Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

I’ve been so buried beneath the rubble of the Obama-Clinton race, and then so buried beneath the rank idiocy of the McCain campaign and the horrifying possibility that he might actually lead this country that it’s been hard to step back and remember what this election is about and what it could do.

The #1 priority is single-payer health care. The #1 priority will continue to be single-payer health care so long as a double-digit percentage of our fellow-Americans are uninsured. But it’s also the #1 priority for a reason that people shouldn’t forget: national health care would work, and in working it would create the base for a progressive revolution. The Republicans know this. Wrote Bill Kristol back during the first Clinton health-care imbroglio:

Health care that’s always there … will re-legitimize middle-class dependence for “security” on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates … as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.

If Obama gets elected, there will be no better time to push through national health care. The Republicans are down. It is time to kick them hard. Not only are they down, but the recent finance-industry collapse has shown Republican deregulation to be a failed mess.

What we need is a Democrat in the White House, a filibuster-proof majority of 61 senators, and the will to give our less-fortunate brethren what they deserve.

If you’re interested in behavioral economics — that is, the study of how humans do behave in real economic situations, rather than how they ought to behave — this book is the locus classicus. It establishes the theoretical and experimental basis for behavioral economics; Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge draws out its consequences for public policy.

On the topic of Thaler: I’ve loved every book and article of his that I’ve read — most notably his book The Winner's Curse and Nudge. His and Tversky’s articles are the shining lights in Choices, Values, and Frames, for opposite reasons. Thaler’s articles dig for as many examples as they can of “irrational” behavior in everyday life and public policy; they are deeply pragmatic. Tversky’s articles are theoretical and mathematical, laying a plausible conceptual foundation beneath Thaler’s and others’ work.

Follow the consequences of behavioral economics, and you end up in some philosophically and economically very interesting terrain. An example from the end of the book will capture the idea. Kahneman and Tversky have just proposed a simple model for how people remember the pleasure or pain from an experience; in particular, their data show that people remember the “peak” of the experience (most painful or most pleasurable) and the end of that experience, but very little of the rest. They’ve tested this in a squirm-worthy way, which I have to relate out of sheer fascination: patients undergoing a colonoscopy report their discomfort level every 60 seconds throughout the procedure. Under the “peak/end hypothesis,” as they call it, patients will remember the colonoscopy more favorably if the end of the procedure is less agonizing than the rest of it. So for one of the groups of patients in the experiment, doctors leave the scope in for a few minutes longer — thereby inflicting mild discomfort, but less discomfort than patients had undergone before. The results were as expected.

There’s a very important question in there for informed-consent laws. If you tell patients ahead of time, “We could leave the scope in for a while; it will almost surely improve your memory of the procedure,” almost no one will assent. This is regrettable and dangerous: if they have a less-pleasant memory of the procedure, they’ll be less likely to come back for followup exams.

So which “self” should give his consent? The self who dreads a colonoscopy that’s longer than it has to be? Or the self who looks back with regret on turning down the offer? Here’s where a bit of paternalism might do some good: if I let my doctor make some decisions for me, I’m likely to be better off than if I decide for myself. Thoughts along these lines feed into Nudge, which stakes out a position of “libertarian paternalism”: always leave people with choices, but set the default choice to what’s best for them.

That direction of thought comes at the end of Choices, Values, and Frames. To avoid falling into the peak/end trap, I should tell you about the rest of the book, too. It starts with the editors’ famous (within its field) alternative to standard economic theory. The standard theory, recall, prescribes a set of reasonable axioms for humans to follow. For instance, we’re told that if we prefer an option A to an option B, and B to C, then we should prefer A to C; this is called “transitivity.” The intuition here is that we can be made into “money pumps” if our preferences are intransitive: if you’re currently in possession of C, and someone offers you B, your preferences say that you should pay at least a little to obtain it. Now you have B. Someone offers you A, so you pay a little to obtain it. Now, since your preferences are intransitive, you can be made to pay for C again. And so one around the cycle. Other axioms in the standard toolbox include the “axiom of extensionality,” which says that identical outcomes should lead to identical preferences. Extensionality gets the severest beating in Choices, Values, and Frames. Describing a public-health intervention as “saving 200 lives” within a community of 600 people makes experimental subjects look upon it much more favorably than if it’s described as “losing 400 lives,” even though those outcomes are transparently identical. This “framing effect” can be repeated just about as often as you like, in as many contexts.

