Tabloid Edition

Pajama Media, Major Problem.

Two seemingly unconnected events today, the combination of which leads me to suspect that Pajama Media has a serious problem on its hands, one that could, if unaddressed, cripple the entire project.

The first was the arrival of the latest Pajamagram detailing progress and all seems well and the project is developing nicely.

The second was my being invited out to lunch by a reader of this blog. A decent lunch in a decent restaurant, what could be wrong with that? (BTW, thanks again Erik!) Well, the problem that arises is the method of payment used for that very lunch. As my host was not only a reader, but a fully paid up member of the mainstream media, he was able to use the corporate credit card to pay for said lunch. Again, there is no problem with that and our discussion roamed over the role of blogs, newspapers, the coming changes, the way in which the very best bloggers (Jane Galt at The Economist for example) are already adding to the glories of the mainstream....a general and wide ranging discussion.

As he said when inviting me to the lunch:

I'm a card-carrying member of the MSM, and as such have something the blogosphere, in the main, doesn't: an expense account.

I fear that this lack could be an insurmountable problem for Pajama Media....just where are the corporate credit cards to which we can charge expensive and alcohol fueled lunches? Where, in fact, would be journalism without such? As anyone who has ever been around journalists will know, whatever we might be doing while sober will not be journalism as we know and love it.

So Pajama does face a serious problem: who’s picking up the lunch tab?

Hooah.

I am indeed, as Harry Hutton explains, a hooah. Guilty on at least three counts.

Aero Contractors Ltd.

Air America rides again in the guise of Aero Contractors Ltd. The man who knows all about this is over here, at the Yorkshire Ranter. Dig through his archives.

Dog Bites Man.

Did anyone ever think it was going to go any other way?

A court on Tuesday declared tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty of an array of charges including fraud and tax evasion,

Howling Stupidity

The New York Times makes this statement of the utmost howling stupidity:

Most of all they need help from Brazil's charismatic president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who must persuade himself and his country's agricultural oligarchy that the rain forest is not a commodity to be exploited for private gain.

Crippled JC on a bloody crutch, for crying out loud how stupid can you get? Things will always get exploited for private gain, that’s the very nature of the human beast. What you need to do is alter the incentives so that by exploiting the resource for private gain the exploiter is also providing public gain. If you don’t get that basic thought into your head right at the start you will never, never ever, manage to solve the problem.

Somehow, one needs to make the continued existence of the Amazon more valuable to those currently cutting it down than cutting it down. In short, make exploiting it for private gain work towards its preservation. Ideas on a postcard please.

Stanley Fish.

A quite wonderful article in the NY Times. No, no excerpts, simply go and read it, on the teaching of language. Stanley Fish sounds like exactly the sort of professor everyone should have had but sadly, all too infrequently did.

Jane Novak

Jane Novak of Armies of Liberation seems to be touching a few nerves. She’s been writing for some time in various Middle Eastern newspapers  (pro-Bush, pro-war and so on) and whatever one thinks of her worldview the latest response is simply wonderful. The Yemen Times has a headline:

Jane Novak a docile pupil of a monkey monk

How wonderful to get people that pissed off!

Moonbat on Trade.

As it’s Tuesday we get to hear the words of wisdom of Chairman Monbiot. Today’s really is quite a doozy, he managing to completely miss the point about tariff barriers, fair and free trade and how the two differ in their effects on developing countries. I realise that Jim will disagree but what the ’Bat is advocating is what will keep the poor poor.

This, indeed, is what the UK appears to have done. In March it published the most progressive foreign policy document ever to have escaped from Whitehall. A paper by the departments of trade and international development promised that: "We will not force trade liberalisation on developing countries." It recognised that a policy that insists on equal terms for rich and poor is like pitting a bull mastiff against a chihuahua. Unless a country can first build up its industries behind protectionist barriers, it will be destroyed by free trade. Almost every nation that is rich today, including the UK and the US, used this strategy. But the current rules forbid the poor from following them. The EU, the paper insisted, should, while opening its own markets, allow poor nations "20 years or more" to open theirs.

