There's something about procedural rules that brings out the hypocrite in just about everyone. Power Line's Scott Johnson catches distinguished Minnesota politician Walter Mondale succumbing to the temptation, with the support of his local newspaper. Mondale recently published an op-ed defending the Senate filibuster, now under attack by Republicans frustrated over their inability to confirm Bush administration judicial appointments. The newspaper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, now concurs with Mondale. A little over a decade ago, though, the paper condemned a 1993 Republican filibuster of a Clinton administration spending bill. And less than a year later, it endorsed a campaign to end the filibuster altogether. Mondale, in fact, was one of the leaders of the successful 1975 Democratic move to reduce the number of senators needed to break a filibuster from 67 to 60.

Of course, those were different times. In 1993 and 1994, for example, a Democratic president confronted a rambunctious Republican minority who were as enthusiastic about exercising their minority prerogatives as the Democrats were about limiting them. Not only were Republican senators filibustering Clinton spending initiatives, but conservatives were enthusiastically embracing the general idea that certain government decisions--in particular, tax increases--should be subject to a minority veto. The Heritage Foundation endorsed a Constitutional amendment to enforce the principle in 1996, and the Republican-controlled Senate voted in support of it in 1998. Numerous states--mostly Republican-controlled--have enacted some form of it.

One can, to be sure, make specific arguments for limiting the supermajority requirement to tax increases, or judicial appointments, or even poet laureate nominations. But in practice, any faction that sees itself as secure in its dominance tends to oppose supermajority requirements altogether, while factions that see their grip slipping, or not yet firm, will see supermajority requirements as an important equalizer against the powers-that-be.

In truth, there's no magic to the number 50%--or 60%, or 67%, for that matter. As long as the number remains fixed, a responsive political class will generate the required majorities to meet the insistent demands of voters. The real problem occurs when changes in the rules outpace the political system's ability to react. With respect to control of the judiciary, that point was reached decades ago, when the American judicial custom of arbitrarily overruling the democratically accountable branches of government expanded from an occasional hobby into a full-time profession. The resulting disruption of the political equilibrium--reflected in the Bork and Thomas nomination fights, the Republican stalling tactics of the 1990s, and the recent filibusters--is still far from being resolved.

Economist/blogger Brad de Long has stirred up something of a controversy by lambasting an essay by German author Gunther Grass published on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversity of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Most commentators have understandably balked at de Long's characterization of Grass as "crypto-Nazi scum" (which de Long appears to have retracted). But the heated partisanship of the conflict (Grass is a lifelong leftist; de Long is of the center-left) has obscured some of the, shall we say, oddities of Grass' essay.

To begin with, consider this passage:

In the cold war that quickly followed, German states that had existed since 1949 consistently fell to one or other power bloc, whereupon the governments of both national entities sought to present themselves as model pupils of their respective dominating powers. Forty years later, during the glasnost period, it was in fact the Soviet Union that broke up the Democratic Republic, which had by that point become a burden. The Federal Republic's almost unconditional subservience to the United States was broken for the first time when the Social Democratic-Green ruling coalition decided to make use of the freedom given to us in sovereign terms 60 years ago, by refusing to allow German soldiers to participate in the Iraq war.

It's true that lots of European intellectuals like to think of themselves as rebels against American hegemony. Still, Grass is writing on the occasion of the anniversary of the fall of the Nazi regime. Is that really the right time to bemoan the subsequent sixty years as a period of German subservience to foreign powers? What alternative fate, exactly, did Grass consider appropriate for Germany in 1945?

There follows the following passage:

Fifteen years after signing the treaty on unification, we can no longer conceal that despite the financial achievements, German unity has essentially been a failure. Petty calculation prevented the government of the time from submitting to the citizens of both states a new constitution relevant to the endeavors of Germany as a whole. It is therefore hardly surprising that people in the former East Germany should regard themselves as second-class Germans.

Again, although one can scarcely fault Grass for worrying about geographic inequalities in modern Germany, is the anniversary of the fall of the Nazis really the right moment to present such problems as a failure of "German unity"?

Grass continues:

Now, I believe that our freely elected members of Parliament are no longer free to decide. The customary party pressures are not particularly present in Germany; it is, rather, the ring of lobbyists with their multifarious interests that constricts and influences the Federal Parliament and its democratically elected members, placing them under pressure and forcing them into disharmony, even when framing and deciding the content of laws. Consequently, Parliament is no longer sovereign in its decisions. It is steered by the banks and multinational corporations - which are not subject to any democratic control.

Once again, it's common on the left to worry about corporate influence on the democratic process. But to use the anniversary of the end of German Nazism to echo old claims that the democratically elected German government is nothing but a collection of puppets of "banks and multinational corporations"? (At least Grass doesn't attribute any particular religion to the international capitalists who have supposedly hijacked German democracy. But still....)

No, not every German nationalist socialist is a National Socialist. And Grass hasn't yet made the jump from the German far left to the de facto German far right (although he wouldn't be the first German artist to do so). But one might have expected a writer like Grass, who has made a career out of exploring the echoes of Nazism in postwar German culture, to be a bit more careful about keeping them out of his own pronouncements.

If you find this blog nearly unreadable, there's now scientific (or at least scientific-sounding) support for your opinion. You can obtain it here.

Personally, I had neither any interest nor any opinion regarding the recent process that resulted in the selection of a new Pope. Nevertheless, I have to admit that when I heard the choice, I did have an emotional reaction, of sorts, albeit a rather crassly parochial one: Cardinal Ratzinger's elevation, I immediately thought, is obviously "good for the Jews".

Just about any other candidate, elected Pope at this particular moment, would have plenty of reasons to make no end of trouble for Jews: a perceived need to appease virulently anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment in Muslim countries, in the name of protecting vulnerable Catholic communities there; desire to participate in Third World international politics--which, these days, teems with anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism--in order to properly represent the huge population of Third World Catholics; or simple recognition of the many eternally sore points of theological and political friction between Catholics and Jews. However, Ratzinger has one very compelling reason not to make trouble: a desire to avoid seeming to the world to be a product of his unattractive past.

Of course, that doesn't mean that he's likely to be much of a help to the world's Jews. But then, not too many sensible Jews ever look to a pope for help. And it's no small comfort that this one--unlike so many of his predecessors--might actually try to refrain from doing much harm.

"Bankruptcy reform" is a lot like tax rates--it's an opportunity for plenty of partisan ranting on behalf of bedrock principles, but it's really about marginal adjustments and practical outcomes, not hard-and-fast absolutes.

On the right, Todd Zywicki argues (and argues and argues and argues....) that the new bankruptcy reform bill will help reduce bankruptcy fraud and abuse, thus lowering interest rates for honest borrowers and protecting individual, small-scale and non-profit creditors from bankruptcy-abusers. On the left, Paul Krugman and Mark Kleiman essentially follow the "cui bono?" path, and conclude that the bankruptcy reform bill is all a plot by consumer creditors to increase their profits by winning the right to squeeze their helpless, impoverished debtors even harder than before. What's missing from both of these arguments is a clear picture of what bankruptcy is for, and why one might want to tighten or loosen its rules.

Bankruptcy is simply a standardization of the act of defaulting on debts. When a debtor defaults on a debt, then the creditor can go to court to recover as much as possible of the debt from the debtor's remaining assets. When there are multiple creditors, though, deciding whose repayment gets which priority up to what amount becomes quite complicated. Bankruptcy is a way of resolving this complexity--in effect, the debtor's current assets are divided up among the creditors according to certain rules, and the debtor's debts are thereby ruled discharged.