There’s a deeper point about preferences that at least a few papers in the book address: humans do not have stable preferences that they can call up with perfect accuracy whenever they’re needed. Preferences are constructed from context. One such contextual constraint on preferences is what one paper calls “extremeness aversion”. This may be connected with Thaler’s observation elsewhere that the best-selling wine on any restaurant’s menu is always the second-cheapest bottle. Likewise, if you want to sell more of a particular size of beverage, make it the “medium” size. The point is that when people walk into a café, they do not have a pre-existing set of choices in mind; their preferences depend in many ways on what they’re presented with. Here’s where one is required to invoke Ulysses and the Sirens: Ulysses at a more-rational moment knew how he would behave when he heard the Sirens’ song; he asked his men to lash him to the mast and tighten the ropes the more he asked to be let go. At a more down-to-earth level, this is why people make sure to eat something before they go to the grocery store. Knowing that your future self might be influenced into making bad choices is not compatible with standard economic theory.

The standard economic model implies that humans have a stable “utility curve” implied by their preferences; that utility curve, from the axiom of extensionality, is based on final states: I should be indifferent between any two outcomes that leave the same amount of money in my pocket. Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory starts with a direct attack on this axiom, based on the observation that people are loss averse. That is, they get more pain from a $1 loss than they get pleasure from a $1 gain. The ratio of pain to pleasure, estimated from various experiments, is around 2 to 1. Note that this pain and pleasure come from changes in wealth: people react differently when presented with hypothetical starting sums of $1,000 and $200 losses than they do when presented with hypothetical starting sums of $600 and $200 gains, even though the outcome is the same.

The experimental layout here is a little questionable, which is unavoidable and which behavioral economists are quick to apologize for. Much of it is based on hypothetical gambles. How much do we learn about real economic behavior if we ask people how they’d behave in an artificial situation? A few answers help. First, hypothetical gambles are just about the only way that you can compare people’s behavior under two different starting incomes with two different windfalls. Second, these experiments suggest hypotheses about real economic behavior, which may then be tested against real-world situations.

There are real-world tests within the book. The most convincing ones are, predictably, Thaler’s. Among others, he brings a behavioral-economic analysis to the question of why so few cabs are available on rainy nights. A straightforward economic answer is that the supply of taxis is geared to the typical non-rainy night; on rainy nights, more people need cabs, so supply runs out quickly. Thaler comes up with a different, intriguing answer on the basis of his own interviews with cabbies: taxi drivers put each day’s wages into a separate box, which Thaler calls “mental accounts.” They work until they reach a certain daily wage, then go home. Of course this isn’t income-maximizing; the income-maximizing approach is to work more, not less, on days when more customers need rides. Thaler’s paper shows that cabbies learn this over time: older cabbies don’t use mental accounts that much. (Mental accounts form an important part of Nudge, and serve as the behavioral response to Modigliani’s “life-cycle theory.” Thaler smirks at and pokes the life-cycle theory in Winner's Curse.)

Other papers in here are somewhat less engaging. There’s one about a supposed behavioral preference for variety, which leads to an experiment involving college students and grocery shopping. (Nearly every experiment in this book was conducted on undergrads; narrower still, the bulk of those undergrads seem to come from Tversky’s Stanford or Kahneman’s Princeton. Dear Academic Psychology Departments: please outsource some of your experiments. Love and kisses, Me.)

But then some are fascinating. Mentioned several times in Choices, Values, and Frames is the observation that longshot bets tend to be clustered at the end of the day at racetracks. The authors present a fascinating behavioral explanation, again centered on day-long mental accounts: people hate to end the day with a loss. So when the end of the day comes, and most bettors are losing, they go for broke on a horse who can pull them out of the red. This mis-allocation of bets suggests a way to beat the odds at the track: come in at the end of the day and bet on the favorite to show (that is, come in first, second, or third). An irrational amount of money will have gone to unlikely horses, and you will probably be in the black.