There’s just one tiny problem with this view (apart from it being totally wrong). Under the Lome Convention and successors, since 1975 the poor countries have had preferential access to EU markets without having to provide free or preferential access to their own in return. As ’Bat points out this doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect:

As the World Bank's own figures show, across the 20 years (1960-80) before it and the IMF started introducing strict conditions on the countries that accepted their loans, median annual growth in developing countries was 2.5%. In the 18 years after (1980-1998), it was 0.0%.

Now we can all argue about cause and effect, we can all scream correlation is not causation but we do have at least a correlation there, do we not? Precisely in that time period that the poor countries did not have to open up their internal markets median growth was zero. And, amazingly, the movement is, the solution offered, is that poor countries should not have to open up their markets. Breathtaking.

The British government has made its own contribution to the poor world's misery by tying aid disbursements to the privatisation of essential public services. It has been paying the Adam Smith Institute, a rightwing lobby group, up to £9m a year to oversee privatisation programmes in developing countries.
....
Again the government admitted, before the election, that its critics were right. The Department for International Development (DfID) published a long mea culpa in which it promised: "We will not make our aid conditional on specific policy decisions by partner governments, or attempt to impose policy choices on them (including ... privatisation or trade liberalisation)."
....
What about the privatisation it was demanding in 2004 and early 2005? What about its recent assault on the public services of Tanzania, South Africa, Ghana and the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh? What about the money it is still paying the effing Adam Smith Institute?

Quite, what about the effing Adam Smith Institute? They can defend themselves no doubt but this anger at liberalization and privatization seems grossly misplaced. Our own experience over the past few decades has been that both of them contribute greatly to the efficient operation of our economy. That is, that they have made us richer. Telecoms, water, electricity, the basic infrastructure serveices are now provided more cheaply, more efficiently, by private sector actors than they ever were when they were State owned. Now if we have learnt this lesson, that having private sector companies do these things makes a country richer, shouldn’t we tell people this?  It is something, after all, that we can prove empirically, not something that is merely a fantasy of a particular political or economic world view.

Are we not, collectively, trying to make the poor countries richer? Is this not the aim of the whole game? So if we have a method that we know does this, we would, if you think about it  ha moment, be fools not to tell people about it. 9 million quid a year seems pretty cheap actually, if via that expenditure the poor countries see the same efficiency gains that we saw in the 80s and 90s by following the same advice.

Two specific examples which I’ve written about elsewhere. One at the Globalisation Institute on mobile phone penetration of the market. Another at Techcentralstation on the digital divide and the need for competetive internet acccess. In both cases we can see that the requirement for things to get better is both the liberalization of the market (more players) and the taking out of the game of the State owned player by privatising it (for if the dominant player remains State owned then competition will never get off the ground).

In short, Moonbat is arguing against those very things that will make the poor richer, just as they have made us richer. The liberalization of markets and the privatization of the inefficient State producers. A highly valuable way to spend 9 million quid out of our aid budget of 4 billion odd. Or 0.25 % of the money going on something that we actually know works. Really, who would have thought it, part of the aid budget that is well spent?
 

Chinese Textile Quotas.

Words of wisdom from the Chinese commerce minister:

Bo Xilai, the commerce minister, said the EU and the US had not provided sufficient evidence that the flow of Chinese goods have damaged their local markets.

Chinese textile exports to the US have swollen by 250 per cent in the last year, and by 83 per cent to Europe.

However, Mr Bo said the price of a dozen T-shirts, one of the product lines cited by the EU, had risen from €97 (£67) to €101 between January and March. He said China had fought hard for its place in the World Trade Organisation and was determined to uphold its trade rights.

"If you place limits on Chinese products, we will adjust our policies accordingly," he warned. "If you place five ounces of pressure on our businesses, we will remove eight ounces of their burdens."

"The EU and the United States should spend more time on the development of high technology, rather than spending time quarrelling with us on issues like shirts, socks and trousers," he said.

The EU said yesterday that it had provided three months of data to show European businesses were suffering. "We see there is irreparable damage and that is why we have launched a request for formal consultations," said commission spokesman Claude Veron-Reville.

