I'm going to try avoid opening Internet Explorer all day. It's been a while since I've done it. Enjoy the terrific blogs on the left, and have a wonderful weekend.

Quote of the day, from Jay Zilber:

As "B" remarked to me recently, the plural of "anecdote" is not "facts."

Again, I find myself impressed not only with Brad DeLong's post, but with his comments, as he takes Mickey Kaus to task for (what else?) misrepresenting a story in the New York Times.

Mickey Kaus's claim(s) to report "some things the NYT didn't tell you about those new Census stats,"--including that during the recession of 2001 "the child poverty rate for [B]lacks actually continued to fall."...

Notice one key thing: the confidence interval ranges overlap. More than 1/2 of the year-2000 range falls within the year-2001 range. More than 1/2 the year-2001 range falls within the year-2000 range. What does this mean? It means that we can say that the point estimate for 2001 is less than the point estimate of 2000. It means that we can say that the data make it look more likely than not that Black child poverty continued to fall. But we cannot say--at least not if we remember anything from our statistics courses--that we have confidence (at the 95 percent level) that it continued to fall...

Is it fair to bash New York Times reporters for not parroting the party line of Mickey Kaus's overstatement--an overstatement for which the CPS does not provide a confident statistical base? Of course not.

I've criticized Kaus in my time, but really, I'm a little jealous. This is his whole job. He doesn't have to teach law, deal with clients, manage IT infrastructure, go to class, or whatever. He doesn't seem to write freelance articles anymore. I don't know much about the guy- maybe he volunteers or trains seals or something- but as far as I can tell, blogging is all he does for a living. (Is he writing a book or something? I've heard that The End of Equality is pretty good, but he can't still be living off of royalties.)

What have you done since Monday? Probably a lot, when you add it all up. What has Kaus done? He's posted four times, for a total of 472 words. Instapundit beat him before 7:30 AM today. At least one of Kaus's posts, out of four, is distinctly unfair.

With all the time in the world, he manages to bash the New York Times, blame welfare for everything but gout, and... Arnold Schwarzenegger may run for governor...

This guy must have pictures of Bill Gates with a sheep. It's the only thing that makes sense.

UPDATE: How could I neglect Uggabugga? He's got a grand old post here, the Kaus-Skipper Service, in which he tracks Mickey for a little over a week and finds that 11 out of 18 of his entries contain a jibe at the New York Times.

According to this salary calculator, $100,000 in Houston is worth $126,144 if you're straight outta Compton.

IN YOUR FACE, REN!

For all the downsides of blogs, they've got at least one tremendous upside for their readers: if a blog prints a statement that seems highly unlikely, you can generally expect to see a link or a source. If they don't provide one, you can often comment right on the blogger's site and express your skepticism. At the very least, you can send an email and feel pretty confident that the blogger will read it.

When old media makes a statement that seems highly unlikely, however, you just have to grin and bear it. Rob Lyman has more. (search for "Pop quiz")

For us folks who are into the weird back-scratching world of blogdom, Neal Pollack rules. He makes the rest of us look bad; it's like playing a pick-up game with Michael Jordan. Today, he bids farewell to The Nation:

It was the home of some of my first published articles, including "What Has Become Of The Left?" "The Left Is Coming Back," "Come On, Left," "Meat Is Poison," "Henry Hyde Is A Dick," "Hair Shirt: The Anti-Sweatshop Campaign and the Second Coming Of the American Left On Two or Three College Campuses," and Henry Kissinger, Vampire Of the World." But now, my association is no more...

My page in The Nation will be replaced by a rotation of features: A monthly Tom Tomorrow drawing of John Ashcroft called "Hiss, Hiss;" "You Can Do It, Left, Don't Touch My Body," a page of inspirational Ani DiFranco song lyrics; the always-scintillating Labor Watch; and the return of Patricia Williams' column, renamed "Diary of A Law Professor Who Happens To Be A Black Woman In Today's Society." Meanwhile, I've got to work on the manuscript of my forthcoming book, "Queen Elizabeth, Transvestite Whore of Windsor."