There are enough gems like this within the 774-page mass of Choices, Values, and Frames that the whole book is surely worth the read. If you have any interest in either the pragmatics or the theory of behavioral economics, this is certainly a book you want on your shelf.

I don’t have especially much time to write about it now, and in any case I’m digesting the material about this bailout less quickly than I can consume it. But here’s how it appears to me, as an educated layman:

• First, and most obviously ridiculous: the White House gets absolutely unchecked power from this bailout. Whatever you may think of the current Administration, this bailout will far outlast them. So if you dislike the McCain camp, imagine them with an unchecked power to control $700 billion. Likewise if you’re not an Obama fan. By “unchecked power,” I mean something very specific: the bailout plan reads as follows:

  Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

  Does anyone remember what happened the last time we granted the Executive Branch a blank check? We sent them to Iraq. They estimated it would cost $60 billion in total, whereas they’re adding something like $10 billion per month to the bill.

  More generally, with a hat tip to Yale law professor Jack Balkin: this is a massive shift in the design of our government. We’re being asked to grant nonreviewable powers over the economy to an agent of the executive branch, whereas the only comparable power today is in the hands of the Fed chairman — who is at least insulated from day-to-day political pressure.

• The bailout saves the banks — makes us swallow all of the downside — without giving taxpayers any part of the upside. This is a travesty. As far as I know, the bailout doesn’t require any quid for the quo.

• If you’ve not heard the phrase “moral hazard” in recent days, that’s because the media assume you’re illiterate. Moral hazard refers to people doing more of what they’re insured against. If we insure the banks against their reckless behavior by bailing them out, without at the same time demanding something of them, we only encourage them to engage in more reckless behavior.

  Regular depository institutions — where you and I have savings and checking accounts — also have moral-hazard problems. With insurance from the FDIC up to $100,000 on each account, depository institutions could risk our money with little concern. In exchange for this risk protection, the government insists that banks hold 10% of their deposits in the vault. It’s regulated moral hazard, and it has worked: there has not been a bank run in recent memory (since the Great Depression?).

  What we’re experiencing now with investment banks is a bank run. People don’t believe that their assets will be worth anything, so they sell them off — thereby making their assets worth nothing. Self-fulfilling prophecies of this sort are exactly what bank laws are supposed to prevent. We need exactly this sort of law to rescue investment banks.

• Moral hazard and “adverse selection” go together. Adverse selection is when only those people who think they’re going to need insurance bother to get it — hence, that the insured are necessarily the riskiest. The only way to get around this problem is to require everyone to be insured. And so it is with banks. As John Quiggin notes, one of the smaller parts of this bailout will be rendered entirely moot by adverse selection — if the banks aren’t all required to chip in.

• We’re being asked to move “now now now.” As Krugman puts it, the Bush administration has “spent a year and a half telling everyone that things were under control[; now it] says that the sky is falling, and that to save the world we have to do exactly what it says.”

  Again, my sense here is that we only have one chance to fix this problem before the economy really goes into a tailspin. We need to do it right.

• Chris Dodd has an alternative proposal that we should push very hard for. It is substantially better than the Paulson plan. It buys the American taxpayer a share in the upside.

I beg of you: call your senators and representatives on Tuesday morning and ask to talk with the staff person responsible for banking policy. Ask what your senator or rep thinks about the Paulson plan. Ask whether he or she knows about the Dodd bill. Insist on three things:

1. That taxpayers not fund failure unless they also get rewarded when banks succeed.
2. That this much control over the economy be constitent with the Constitution’s values.
3. That investment banks be subject to FDIC-like regulation.

P.S.: Barry Eichengreen — he of the magisterial Globalizing Capital — has a terrific short “Anatomy of a Crisis”, which you should definitely read.

Good, because so do I.

If you happen to live in Cambridge, it turns out that the Election Commission has absentee ballots in its office starting 20 days before the election. They’re open on some Saturdays, and until 8 p.m. on Mondays.

