile.

The second was to worrying about noisy kids during the service. Since this
church was too small to have a Sunday School (just a nursery for the very little
ones such as my Benjamin and Lily), Amelia and Elizabeth stayed with me and
Helen during the entire service– as opposed to leaving just before the sermon,
their normal practice. Martha would worry about keeping control of them lest
they bother everyone else. Mary would–perhaps– let them distract, and focus on
God. So perhaps I should let them bother people more.

Since they stayed for Communion, I tried explaining it to them (despite I
Corinthians 14 [+/-]ERROR: You have exceeded your quota of 500 requests per day. Please contact the developer of this application if you have questions. (If you're the developer and have questions about this error message, please contact Crossway.)
: 34-35, ”
Let your women keep
silence in the churches: for it
is not permitted unto them to
speak; but they are
commanded to be under
obedience, as also saith the
law.
And if they will learn any
thing, let them ask their
husbands at home: for it is a
shame for women to speak in
the church.”) I was gratified that Amelia drew the attached picture. It depicts
some people who are happy because Jesus let his body be killed for them.

Clayton Cramer refers us to a marvellous website of slogans for conservative bumper
stickers and protest signs. Maybe I’ll add more later, when I have more time. See the
thumbnail images at
www.protestwarrior.com.

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"120 " align= left >

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Via
Instapundit, I found
kimberly Swygert’s list of logical fallacies using IQ testing as a running
example, she having been inspired by Nizkor’s list of logical
fallacies, which uses Holocaust Denial for its examples. I’ve edited down her post to
the version below, not bothering with ellipses.

Appeal to an Unnamed Authority.

This fallacy is committed when a person asserts that a claim is true because an expert
or authority makes the claim and the person does not actually identify the expert. Since
the expert is not named or identified, there is no way to tell if the person is actually
an expert. Unless the person is identified and has his expertise established, there is no
reason to accept the claim.

As in, “Critics say tests are biased toward minorities.” Simple, to the point - and
wrong.

* “Early psychometricians were white men, so they must have been racist.” ( "http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html">Ad Hominem fallacy.)

* “Most teachers oppose standardized testing, so it must be wrong.” ( "http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-belief.html">Appeal to Belief
and Biased
Sample fallacy.)

* “This standardized test upset an elementary school student, therefore it is wrong.”
(Appeal to
Pity fallacy, at which Michael Winerip is an expert.)

* “I don’t take tests well, so there’s no way the SAT could predict my college
grades.” (
Relativist Fallacy.)

* “It was in the news this week that there was a scoring error on the PRAXIS; ETS must
make a lot of those errors.” (Spotlight fallacy.)

* “You’re a psychometrician, so of course any argument you make in support of
testing must be taken with a grain of salt.” (Circumstantial Ad
Hominem, not to mention surreal.)

* The “Live By the Statistics, Die By the Statistics” argument.

Evidence suggest X cannot be true, thus, Y must be true regardless of evidence.

This occurs when testing critics argue the inappropriateness of using a standardized
test for predictive purposes, allegedly because the correlation of the test score with
the dependent variable is “too low,” but then suggest alternatives (such as interviews or
essays) with no corresponding data to show that these alternatives are better
predictors (as demonstrated here). This seems like a twisted
alternative to the Burden of Proof fallacy; because testing critics have (they believe)
provided proof that a test is not good enough, this relieves them of any obligation to
provide proof that the alternatives they suggest are any good.

* The “Emotionally-charged Yet Undefined Word” fallacy.

X is true, even though no one knows what X is.

The obvious example here is bias, a word which is used in every article
critical of standardized tests, yet is rarely properly defined.

* The “800-Pound Gorilla In the Room” fallacy.

The cause of A must be anything other than what is most awkward to admit is the
cause of A.

This is related to the Confusing Cause and Effect fallacy, in which one assumes that
because A and B regularly occur together, A is the cause of B, and the Post Hoc fallacy, in which A
occurs before B, therefore A must be the cause of B. But in the testing critic version,
even when A and B always occur together and A always predates B, it must be true that A
cannot be the cause of B. This happens when someone observes that, for example,
poor teaching based on ill-defined concepts and “progressive” ideas often predate poor
test scores, yet testing critics will claim that home life, discipline issues - indeed,
anything except the curriculum - must be the cause of the low scores. It hardly
needs to be said that this is also related to the Wishful Thinking
fallacy.

* The “Omniscient Observer” fallacy.

Item X was created for Person A. Person B cannot solve Item X; therefore, Item X
is not appropriate for Person A.

I’m thinking here of the logical fallacy that led reporters and observers to assume
that because Governor Bush (who hasn’t taken geometry in 30 years and doesn’t use the
stuff in daily life) couldn’t answer an FCAT geometry item on the
spot, he has no right to insist that Florida’s high-schoolers take the test.

In previous posts such as
HREF="http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/000030.html">this one I’ve
discussed other aspects of the Plame-Wilson affair, but I just noticed that the
January 2001
Vanity Fair article has some evidence on the honest of
Valerie Plame herself. Early in the article it says,

On the third or fourth date, he says, they were in the middle of a “heavy
make-out” session when she said she had something to tell him. She was very
conflicted and very nervous, thinking of everything that had gone into getting
her to that point, such as money and training.

She was, she explained, undercover in the C.I.A. “It did nothing to dampen my
ardor,” he says. “My only question was: Is your name really Valerie?”

Later in the article it says, in commenting on Novak’s column that said Plame
worked for the CIA:

Plame herself thought instantly that the leak was illegal. Even members of her
family did not know what she did.