She warned that China had 15 days to limit its exports or face possible EU curbs.

The problem with Ms. Veron-Reville’s statement is that it is a lie. Flat out, complete and total and utter bollocks. I have repeatedly asked both her office and Eurostat for the figures. (Before anyone can actually decide what is going on we need the numbers not just for Chinese imports but for all imports by country of origin. Some countries will have seen falls in their exports....most probably as a result of Chinese companies moving production back to China as they no longer need to do the finishing elsewhere to gain quota share.)

Here is the answer I got from Eurostat on May 23 2005:

Thank you for your e-mail. There are still 5 Member States missing for March
2005: Belgium, Denmark, Cyprus, Portugal and Lithuania. We estimate to have
them within 2-3 weeks, so I suggest you contact us again a bit later on, if
it's not too late for you to receive the data by then, and I hope that we
then will be able to send the data to you.

The Commission cannot have provided the relevant data for the three month period as the relevant data does not yet exist. Lying bastards.

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn has a few words of wisdom today:

After that, the rest doesn't matter: you can't do trickle-down nation-building. The British, who've written more constitutions for more real nations than anybody in history and therefore can't plead the same ignorance as President Juncker, should be especially ashamed of going along with this farrago of a travesty of a charade.

Ah, say the Eurofetishists, but you naysayers are gloating undeservedly: the French didn't suddenly see the light and decide British Eurosceptics had been right all along; they rejected the EU constitution because they thought it was an Anglo-Saxon racket to impose capitalism on their pampered protectionist utopia.

But so what? Britain's naysayers don't have to reject the constitution for the same reason as France's commies, fascists, racists, eco-nutters, anachronistic unionists, featherbedded farmers, middle-aged "students", Trot professors and welfare queens, bless 'em all. If they want to go down the Eurinal of history clinging to their unaffordable welfare state, their 30-hour work weeks, 10-month work years and seven-year work decades, that's up to them. If Britain doesn't, that should be up to Britain.
....
Incidentally, that "lunatic fringe" in France now accounts for about 60 per cent of the electorate. That's another lesson for the decayed Euro-elite. One of the most unattractive features of European politics is the way it insists certain subjects are out of bounds, and beyond politics. That's the most obvious flaw in Giscard's flaccid treaty: it's not a constitution, it's a perfectly fine party platform for a rather stodgy semi-obsolescent social democratic party. Its constitutional "rights" - the right to housing assistance, the right to preventive action on the environment - are not constitutional at all, but the sort of things parties ought to be arguing about at election time.

I don’t (despite what you might think) agree with everything Steyn says but that last sentence does strike a chord. Indeed, looking at some of the speeches from the pro- side, that’s actually the point. Attempting to set in stone the European exception, the social democratic state. Yet that is exactly what we are supposed to be deciding at each and every election.

Megafauna Extinctions.

Slightly dubious about this report:

Humans may have been unjustly accused of wiping out the giant kangaroos, wombats and other massive marsupials that roamed Australia 40,000 years ago, new research suggests.

I’m dubious not because of any of the science they have or have not done, but rather because the whole field of megafauna extinction is so tied up with almost emotional baggage. On the one side there are those who want to believe that early man, the hunter gatherer, was environmentally sound, someone who walked lightly upon the earth.  On the other, those who want to point out that greed, short-sightedness, environmental damage, are nothing new, they are not things created by capitalism or any new outbreak of viciousness in the human soul.

One of the battlegrounds of this fight over primitive man better than us/primitive man just like us is just  what did happen to the various megafauna as man moved into environments where he was previously unknown?

The Australian researchers claim that climate change is what did for those there, not, as often supposed, man eating them. Superficially (looking only at the newspaper, not the report) the case appears a little weak. We know that early man in Australia used fire to clear the land and so there could be an indirect linkage, if not a direct one.