"Charles Dodgson" is one smart guy. This is priceless:

Last year, when Enron was going down, some conservative bloggers found a silver lining in the cloud: no longer, they claimed, would "liberals" be able to grouse that Enron was responsible for the California energy crisis --- if they were running a scam, how could they go broke?

...Over the past little while, we've had news of:

-Enron's schemes to, among other things, tie up transmission lines with bogus transactions, to run transient local shortages into price spikes, by making sure they couldn't be relieved from elsewhere.
-A report that companies running generators were playing the same game --- deliberately withholding available generator capacity (in plants which they had reported to the market regulators as in current working order, and ready to go).
-Most recently, a similar scheme by El Paso involving its natural gas pipelines --- again, withholding capacity, with the obvious goal of running up the price.

Well, don't all rush to apologize at once.

From today's librul anti-war New York Times editorial page: "Why Iraq Can't Be Deterred," by Kenneth Pollack.

It's not a bad piece at all. He makes a reasonable argument that Saddam, while not suicidal, can be so reckless and miscalculating that he might not be conventionally deterrable. He lists several examples of Saddam's actions, which look dangerously similar to irrationality.

When Secretary of State James Baker met with Tariq Aziz in Geneva on the eve of the war, the letter he presented from President Bush to Mr. Hussein threatened the "severest consequences" if Iraq took any of three actions: use of weapons of mass destruction, destruction of the Kuwaiti oil fields or terrorist action against the United States.

The first point to make is that this did not stop Mr. Hussein from destroying the oil fields or dispatching hit squads to the United States, so the notion that he is easily deterred is dubious. Mr. Hussein did not use chemical munitions against coalition ground forces because he initially believed that he did not need them to prevail. Nevertheless, he did keep stockpiles farther back from the front, suggesting he planned to use them if the battle did not go as he expected. Whether he would have used these weapons is an open question, because the coalition ground advance was so rapid that Iraq's forces never had a chance to deploy them.

Although this detail made me raise an eyebrow:

When Yevgeny M. Primakov, a Soviet envoy, went to Baghdad in 1991 to try to warn Mr. Hussein to withdraw, he was amazed to find out how cut off from reality Mr. Hussein was. "I realized that it was possible Saddam did not have complete information," he later wrote. "He gave priority to positive reports . . . and as for bad news, the bearer could pay a high price." These factors make Mr. Hussein difficult to deter, because his calculations are based on ideas that do not necessarily correspond to reality and are often impervious to outside influences.

Hmmm... sound like anyone we know?

The Bloviator: Informative and depressing! (permalinks FUBAR, look for "FEARED STAFFING SHORTAGES DUE TO SMALLPOX VAX OF PROVIDERS")

The more you look at health policy issues, the more you realize that pretty much everything is interconnected. Take the malpractice crisis: it's a function of the civil law system in this country, the environment in which we live, patient safety, communication in medicine, access to care, and interest rates and the stock market, among other things... Here, we have the immediate crisis of emergency room and hospital staffing running up against the need adequately to prepare for smallpox. How do you choose?

It doesn't exactly fit on a bumper sticker, but he's right, of course.

You might have heard that staffers of Iowa's Democratic incumbent Senator Tom Harkin snuck into a meeting of his challeger, Republican Greg Ganske, secretly videotaped it, and gave it to the news. You may have seen it referred to as a "Democratic Watergate."

In fact, via MWO, a Republican activist, a former campaign contributor to the Ganske campaign, was openly taping the meeting. He went to the fundraiser to hear Ken Mehlman, and didn't know that Greg Ganske was going to be present. Here's his statement:

I was openly present and participating in the event. Rather than take notes of the presentation and discussions, I chose to tape-record them. Congressman Ganske arrived late and in his speech stated that, as for Senator Harkin; "You've never seen a campaign where anyone will attack him like we're going to attack him, with a smile on our face...." I was incensed by Congressman Ganske's attitude and provided the tape to a Harkin staffer.

No laws were broken. No scandal. No Democratic one, anyway. You can anticipate updates from, among others...

Rush Limbaugh- "This is worse than Watergate, folks!"
CNN
FindLaw
Drudge Report
The New York Times
The Associated Press (via Free Republic- a few of the comments are hilarious in retrospect)

Some may already have updated by the time you read this.