Of course, the devil's in the details. When can a debtor declare bankruptcy? Which of the debtor's assets are the creditors then allowed to divvy up? Which debts and obligations are thereby discharged? The answers to these questions can be more debtor-friendly--say, giving the debtor maximum flexibility in choosing when and how often to declare bankruptcy, requiring that only certain specific assets be seized, and specifying that all obligations are thereby fully discharged. Or they can be more creditor-friendly--say, severely limiting the debtor's option to declare bankruptcy, requiring that all present and future assets be prospectively seized, and only allowing a few debts to be thereby discharged. Where the laws stand on these questions thus determines a balance between debtors' and creditors' interests, which can be shifted in either direction at any time, for political or economic reasons. The latest "bankruptcy reform" bill, for instance, would shift the balance slightly further towards the creditors' interests in certain ways.

The bill is a response to a recent significant rise in the rate of bankruptcies. The bill's supporters argue that "abuse" of the law is increasing, as bankruptcy becomes less of a cultural stigma, and that the resulting hesitancy on the part of lenders may reduce the availability of credit to "honest" borrowers. The bill's opponents respond that the rise in bankruptcy is a result of increased "sub-prime" lending--that is, lending to borrowers who were higher bankruptcy risks in the first place--and that creditors are simply trying to avoid having to pay the price for their reckless lending practices.

Rather than attempt to assign blame for the rise in bankruptcies, it would be worthwhile to ask whether they're a problem in the first place. In fact, the rise in bankruptcies is a result of increased lending to risky borrowers--but the lenders weren't simply being foolish or reckless. Rather, their behavior is a perfectly sensible response to the financial revolution of the '80s and '90s--the same one that helped trigger today's housing and mortgage boom.

In the last couple of decades, it has become legally and technically possible to "repackage" debt more flexibly than ever before. For example, mortgages were once issued by individual institutions, who stood to lose substantial amounts of money if more of their mortgages defaulted than they had expected--say, as a result of a local economic downturn. Today, however, mortgages can be "bundled" into "mortgage-backed securities"--bonds whose value is based on the combined future mortgage payments of many different borrowers. These bonds can then be sold off to multiple investors, spreading the risk of any one institution's mortgage portfolio over perhaps hundreds or thousands of institutions. As a result, any individual institution's risk is greatly reduced.

Of course, since financial institutions are in the business of fielding controlled amounts of risk in exchange for the chance of a profit, their response has been not to reduce the risk of their portfolios, but rather to seek higher profits by jacking their risk back up to its previous level. The obvious way to do this is to lend to higher-risk borrowers, at higher interest rates, and then reduce their exposure to its previous level using the repackaging trick.

Something very similar has happened in the consumer lending business. Those "sub-prime" lenders--credit card companies that sign up hordes of questionable credit risks--are engaged in exactly the same game as the mortgage issuers: they repackage their cusomers' future credit card payments as bonds, then sell them off to multiple buyers, spreading out the risk to the point where any one buyer's exposure is bearable even at high default rates--that is, at high bankruptcy rates. And since these higher-risk loans also carry higher returns--poor credit risks are always charged higher interest rates--these bearable-risk, high-return bonds are good business for everyone. That's why those millions of "pre-approved" credit card applications keep flowing through the mail, even as the bankruptcy rate increases.

Under these circumstances, the argument for bankruptcy reform--that it's necessary to stem the rising tide of bankruptcies to keep credit within reach of higher-risk customers--is clearly nonsense. The increased availability of credit to less credit-worthy customers is driving the increase in bankruptcies, not being threatened by it. It's true that making bankruptcy more difficult and onerous for debtors would make credit even easier for high-risk borrowers to obtain. (So would the return of debtors' prison, for that matter: lenders would be confident of the willingness of even high-risk debtors to do everything possible in order to repay their debts and stay out of jail.) But the increase in the bankruptcy rate, far from being a harbinger of decreased credit availability, is actually a symptom of increased credit availability. Credit availability may or may not be at the "ideal" level today, but if you think we need more of it, then you should already be happy with the direction it's been going.

The day bankruptcy rates drop, on the other hand--because creditors are too afraid to lend to all but the least risky borrowers--we might want to consider tightening bankruptcy laws, in order to boost lenders' confidence that they'll be repaid. That day may yet come--say, after some future economic downturn triggers a sharp rise in bankruptcies, panicking creditors into tightening their credit standards. (Indeed, I suspect a greater-than-expected jump in interest rates could well create such an outcome very soon.)

However, that day is certainly not today. Creditors are hardly spooked by the current rising tide of bankruptcies--on the contrary, they fully expected it, have factored it carefully into their calculations, and are loving every minute of it.

Volokh co-conspirators Orin Kerr and Jim Lindgren have come out in favor of a proposal to limit the terms of US Supreme Court justices to 18 years. Co-conspirator Randy Barnett is also somewhat sympathetic.

My response: why not 4-year terms for Supreme Court justices, commencing at each presidential inauguration? To paraphrase Shaw, we've determined what they are--now it's just the duration we're bargaining over.

The justifications for 18-year terms--that they might make the Supreme Court more "modest" and responsive to public opinion, and presidents less inclined to appoint young, inexperienced justices, in the hope of influencing the Court for 50 years--effectively concede the point that the justices' role has long ceased to be anything even resembling neutral, dispassionate application of the Constitution and federal statutes. It is apparently now widely acknowledged that candidates are nominated by politicians for the sole purpose of enshrining particular political viewpoints--even constituencies' interests--in Constitutional and statute interpretation. Given, then, that the justices' role is a de facto political one, what's the argument for not making them every bit as accountable as any other political actor?

Of course, once they're political actors, it's hard to see what benefits they provide that aren't already covered by the other democratically accountable branches of government. Then again, perhaps if they had simply stuck to being judges in the first place, and hadn't succumbed to the temptation to abuse their powers for nakedly political ends, then they might not seem so utterly superfluous now.

Just for fun, here are some music trivia questions:

1. What song, written in 1968 by film composer Piero Umiliani for a soft-core documentary on sex in Sweden, went on to become a worldwide hit, recorded by numerous artists--including the Muppets?

(You can learn the answer using this search query. Or you can listen to a sample of the original recording here.)

2. What 1970 soft pop hit by Roger Nichols and Paul Williams was originally written for a television commercial for the Crocker Bank?

(You can learn the answer using this search query.)

3. What well-known "folk song" was actually written in 1940 for the musical "Esterke", by the legendary New York Yiddish theater composer Shalom Secunda (who also wrote the Andrews Sisters' hit "Bei Mir Bist Du Shein"), with lyrics by Aaron Zeitlin that allegorically mock the doomed Jews of Europe for failing to escape to America?

(You can learn the answer using this search query.)

For some inexplicable reason, lots of bloggers seem to have been moved to comment on David Brooks' recent, unimpressive New York Times column on the difference in divisiveness levels between the left and right. I'll grant that Brooks' column is correct in one respect: today's right is somewhat more fractious than the left--although decreasingly so, as the former gets more comfortable with its electoral dominance and corresponding political power. Brooks' characterization of that fractiousness, however, is completely wrong. Brooks believes that conservatives are politically more successful because "they enjoy big debates about public philosophy", whereas liberals don't.

This is ridiculous. Intellectuals enjoy big debates about public philosophy. There are intellectuals on both the left and the right, and neither group has helped its side's cause very much in the political arena. Winning politics isn't a matter of crafting a brilliantly coherent philosophy, but rather of crafting a marginally coherent coalition that's larger than the opponent's.

And that's where conservative fractiousness has helped. Conservatives, having been the minority side for something like half a century, eventually got hungry enough to incorporate many small factions who didn't necessarily agree with each other on much at all, except that they didn't like the ruling liberal coalition. One by one, as they attempted to peel groups of voters away from the left/Democrats/liberals, they engaged in spirited haggling over how much weight to grant the new group's agenda. This process continues, with the hot debates in conservative circles--immigration, federalism, fiscal discipline--centering on how much to offer relatively recently, tentatively recruited groups--Hispanics, libertarians, middle-class moderates--at the expense of the base--nativists, social conservatives, businesses.