I intend to walk over there on the 15th of October, fill out a ballot, and be done with the election right then.

(In a surprise move, I am voting for Obama. I will engage in a bit of hasty speculation here, and predict that Massachusetts will vote Obama as well. If it doesn’t, then no one will.)

It’s rather remarkable that most everyone was in on the “Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that will swallow up the world” meme. I wonder where that started. It reminds me of the famous “Manhattan Project scientists were concerned that they might destroy the earth’s atmosphere” story. That was bunk, as the Los Alamos Primer made clear:

Edward [Teller] brought up the notorious question of igniting the atmosphere. [Hans] Bethe went off in his usual way, put in the numbers, and showed that it couldn’t happen. It was a question that had to be answered, but it never was anything, it was a question only for a few hours. Oppy [Robert Oppenheimer] made the big mistake of mentioning it on the telephone in a conversation with Arthur Compton. Compton didn’t have enough sense to shut up about it. It somehow got into a document that went to Washington. So every once in a while after that, someone happened to notice it, and then back down the ladder came the question, and the thing never was laid to rest.

P.S.: My friend Andrew informs me that there was a lawsuit to stop the LHC. I was not aware.

P.S. (17 September 2008): In the comments, Seth reminds me that he had informed me of the lawsuit’s bogosity some months back. Hat tip to him.

I can quite easily crash Safari on the iPhone by

1. Zooming in a lot or
2. Visiting Facebook (or at least the new Facebook).

I can’t do it every time, but I can do it at least 70% of the time. You’d think Apple would have tested the iPhone under both these conditions.

While I’m here, I should probably mention that I get a lot of use out of Firefox 3’s AwesomeBar. Its absence in Safari is a big loss.

Being a Philip Roth novel, Indignation features what the scientists would primly call “an episode of receptive oral sex.” Roth is rather more straightforward with his nomenclature than either the scientists or I can be (this is a family publication, after all): the novel that brought him infamy, Portnoy's Complaint, featured a chapter that we’ll have to call “C-Word Crazy.”

The “receptive episode,” as we’ll call it here, sets off a chain of disasters for Indignation’s narrator — the episode’s recipient, as it were. He’s already left home in New Jersey (most Roth novels take place in New Jersey) to get away from a father who appears to be going insane. Until then, Marcus and his father had been just about as close as two people could be: they worked side by side in the father’s Newark kosher butcher shop, and Marcus was all that a father could ask for: well-behaved, straight-A student, working nonstop, eyes always on the prize, intense. Then, for no reason that Marcus can discern — though it may be related to the thousands of Americans dying in Korea as this domestic disaster is happening — dad starts suspecting the worst: he asks Marcus constantly where he’s been (as it turns out, “the library” is just about as wild an answer as dad should ever expect), locks him out of the house if he gets back a moment past curfew, and generally makes his life a nightmare. So Marcus leaves home, abandons the familiar confines of college in Newark, and enters a polite Baptist college in the middle of Ohio.

You might wonder a couple things at this point: how a paranoid father would possibly release his son into the American heartland, and where the insanity came from. These are the first two of several “Huh?” moments in Indignation. Another is that receptive episode. It comes basically out of nowhere, and surprises Marcus just as much as it surprises us. Like a lot of people, the discovery of sex tears Marcus’s world apart. And it couldn’t come at a worse time for him: he’s already moved out of one student dormroom because his intense, studious ways conflict with the antisocial habits of his roommate. After the receptive episode, he feels compelled to defend the girl’s honor against his second roommate, who promptly coldcocks Marcus. So on he moves to his third room, the coldest, least-desirable pit on the entire campus.

Each of these shocks to Marcus’s life seems rather unsupported by the story leading up to it. This bugged me until the final few pages, which tilt the story on its head; I’m still processing what they’re about, but my sense is (I’m being careful not to give anything away here) that they change the story from a straightforward walk down memory lane to a satirized lecture on the collapse of American morals. I wish I could say more about the ending; if anyone out there reads it, email me and let me know what you think.