But if we want to seriously propose that early man was not as we are, if we want to blame only modern man (as with the dodo), then there are a number of other incidents that we have to explain. The disappearance of the N American horse at about the same time as the Clovis people moved south, 10,000 BC or so. Various lemurs and similar after 400 AD as Madagascar was settled. Endless bird extinctions as the Polynesians spread across the Pacific. Birds again, Moas, in New Zealand as the Maoris got there in 1,100 AD. Perhaps some of these were co-incidences, perhaps climate change or other factors caused some of them. But for us to look back at our forebears as environmental stewards, all of them have to be such, and that’s not something which I think can be supported.

If you wish, there’s a lot of explaining that has to be done before we assume that there ever was an Eden, some primitive arcadia where man lived in harmony with nature. It may actually be my view, that it is only our ability to cause damage that differs, not anything so fundamental as human nature that has changed.

Kidnappers and Kidnappees.

No, I don’t know the details of this case but it does at least look like, in one case, a kidnapper was also a kidnappee. Full details at My Pet Jawa.

Lobbying in the EU.

Something in The Guardian:

A green paper at most may be published later this year. The turnaround prompted 80 NGOs to launch a campaign, the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation (Alter-EU), demanding mandatory disclosure rules to enable democratic scrutiny of the role of lobbyists in EU policymaking.

Erik Wesselius, of the Amsterdam-based Corporate Europe Observatory, said last night: "What Mr Kallas now seems to have in mind is just a code of conduct or a simple register. If that's the case it would be very disappointing and completely insufficient, especially as a mandatory system works marvellously in the US and Canada."

Alter-EU wants US-style registration that shows which companies have been lobbying on which issues, the persons carrying this out, the institutions they have been lobbying and the amount of money spent.

Mr Wesselius said: "Mandatory disclosure would help to get hard data on the whole process, which would help to illustrate the extent of this phenomenon of lobbying, the huge sums of money spent and the influence it wields."

His body claims corporate lobbyists have substantially watered down several proposed laws, even drafting amendments for sympathetic MEPs to table.

All fine by me, no problem at all. NGOs are lobbyists as well of course, Alter-EU will also have to dsiclose its activities, sources of funding and so on. Or isn’t that quite what Mr Wesselius means?

Lions Tour.

So theLions Tour is now properly on and it’s going to be a tought one. However, I think this might be a little ambitious:

Mains, who coached the All Blacks to a 2-1 success when the Lions last toured New Zealand back in 1993, stated that in his opinion, after watching that 25-25 draw against Argentina: "It is abundantly clear that this is the worst Lions team to arrive in New Zealand that I can remember.

We will find out shortly ....everyone ready for the 7.30 am starts down the pub?

French Referendum Result.

So if you were looking for considered and accurate reflections upon the meaning of the result last night you should go to here, here and here.

The considered and accurate reflection upon the subject in this household is as follows:

Bwaaahahahahahahahahah, giggle, snort, sniff, aaaahahahahah, splurt, heeeeehehehehe.

Apologies.

Apologies to the adoring millions for the abscence of blogging so far today. Broadband has just arrived after being out all day so if you can bear to wait a little the armadillo will indeed dance for you.

In the interim have a look at this from EU Rota. A fascinating look at labour rigidity, GDP growth and unemployment rates. Correlation not causality at this point, of course, but there are good reasons to thing that one does cause the other as well.

I may well have to steal borrow some of this analysis, in fact given that I’ve got a deadline coming up I almost certainly will.

Britblog Roundup # 15

Yes, it’s that time again, as the colonial cousins slumber away their Memorial Day bbq and beer,  we in the Mother Nations have the treat that is the Britblog  Roundup, now in its fifteenth incarnation.  An attempt to bring you the best posts of the week from the bloggers of the four nations on these Isles. (About the only other thing we all do together is play rugby as the Lions once every four years and on the evidence of last week that’s not going all that well.) You can nominate posts by simply sending the url to britblog AT gmail DOT com.

First up is a nomination from Chicken Yoghurt (who has himself been oft nominated in the past) for the Curious Hamster. He does something very evil, very evil indeed. Takes the words of the Dear Leader and actually applies them to his own actions. No fair that, expecting politicians to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

Murkee is signing from the same hymn sheet, starting off  with the leak in today’s papers that teh ID cards will cost 5 times what is currently stated. He goes on from there.