Meanwhile, the left, as a recently-dominant faction now reduced to a minority, is too busy trying to contain the damage to think about such outreach moves. There's little disagreement among liberals because they're simply trying to protect the gains made by their core constituents during their years in power--gains that have long been a matter of internal consensus for them, and were until recently matters of national consensus as well. In their current state, they have no time, energy or inclination for jettisoning any of these consensus positions in return for some outside group's support. In effect, they've become a true "conservative" party--dedicated to preventing, as much as possible, a rollback of their cherished achievements.

This posture, although natural and understandable, is also a mistake. The sooner the left can think in terms of building a coalition out of disaffected anti-conservatives, rather than defending one consisting of embittered liberals, the sooner they will contend seriously for power against the right. That requires preparedness to give up some battles--even over traditional bedrock principles--as lost, if they're no longer politically viable. That's what conservatives did some time ago with their blanket opposition to government entitlements and racial equality, for example--and look at where they are now.

Of course, liberals will wake up, later if not sooner--the same process that (re-)created the modern conservative movement will ultimately recreate liberalism as well. But any liberal who's serious about challenging today's conservative political dominance had better hope--and act--for the awakening to begin soon.

Mark Kleiman points to a New York Times article about moves at DARPA, the Pentagon's research funding agency, to cut funding to long-term, academic research in computer science, in favor of shorter-term industrial development projects. A number of prominent computer scientists are quoted in the article, sounding quite incensed at DARPA's supposed shortsightedness in failing to renew and expand their usual grants. Buried towards the end, however, is this telling tidbit:

Still, a number of top scientists argue that the Pentagon's shift in priorities could not have come at a worse time. Most American companies have largely ended basic research and have begun to outsource product research and development extensively even as investments in Asia and Europe are rising quickly.

Now, those of us who were involved in computer science research back in the boom years of the '90's, when industry was spending like crazy on it, might scratch our heads a bit at this claim. You see, I'm trying to recall if any of these same professors back then used to chide DARPA for funding so much CS research, and reassure them that the government's money could best be spent elsewhere, since industry was easily taking up the slack in the CS area.

I clearly recall some academics arguing that industry's massive funding of CS research required a matching injection of government funds. I seem to remember the occasional claim that government funding had to keep pace with industry, to avoid private corporations "capturing" the expected massively lucrative fruits of basic CS research by claiming intellectual property rights on them. Maybe somebody might have argued that the surge in industrial funding of CS research was a sign that the research area had a lot of potential, and was hence deserving of government largesse. Or that it proved the economic importance of research to the hi-tech industry, which therefore needed still more government funding of research to help it stave off competition from other countries.

But I somehow can't seem to recall a single one of the professors quoted in the article arguing back then that government funding is most needed when industry isn't bothering to supply much funding of its own, and therefore that the abundance of industrial funding at the time was a sign that government research funds were less urgent, and could safely be cut back without harming the field or the economy.

Then again, perhaps it's just my poor memory.

Columbia University has just released a report on the results of its investigation into the conduct of certain of its professors of Middle Eastern Studies. The investigating committee consisted largely of faculty conspicuously sympathetic to the professors in question. And, indeed, the report they produced largely exonerates the professors of wrongdoing, and even criticizes the accusers, who have themselves been accused of trying to undermine the professors' "academic freedom".

Let's take for granted (I certainly do) that the accusations against these professors--all of them virulent, even militant critics of the state of Israel--have more to do with the politicized nature of their scholarship than with any real or alleged misconduct. If one were a believer in "academic freedom", then any discussion of the legitimacy of these accusations would end there. But as I've explained before, I consider "academic freedom" to be primarily a cover for eviscerating academic standards, and allowing political propagandists, purveyors of pseudo-scholarly nonsense, or just plain useless deadwood to keep their cushy academic sinecures. There remains the question, though: how is a university supposed to defend academic standards against "academic freedom"?

University administrators are often confronted with this question when an embarrassing faculty member--or sometimes an entire department--is noticed to be producing and teaching propaganda, or nonsense, or nothing at all, instead of serious scholarship. The standard approaches are (1) allowing (or quietly encouraging) more competent scholars to develop somewhere else on campus, whence they can marginalize and overshadow the cranks until the latter retire or leave of their own volition; or (2) giving the offending cranks a push, by digging up "offenses" on their part to justify active measures against them. Ward Churchill's treatment was an example of the latter approach--after the politically incendiary nature of his scholarship became embarrassing to the university, numerous incidents of plagiarism and poor scholarship that were previously papered over suddenly came to light, allowing the university administration to justify taking action. In another case, a professor who openly espoused Nazism was turfed out for excessive absenteeism.

Likewise, the Columbia professors' accusers were clearly trying to give the university an excuse to clean house in the Middle Eastern Studies department. Unfortunately, the university administration refused to take the hint, and instead threw its weight behind the professors' "academic freedom". The result will be more garbage pseudo-scholarship emanating from the Columbia Middle Eastern Studies faculty.

Defenders of "academic freedom" will no doubt argue that it can protect outstanding scholars with controversial political views. (Indeed, some of them will make that very argument in this case.) But in practice, those who are more interested in, say, political conformity than in good scholarship are perfectly willing to denigrate good scholarship in the name of political conformity--while using "academic freedom" to protect politically conformist bad scholarship. "Academic freedom" is thus a much more powerful weapon in the hands of the defenders of bad scholarship than for the defenders of good scholarship. It's bad for academia, and deserves to be discredited.

Eugene Volokh and Mark A.R. Kleiman have been debating a somewhat grisly topic: whether it would be just and moral to torture a heinous criminal (say, a serial killer of children) to death, as retribution for his crimes. They appear to have come to agreement, in the end, that purely retributive punishment of this sort is morally just, but nevertheless operationally impracticable, for various reasons.

Needless to say, I disagree. I support severe measures--such as capital punishment, and even torture--when necessary for legitimate purposes, such as deterrence or prevention of even worse misdeeds. But I strongly oppose mistreating criminals merely out of vengeful cruelty.

I've already articulated my views on these issues at length, and there's not much point in any event in arguing over such fundamental moral disagreements. But I feel compelled to respond to what Kleiman and Volokh apparently consider the clinching argument in favor of retributive justice. As Kleiman puts it:

[C]ould you explain to me why we kept chasing Nazi war criminals well into the 1990s? Was the Third Reich likely to come back? Were we hoping to deter the next round of mass murderers?

Perhaps it's the perpetually warm, sunny weather in Los Angeles that's convinced UCLA professors Kleiman and Volokh that monsters comparable to the Nazi war criminals are purely relics of the past. But those of us with a darker--and, I believe, far more realistic--view of the world see the Nuremberg trials, and subsequent Nazi-hunting, as a serious exercise in deterrence. That's presumably why grand, public trials were held, rather than standard military court martials. That's why the accusers, judges and executioners were from the victorious allies who defeated the Nazis, not from the nations and peoples that the Nazis overran and decimated. That's why the slogan of the Nazi-hunters is "never again"--rather than, say, "torture the bastards". That's why the governments that sheltered Nazi war criminals from prosecution were not those given to expressing horror at the idea of retribution, but rather those, like Syria's and Argentina's, given to voicing sympathy with Nazi ideas. And that's why the iconic monstrosity of the Nazis is used regularly today, along with the stories of similar monsters who got off scot-free, such as Stalin and Pol Pot, to call us to action against contemporary horrors--whereas the fates of those whose cruelties were brutally avenged, such as, say, Italy's Mussolini, Rumania's Ceausescu, or Nicaragua's Somoza, are rarely, if ever, used as moral exemplars of any kind.

Perhaps it's naive to think that power-hungry, megalomaniacal sadists would be deterred by the threat of being brought to justice. Then again, perhaps it's naive to think that everyday criminals are so deterred, either. Obviously, criminals of all types do what they do because deterrence has failed to intimidate them--and perhaps some are, indeed undeterrable.

What we do know, however, is that Hitler is said to have remarked, just prior to his invasion of Poland, "who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" And the Nazis certainly went to considerable effort and expense to keep the scale and many of the details of the Holocaust as secret as possible--even when the Nazi empire was at the height of its power, openly committed to many frankly brutal ends, and in a state of total war with virtually all the countries that could possibly threaten it. Perhaps the fear of being called to account for their crimes did weigh on the minds of the Nazi killers, after all. And if even they felt at least some shred of culpability-inspired inhibition, then who else might?