I see an inconsistency. Plame meets a consultant at a party at the Turkish
embassy, falls for him immediately (see the rest of the article), and tells him
about her job on the fourth date. But she doesn’t tell “members of her own
family”, and she is appalled when a journalist somehow finds out and says she
works for the CIA. Maybe if the journalist had gotten his information from a
“heavy
make-out” session instead, she wouldn’t have been so upset.

Joseph Wilson is an opportunistic liar of no great interest in himself, but
his story opens up interesting questions about the CIA and about the theoretical
difficulties of managing bureaucrats. As I recount in earlier posts such as HREF="http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/000030.html">this one, when Vice-
President Cheney tried to prod it into action on investigating the possible
Iraq-Niger connection, the CIA chose an anti-Administration activist who is
affiliated with a pro-Islamic think tank and was a political appointee of the
previous, Democratic Administration to investigate. Moreover, the CIA seems not
to have required him to sign an agreement not to disclose his secret mission to
the New York Times, despite knowing that he loves publicity, and the CIA was
strangely willing to confirm that his wife, Valerie Plame, was categorized as a
secret operative, and unwilling to disclose that she suggested her husband for
the job. What are we to make of this?

The January 2001
Vanity Fair article has some useful data. First: Vice-
President Cheney (a proxy for President Bush) thought the CIA was doing a bad
enough job that he wanted to see their raw data rather than trust that their
analysis had anything backing it up, and that he visited the CIA in person to
try to get them moving:

According to an October 27, 2003, story by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker,
there seemed to be a tendency by Cheney’s office, among others, to bypass the
analysts and use raw intelligence given directly to the administration.

…

Cheney and his chief of staff, Lewis Libby, visited the C.I.A. several times at
Langley and told the staff to make more of an effort to find evidence of weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq and to uncover Iraqi attempts to acquire nuclear
capabilities. One of the people who objected most fervently to what he saw as
“intimidation,” according to one former C.I.A. case officer, was Alan Foley,
then the head of the Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control
Center. He was Valerie Plame’s boss. (Foley could not be reached for comment.)

What is “intimidation” to the employee, of course, is “criticism for
laziness”
and “pressure to uncover past mistakes” to the boss. I had a good session with
my PhD students today, one of whom is working on a mathematical model of
bureaucracy and term limits, and how policy results from the interaction
between voters, politicians, and bureaucrats. He has focussed on modelling
policy preferences as a continuum between Liberal and Conservative, but I
realize that there are two other dimensions worth his investigation. I can
summarize these in the context of the CIA: “A: Let CIA employees play golf all
day” versus “B: Make CIA employees work long hard hours” and “A: Let sleeping
dogs lie” versus “B: Uncover past CIA mistakes”. The CIA prefers option A in
each case, and the politician–whether Democrat or Republican– prefers B.
Since each side has power, the ultimate policy will be somewhere in between.

It wasn’t just Wilson who lied– it was the CIA. Again, from Vanity Fair:

Phelps and Royce [of the July 22,2003 Newsday story] also cited a “senior
intelligence official” who said that Plame
did not recommend her husband for the Niger job, adding, “There are people
elsewhere in the government who are trying to make her look like she was the one
who was cooking this up, for some reason. I can’t figure out what it could be.
We paid his (Wilson’s) airfare. But to go to Niger is not exactly a benefit.
Most people you’d have to pay big bucks to go there.”

Here is what this looks like to me. There are widespread indications that
the CIA is incompetent. Vice President Cheney was pressuring the CIA to do a
better job. The CIA decided to fight back. They are, after all, experts in
information and disinformation. So they gave Wilson the Niger mission to
simultaneously pretend they were making efforts to investigate and to create a
news story to embarass Cheney.

Both sides– the Administration and the CIA– knew this was just one battle in
a bigger war. President Bush has been careful to praise the CIA over and over,
despite the obviously bad job it has done, despite the embarassment it creates
for him, and despite its higher levels being determined by the Clinton
Administration for 8 years and by a
Clinton appointee even after that. Why? Because Bush is a smart administrator.
He knows that the CIA is a tough agency to discipline, especially when foreign
affairs require it to function well in the short run. Any kind of reform of any
organization is going to hurt short-run performance in exchange for helping
long-run performance. Sometimes the short run is just too important to
sacrifice. Moreover, the CIA is well positioned to fight back. Its activities
are secret, so it is hard to disclose incompetence to the public, and the CIA
can badly hurt the Administration in two ways– by purposely giving it bad or
incomplete information so the Administration later looks foolish, and by leaking
embarassing information to the press. It can also claim that if the
Administration tries to make it more effective that the Administration is
bringing politics into what is an agency staffed by people with no opinions of
their own, pure technocrats working for the good of the country. The CIA is
uniquely positioned to make this claim– they can say that they deserve very big
budgets and have done extremely good work, they just can’t give any evidence of
it, because that would reveal secrets to the enemy.

Of course, the main enemy may be the taxpayer, but that is left unsaid.

So– in this case, the CIA made it clear that if someone from the Administration
messed with them even in a small way, they’d hit him hard and they’d be quite
willing to hit below the belt. That is especially important because talk of
fundamental overhaul of the agency is in the air– even reorganization that
would prevent the CIA Director from being such a defender of his bureaucracy–
and such talk has to be stopped before it gets far.

Why, then, did Cheney leave himself open to this kind of attack? He is an old
hand at bureaucracy, after all.

(a) He does want to get results with bureaucrats, and wants to have reputation
for toughness. He’s worked with the Defense Department, one of the toughest
agencies, and has learned that fear works better than love.