In any case, I think it’s safe to say that the book’s whole structure, in light of its ending, is a risk for Roth. At least until the end, I think the reader is likely to feel cheated by one unmotivated shift in the plot after another. Many readers would probably put it down before finishing it.

It helps Roth, then, that Indignation is a little thing — 200ish small pages with generous spacing. It’s easy to tear through in one sitting. I essentially started and finished it over the course of two 90-minute commutes. It’s a fine book, but Roth shouldn’t get credit for just being Roth: many authors could have written something as good as Indignation, which is not something I can say for a book of similar heft like Roth’s Dying Animal. Your time is probably better spent on the latter.

(Note: I read an early review copy of Indignation, generously supplied to me by the publisher. The book will be released tomorrow. Details of its printing may differ from what I read, but I can’t imagine that the story itself will.)

Quick recommendation: do not try to install the new iPhone 2.1 firmware update under VMWare. Trying to do so today was unfun. My phone was temporarily a brick, until I found a coworker’s actual Windows box and installed it from that machine’s iTunes. Until I did that, I was getting lots of “unknown error” codes, like the dread 1611.

Other than this firmware update, I’ve had no problems doing everything under iTunes under XP under VMWare. This one was unpleasant, though.

I know that the appropriate stance when reading a book about famous thinkers is to use some historical imagination and put myself in their shoes. No one ever said this would be easy, and I am by no means equipped to do it properly even yet. Let me be honest: Christianity seems unalterably silly to me, the more so as I read more about it. The only thing that seems likely to rescue it for me, as an intellectual pursuit, is if I read some modern thinkers who were born into the Western scientific inheritance after the Protestant Reformation had a chance to shake itself out, and who completely absorb those teachings into their religious writings. I have a couple pointers to works that might fit this bill (The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza and The Philosophy of Spinoza), but in the meantime I can’t help reading all of this with a smirk.

McGiffert does his very best to treat these great thinkers seriously and concisely. We move briskly from the mediæval background to the Reformation — namely Augustine — through Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Luther’s student Philip Melanchthon. From there we get all manner of new Christians: we get Anabaptists and Socinians, Puritans and Pietists and evangelicals. They loathed each other. They viewed Christ differently. They viewed the relation between civil and spiritual government differently. Some took the Bible more literaly, some more symbolically. Some — most — of them viewed man as bottomlessly depraved, salvageable only by divine intervention. One sect’s optimism forced its opponents to adopt an even more reactionary position. And so the whole mess spun out of control. (Well, that’s one way to frame it. Another way is that the ambiguities in the Bible and in the life of Jesus, combined with new print technologies and wider literacy, led naturally to a flowering of divergent ideas. This is the kind of flowering where people kill one another. Death flowers.)

One outcome of all of this was Rationalism — making peace with the scientific and mathematical changes being wrought all around them and trying to justify Christianity on the basis of objectively obvious axioms. These didn’t work out. One proof (described on p. 227) is based on the rightness of Christian ethics: since the outcome of Christianity is right living, clearly Christianity is right and true. Naturally one has to then argue that no other system of ethics could possibly produce right outcomes. The only way one can really cling to such a belief is by ignoring the non-Christian world altogether. This the British, among others, did.

Maybe Christianity is totally incompatible with argument. This would conflict with a few hundred years during which Christians did feverishly try to make their religion mesh with reason, but why not? Late in the game, then, we get books with titles like Dodwell’s: Christianity Not Founded on Argument: And the True Principle of Gospel-Evidence Assigned, counseling us that “Religion will not admit of the least alliance with reason,” that “The only power to bring us to religious faith is the Holy Spirit,” and that we should “trust … in the Lord with all [our] heart[s], and lean not unto [our] own understanding.” This has a certain kind of honesty, but it sounds suspiciously like the terrified ravings of someone who’s been backed into a corner: not only is he not scared, he’s happy to be in the corner. He cannot explain why standards of argument that apply everywhere else do not apply to his own favored religion, so he pretends that he’s not obliged to argue.