Should doctors be using computers?
The New York Times often goes out of its way to make it clear that everything bad that happens, or that might be happening, is about Bush and his administration. One example is this article entitled, "Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged Television News". In paragraph 12 they tell us that this practice "also occurred in the Clinton administration". I guess that was the Previous Age.

But what especially upsets me now is that the Times administration has decided that in order to aid their Bush-bashing, they have to come out against the computerization of medical records. At least for now. As I've mentioned before, I have a long standing interest in this subject. I think it is absurd that computers are not used more to keep track of patients' medical records and of the decisions of their physicians. Obviously this should be computerized, and obviously it should be done well and not badly.

The article begins with a really damning attack against Bush: "The Bush administration and many health experts have declared that the nation's health care system needs to move quickly from paper records and prescriptions into the computer age." We are not told just when the administration declared this, nor what they might mean by "quickly". We are told that Dr. David Brailer, the administration's national coordinator for health information technology, took issue with "the suggestion that the Bush administration is encouraging a headlong rush to invest in health information technology". We are not told who made this "suggestion", nor are we given any evidence for it. Brailer says that "for the next year, ... his policy efforts will be to try to encourage the health industry to agree on common computer standards, product certification and other measures that could become the foundation for digital patient records and health computer systems." That certainly sounds like a headlong rush to me.

Just why is the New York Times so afraid of doctors using computers? The excuse is three articles that appeared Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association; all of the abstracts, and the text of one of them, can be read for free. These papers apparently "cast doubt on the wisdom of betting heavily that information technology can transform health care anytime soon".

[The paper by Koppel et. al.] found 22 ways that a computer system for physicians could increase the risk of medication errors. Most of these problems, the authors said, were created by poorly designed software that too often ignored how doctors and nurses actually work in a hospital setting.

The likelihood of errors was increased, the paper stated, because information on patients' medications was scattered in different places in the computer system. To find a single patient's medications, the researchers found, a doctor might have to browse through up to 20 screens of information.

Among the potential causes of errors they listed were patient names' being grouped together confusingly in tiny print, drug dosages that seem arbitrary and computer crashes.

... The study did not try to assess whether the risks of computer systems outweigh the benefits, like the elimination of errors that had been caused by paper records and prescriptions.

In fact, the paper tells us (although the Times does not) that, "Published studies report that CPOE reduces medication errors up to 81%." This is the benefit we apparently get even from a program that is horribly designed and atrociously implemented. The program in question has been in use since 1997, presumably as part of Bush's headlong rush.

Dr. Koppel tells the Times that he is "skeptical of the belief that broad adoption of information technology could deliver big improvements in health care". I guess he wasn't present when my sister took our father to the hospital and had to describe (over and over again) his medical history of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's, and the medication he was taking for each of these. I guess Dr. Koppel was never present in an emergency room where patients similar to my father come in -- often by themselves -- all the time.

The JAMA issue also has an editorial that propounds at great length the remarkable insight that people designing computer systems should be very familiar with the needs and the practices of the intended users. It also asserts that, "health care ... is from an organizational standpoint probably the most complex enterprise in modern society." This is highly questionable.

Another paper examines more generally computer support systems used by doctors. Or rather, it examines a whole lot of studies that examined these systems. It concludes: "Many CDSSs improve practitioner performance. To date, the effects on patient outcomes remain understudied and, when studied, inconsistent." The Times article didn't have room for this conclusion, but they did say:

[The editorial] found that most of the glowing assessments of those clinical decision support systems came from technologists who often had a hand in designing the systems.

"In fact, 'grading oneself' was the only factor that was consistently associated with good evaluations," observed the journal's editorial ...".

This last statement from the editorial isn't true. Other factors given involve whether or not practitioners used the system, the usability and integration of the system into practitioner workflow, practitioner acceptance of computer recommendations, and the presence of automatic prompting. And the authors point out that there are reasons beside (obvious) bias why people who are involved in both evaluating and designing a system might produce a system that evaluates better.

Of course, the Times provides token balance by experts. But it makes sure to tell us that "even those experts conceded that the articles raised some good points."

It would be nice if the Times would tell us what, exactly, should be done. How much longer should we expect it to take to develop these computer systems, or should we just give up on the absurd idea of doctors using computers? Perhaps we should take away those dangerous, flawed computer systems from nuclear reactors and air traffic control. Perhaps New York Times writers should go back to using typewriters pencil and paper to record their work.

"Why is everyone mad at the mainstream media?", is the subtitle of a recent New Yorker article by renowned journalist and author Nicholas Lemann. "Mainstream journalists want to think that the public is aware of--and respects--the boundaries that separate real journalism from entertainment, and opinion, and propaganda, and marketing," he writes. It appears, though, that "instead, the public....doesn’t accept that [real journalism] really is distinct and superior." Lemann, deeply concerned, set out to investigate.

And where would this esteemed scribe go to study the American news-consuming public, and to try to understand its newfound disdain for "real journalism"? Intrepid fact-finder that he is, Lemann seeks out....Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times; Ann Marie Lipinski, editor-in-chief of the Chicago Tribune; Leonard Downie, Jr., editor-in-chief of the Washington Post; Jim Kelly, managing editor of Time magazine; James Warren, the deputy managing editor for features at the Tribune; Don Wycliff, the Tribune’s public editor; Neal Shapiro, the president of NBC News; and--for a couple of paragraphs,three-quarters of the way through the piece--a single non-journalist: Ed Gillespie, former chair of the Republican National Committee.

Of course, those were only the interviewees Lemann actually quoted in the article. He may have talked to more people, since he mentions that he "spoke to the heads of several large news organizations". According to him, "all of them maintained that they get attacked from both political sides, and agreed that both the amplitude and the frequency of the attacks seem to be increasing." Generally, though, the editors were baffled as to the causes of "the constant low hum of political objection to what they do." Keller offered, "I think conservatives feel this way in part because for years they’ve been told they should feel this way." Warren "was frustrated that what seems obvious to him and his colleagues evidently doesn’t to their audience." Says Wycliff: "I just think the people out there who write to me, who call me, they do not have the governors on their behavior that we have in our industry."

According to Lemann, "[t]his is what journalists in the mainstream media are starting to worry about: what if people don’t believe in us, don’t want us, anymore?" He set out to answer this question, asked a bunch of fellow journalists, and got nowhere. Yet the answer was right there, in plain sight, in his own magazine article--if only he'd made the tiniest effort to look at it, for once in his life, from a slightly different perspective.

The controversy surrounding a recent Los Angeles Times article by Korea correspondent Barbara Demick suggests that the practice of journalism in America may be in for a momentous change. Conservative bloggers have pummeled Demick for the article, in which a North Korean official cheerfully defends his government's record, completely unchallenged. She's even been compared to Walter Duranty, the notorious New York Times journalist who filed glowing dispatches about Stalinist Russia during the Great Terror of the 1930's.

Well, it turns out that the story isn't that simple. Apparently, Demick has written at length about the horrors of the North Korean Regime after all. Then there's this article, from this past fall, in which Demick ruminates on the difficulty of reporting on North Korea while being barred from the country. And now, a few months later, we read Demick obediently parroting the North Korean government's propaganda.

I believe what we have here is a classic example of the foreign correspondent's version of a "source greaser". A couple of years ago, when it was revealed that CNN had prettified its coverage of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in return for "access", I pointed out that domestic journalists do this sort of thing all the time, buttering up sources in return for juicy tidbits. It's hardly surprising, then, that reporters traveling abroad pack a similarly lax set of scruples, when it comes to getting information about countries where the flow of information is tightly controlled by the government. I strongly suspect that Barbara Demick is playing this game--filing some obsequious reports about North Korea in the hope of getting a journalist's visa, where (she imagines) she can get the real scoop on the country.