(b) He is in a stronger position than most vice-presidents, because he was
chosen for his talent rather than for political advantage. Bush clearly chose
him because he wanted a smart senior advisor with lots of experience– there’s
no other reason to choose a Wyoming oil industry executive with no political
constituency. The typical VP is someone like Quayle, Gore, or Edwards, who is
chosen to give a slight advantage in an election and who therefore is

dispensable after the election is over.

(c) Cheney is hard to scare. He is used to insult, used to running big
organizations, and cares more about his legacy than about winning the next
election. No doubt he would cheerfully step down as VP if Bush wanted him to–
it is not a stepping stone to something else for him.

Thus, this episode may give us some insight into the perils to be faced in
administrative reform.

Here’s a fuller bio than I had in HREF="http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/000030.html"> my earlier post,
based on information mostly from
PBS (I am not quoting
them)

1988 to 1991: Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S.
Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. During “Desert Shield” he was the acting Ambassador
and was responsible for the freeing of several hundred American hostages. He was
the last official American to meet with Saddam Hussein before “Desert Storm. He
was number two, in charge of administrative matters, to April Glaspie, the
career diplomat who it seems in July 1990 made Saddam think the U.S. would not mind
if he invaded Kuwait and has not held an ambassador-level job since. She
left on vacation later that month, leaving Wilson in charge, and after Saddam
invaded Kuwait a few weeks later she didn’t return to Iraq. The Air Phase of
the First Gulf War started in January 1991.

1992-1995: U.S. Ambassador to the

Gabonese Republic and to the Democratic Republic of Sao Tome and Principe from
1992 to 1995 (one ambassador for those two countries is standard)

1995-1997: Political Advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of United States
Armed Forces, Europe

June 1997
- July 1998:
Special Assistant to the President and Senior
Director for African Affairs at the National Security Council

(more…)

Why don’s we have the simple technology needed for electronic books? What is
needed seems rather simple, technologically:

We need a small hinged screen that looks just like a conventional book,
with a slot
into which the user can insert a small memory RAM card (say, 8M) containing
plain ascii texts. The device would have software that would divide the text up
into pages. When you reach the end of page 1, you would hit a button at the
bottom right-hand corner that would refresh the left screen with page 3 while
you are reading on page 2. When you get to the end of page 2, you’d hit a button
that would refresh the right screen with page 4. On the cover would be other
dedicated buttons that would allow you to go directly to any page number of
your choice (you’d hold it down a page numbers would whiz past until you got to
the one you wanted). There would be no ON/OFF button– that would be one just
by opening and closing the book, with a timer to turn off automatically if you
forget. It would run on two AA batteries, or, if that isn’t enough power, plug
into a wall outlet for recharging.

Notice that in all respects this is as close to a conventional book as
possible. The conventional book is a great design. All it lacks is the ability
to add new texts to a given shell, so that currently if you want to take 20
books on vacation or into your hammock you’ve got too big a pile to carry.

In contrast, the HREF="http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108984193547264011,00.html?mod=
home_inside_today_us">WSJ ($) today tells us of a rather pitiful couple of
new electronic readers:

Now the world’s two biggest consumer-electronics companies — Sony and
Matsushita Electric Industrial, the maker of Panasonic devices — are giving the
digital book a whirl in Japan, though not yet anywhere else.

Both recently started selling electronic readers that let users view a variety
of material downloaded from Internet sites. But despite some attractive services
and compelling technology, a week of testing the Sony Librie and Panasonic
SigmaBook reminded me how great paper still is.

…

Part of the problem is that the Librie display’s response is excruciatingly
slow. “Turning” a page takes a full second, and using the jog wheel to move the
cursor through menus is frustrating. It’s still tolerable if you’re chugging
through a story from start to finish, but returning to a section you’ve read
before is a real slog unless you’ve had the foresight to “bookmark” the page you
want.

Where the Librie really fails is in its handling of digital content. It can only
view content that comes from a site run by Publishing Link, a Sony-affiliated
company with investments from most of Japan’s big publishers. Users download
digital books to their computers from there and then transfer them to the
Librie, …

The article shows a picture of something like a tablet PC, with a zillion
buttons and a single screen. Surely the geeks of HREF="http://www.jnto.go.jp/eng/RTG/RI/kanto/tokyo/akihabara/akihabara.html">
Akibahara can do better than that. I suppose the problem is that they don’t
actually ever read books,having acquired a mistrust for them from their
extensive experience with the uselessness and deception of computer manuals.
Thus, they are trying to make a small computer for reading rather than trying to
imitate the classic book design.

This is part of a general failing of technology geeks: the failure to realize
that the best innovation is one which looks and feels almost exactly like old-
fashioned technology to the user, so there is practically no learning cost and
no risk in buying it. We saw this with PC’s: computer people didn’t realize that
they were successful mainly because most people wanted to buy a glorified
typewriter. We saw it with email too: that is successful because it is almost
the same as writing a letter. The best technology is the technology that is
invisible.

In a
recent post I
discuss the lies of Joseph Wilson IV, the husband of Valerie Plame. One angle
that has not gotten enough attention is why he and his wife wanted him to go on
the mission to Niger. The most likely explanation is that Wilson wanted to make
the President look bad, and planned all along to write his notorious New York
Times op-ed, and that the CIA, for its part, wanted to pretend they were
investigating the Niger-Iraq connection but actually wanted to bury the topic,
because if any connection were found it would make their previous ignorance of
it look bad. That’s the kind of explanation I thought about a year ago when this first
came up.

But there’s another possible explanation, complementary to the first. This
other possibility is that Wilson wanted to go to Niger on a CIA mission in order
to help his consulting business. His wife dutifully proposed it to the CIA,
and her bosses were willing to go along with it as a favor to her, a kind of
bonus payment.