UPDATE: In the comments, Henry Hanks and another person provide links that provide reasonable doubt about the taper, who was apparently not a Republican activist. As far as I can tell, no one has disputed that he was openly taping the meeting; it was no secret.

I don't get Blogger sometimes. First, it seemed to eat the post below this one, which reappeared this morning. Now it seems to have lost my comments. Ted Barlow's crack technical staff is on it, but I can't promise anything.

Another thing from P.L.A. P.L.A. stands for "Politics, Law and Autism," as Dwight Merideth has an autistic son. He writes about Bruno Bettelheim, the Freudian psychologist who was influential in popularizing the (completely, provably wrong) theory that autism was caused by bad mothers.

It's long, but it's very moving, and well worth reading in its entirety. Most of the people reading blogs wouldn't blink at it in a magazine; consider it a magazine article. Here is a small sample.

(Bettelheim's) seminal work on the issue “Empty Fortress” became the most influential work on the causes of autism written to that point. His theory of the cause of autism was almost universally adopted. The medical community accepted his theory. The psychologists accepted the theory. Many educators accepted the theory. Public policy was influenced by Bettleheim’s theory. Finally, a vast portion of the public including parents of autistic children accepted Bettelheim’s theory of a psychological cause of autism.

Despite the acceptance if his theory, Bettelheim was utterly wrong about the cause of autism. Bettelheim’s theory of causation was based on a Freudian model. He theorized that some early psychological trauma caused children to withdraw from the world and to be autistic.

In Empty Fortress, Bettelheim writes that “Infantile autism is a state of mind that develops in reaction to feeling oneself in an extreme situation, entirely without hope.”

Modern science has debunked Bettelheim’s theory. Autism is not a state of mind. It is a state of brain. Autism is a development disorder that is caused by a genetic birth defect in combination with some environmental trigger. While we do not as yet know the exact genetic defect and while we have not yet identified the environmental triggers, rigorous research has conclusively demonstrated that autism is a neurological and not a psychological disorder.

Bettelheim’s theory of causation, however, went well beyond simply postulating a psychological cause for autism. Bettelheim "knew" where the blame for causing autism should rest. Bettelheim placed the blame for causing autism squarely on the shoulders of the mothers of autistic children.

I'm transcribing right now from E. Fuller Torrey's excellent Surviving Schiozophrenia:

One of the most remarkable facts about schizophrenia is that researchers in the mid-nineteenth century were closer to the truth regarding its causes that were researchers in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1830s, in both England and the United States, there was a consensus among most mental illness professionals that insanity was a brain disease. In England, for example, William A. F. Browne stated that "insanity then is... produced by an organic change in the brain." Researchers, looking for abnormalities, assiduously examined the postmortem brainsof insane individuals, but the results were contradictory since the available techniques were inadequate to find them. In 1867 Henry Maudsley recognized that "the important molecular or chemical changes may take place in those inner recesses to which we have not yet gained access... (and) to conclude from the non-appearance of change to the non-existence therof would be just as if the blind man were to maintain that there were no colors, or the deaf man to assert that there was no sound."

Incredibly, one hundred years after Brigham, Browne, Maudsley, and their colleagues were discussing insanity as a brain disease, their psychiatric offspring were investigating insanity as a product of bad mothering or mislabeling. In no area of medicine- perhaps all of science- did research go backwards for as far or as long as it did in psychiatry.

Here's a good paper on the subject: Burying Freud and associated commentary. I've put in a paragraph break for readability; MTV generation and all.

Grünbaum (ref 4) has examined Freud's procedures and shown how they bear no resemblance to the methods that have proved elsewhere so effective in arriving at reliable, generalisable, and practically useful conclusions. Consider the discovery of the repressed Oedipus complex. For Freud, this was the key to every neurosis; and it is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic thought. It was postulated on the basis of data acquired during his period of self-analysis. The crucial datum (note use of the singular) was Freud's recollection of a long train journey with his mother, when he was 2 years old, during which, according to the differing accounts he gives, he either must have seen her naked or actually did so, as a result of which he conceived a sexual desire for her. A few weeks after retrieving this quasi-memory, he concluded that the male sexual love of the mother was a universal event of early childhood. This huge jump was subsequently supported, Freud claimed, by direct observations in children, especially in analysis. Details, however, are strikingly lacking. Out of a single evaporating drop of pseudo-fact, he had created a roomful of steam.