What's interesting about this case is that it demonstrates the way the collapse of the media establishment (of which blogs are only one part) has opened up journalists' practices--including source-greasers--to withering scrutiny. As a result, many standard journalistic practices--source-greasers among them--may now be impossible to get away with.

That's not a bad thing. Source-greasers are part of an inherently dishonest transaction, whose only beneficiaries are the journalist and the source. The source gets both flattering press and the opportunity to mislead the public by feeding the journalist "scoops" of his or her choice, and the journalist gets preferential access to these scoops. The public is the clear loser from this type of transaction, and its abolition can only improve journalism.

In the case of foreign reporting, scrutiny of journalistic practices is particularly difficult, because the audience is inherently less well-informed about the topic, and therefore less able to assess the credibility of the journalists. But if the CNN and LA Times cases are any indication, even foreign correspondents may soon be constrained by media watchdogs to report in something resembling an honest fashion. That would certainly be a tremendous improvement.

Elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, democratization in Egypt, pro-democracy and anti-Syrian protests toppling the government in Lebanon, even some democratic noises in Saudi Arabia....is George W. Bush's grand plan--to counter Islamist terror by toppling Saddam Hussein, thus igniting democratic revolutions across the Arab world--succeeding?

There are actually three parts to that question:

Are recent events in the aforementioned countries manifestations of a wave of democratic revolutions sweeping across the Arab world?

Is US policy--in particular, the invasion of Iraq--responsible for them?

Should they be regarded as positive developments from the point of view of American interests?

Conservatives are generally inclined to answer "yes" to all three questions. Their star witness is Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt--not exactly a paragon of the democratic spirit--whom the Washington Post's David Ignatius nevertheless quoted as saying,

It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq....I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.

Interestingly, the left offers a fair bit of qualified agreement--including even some credit to the Bush doctrine and its application in Iraq. There is general admiration for the elections there and for the new post-Arafat order among the Palestinians; particular satisfaction over Mubarak's concessions in Egypt; and widespread skepticism only regarding prospects in Lebanon. (Particularly amusing is Flynt Leverett's New York Times Op-Ed warning about the possible disastrous consequences of Syria losing control of Lebanon. He warns that the US might have trouble "containing Hezbollah without on-the-ground Syrian management"--as if Syria weren't Hezbollah's primary lifeline.)

In fact, leftist skeptics are correct in not swallowing conservative triumphalism whole--democracy is far from a done deal in any of these countries. Their skepticism, however, isn't necessarily wisely distributed.

Possibly the most promising case is Lebanon, which was at least somewhat democratic before civil war broke out in 1976, and whose current dictatorial government is foreign-imposed. Its foreign occupier, Syria, is now straining under American and even some international pressure to leave Lebanon to the Lebanese. For Syria, the fall of Saddam Hussein meant the elimination of a major source of distraction from Syria's misdeeds, and of much-needed oil-smuggling revenue.

On the other hand, the Syrians have enormous incentive not to give up so easily--their economy is heavily dependent on its plunder of more prosperous Lebanon--and a long record of being as ruthless as they need to be. If Syria were to react to Lebanese rebellion not by withdrawing its troops, but rather by sending its tanks into the streets of Beirut, it's highly doubtful that there would be any significant Lebanese resistance, and foreign intervention--American or Israeli--is no more likely. Driving Syria out of Lebanon will require much more than a few civilian protests--sustained economic, political, and perhaps even military pressure may be necessary. Fortunately, Syria's government is in a very weak position, and Europe and America are unusually united in this effort.

The new government in Iraq has, in some ways, better prospects than the Lebanese democrats--after all, a supportive American occupation is much less of an obstacle than Syrian hegemony. But Iraq's population is at least as fragmented as Lebanon's, and has an even worse historical record of hostility. Moreover, Iraq's domineering neighbor, Iran, is as ruthless as Syria, and much more resilient to Western pressure. American troops can head off an actual invasion, and help suppress terrorist uprisings. But they can't prevent Iraq's government from disintegrating into ethnic, tribal or regional warfare, or falling into Iran's orbit quasi-voluntarily.

At least Iraq's democracy is off to a fairly promising start. Egypt's and Saudi Arabia's token gestures towards democracy are neither sincere nor likely to be fruitful. Neither country has anything like a viable democratic opposition, although both are threatened by thriving Islamist terrorist movements. Under the circumstances, democracy's poor prospects in these nations may not actually be an unalloyed misfortune--particularly for the US, but also for citizens of those countries, considering the precedent of Algeria's unfortunately premature democratic experiment in the early 1990s.

As for the Palestinians, their recent exercise in democracy spoke volumes. The new Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, actually has a remarkably good record as a supporter of peace and reconciliation with Israel. But Palestinian society is still clearly dominated by supporters of never-ending, all-out terrorism--and not, needless to say, by democratic reformers--and Abbas has no power even to take significant action against the terrorists, let alone to defeat them. Perhaps one day there will be enough popular support for peace with Israel to mount a credible opposition to the terrorist warlords who effectively rule the territories. But that day still looks very far off.

A typical academic
Bernard Gui is a character in Eco's "The Name of the Rose", but he was also a real person who lived in France in the 14th century. I recently came across
this description of his life, which makes it clear that he was an intellectual
whose career path was similar to that of many modern day academics:

Due to Bernard Gui's health, intellect, and communication skills he was chosen to first study logic in his earlier years, then philosophy where he read commentaries about Aristotle. ... Bernard Gui went on to study theology, became a history writer, helped to build the first library in the province of Toulouse and finally was made inquisitor of Toulouse.

What modern academic would turn down such a choice position?

Proof that Kyoto is a fraud
The justifications for the Kyoto Protocol are essentially fraudulent. If you and I both were both atmospheric scientists and economists, then perhaps I could prove this to you by discussing the chemistry of carbon dioxide and by providing numerous charts and tables. But I'm not and (probably) you're not, and even if I were, it would be wrong for me to try to convince you by using material that you are not qualified to understand. Furthermore, my point is not that the justifications are false -- I don't know if they are or not -- but that they are almost always fraudulent. I will show they are fraudulent by referring to the statements and claims made by the proponents of the protocols; these statements make it absolutely clear that all the proponents I've ever encountered -- if not ignorant and delusional -- are extraordinarily dishonest.

I will first show that Kyoto was a fraud when the conference first occurred in 1997. Then I will show that it continues to be a fraud to this day.


Proof that Kyoto was a fraud

In 1995 the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) issued its Second Assessment Report on climate change. This report was often cited as a one of the main justifications for the Kyoto protocol, for example by Greenpeace. This justification is less than compelling since the IPCC is generally acknowledged to be a left-leaning organization. What makes the justification disingenuous, however, is that the IPCC report contained a summary that itself contained a summary about the scientific consensus at the time:

Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is currently limited because the expected signal is still emerging from the noise of natural variability, and because there are uncertainties in key factors. These include the magnitude and patterns of long­term natural variability and the time­evolving pattern of forcing by, and response to, changes in concentrations of greenhouse gases and aerosols, and land surface changes. Nevertheless, the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.

I've put the five main waffle words in bold face. Notice that the statement doesn't even mention global warming, since presumably the consensus for that would have been even weaker. This summary makes it absolutely clear that the scientific consensus did not in any way whatsoever justify taking any action at all on climate change, let alone enormously expensive action.

Now if anyone had justified Kyoto by saying that the justification was in spite of the IPCC report -- as far as I know, nobody did -- and then went on to argue that the report was right-biased (in fact many of its authors argued that the conclusions were left-biased) or out-dated, then this justification might have been respectable. (As far as I know) no one argued this way.