Let’s think about that scenario. It’s hard to get much public evidence, but I
can lay out what we have and what would confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis.

First, let’s look at Wilson’s current job situation.

Clifford May at
NRO tells us:

Wilson spent a total of eight days in Niger “drinking sweet mint tea and meeting
with dozens of people,” as he put it.

…Oddly, too, as an investigator on assignment for the CIA he was not required
to
keep his mission and its conclusions confidential. And for the New York Times
, he was happy to put pen to paper, to write an op-ed charging the Bush
administration with “twisting,” “manipulating” and “exaggerating” intelligence
about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs “to justify an invasion.”

…

In 1991, Wilson’s book jacket boasts, President George H.W. Bush praised Wilson
as “a true American hero,” and he was made an ambassador. But for some reason,
he was assigned not to Cairo, Paris, or Moscow, places where you put the best
and the brightest, nor was he sent to Bermuda or Luxembourg, places you send
people you want to reward. Instead, he was sent to Gabon, a diplomatic backwater
of the first rank.

After that, he says in his memoir, “I had risen about as high as I could in the
Foreign Service and decided it was time to retire.” Well, that’s not exactly
accurate either. He could have been given a more important posting, such as
Kenya or South Africa, or he could have been promoted higher in the senior
Foreign Service (he made only the first of four grades). Instead, he was
evidently (according to my sources) forced into involuntary retirement at 48.
(The minimum age for voluntary retirement in the Foreign Service is 50.) After
that, he seems to have made quite a bit of money — doing what for whom is
unclear and I wish the Senate committee had attempted to find out.

Actually, I wonder whether we know if he “made quite a bit of money”. He seems
to be driving a Jaguar and wearing fancy clothes, but when somebody is a liberal
white Democrat with a name like “Joseph Wilson IV” and a career in the Foreign
Service, you wonder if there might be some inherited WASP money there. Against
this theory, the
Middle East
Institute Media Resources tells us that

Ambassador Wilson was raised in California and graduated from the University of
California at Santa Barbara in 1972.

(Note, by the way, that this website, dated 2002, also says “He is married to
the former Valerie Plame and has two sons and two daughters.” He made no secret
of his marriage to someone whose supposed job sounds awfully like a CIA cover
job. )

PBS says

Currently, Wilson is CEO of JCWilson International Ventures, Corp., a firm
specializing in Strategic Management and International Business Development. He
is also an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington DC.

A forum had a caller
asking him what he actually does for a living:

It seems, too that he is a “Strategic Advisor” to the
CPS :

Corporate and Public Strategy Advisory Group (CPS) is a consultancy company
providing strategic advice in public affairs and business and investment
development, to the public and private sectors.

CPS actually seems to be a Turkish consulting firm, as a glance at
its personnel shows.
Why is Wilson linked to them? Maybe he’s knows a lot about Turkey too. Or maybe
they’re eager to have a former U.S. Ambassador on their masthead, and he’s
willing to sell his name cheap.

Those are our facts. What can we make of them? Well, here are my
speculations. WASPy liberal Joseph Wilson IV graduated from Santa Barbara in
1972 and didn’t want to dirty his fingers with a job in business, so he went
into the Foreign Service. He didn’t do terribly well there, and was eased out at
age 48, two years before the earliest voluntary retirement age. What was he to
do? He kicked around in various political appointments in the Clinton
Administration for a few years, he put up his shingle as a consultant, and he
did odd jobs for CPS and anyone else he could get work from. In America, even if
you’re rich, you’re supposed to have a job if you’re under age 65. If you can’t
find a job or don’t want to, the conventional way out is to call yourself a
consultant and change the subject if people rudely ask you exactly what being
a consultant means.

But you know that some consultants actually make money, and that if you are a
consultant on political matters, one way to earn money is by seeming to have
important contacts in government. Your wife is one such contact, but she’s
pretty far down the totem pole. Nonetheless, she can help. She can get you a gig
visiting a foreign capital– it’s only Niger, but you’re desperate– as a
representative of the CIA, on a mission of the highest importance. Your air fare
is paid, as is the bill at the one decent hotel in Niger (only about 100 bucks
a night, at the HREF="http://niamey.hotelkey.com/hotel/hotel_sofitel_niamey_gaweye/niamey/niamey
/niger/africa/47399/en">Hotel Sofitel I’m guessing). That doesn’t matter
much, though, and neither does the fact that you can’t get paid anything because
that would violate the federal anti-nepotism law,
5 USC Sec. 3110. What matters is that you come back to
America and, since somehow you didn’t sign any nondisclosure agreement, when
people ask what you did last year, you can say, “Oh, lots of stuff. For example,
when the CIA needed to send someone to Africa to check on possible uranium sales
to Iraq, they naturally thought of me, and after some thought I agreed to take
the time to go, since I do like to serve my country even now that I’ve joined
the private sector.”

Is this part of his motivation? I don’t know. You’ve got the same facts as I do
now. I still think the “Get Bush” motivation– which, note, has also been a huge
source of publicity and income for him– is the main thing. But 8 days in Africa
would be worth it for the boasting value alone, whether that value came back in
actual consulting contracts or just in preserving one’s self-respect as a man
ashamed of involuntary early retirement.

This hypothesis could easily be disproved if it was false. What we would need
is a copy of Wilson’s tax returns or some other measure of how he is spending
his time. If he is making lots of money from consulting and seems to have more
business than he can handle, the hypothesis is false. If, on the other hand, he
isn’t doing much business at all, and is spending a lot of time at the golf
course, then the hypothesis becomes more plausible.