Those few of Freud's case histories that are possible to assess are invalidated, as evidence, by a confirmatory bias. Esterson (ref 2) shows how, again and again, Freud muddled his own conjectures of what was going on in his patient's unconscious with their accounts of what they later remembered and, over time, he came to represent the former as the latter. It was hardly surprising, then, that, like a first-year medical student or a hypochondriac making diagnoses, Freud found that everything he recalled from his consultations could fit his theories. This circularity, whereby the theory created the facts that supported the theory, should have been evident to anyone reading the published works, but few had noticed it.

It seems to me that intellectual historians who praise Freud for his originality or influence are, to put it mildly, missing the point. Autism and schitzophrenia are just two diseases for which Freudian psychotherapy provided nothing but utterly ineffective "treatment", blame, pain, and scientific retardation. Freud's enormous influence turned psychology away from the medical/ scientific method into speculation, analogy, and "insight." When I seriously stop to consider how much opportunity and how many tears were wasted because of his theories, it makes me want to scream.

OK, one more thing: P.L.A has a detailed post about the way that the Bush White House adjusts its informational inputs to best fit its preconcieved ideas. I can't do it justice (Dwight Merideth has assembled quite a few examples), but here's a sample:

One of the reasons that we have little confidence in President Bush’s decision-making with regard to almost any issue is that he exhibits a complete lack of respect for the collection or assessment of information prior to making his decision...

Mr. Bush is confident in his ability to make decisions without reference to relevant information. The economic summit was not for the purposes of gathering information or developing policy, it was for scoring political points and allowing Mr. Bush to bask in the admiration of the faithful. Commissions are not appointed to determine facts or to recommend policy, but rather to ratify the Revealed Truth that Mr. Bush has divined without reference to facts. Environmental data, crime statistics and intelligence information are to be redacted, controlled or prohibited if in conflict with Revealed Truth. Mr. Bush’s attitude towards the collection and assessment of data does not suggest stupidity. It suggests arrogance.

Exactly. I've recently read A Bright Shining Lie and The Best and the Brightest about the Vietnam war, and this is a big part of what went wrong in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations when it came to planning Vietnam. Especially under Johnson, criticizing the war became a career-limiting action. It was insane.

It's one of the things that makes me twitch when I think about the thoroughness and rigor going into the invasion plans on Iraq. Maybe they considered every angle and every possibility in their planning; maybe they weighed and planned around the reasons not to invade. But if they did, this approach would certainly be inconsistent with approach to other decisions. When I read about the way that the Pentagon magically refloated the American boats and resurrected their troops in the notorious Middle Eastern Red/ Blue war games, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

No blogging today. EXCEPT:

Rob Lyman, one of my sharpest commentators/ critics, has finally started his own blog. Give him hits, wish him well.

D-squared has a great post about how badly Russian privatization was handled. He combines an interesting approach with lots of swearing:

Me: What the hell happened? How did you fuck up Russia so badly? People call Art Laffer a crap economist, but he never starved a million people to death! What were you guys smoking?
Harvard Institute type: Oh it was terribly sad. Our policy mix was about right, but, unfortunately, the whole thing was derailed by the botched privatisation program
Me: I'll say it was fucking botched! GDP fell by 42%! Life expectancy fell by seven years! I simply do not believe that a freaking privatisation program, a fairly mild supply-side reform, no matter how badly designed, could have that kind of immediate and catastrophic macroeconomic effect!
Usher: Excuse me sir, would you mind lowering your voice and minding your language? Professor Shleifer is about to make his speech
HI Type:Well the problem is that because the privatisation program was handled badly, the national assets ended up in the hands of a small group of oligarchs.
Me: So fucking what? They were in the hands of a small group of oligarchs before the privatisation! In any case, how does this affect output?! When people find out that their employer has been taken over, they might slack off a little, but they don't suddenly decide to down tools, go home and starve to fucking death! There's got to be more to it than that!
Somewhat more burly usher: Excuse me sir, would you mind stepping outside ...?