Proof that Kyoto is a fraud

In 2001 the IPCC released it's third report on climate change. Unlike the earlier report, this one had a conclusion blaming human activity for causing a large amount of global warming. (Let us ignore the fact that these conclusions have been contested by some of the authors of the report.) Perhaps now, Kyoto really is justified. But I have not heard one single person say, "Yes, Kyoto was a fraud that was not justified by the scientific consensus at the time, but, as it turns out, it is now justified by the scientific consensus of the current time." Rather, most supporters pretend that the consensus has always been there, and has merely gotten stronger. I believe that most of them are lying to us. Furthermore, they usually try to ignore the costs altogether, and only refer to them at all when forced to. And most incredibly, they hardly ever talk about the benefits, and when they do, they usually admit that the benefits are insignificant.

Why do it then? The reasons ultimately become rather mystical: it is about "respecting the planet", about "taking the first step", etc. "Ecotheology" anyone? And of course all skeptics are dismissed as being Oil Company Shills or fundamentalists or people-guilty-of-politicizing-science.

The real scientists are the most despicable here. A serious expert who believes that human activity is causing disastrous global warming, and who has studied the economic costs of Kyoto and considers them worthwhile payment in exchange for the benefits, would say something like the following:

Kyoto was a fraud, but now we should do it. I have nothing but disgust for the dishonest, theological, politicizing by the Left that makes it so embarrassing for any serious person to support Kyoto. I respect the arguments of Bjorn Lomborg that the money could best be spent on things other than Kyoto, but I disagree, for reasons that require more space than I have available here. I also respect scientists such as Lindzen and Singer who disagree with me on the science part, but the subject has been so badly politicized that I have no idea which of us better represents the consensus. Al Gore is jerk.

Speaking of Gore, I think his support for the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" was a turning point. Most Kyoto people now have so little confidence in their own predictions of global warming that they are preparing an explanation for any eventual global cooling: "It was caused by global warming". And if the weather doesn't seem to be changing much, it will be because the warming and the warming-caused cooling are balancing each other out ... for now. This story points out that the term "global warming" is gradually being replaced by the term "global climate change", and that the nature of the "climate change" in question is endlessly shifting.

Lastly, I refer the reader to Dan's excellent post (one of his best ever) on the subject.

Update: Dan has asked me to be more specific when accusing people of fraud. In reality, there are too many individuals to mention, and they are nasty, scary people. But I will name some organizations: the seventeen national science academies that issued a joint statement supporting Kyoto in the journal Science in May, 2001. The full text of that statement is not available for free online; it is described here, and the complete version is every bit as awful as one might imagine.

An Administrative note: We'll be trying out the new Blogger "comments" feature, to see if it's an improvement on the comments system we previously used. From now on (or until we ask you to do otherwise), please enter comments on a posting using the second link under the posting (the "X Comments" link), rather than the first link (the "X Old Comments" link). Comments using the old system can still be retrieved using the "Old Comments" link. If the new system works, then we'll eventually phase out the old system.

Yet more on tenure and free speech
Responding to Dan's recent comments about freedom of speech on campuses:

1) I will defend Tenure to my dying day. Or at least until I retire.

2) The fact that tenure is spectacularly unsuccessful at protecting free speech on campus does not mean that it is completely unsuccessful. For example, it stopped me from getting fired for my speech; I merely received a warning that I'd better not do it again.

3) I agree with Dan that a professor should be judged by his professional output -- teaching and research -- according to the professional standards of that field. And not according to his offline (which may be online) pontificating. This is what I mean by "free speech" in this context.

4) I agree with Dan that many fields (such as ethnic studies and women's studies) have no real content and standards and they should not exist. (I disagree that these people are merely dressing up job preservation as serious work. Rather, I think that in many cases they are profoundly evil.) But how should these fields be eliminated? What is needed is "the cold light of pragmatic scrutiny", but where is it going to come from? One reason it is important to have free speech on campus is so faculty can speak up, and criticize and mock these fields. Where the Left doesn't have an interest, this can happen; an example is at Florida State University where faculty successfully stopped the creation of a chiropractic program .

5) I do not for a minute believe Dan's claim that there is free speech in departments of science, medicine and engineering. (A writer to Jonah Goldberg similarly claims that there is plenty of free speech in his science department. Of course, to avoid reprisals, he chooses to remain anonymous.) There is virtually no free speech in science or engineering in my university. Consider MIT, for another example. Given the speech codes there (that prohibit, for instance, any conduct that creates an "offensive" environment), and given the lack of outrage at the Birgeneau/Hopkins report discussed here, and given some other things that I know about the place, it seems as if there is very little freedom of speech there. In fact, if there is any department in any prominent American or Canadian university where -- for example -- people feel they are (roughly) as free to make anti-feminist speech as they are to make feminist speech, I'd like to know about it. In fact, an argument can be made that Women's Studies departments have more freedom of speech than other departments, for the simple reason that their members and students have already been selected (or self-selected) for the purity and correctness of their thought.

6) Eugene Volokh is one of my internet heroes because of his intelligent advocacy of freedom of speech and because of his dispassionate discussion of legal issues (although I wish he could separate the two a bit better). Dan mocks him for writing about his son and his hobbies, but it is important to point out that the vast majority of his blogging is firmly related to his areas of expertise.

The entire blogosphere seems to be talking about Ward Churchill: the left, the right, libertarians, traditionalists--even this very blog. Churchill, in case you live in the Web equivalent of a cave, is a professor at the University of Colorado who wrote an article justifying in rather callous terms the September 11th, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Similarly outrageous statements have been, as my co-blogger notes, fairly common in academia for quite a while. But Churchill had the misfortune of shooting off his mouth at a moment when the political tilt of universities has become something of a hot issue. For example, campus conservatives have gathered considerable momentum behind a movement to defend, in the name of "free speech", the expression of conservative views in academia. At the same time, plenty of conservatives have happily called for Churchill's firing, "free speech" notwithstanding. Meanwhile, as my co-blogger has also noted, leftists who are now rising to the defense of Churchill's rights were not nearly so quick to protect Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he made a few seemingly innocuous remarks about gender disparities in science. In short, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around on this matter.

Of course, as I have pointed out before, the whole business of "free speech" on campus is (pace my co-blogger) pernicious nonsense. A university isn't a democracy, it has no powers to imprison, and it has not only a right but a positive duty, under all sorts of circumstances, to punish speech that is not even offensive or outrageous, but merely factually incorrect or of insufficient academic quality. One can, after all--I would hope--be denied tenure, refused a faculty position, expelled from a graduate or academic position, or denied admission in the first place, merely for saying things that are mistaken, poorly expressed or badly reasoned (in the judgment of the current faculty) in examination or assignment papers, class presentations or job interviews. In such an environment, talk of "free speech" is simply ludicrous.

Why, then, is it so common? It's certainly not protecting unpopular speech on campus. As my co-blogger has pointed out, a combination of powerful social and professional pressures more than suffices to make universities among the most mind-numbingly conformist institutions in North America. And on both sides of the political aisle, as I mentioned above, free speech rhetoric is routinely understood to apply "for me, but not for thee"--that is, it is deployed exclusively in the defense of ideas with which one agrees, and dismissed as inapplicable, for one reason or another, in the case of ideas with which one disagrees.

No, the real reason for all the "free speech" rhetoric is that it's the last-ditch defense of choice for those ensconced in an academia that (as I never tire of pointing out) suffers from a complete lack of societal consensus or internal understanding regarding its proper goals and purposes. Some parts of it, to be sure--medical schools for instance, or engineering faculties--are in fact quite clear on their mission. (Unsurprisingly, these are also the parts of the university least plagued by controversies over "free speech".) Liberal arts institutions and departments, however, are almost entirely bereft of purpose. They face little external pressure to teach job skills (as in the professional schools), nor to inculcate a particular mandated set of beliefs in their students (as in traditional religious colleges), nor to make practical contributions to the nation's well-being through their research (as in scientific and technical departments). They are simply left entirely to themselves to decide what they consider worth doing and teaching--knowing that whatever they decide will matter not one whit to anyone, most likely including themselves.