If the hypothesis is true, a new question arises. It would certainly be
unethical for his wife to have gotten him a CIA consulting gig just for their
own private purposes when she knew he wouldn’t do the best job of it, but would
it be illegal? It would be if he were paid cash, but he was not. Suppose,
though, that she plainly admitted that he was given the job for the purpose of
helping him get private consulting contracts. Would that be illegal? I don’t
know.

Via Daps Lyrics, here are the words to a
Tracy Lawrence song I like, “Paint
Me A Birmingham”

He was sitting’ there, his brush in hand
Painting’ waves as
they danced, upon the sand

With every stroke, he brought to life

The deep blue
of the ocean, against the morning’ sky

I asked him if he only painted ocean
scenes

He said for twenty dollars, I’ll paint you anything

Could you Paint Me A Birmingham

Make it look just the way I planned

A little
house on the edge of town

Porch going’ all the way around

Put her there in the
front yard swing

Cotton dress make it, early spring

For a while she’ll be, mine
again

If you can Paint Me A Birmingham

He looked at me, with knowing eyes

Then took a canvas from a bag there by his
side

Picked up a brush, and said to me

Son just where in this picture would you
like to be

And I said if there’s any way you can

Could you paint me back into
her arms again?

Could you Paint Me A Birmingham

Make it look just the way I planned

A little
house on the edge of town

Porch going’ all the way around

Put her there in the
front yard swing

Cotton dress make it, early spring

For a while she’ll be, mine
again

If you can Paint Me A Birmingham

Paint Me A Birmingham

Make it look just the way I planned

A little house on the
edge of town

Porch going’ all the way around

Put her there in the front yard
swing

Cotton dress make it, early spring

For a while she’ll be, mine again

If
you can Paint Me A Birmingham

Oh paint me a Birmingham

The music is important, of course. Poetry seems to be in the doldrums since 1950 or so, just like classical music. Could it be that the talent that would have gone into both has gone into writing popular songs instead? That’s where the money is, and someone with talent can do equally good work either place.

Some might deny this, and say that popular music is no place for an artist, because the masses won’t buy good music. Suppose we grant the premise– that the masses like bad songs better than good songs. Although I’m an economist, and economists usually are too bound to the idea of “consumer sovereignty”– that consumer decisions cannot be criticized on grounds of taste– I am quite willing to abandon the idea in contexts like this. But let’s think about the implications of consumers not being willing to pay as much for artistic music as for schlock.

The key is to make the right comparison. Suppose Artist A is trying to write good, artistic songs for the masses. He will of course earn far far less than Artist B, equally talented, who prostitutes himself to write bad, schlocky songs for the masses. But that is not the proper comparison. Rather, we must compare Artist A with Artist C, who is trying to write good, artistic songs, but in the venue of classical music. I bet Artist A will make far more money than Artist C. He will certainly make more money from royalties, and the only question is whether Artist C makes enough from subsidies from nonprofits and government to come anywhere close. If you’re writing good music, maybe it won’t sell as well as bad, but if the mass market is a thousand times bigger than the classical market (for newly composed music, that is), a conservative estimate, then you can do far better with a 1% market share than a classical composer could with a 100% market share (900% better, in fact, in this example).

Steven Landsburg usually makes more sense than he does in the
Slate post in which he discusses the minimum wage. He makes three claims that seem to me wrong. The claims are (1) and (3) in my paraphrase):

1. Published studies of the effect of the minimum wage on employment cannot be trusted because of a selection effect: a study which found no effect would not be published, but a study which found a study due to a trick in the data *would* get published.

2. “It is almost impossible to maintain the old argument that minimum wages are bad for minimum-wage workers.”

3. A minimum wage increase will hurt employers.

First, let’s have some discussion of the theory. Why do economists think that an increase in the minimum wage reduces employment? Assume some employers are actually paying the minimum wage before the increase (that is, we don’t have a minimum wage of $.25/hour in an economy where nobody works for less than $5.00/hour anyway.) Consider three types of employers:

1. Employer A does not change the number of hours of worker time he buys when the minimum wage goes up.

2. Employer B reduces the number of hours of worker time he buys when theminimum wage goes up.

3. Employer C *increases* the number of hours of worker time he buys when the minimum wage goes up.

How many employers of each type will there be? Lots of type A, and lots of Type B, I would think– or, if you like, at least a *few* of Type B. But I would expect zero employers of type C. Why would any employer react to minimum wage increases by hiring more workers? If he is so generous as to like to give away money, he would have done that even before the minimum wage increase. Thus, there will be some employers who don’t react, and some who reduce employment, so on average employment will fall.

The theory is therefore unequivocal: people will be working fewer hours if the minimum wage is increased.

But how big will the reduction in hours be? That is the real question, and it might be very small, especially in the short run. If we increase the minimum wage from $6.00 to $7.00 today, employment might well be unchanged tomorrow. Even over six months, it might not change much, if managers need time to ponder, for example, whether it is worth cutting back on the hours a fast-food restaurant is open. Much of the impact will occur in the long run– over a period of several years– as employers decide not to open new outlets or not to bother refurbishing old outlets whose profitability has been hurt by the higher wages. In the meantime, old outlets may keep on operating with the same shop hours even if the wage is higher, given that the other costs of the shop are sunk already.

Finally, we must keep in mind that the theory just says that employers will hire less labor, not that they will hire fewer workers. A fast food restaurant might go from 30 employees at 6 hours per employee down to 30 employees at 5 hours per employee. That keeps employment exactly the same, but labor hours have fallen from 180 hours to 150 hours, the equivalent of firing 5 of the 30 employees.

Indeed, an increase in the minimum wage could even *increase* employment. Our
restaurant might go from 30 employees at 6 hours per employee to 40 employees at 4 hours per employee. That is a big increase in employment, but a reduction in hours worked from 180 hours to 160 hours.