He argues that the problem is not that the new owners were a bunch of crooks, since the old owners were a bunch of crooks too. Rather, he argues that the new crooks had the incentives and (more crucially) the means to funnel as much capital as possible outside the country ASAP. He argues that:

Russia experienced a huge and horrendous depression precisely because an item which is usually small enough to be forgotten about (the drain on domestic liquidity brought about by capital flight on the part of criminals) became significant enough to be large relative to the domestic money supply. So the *really* stupid policy of the Harvard Institute was to impose the open foreign exchange and capital markets which made the capital flight possible.

Good stuff; go read it.

Yesterday, I got an email* from a reader in California. She wrote,

Ted (if that is your real name),

Your sloppy, poorly reasoned "weblog" needs a barely-animated Burger King cashier singing to the tune of "Carol of the Bells."

Love,

Elaine

Happy to oblige, Elaine.


* No I didn't

Win Fitzpatrick links to a great interview with Steven Pinker. Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct was one of the most pleasurable science books I can remember reading; it's a model of clarity and reason, written with a sense of humor.

Everybody's linking to TBogg, so what's so special about me? Nuttin. Among other nice posts, he's got a great excerpt from Senator Wayne Allard on Meet the Press.

I've come to believe that the Senator is a master of Techno-Shamanism*. Otherwise, he was either drunk or hopelessly dishonest, and we can't have that.

(FYI: Look at the hit counter at the bottom of the page. 2,891,824. Apparently, there's a huge audience for mescaline-inspired philosophy.)

I've finally written about the damn barebacking story. I hate this issue: it’s an old story, it’s a classic “liberal circular firing squad” situation, and it has nothing to do with anything important. But I've never really explained my side, so I'm going to get it out of my system. If a discussion of a certain gay conservative weblogger’s sex life isn't your cup of tea, I salute you, and recommend one of the fine, fine blogs on the left.

If you’re still interested, I’ve posted my argument here.

I'll be on the Hugh Hewitt show tonight, 7:40 Central time, to talk about Iraq. I'd better think of something to say.

Did you see this? Via This Modern World, air marshals threw an Indian* physician in jail for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Dr. Rajcoomar was seated in first class on a Delta Airlines flight from Atlanta to Philadelphia on Aug. 31 when a passenger in the coach section began behaving erratically. The passenger, Steven Feuer, had nothing to do with Dr. Rajcoomar…

There were no terrorists on board. There was no threat of any kind. When the plane landed about half an hour later, Mr. Feuer was taken into custody. And then, shockingly, so was Dr. Rajcoomar. The air marshals grabbed the doctor from behind, handcuffed him and, for no good reason that anyone has been able to give, hauled him to an airport police station where he was thrown into a filthy cell.

UPDATE: Indian-American, I should have said. He's a retired Army major.

Jim Capozzola had a good catch: the New Republic's smear of Rachel Swarns and the New York Times, accusing them of carrying water for the Mugabe regime. It wasn't true when Andrew Sullivan wrote it, and it isn't true now.

FYI, I wrote to Andrew Sullivan to ask if he had written this piece, and he said that he hadn't. So address all polite correspondence to the editors.

Hi, Hugh Hewitt fans! I haven't said anything good recently about the war on Iraq, and I'd never dream to think that I spoke for "the left." But Jeff Cooper sums up my personal feelings pretty well: we want to see Bush succeed in Iraq, and we're open to being convinced. But we are sick of being plied with half-honest or downright dishonest reasons for war, and we'd like to see someone other than the Atlantic Monthly talk about what happens on the day after V-Day.

You may also enjoy this discussion from David Yaseen about why many lefties think the Bush administration is bad for the country, and why his pernicious effects may last for generations.

Jim Henley at High Clearing has a wide variety of well-argued posts against the war, if you're interested.

Finally, I made a chart a little while about about why invading Iraq is a better idea and a worse idea than invading Vietnam in the early 60s. The HTML is ugly as sin, but I think that it made sense.