Protestant Thought Before Kant is sort of the dual of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s sweeping epic. Where MacCulloch was expansive and detailed, McGiffert is tightly focused and content to paint arcs. Where MacCulloch methodically covers the history with only enough theology to fill in some gaping holes, McGiffert’s book is a little gem of theology with virtually no history surrounding it. The Thirty Years’ War merits only a peep from McGiffert, whereas the first half or two-thirds of MacCulloch’s book teased us toward the War’s final convulsion.

McGiffert could use more history; its absence means that he has to fall back to metaphysical handwaving. He tells us that liberalism, with its new feelings of optimism about man’s place in the world and his ultimate redemption, emerged from some vague “modern spirit” (p. 176) or “general spirit of the modern age” (p. 187). As someone who respects historical materialism of the Guns, Germs, and Steel vein, this just won’t do. But I can’t blame McGiffert for cutting out almost all history: he wanted to pack all of Reformation theology into a couple hundred pages. I’ll cut the guy some slack.

A friend asked me a very legitimate question a while back, about my attempts to take this stuff seriously: Why do I feel obliged to take “Christianity [seriously] but not Zoroastrianism, or neo-Platonism or the Ghost Dance?” Totally fair cop, and it answers itself: I feel so obliged because I live in a Christian society, which is a terrible reason to want to dignify non-arguments with this kind of energy. One could argue that this will help me understand my fellow-countrymen, and in some sense it might. Probably reading the history of theology won’t do the trick; actually going into a church might.

(Originally published on BookSlut.com in slightly modified form.) The ground here is so fertile; it’s a shame that Stephen Dando-Collins does approximately nothing with it. We start with one of the more badass lines in the history of capitalism — a letter from a tycoon to his erstwhile business partners:

Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The story of wrongs avenged gets better. Because while Vanderbilt’s partners are scamming him, the American William Walker is trying to take over Nicaragua. Vanderbilt needs Nicaragua; the gold rush is heating up in California, and Vanderbilt wants to shuttle passengers from the east coast to the west. Without a railroad or a Panama Canal, the quickest way to do this had been to send them around the southern tip of South America. Vanderbilt had another idea: send boats through the Caribbean to Nicaragua, get on the San Juan River at Greytown, follow the San Juan to Lake Nicaragua, use mules to cover a small strip of ground between the Lake and San Juan Del Sur, and dump them out onto the Pacific. From there, the trip up to California is comparatively short.

There will be conflict eventually. On the one side we have Walker, the American “filibuster” (a term meaning something like “treasure-seeking cowboy” before it meant “reading from the phone book for 72 consecutive hours”), hoping to carve out a new nation under his tutelage in South America. On the other we have a ruthless businessman who needs Walker’s territory to make his money. While Vanderbilt plots his enemies’ destruction, Walker draws thousands upon thousands of Americans down from the north into his private army and names himself president of Nicaragua. How do those thousands of Americans get there? They need to take ships, obviously. The collision course is set.

Unfortunately, Dando-Collins does as little as possible with these promising materials, and by the end of “Tycoon’s War” he reminds us how little he’s done with them. For instance: one might want to know what motivates Walker to do what he does. Is it money? Fame? Power? You’d think that in a book ostensibly about “America’s Most Famous Military Adventurer,” his motivations would be weaved into most every page of the book. Yet Dando-Collins saves them for the end, in a couple-page-long chapter entitled “The Protagonists’ Motives.” Dando-Collins will soon be releasing an edition of the New Testament with an epilogue entitled “Stuff About Jesus.”

Dando-Collins wants us to believe that Walker was hugely important within American history. He may well be, but nothing Dando-Collins tells us would suggest so. The best he can come up with is to note that “To this day, there is an historical marker honoring Walker outside the Nashville house where he was born and grew up.” Mt. Rushmore it isn’t.

The unfortunate reality seems to be that Dando-Collins is a William Walker fanboy. Near “The Protagonists’ Motives,” we get this: “Throughout Central America today, Walker’s name ranks with that of Hitler and Stalin.” That is the sole unflattering line about Walker in the book’s 342 pages, and it takes 334 pages to get there. The reader is not equipped to understand why Central Americans might view Walker that way.