This is important in evaluating studies such as that in the famous 1995 book by Card and Krueger. Their original study looked at employment in a clever comparison of New Jersey with neighboring Pennsylvania, two states with different minimum wage laws. They concluded that an increase in the minimum wage had no effect. Taken literally, their statistical results seem to show that the increase in the minimum wage in New Jersey *increased* employment, but they don’t push that conclusion, since they don’t have a theory for it. Indeed, the result is so odd as to cast doubt on their entire study, because it suggests that unknown to them, something else entirely different was happening in New Jersey that coincided with the minimum wage increase.

Or, it might be that restaurants went from 30 employees at 6 hours each to 40 employees at 4 hours each as I suggested above. Neumark and Wascher (American Economic Review, 2000) take a look at hours instead of employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and come to a different conclusion;
Card and Krueger, (American Economic Review, 2000) reply and criticze Neumark and Wascher.

So it is hard to measure the effect of the minimum wage. Now back to Landsburg’s three points.

1. Published studies of the effect of the minimum wage on employment cannot be trusted because of a selection effect: a study which found no effect would not be published, but a study which found a study due to a trick in the data *would* get published.

Point (1) is nicely hit by a July 9 comment of Jim Glass on
Brad DeLong’s weblog.

Is Landsburg really saying 95% of all studies have found the minimum wage to have no effect on employment — and by so finding were deemed too “uninteresting” to publish, like Card & Krueger? If so, that ought to be easy enough to verify. Calling all studies!

A second, bigger, problem with point (1) is the claim that a study which found no effect could not be published. The conventional wisdom is that the minimum wage does reduce employment, so we’d actually expect selection bias *the other way*. “The minimum wage reduces employment” is a “Dog bites man” story. “The minimum wage does not affect employment” is “Man bites dog”. Card and Krueger got a lot of mileage out of their study precisely because the results were so counter to theory.

A caveat:studies which show no effect would often not get published because editors would rightly be concerned about lack of statistical power– a concept I explain in a recent post of mine. Suppose the data is not good enough to pick up the effect of the minimum wage– even if it is a large effect– because too many other things are going on in the economy that affect employment. Then, a study which cannot reject the null hypothesis of no effect also would not be able to reject the null hypothesis of a large negative effect.

Jacob Levy, at the Volokh Conspiracy, writes about this selection theory. His post prompted me to write this, since the Card-Krueger result has come up in the Indiana Law and Econ Lunch before and since Levy wrote

The econo-bloggers all seem to think Landsburg is basically right about the consensus view among economists.

I’m an economist who dissents from that view. Tyler Cowen has an interesting angle too: just as product quality falls when a price maximum is imposed, so we would expect job quality (e.g., air conditioning) to fall when a wage minimum is imposed.

Also, Steve Bainbridge has a good post where he says,

Being curious as to whether there really was a new consensus to which folks like Sowell and Neumark are just outliers, I did a little digging and came across “Consensus Among Economists: Revisited” by Dan Fuller and Doris Geide-Stevenson, published in the Journal of Economic Education (Fall 2003). They find a decline in agreement among surveyed economists between 1990 and 2000 with respect to the minimum wage: “It is likely that the recent research and debate concerning the effect of a minimum wage increase on employment have shifted economists’ opinion toward less agreement.” Yet, while there has been a shift, in 2000 a plurality of the surveyed economists (45.6%) still agreed with the statement “Minimum wages increase unemployment among young and unskilled workers.” Another 27.9% agreed with provisos, while only 26.5% disagreed. So perhaps there is less of a consensus than some would have you believe.

2. “It is almost impossible to maintain the old argument that minimum wages are bad for minimum-wage workers.”

Jim Glass points us to a Cleveland Fed survey by Neumark, Schweitzer and Wascher (two of them were the critics of the Card-Kreuger study I cited). But I would not rely on the many empirical studies that do find negative employment effects. Finding the long-run effect on hours worked of a 20% increase in the minimum wage is hard to do accurately if at the same time, (1) tax rates are changing, (2) the economy is rising and falling, (3) import competition is increasing or decreasing, (4) big companies that hire lots of low-paid workers are changing their policies in various ways, (5) the criminality of young unskilled workers is rising or falling, (6) schools and junior colleges are changing the quality of the workers they produce…

That is why Card and Krueger tried comparing just two regions in adjacent states– to control for these other things. But with just two states, you end up with the problem that maybe something special about one of the states that is not included in the study is driving the results.

So I find the theory more believable. A standard example of why the theory is compelling is to ask whether you believe the effect of an increase would be small if the increase were from $5.00/hour to $50.00/hour. If you think that big an increase would have an effect, how about from $5.00 to $6.00? From $6.00 to $7.00? From $7.00 to $8.00? … From $49.00 to $50.00? To quote Jim Glass again,

… if we keep changes small enough so we don’t see ourselves doing any visible harm we will be free to imagine we are doing a lot of good!

3. A minimum wage increase will mainly hurt employers.

Brad DeLong caught what’s wrong with this. Employers who hire minimum-wage labor are likely to be in highly competitive industries– fast food, agriculture, production of low-quality goods, and so forth. Their profits are just a normal return on capital. If their costs rise, their prices will rise too. There will be some short-run loss of quasi-rents– with higher prices, sales will fall and some of the employers will go out of business. But those employers were not earning more than a bare competitive return to their talents and capital anyway, so they haven’t lost much. And, indeed, starting from Landsburg’s premise of no employment loss, there won’t be any sales loss either, and thus no exit from the industry (if sales fell, then employment would have to fall too, unless we believe employers are willing to pay workers to stand around idle). Instead, the losers are consumers of the products and services of minimum-wage workers.