And so, not unlike modern poets, many modern academics simply pick an agenda--perhaps political activism of one sort or another, perhaps social climbing, perhaps mere job preservation--and dress it up as serious work. When challenged, they hide behind mutually contradictory justifications: their important role as guardians of the standards of their field's great masters; their right and duty to break with those same past masters, and invent their own standards; the impossibility, in the end, of defending any standards. And when all of these sophistries are played out, they fall back on the very last refuge of the useless sinecure-holder: "free speech".

Consider arch-free speech defender Eugene Volokh, defending academic freedom: "Who benefits from academic freedom? Well, if you like this blog....then you do". In other words, without academic freedom, Eugene Volokh might conceivably not be able to indulge quite so freely in his hobby of ranting at his readers over the Internet, while the government of California continues to pay his comfortable salary regardless of what he says. And why shouldn't they treat him the way any other (say, private) employer would? Because, he says,

university professors are supposed to do a good job by saying what they think is right, even when that's offensive or alienating to people. Such an ability to express highly controversial views, even views that many people find deeply offensive, is critical for the effective functioning of universities as institutions.

Now, that's simply false. By "saying what they think is right", university professors may be doing a good job, or a bad job, or an indifferent one--but the criterion is certainly not whether they are being frank. A convinced creationist can be a brilliant evolutionary biologist, publishing groundbreaking ideas which he or she deeply believes to be sorely misguided. Indeed, for all we know, Eugene Volokh himself believes that the US Constitution, properly read, demands a Marxist egalitarian "dictatorship of the proletariat" for America. And that's fine, as long as he teaches his classes a more conventional interpretation of the same document. A professor, in short, does not do a good job by saying what he or she thinks is right, but by saying what the experts in his or her field consider to be right--that is, to be correct and creditable by the standards of the field.

Of course, Eugene Volokh knows this full well, and I have no doubt that when he's not having fun blogging about his son and his gun hobby, he's working hard at UCLA, adhering rigorously to the standards of his chosen field, the law. But what if there are no standards in one's field? When we read about a Ward Churchill, or a Joseph Massad, the topic inevitably turns to "free speech", or some variation thereon: the right of the professor to say what he pleases, the right of other professors with opposing views to say what they please, the right of the professor's students to say what they please. That's because in their respective fields--"Ethnic Studies", "Middle Eastern Studies"--there are no standards under which any of the participants can be criticized for saying whatever they please. There are only political opinions, personal and group loyalties, and positions of power to defend. And because it's embarrassing to admit that they're merely protecting their sinecures, salaries and soapboxes, they instead set themselves up as martyrs to the cause of "free speech".

Here's a modest proposal: instead of fretting endlessly about the "free speech" of politicized professors or their opponents, why not require--as, say, Lawrence Summers did of Cornel West--that professors in all fields demonstrate their value through scholarship and teaching of genuine academic discipline and substance. Moreover, we could demand that entire fields themselves demonstrate their value to society, in terms of concrete contributions to its well-being. Those that cannot convince their university administrations that they are worthwhile could then be safely eliminated from academic faculties, and their professors pensioned off.

If, as a result, fewer Professor Volokhs feel safe blogging their opinions--well, you know what they say about opinions. (And there are plenty of hungry young bloggers ready to fill Volokh's shoes, and willing to endure less glamorous jobs, or accept professional circumspection in their postings, or, if necessary, post anonymously, to lure his readers away.) On the other hand, the cold light of pragmatic scrutiny would surely spell the end of many, perhaps most, of academia's Ward Churchills and Joseph Massads. All it would take is consensus agreement that their supposed right to propagandize on some university's dime need not be preserved at all costs, in the name of "free speech".

Ward Churchill and free speech
Many writers (on the internet) are shocked, shocked to find that gambling support for mass murder is going on in our universities. Although many of those who despise Ward Churchill's remarks think he should be fired, there are others who not only believe that Universities should have freedom of speech, but actually seem to understand what this means. In particular, there are some excellent remarks here, here, here, here, and here.

I refuse to discuss the issue of Churchill's racial purity -- or lack thereof -- except to state that anyone concerned about someone's racial purity deserves to be lied to about it. However, I'd like to add:

1) Eugene Volokh should be commended for having the patience to explain once again why our notion of free speech must be very extreme. I find it very sad that such obvious things have to be said over and over again to intelligent people -- sad that we have to treat these people like children. It's not that it's impossible to make a reasonable argument for a mild notion of freedom of speech, it's just that no one who wishes to do so seems to be aware of the most basic issues. I'm happy that Volokh spices up the lecture by distinguishing between different types of "slippery slope" arguments.

2) Usually "slippery slope" arguments are hypothetical. In this case, the bottom of the slippery slope was reached a couple of decades ago. For a long time, in most respectable North American universities, it has been very risky to say anything antagonistic to the extreme left. Last I checked, Larry Summers was still apologizing, undergoing re-education, and buying indulgences for his incorrect remarks. In my university, incorrect speech is rarely spoken. The last time I spoke incorrectly, numerous administrators threatened to fire me, and they are still trying. The only thing stopping them is my Tenure.

3) This raises the question: given that we have tenure, why aren't tenured professors not-of-the-extreme-left (NEL) more outspoken? Of course, the extreme-left has seen to it that NELs are under-represented, but there are still many of us around. Why don't tenured NELs speak more? I'm not sure, but some of the reasons are: fear of reprisals in spite of tenure, and fear of being different. Tenure has certainly not had the effects its supporters would like it to have, but I still think the situation would be very much worse without it.

4) My reference to "Casablanca" above was intended to poke fun at NELs who either pretend to believe or actually believe that Churchill said something unusual. His "Eichmann" language is more colorful, but it is not basically very different from the "root causes" rhetoric that has taken over our campuses. Similarly, the people who shout "death to Jews" are not really different from the intellectuals who advocate a "one state solution" and the "right of return" and who openly support groups whose members routinely shout "death to Jews". In fact, I much prefer that extremists say what they mean in plain language rather than speaking in code phrases. By being overly harsh with Churchill we are merely encouraging people like that to go back to their coded language. Rather than fire him because he is worse than Chomsky et. al., we should leave him alone because he isn't. If Churchill does get fired, it will be because the extremists are more than happy to sacrifice him: this not only warns others to use proper codes, but it is a small price to pay in return for getting NELs to abandon the principle of freedom of speech on campuses.

5) Some people think that free speech should not apply to nontenured professors. They think that free speech is a perk we give to those with tenure, but this is backwards. Rather, tenure is something we give to help ensure free speech. Then why don't we give tenure to every professor? This wouldn't be feasible, since tenure represents a huge economic commitment. So we compromise, and only give tenure to those who we believe have demonstrated sufficient excellence to at least somewhat justify that commitment. But free speech costs nothing, and should be for everyone. Of course, this tenure system is not necessarily the best one, and I can see all sorts of arguments for modifying or eliminating tenure.

6) Eugene Volokh argues that free speech tends not to be especially desirable in private enterprise. I don't think it should be forced on private companies, but I think a reasonable amount of it is very desirable. Volokh mentions that one of the benefits of free speech is that we get to hear his opinions. Wouldn't I also want to hear his opinions if he worked for a private company, even if producing such opinions was not a mandate of the company? Wouldn't he want to express his opinions, even if he worked for a private company? So the right of employees to express opinions without reprisals is, by and large, desirable for the public good.

If I work as a software engineer, shouldn't we hope that my employer allows me to express my opinions on my own time? What if my co-workers want me fired because of my politics, even if the politics don't interfere with my work? What if the customers I deal with state that they want me fired because of the abhorrent ideas I've just written, even though we've gotten along fine before? What if, instead, these people have no objection to my politics, but can't accept my race or religion? These aren't easy questions, but I think my employer should try to convince my co-workers and customers to be reasonable and professional in their dealings with me.

There is one class of employee that I think should be given relatively little freedom of speech by his employer. I am referring, of course, to journalists. After all, the freedom of speech of the employer is central to the enterprise, and he must be allowed to choose journalists who will not, on their own time or in their work time, speak in a way that is too inconsistent with the goals of the newspaper. If I hire journalists to be "objective", I don't want them to express insane opinions and beliefs even on their own time, for then my readers wouldn't trust them. If I want my newspaper to be a warm x-ist cocoon, I wouldn't trust my journalists if they went around speaking ideas of their own, and it would disturb my readers as well.