Clive Davis directs us to a photography blog, Image. Some quite wonderful stuff there.

Liberal England mulls over the Eurovision Song Contest and somehow manages to segue to Lt. Pigeon’s second piano player. Spooky.

Perfect.co.uk is also strongly opposed to the ID cards. In fact, even with all my wandering around blogs, I’ve not yet come across one that is actually putting the case for the scheme. Would anyone want to point me to a UK blog that tries to do so?

Talk Politics continues the ID card theme of today’s roundup (the actual bill was published last week which is why there is all this analysis). The National Identity Register will be recording a great deal more about you than you currently think. The full details in two complex posts here and here.

Politicalog notes that one of the flagship City Academies is itself failing.

England Expects has what is probably the only transcript that will ever see the light of day on the debate on the Motion of Censure for Sr. Barroso, master of all matters European. Quite shockingly it seems that European Hansard takes months to appear so there is no way of actually finding out what is said until months to late. Do read it, as it does show something of the way we are ruled.

Diamond Geezer has a terrific desciption of walking the Regent’s Canal. So  good you don’t actually have to do it yourself.

Not Proud of Britain has a question for, an appeal to, Gordon Brown. Certainly got my sympathy.

Liberty Cadre reports fro the start of the No Campaign on the EU Constitution.

A Message From Albia reports from a country strangely like, but worse, than Britain. Just scroll through.

Paul Coletti on immigration. We need more of it, much more of it, however old Enoch’s corpse might spin.

Through Irish Eyes is less than enamoured with hte British way of service. Quite bloody right, too.

Galilean Library has an interview about Newton and the mistake we make in treating the science and the alchemy separately, they make a seamless whole that has to be understood.

Scary Duck continues his retelling of a tortured choldhood. You could probably get his age to within a year from this episode, if you could remember the release date of the Queen single.

Now that the cycling season is back with us Blognor Regis is your guide to the intricacies of the sport (although I would have picked a title less likely to be redolent of sex amongst the unemployed for that post).

The Yorkshire Ranter finds himself in Norway debating the EU with Chinese telecoms engineers. (Yes, really.)   

Laban Tall digs a little deeper into the story of the Academy that’s failing...things are more complex than they at first seem.

In Actual Fact recalls the early days of learning German. Normally these sorts of problems come from people intentionally misleading you.

Late update, Norm of that Blog has more on the upcoming boycott of Israeli cricket.

And that’s it, this week’s Britblog Roundup. More next week, older versions can be found in the index under, amazingly, Britblog Roundup.

Cui Bono?

A letter in The Economist:

SIR – With regard to Dan Taylor's plea for the European Union to embrace Canada as a member, I say fine (Letters, May 14th). But then the United States gets Britain. I think America would walk away the clear winner in that trade.

Matthew Klokel

Washington, DC

Umm, no, I think Britain would be the clear winner there.

onomist

The Cost of ID Cards.

As has been mentioned here before, the estimates of the costs of ID cards seem a little off. The Observer has got hold of the draft of a report from the LSE on what they calculate to be the true costs:

The government's plans to introduce identity cards were dealt a body blow last night after it emerged the true cost of the scheme could top £18 billion, more than triple the official estimate.

The figure has been calculated by experts at the London School of Economics, who have spent months producing one of the most authoritative analyses of the scheme.

Their findings, which will be published in the next two weeks, will be seized upon by critics of the current ID card bill working its way through parliament. It is likely to spark a backbench rebellion from Labour MPs and be taken up by the Tories and Liberal Democrats, who oppose the government's plans.

Last week the Home Office issued a report which estimated that, over the next decade, the cost of running the scheme, in conjunction with a new biometric passport system, would be £5.8bn. Because the Treasury has insisted the scheme must be self-financing, this works out at an average cost of £93 to each card holder.