This is a note on a technical point I was writing to a law professor about
which I might use in my own writing or teaching later.

Suppose we estimate the effect of capital punishment on murder to be a
reduction in the murder rate of 3, and we want to know how accurate that
estimate is, and whether we can be confident the true value is not really 0. The
standard test is the t-test, which might give us a confidence level (or
significance level) of 30%. Conventionally, our conclusion would be
that we cannot reject the null hypothesis that capital punishment has no effect
on murder.

But what does the 30% mean? It means this. Suppose that the true effect is
indeed 0. If our model is correct, and we ran the same kind of test on 100
different samples of data, we would expect to falsely reject the null hypothesis
of 0 effect in 70 of those 100 tests. Each test would come up with a different
estimate– 3, 7.2,-8.4, 1.9, 0.0, -2.1, etcetera– and 70 of those estimates
would be far enough from 0 that we’d falsely conclude that the true coefficient
was not zero. Thus, this test would be very misleading on this data if the true
effect is indeed 0.

Should we therefore conclude that the true effect is 0? Not really. There is a
second desirable feature of a test: its power. A test’s power is the
probability that the test gives us the right answer given that the null
hypothesis is wrong– that is, the probability that we wrongly fail to reject
the null. It could be that our data is so poor that our t-test cannot reliably
detect an effect of capital punishment on murder even though the effect exists
and is strong. That, indeed, is truly the big problem for statistical studies
of capital punishment, and one reason I tend not to pay them much attention.

Let me explain more. Suppose the true effect is 3.5. The power of the t-test is
that probability that we don’t fail to reject the null hypothesis of a 0 effect,
given that the true effect is 3.5– a number that we might estimate to be equal
to 45% in this example where our estimate was 4. Thus, it might be although we
think our test is too unreliable to tell us that the true value is different
from 0, we might at the same time think our test is also too unreliable to tell
us that the the true value is different from 3.5. So we would *not* conclude
that we can say capital punishment has no effect– though we can’t say it does
have an effect, either.

The reason that power values are not reported in studies is that the value of
the power depends on the true effect, something we don’t know. There is just
one null hypothesis, so it is easy to find the significance of a test. But
there are lots of possible true effects. In the last paragraph, I assumed the
true effect was 3.5, and got a power of 45%. If the true effect were not 3.5,
but 1.2, then the power might be 7%. That would be because it would be very hard
for a test to be powerful enough to distinguish between a true effect of 1.2 and
a null hypothesis of 0. Or, it might be that the true effect was 17.5, and the
power was 91%. If the true effect is as big as 17.5, it would be very
unlikely that our test would cause us to believe it was 0.

Thus, in thinking about statistical studies that fail to find a statistically
significant effect of X on Y, we must remember that maybe the data was just so
poor that if such an effect did exist, the study wouldn’t have found it anyway.

Clifford May at
NRO has the best coverage of the unsurprising vindication of the
conservative (or just non-alarmist?) view of the Plame-Wilson affair. (See my
posts on Valerie Plame,
Joe Wilson, and
French trickery. )
Mr. May’s article should be read in its entirety, but here is what I found new:

But now Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV — he of the Hermes ties and Jaguar
convertibles — has been thoroughly discredited. Last week’s bipartisan href="http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf">Senate intelligence
committee report concluded that it is he who has been telling lies.

For starters, he has insisted that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, was not
the one who came up with the brilliant idea that the agency send him to Niger to
investigate whether Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire uranium.
“Valerie had nothing to do with the matter,” Wilson says in his book. “She
definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.” In fact, the Senate panel
found, she was the one who got him that assignment. The panel even found a memo
by her. (She should have thought to use disappearing ink.)

Wilson spent a total of eight days in Niger “drinking sweet mint tea and meeting
with dozens of people,” as he put it. On the basis of this “investigation” he
confidently concluded that there was no way Saddam sought uranium from Africa.
Oddly, Wilson didn’t bother to write a report saying this. Instead he gave an
oral briefing to a CIA official.

Oddly, too, as an investigator on assignment for the CIA he was not required to
keep his mission and its conclusions confidential. And for the New York Times
, he was happy to put pen to paper, to write "http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm">an op-ed charging the Bush
administration with “twisting,” “manipulating” and “exaggerating” intelligence
about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs “to justify an invasion.”

In particular he said that President Bush was lying when, in "http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html">his 2003
State of the Union address, he pronounced these words: “The British
government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa.”

We now know for certain that Wilson was wrong and that Bush’s statement was
entirely accurate.

…

Yes, there were fake documents relating to Niger-Iraq sales. But no, those
forgeries were not the evidence that convinced British intelligence that Saddam
may have been shopping for “yellowcake” uranium. On the contrary, according to
some intelligence sources, the forgery was planted in order to be discovered
— as a ruse to discredit the story of a Niger-Iraq link, to persuade people
there were no grounds for the charge.

But that’s not all. The Butler report, yet another British government inquiry,
also is expected to conclude this week that British intelligence was correct to
say that Saddam sought uranium from Niger.

And in recent days, the Financial Times has reported that illicit sales
of uranium from Niger were indeed being negotiated with Iraq, as well as with
four other states.

According to the FT: “European intelligence officers have now revealed
that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic
intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of
an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the
traders was Iraq.”

There’s still more: As "http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39834-2004Jul9.html">Susan
Schmidt reported — back on page A9 of Saturday’s Washington
Post: “Contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s
previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about
the reliability of the Africa intelligence.”

The Senate report says fairly bluntly that Wilson lied to the media. Schmidt
notes that the panel found that, “Wilson provided misleading information to the
Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger
intelligence was based on a document that had clearly been forged because ‘the
dates were wrong and the names were wrong.’”