Matthew Yglesias asks a very pertinent question that concisely summarizes the skeptical position on the US intervention in Iraq:

Even if the election goes well as a procedural matter tomorrow, what good will it do?

Wrapped up in that question are a number of fears about the outcome of the intervention: post-election Iraq might descend into chaotic, bloody civil war, or be taken over by Ba'athist or Al Qaeda-affiliated insurgents, or fall under Iranian domination, or....remain a violent, draining de facto US protectorate from years to come.

Well, I could respond by reassuring the skeptics that Iraq following the election will no doubt become a model of peaceful, free, pro-Western democracy, from which American troops will be able to depart within months, happy that their work there has been completed. Unfortunately, I can't muster the optimism to declare such an outcome the likely one.

But we can separate the question, "whither Iraq after the elections?", into two separate ones: "whither Iraq in the next few years?", and "how will the elections, in particular, affect the next few years in Iraq?" And it seems clear to me that whatever the answer to the first question, the answer to the second is likely to be, "quite positively".

First of all, the election offers a process by which unviable Iraqi political forces (quite possibly including Iyad Alawi's current interim government) can be weeded out, and a viable political party given a chance to govern. That fact alone makes the likelihood of complete political breakdown and outright civil war less likely (though far from impossible).

Second, the parties projected to do well--the unified Shia and Kurdish slates--are hardly the most disastrous choices one could imagine. Either or both could, of course, turn tyrannical or bloody or unusually corrupt or incompetent or any combination of the above. But the odds of this are probably considerably less than for most other plausible combinations of ruling parties that might find themselves at the top of the heap under an alternative government selection process.

And finally, the mere smooth, uncorrupted exercise of the democratic process, I believe, can have a salutary effect on a nation's long-term political health. It's worth remembering that Germany and Japan--two of the most surprising converts to democracy in history--actually had functioning democracies in their not-too-distant pasts, before embracing fascist dictatorship. Other countries as well--most notably France, as well as a number of Latin American states--went through one or more cycles of established and collapsed democratic systems before finally stabilizing under a democratic government. Still others had what might be called "sham democracies"--parliaments and elections that were not in fact democratic--that eventually evolved into actual democratic governments. A transition from pure dictatorship to functioning democracy, on the other hand, is much, much rarer.

Of course, Yglesias is probably more concerned about Iraq's short-to-medium-term future than its long-term political development--particularly insofar as the near-term presence of US troops makes the former a pressing issue for Americans. Fortunately, one can be a pessimist about the immediate implementation of full-fledged democracy while still being optimistic about Iraq's immediate future.

Consider the situation in post-election Afghanistan, for example: the Karzai government isn't exactly the Blair government, the warlords haven't disappeared, the Taliban still threatens, and American troops remain. Still, Karzai turns out to be politcally shrewd enough to hold the central government together and negotiate successfully with regional leaders. And with the help of a modest American military presence, local Afghan forces have been able to stave off any major Taliban comeback. A similar outcome in Iraq is not entirely implausible--certainly no more implausible than it would have been in pre-election Afghanistan itself. And at this point, achieving such results in Iraq would also have to be considered a tremendous American success.

A couple of years ago, I made fun of the Supreme Court's decision that it's unconstitutional for the police to point infrared scanners at homes to detect heat (from basement marijuana farms, for instance). Some of my ridicule was directed at Eugene Volokh, who defended the decision (Kyllo v. United States) using a wholly (and admittedly) arbitrary "reasonableness" criterion: infrared detector searches are, to him, "unreasonable", whereas searches of neighborhoods for, say, dirty bombs using a Geiger counter (scientifically not terribly different from an infrared scanner) are "reasonable".

Well, now fellow Conspirator Orin Kerr has provided the first plausible justification that I've heard for the Court's Kyllo ruling. He also sees it as part of a recent trend in the Court's Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. Unfortunately, he also sees this trend as a "potentially troubling development".

The justification, according to Kerr, can be deduced from a recent decision (United States v. Place) in which the Court found police searches for drugs using drug-sniffing dogs to be Constitutional. Kerr believes this decision to be part of a pattern, in which the Court determines whether particular searches are Constitutional under the Fourth Amendment based on what information they extract. Drug-sniffing dogs, for example, only determine the presence or absence of drugs--a matter of pure guilt or innocence, which citizens are therefore presumably not entitled to hide from police officers--and are therefore permissible to use in warrantless searches. Infrared scanners, on the other hand, can potentially detect a wide variety of details about the interior of a person's home--including details that the police have no business knowing, and might conceivably abuse upon discovery.

To Kerr, this new trend is a deviation from earlier jurisprudence, which held that the Constitutionality of searches depended strictly on whether they violated some notion of property rights (suitably abstracted to include, for example, rented properties, but not, say, telephone conversations). In his view, the "information-based" criterion is a product of an oft-misinterpreted "privacy doctrine"--that the Fourth Amendment exists to protect individual privacy in general from police snooping--that is in fact, when properly understood, simply a restatement of the narrower, property-rights-based criterion.

Now, whatever else one might say about the "privacy doctrine" approach of considering what information a search extracts, it at least has the virtue of being possibly, conceivably tied to some notion of public opinion on these matters. Judges are not really in a position to know what kind of information the public want the police not to be able to extract without a warrant, but if they were to guess, they might plausibly come up with an answer such as, "information, such as the inner appearance of the suspect's home, as revealed by an infrared scanner, that does not pertain to whether the suspect has committed a crime". On the other hand, a response like, "that which can be obtained without violating the property rights of the individual, defined in a technical, abstract legal sense, and irrespective of its relevance to the suspect's guilt or innocence", is somehow less plausible as a reflection of the public's preferred definition of the bounds of their own protection from police searches.

Of course, if judges--or law professors like Prof. Kerr--wanted their judgments to defer to the popular will, they could always leave it to the people's representatives to decide. And we all know what horrors that would entail....

Heresy at Harvard
Harvard president Lawrence Summers recently dared to suggest that it is possible that innate differences between men and women may be part of the reason that there are many fewer women in science than men.(See here and here.) Feminists are outraged, and one went so far as to swoon.

1) Any attempt to explain the small number of women in science has to explain the much larger number of women in the (traditionally male and very time-consuming) areas of management, medicine and law.

2) Feminists very often declare there to be vast differences between men and women. Of course, women usually come off better in these comparisons: nurturing rather than violent, for example. If you read my selected articles from ACM TechNews (all of which are 100% feminist approved) about why there are few women in science, you'll see that the explanations in many of them involve the assertion that men are different from women; the articles are generally too incoherent to explicitly say whether or not these differences are innate, but since the differences make women superior and since no societal explanations for the differences are usually given, the implication is that they are innate.

3) This is not the first time that swooner Nancy Hopkins has been reported in the news as leading the Feminist Fight. In the nineties there were complaints at MIT that female scientists were being treated worse than male scientists. Dean Birgeneau appointed a committee to study the complaints. What was the role of Hopkins? She was the chief Complainant and she was the Head of the committee appointed to evaluate the complaints. ("Forget it, Jake -- it's Chinatown."). Birgeneau is an idiot, and he went on from this success to doing as much damage as he could as president of the University of Toronto; he has now moved on to bringing a much needed breath of fresh political correctness to Berkeley. But if Hopkins' complaints were well-founded, she is also an idiot for investigating them herself, and thus ensuring that no serious person would ever take them seriously.

4) If there are prejudices in Universities against women in science, they are remarkably subtle. The prejudices against men are institutionalized and overt. Concerning institutional restrictions against any speech the feminists don't like: these restrictions are massive, overpowering, and virtually 100% intimidating. On the rare occasion such speech is uttered by a professor in a prominent university, it tends to be national news.