But, according to the LSE's analysis, a draft section of which has been obtained by The Observer, the true cost of implementing and running the scheme, will be between £12bn and £18bn. This could make the average cost of a card as high as £300 to every adult, unless government departments are prepared to shoulder some of the financial burden.

We can’t acutally check these numbers for:

A spokesman for the Home Office said it was impossible to comment on the LSE's findings because of the confidential nature of the commercial contracts involved

Rolling around in the back of my mind is the Freedom of Information Act. It has certainly been used to uncover some aspects of commercial contracts (how parking enforcement companies are paid, for example) so there might be something of a coup there for an aspiring journalistic type: file an FOA request for those contracts.

But the basic and simple point stands out I think. The bastards are lying to us, again.

Shooting Rights.

News from the anti-country sports campaign:

Anti-hunt campaigners are secretly planning to buy up thousands of acres of land where game shooting takes place in order to block the pastime, as they widen their attack on country sports.
.....
It is preparing plans to buy large areas of moors, foreshore and wetlands in order to prevent other landlords from acquiring the shooting rights. The league plans to sell on the land, using the proceeds to buy up more areas. But it will retain the sporting rights for itself - thereby denying others the right to shoot over growing parts of the country.

Great news there, people using their money to enforce their property rights. Now, if we could only encourage others to use the same principles, that you put your money where your mouth is and that property rights mean just that, that you have the right to do as you wish with what you own.

Why, we might apply it to smoking in pubs, landlords being allowed to make their own decision, and then where would we be, eh?

The Grandpa Gang.

Do read the rest:

They were caught six months later as they approached the Mendener Bank in Menden-Lendringsen, each of them allegedly carrying a weapon. "It took longer to arrest them than usual as they had to be read their rights twice - two of them were wearing hearing aids and the batteries were low," said a police spokesman.

Too Much Salt?

I am and have been dubious about the campaign to get us all to eat less salt, for one fairly obvious reason. Assuming that one’s kidneys are functioning properly, excess salt in the diet does not lead to an excess in the blood, it is excreted. Having said that I’m even more dubious about this report:

Advice on reducing your sodium intake should be taken with a pinch of salt, according to the latest research. Not only is there no need to eat less of it but it can also be positively dangerous for some people's health.
....

There was little to be gained, he said, by cutting salt for anyone on a typical Western diet who eats the equivalent of 16g or three-and-half teaspoonfuls a day.

The independent research, known as the Rotterdam Study, involved almost 8,000 people in their fifties and above. Each person's sodium intake was estimated from a nightly urine sample and compared with their blood pressure over a month.

The findings showed that as long as their salt intake was moderate - no more than 16g a day - there was an insignificant effect on blood pressure.
.....
Other scientists at the conference, organised by European Union salt producers, went further saying that the guidance to reduce salt intake could be dangerous to pregnant women and the elderly.

No, it’s not that the report was given at a conference sponsored by the salt producers....cherry picking papers for a conferenceis very different than getting peopleto do research that supports you in the first place.
Rather, it’s the measurement system used. Given that I am already biased (prejudiced?) in thinking that it is whether the kidenys are excreting thesalt or notwhich is likely to be the problem, measuring the amount excreted, rather than the amount consumed, doesn’t really seem to work for me.

Still, I’ve been wrong on such scientific matters before and may well be here. Anyone care to explain to me why salt is so awful, if indeed it is true that we excrete the excess?

You Just Can’t Win, Can You.

Health officials are examining reports of blindness among men using the impotence drug Viagra.

You just can’t win, can you? Youth is blighted by the knowledge that playing with yourself will make you blind, now age is blighted by the knowledge that playing with others will do so too.

Tsunami Problems.

The Telegraph carries three stories on problems in Sri Lanka over the distribution of aid following the tsunami. Bureaucracy apparently causing the problems. No, nothing to do with the UN, purely home grown stuff. An illustration, in fact, of why the place is so poor at all. An illustration, in fact, of why aid in and of itself is not the solution (or rather, not the entire solution), for here we have a situation where money simply is not a problem. There are sufficient resources to do everything necessary. Yet it is not getting done. Sometimes it really is the system at fault, not the poverty or the lack of wealth and resources.