The problem is Wilson “had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of
what names and dates were in the reports,” the Senate panel discovered. Schmidt
notes: “The documents — purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq
— were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to
Niger.”

…

Schmidt adds that the Senate panel was alarmed to find that the CIA never
“fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger destined
for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.”

…

… Now that we know that Mrs. Wilson did recommend Mr. Wilson for the
Niger assignment, can we not infer that she was working at CIA headquarters in
Langley rather than as an undercover operative in some front business or
organization somewhere?

As I suggested in another NRO piece ( "http://www.nationalreview.com/may/may200309291022.asp">Spy Games), if that
is the case — if she was not working undercover and if the CIA was not
taking measures to protect her cover — no law was broken by columnist Bob
Novak in naming her, or by whoever told Novak that she worked for the CIA.

…

In 1991, Wilson’s book jacket boasts, President George H.W. Bush praised Wilson
as “a true American hero,” and he was made an ambassador. But for some reason,
he was assigned not to Cairo, Paris, or Moscow, places where you put the best
and the brightest, nor was he sent to Bermuda or Luxembourg, places you send
people you want to reward. Instead, he was sent to Gabon, a diplomatic backwater
of the first rank.

After that, he says in his memoir, “I had risen about as high as I could in the
Foreign Service and decided it was time to retire.” Well, that’s not exactly
accurate either. He could have been given a more important posting, such as
Kenya or South Africa, or he could have been promoted higher in the senior
Foreign Service (he made only the first of four grades). Instead, he was
evidently (according to my sources) forced into involuntary retirement at 48.
(The minimum age for voluntary retirement in the Foreign Service is 50.) After
that, he seems to have made quite a bit of money — doing what for whom is
unclear and I wish the Senate committee had attempted to find out.

It would be interesting to see which of Wilson’s many defenders in the
blogosphere have commented on the discovery that he was lying– something they
vehemently denied earlier.

The American Spectator has a prime example of the "http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=6813">contemptibility
of the International Court of Justice, commenting on its recent decision
saying that Israel should take down the wall that defends it from the PLO-
occupied territory:

Of its fifteen “judges,” seven come from nations which have no rule of law and
allow their citizens no rights of self-determination or due process of law.
These stalwarts — all of whom joined in the condemnation of Israel — come from
Communist China, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, Russia, Egypt, Jordan, and Venezuela.
Two more come from France and Belgium, two of the worst Israel-haters and
Arafat-lovers of the European Union. Another comes from the Netherlands, ever-
willing to join the EUnuchs in making U.N. mischief. That makes ten of fifteen,
more than enough to predetermine the outcome of any issue, be it one of Israel
or the United States.

Another measure is set by the “court’s” own procedures. One of the judges,
Elaraby of Egypt, used to be an Egyptian diplomat, assigned to the U.N. to join
in any Israel-bashing nonsense in the General Assembly.

…

As a matter of international law, such as it is, the court lacked jurisdiction
to hear the case. One of the basic principles that the court is supposed to
follow is that it can’t decide “contentious” issues when one of the parties to
it — in this case Israel — has declined to submit the matter to the court to
decide. The “court” blew past this restriction by saying that it had
jurisdiction — despite Israel’s objection — because the U.N. General Assembly
is dealing with the overall issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

…

All you really need to know about the ICJ decision is that nowhere does it even
recognize the fact of Palestinian terrorism against Israel. The whole decision
talks about the “occupied” territories as if they were pacific realms, of no
danger or even inconvenience to the Israelis. It concludes — without factual
predicate — that the wall is not necessary for Israel to defend itself. The
entire 65-page decision talks in terms of the Palestinian territories as if they
were an ancient British forest or a modern Canadian city.

Remember all this next time you hear someone treat any ICJ decision as something
to respect.

UPDATE, OCTOBER 4: See also HREF="http://www.joannejacobs.com/mtarchives/014255.html">Joanne Jacobs and
The City Journal “In Defense of
Memorization” by Michael Knox Beran, to which Pete DaDalt kindly drew my
attention. By the way, we haven’t gotten round to memorizing any poems– kindergarten and preschool have somehow displaced it. By the time I figure out how to raise children, mine will be grown! That’s why tradition would be helpful; it’s hard to roll your own.

We had a 5-year-old visiting us Saturday while her parents were moving
from one one house to another. She was able to read a phrase painted on our
breakfast nook wall, “Faith, hope and love– but the greatest of these is love,”
and it turns out her mother has taught her to read in about three months. That
made me wonder whether we should teach our Amelia something formally. How about
poems? She won’t learn those at school. She already has learned most of "http://www.rasmusen.org/x/archives/owl.txt">“The Owl and the Pussycat”. Her
Grandma Rasmusen had the good idea of asking each of her grandchildren for a
child-specific performance for her birthday in April– for example, 1-year-old
Benjamin’s singing a song and Amelia’s recitation of a poem.

So I put together
a list of poems for children
to memorize. Half of these are too long, and it may be the whole plan will
dissipate, but I’ll see what happens, and keep my eyes open for other good
poems. So far I have the following

YOU’RE NASTY AND YOU’RE LOUD (Jack Prelutsky)
A Story (Unknown)
Chartless (Emily Dickinson)
Whistling (Jack Prelutsky)

Little Seeds (Else Minarik)
A Spike of Green (Barbara Baker)
Hiawatha’s Childhood (Longfellow)
The Wonderful “One-Hoss Shay” (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior)
The Spider and the Fly (Mary Howitt)
THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS (Clement Moore)
Home (Edgar Guest)