Certainly, from the way the stories are presented, one could conclude that rather less governance is needed. But then I would say that wouldn’t I, as I generally believe that less governance is the solution to most problems. Still, nice to see a real world example to support my prejudices (and no, this does not mean I am happy that people are suffering so).

Krugman on Okrent.

TigerHawk was at a speech that Paul Krugman gave at Princeton and took extensive notes. Interesting stuff Mr. K came out with while talking to a supportive (ie no conservative said anything) crowd. Specifically he responded to the criticism by Daniel Okrent thusly:

One of Krugman's "acolytes" asked him in sympathetic terms if he had anything to say about Okrent's charge. Many of the people in the audience did not understand the reference to Okrent, so Krugman explained that "the public editor" of the Times -- Krugman never once used Okrent's name himself -- "took a very peculiar blast" at him about the misuse of numbers without supplying any evidence. Krugman said that he had exchanged emails with "the public editor" in the last few days in response to the article, and that Okrent had not supplied any instance of Krugman misrepresenting numbers. He attributed Okrent's criticism to pressure from conservatives, and said that Okrent had questioned him about his columns via email since Okrent had come to the paper a year and a half ago, but that he (Krugman) "always had an answer." Okrent, who was "under constant pressure" from conservatives, finally gave up asking Krugman about the columns and "built up a list of grievances in his mind" which he uncorked in his final column.

Basically, Krugman believed that Okrent had a psychological need borne of pressure from conservatives to find misrepresentations in Krugman's work. According to Krugman, there are no such misrepresentations.

Similar stuff came up at Brad DeLong’s yesterday where they were discussing Andrew Sullivan’s swipe at Krugman, and the subsequent email he received. What rather depressed me was a couple of commenters asking for proof that Krugman had been, er, selective with his facts, and when offered two pieces which proved precisely that simply refused to read them.

My own take on it is that columnists are not only allowed but are supposed to pick and choose their facts to get across their point. That’s what they’re for, as opposed to the news pages which should be a great deal more even handed. They should also be  open to people checking which facts they do use and the opinions which they express can and should be challenged. One might want factual errors to be corrected or at least acknowledged but that is rather different from insisting that a columnist include all the facts or appear to be unbiased in his presentation of what evidence he does use.

Anyway, I recommend the rest of TigerHawk’s piece, a nice piece of reportage (with its own inbuilt biases of course).

Something to Share.

Way back I had a post on the question and answer session that Aldeia Guevara did for The Guardian. This comment on it arrived overnight, too good not to share:

Woah! If you think that you're definition of "democracy" in its true representative form, is applicable only to those societies which a) have multiple parties not which represent constituents and "the people", rather the wealthy campaign donators who fund them...and b) free and fair (???) elections which elect the Head of State (i.e Bush II because that was obviously free and fair!!)...then you are the deluded one. It appears that the desire to create a society NOT modelled on GREED and excessive individualism to the detriment of collectiveism and focusing on society, is not acceptable by you. I thought the essence of "democracy" (a Greek word and it may pay you to actually UNDERSTAND what it means in Greek before you mouth off with your preposterous commentary!)is a government by the people. Well dear sir, if the PEOPLE want individuals to represent their localities and NOT parties,(those wretched things which have bastardised the concept of representation), then they should be able to. My guess is that you fear a society better educated, more alert, and not susceptible to BULL**** fed by a mass media machine which is "free" (hilarious!), in other words a propaganda machine! If only other nations could follow Cuba's example, then maybe we wouldn't have a degraded society void of any real emotion, community values, and appreciation for life in general....not this rampant materialism which has created a desperate society constantly fearing the scarcity of goods and caught in a vicious cycle of accumulation, debt, and a sense of feeling one is NEVER good enough, pretty enough, smart enough,,,or ever having enough. Not to mention a society which has ravaged the planet to the point of collapse. I'm tipping "depression" and "alienation" are not common ailments that Cuban society suffers from....but I can bet your society is! You can keep your perceived freedoms...because that's all they are..false perceptions keeping you trapped in a box full of ill conceived theories and beliefs. Good luck to you. Keep your society how you want it...and let others get on with their own without your constant drivel and interference.

Synchronicity or What?

Jane Galt asks this question yesterday:

What's the movie where the Germans are trying to fool a captured soldier into telling them about d-day by convincing him that the war is over and he's back in America with amnesia? It's driving me crazy.

The BBC (via Greg) reports this today:

Japanese officials are investigating claims that two men living in jungle in the Philippines are Japanese soldiers left behind after World War II.
The pair, in their 80s, were reportedly found on southern Mindanao island.
The men were expected to travel to meet Japanese officials on Friday, but have yet to make contact.
The claim drew comparisons with the 1974 case of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, who was found in the Philippines jungle unaware the war had ended.

Spooky, Hunh? 

Britblog Reminder.

Don’t forget to send in your entries for the Britblog Roundup.

Whatever you think is the best post from British and Irish bloggers of the past week, to britblog AT gmail DOT com please. As we were mentioned on the BBC this week I’m hoping for a decent turnout.

English and American.

Via Newmark’s Door I see that Mirriam Webster asked people for their favourite word that was not in the dictionary, Number 1 was "ginormous". As I actually used the word a day or two ago (with reference to condom sizing, of all things) I thought I’d actually check this. There in my Chanbers (1998 edition) it is, ginormous, (colloquial), huge, altogether enormous, (gigantic and enormous).

As ever, the English, leading the way for the colonial cousins.

That Constitution.

A Frenchman writes on the Constitution:

That has affected how the Constitution was conceived and written. The participants in the Convention (who were appointed, not elected) certainly have good intentions, but are they worthy of such a lofty task? In exceptional circumstances, when history demands it, exceptional personalities emerge, people with an acute sense of what the times demand. When things are quiet, second-raters take up the job. That is why the "founders" of Europe have no hope of one day being considered in the same light as Washington, Madison and Franklin. That is also why, from the beginning, the European Union has been so marked by bureaucracy and run by unelected "experts."

Vraiment M.

Another Good Idea.

James Miller has another good idea at Techcentralstation. Outsource and offshore a chunk of education. Seems like a blindingly good idea to me and will have the teacher’s unions up in arms, an added benefit.

What a Good Idea.

Duncan Campbell (the Grauniad journo, not the Ricin Plot investigator) comes up with a fabulous idea today.

In Poland in the 60s, according to a Polish woman who emailed me, "the authorities introduced the Hitchhiker's Booklet. Every hitchhiker who had it could write down how many kilometres they covered. The booklet contained coupons for drivers, so each time a driver picked up somebody, he or she received a coupon. At the end of the season, drivers who had picked up the most hikers were rewarded with various prizes. Everybody was hitchhiking then."

Surely here is an idea for any political party desperate for a bit of blue-sky thinking. Such an initiative would seem to fulfil many of the government's current aims: it would increase respect by breaking down barriers between strangers, it would help fight global warming by cutting down on fuel consumption as hitchhikers would be using existing fuels and not flying, and it would improve educational standards by delivering instant lessons in geography, orienteering, history, politics and sociology. What is New Labour waiting for?

From memory there are a number of  places trying out variations of the American ride share schemes but this is inspired, goes well beyond any of them.

I would quibble a little over one point, that it should be a political party that proposes or the State that should fund such things. By using a prize system one would get vastly more activity per pound spent than one would with direct payment (people consistently over estimate the liklihood of winning something) and you could almost certainly get many of the prizes donated by chivvying  companies into donating them for the reflected glory. But this is such a good idea that we shouldn’t wait for the State to lumber into action, rather, we should be looking  to a private sector actor. Someone known to be worried about, involved in,  actions to counter climate change. Someone with deep pockets (I reckon, indeed would be happy to come and set it up at such a budget, something like 500,000 a year would do it), someone with a brand that is already associated with such initiatives. Someone who in 2003 received 163 million euros in donations to save the planet perhaps?

Hellooo! Greenpeace? Care to actually do something useful?