We can at least hope for solid military history. “Tycoon’s War” is a reasonably engaging on that score, and indeed that seems to be the only part of “Tycoon’s War” that really interests Dando-Collins. He mostly lets the Walker biography, the Vanderbilt biography, the broader story of the U.S.’s role in this hemisphere, and the clash-of-titans aspects drop.

I’d advise reading the Wikipedia entry on Greytown and skipping “Tycoon’s War.”

(Originally published on BookSlut.com in slightly modified form.)

I honestly couldn’t decide, while reading this book, whether I hated it. Which isn’t necessarily a check against it; I suspect Conrad knew that she’d elicit this opinion from most of her readers.

There are two big reasons why most readers will feel that way:

1. It’s a standard-size book that purports to cover most every important issue in American political life. Every issue will necessarily receive less coverage than it deserves.

2. When Conrad says “Politics,” what she really means is “the beliefs that most Americans hold.” She wants to introduce you to all the beliefs, mistaken or otherwise, that you’ll encounter around the water cooler. She tries to dispense with the facially bad arguments, but people on any side of any issue will wish that she tried harder.

Is the problem that I’m just too opinionated? Do I selfishly wish that Conrad would support my side more than the other guy’s? That’s the crux of my uncertainty over this book. At some level I think I am the problem. Another problem, though, is Conrad is not an expert on health care, or foreign policy, or economics, or the environment, or any of the other issues that she covers in “What You Should Know”. She is “pursuing her doctorate in art history at Columbia University.” She knows how to read newspapers with a critical eye, and I have to tip my hat to her on that; critical reading is not something that many people can do.

Why, then, should we read Conrad rather than any other intelligent person who digests newspapers? For that matter, why shouldn’t Conrad have published a book of newspaper clippings, which intelligent readers could then dig into? So far as I can tell, the answer lies in the author blurb on the jacket cover, right above the bit about her art-history work: Conrad is “the daughter of the senior Democratic senator from North Dakota and the niece of the Republican U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.” Being from the West, she’s supposed to be libertarian and maverick. Being so intimately connected to U.S. politics, she’s supposed to give us a behind-the-scenes view of who’s sleeping with whom, who’s bought whom out, and so forth. The book doesn’t deliver on that promise, so it’s not even worth addressing.

What we’re left with, then, is a précis of American newspapers, written by a smart person. Since her goal is to help us all understand our fellow-Americans’ political beliefs, Conrad is loath to write off most anyone — though she seems to have no problem judging one belief or another as kooky. For instance: “A few far-left liberals are opposed to rendition in every instance; most believe there are times when it is acceptable to breach the laws of a given nation in order to apprehend a criminal, especiallt if it has a shaky rule of law or is run by an unfriendly dictator.” (p. 184)

This is what drives me up a wall about Conrad’s book. Like the newspapers that form her sources, Conrad accepts the common framing of issues, and thinks it’s perfectly okay to label one side — typically the left — lunatic. So 20 pages later, she writes

“I’m going to use scientific terms like ‘embryo’ and ‘fetus’ when referring to early stages in human development. Be aware, however, that some opponents of legal abortion find these terms offensive. They call a fetus an unborn child and say they support the rights of the unborn.” (Bolding in original.)

Did you see her call them “a few far-right conservatives”? I did not. She maintains an indifferent posture, which masks an implicitly conservative ideology.

Throughout this book, Conrad needs to keep asking more questions. If someone believes that the U.S. has a right to capture people from unfriendly regimes, we are implicitly granting that right to foreign governments. This is the same argument used against torture: if we do it, we encourage them to do it. Conrad can label rendition’s opponents extremists because she lives in the most powerful nation on earth: if we can snatch people up from Namibia, who cares if the Namibians try to do the same to us? Conrad doesn’t put it this way because newspapers don’t put it this way.

What You Should Know About Politics is filled with this kind of pretend objectivity, and a refusal to ask more fundamental questions about the U.S. political process or the role of the media in controlling that process. If you’re not already familiar with the issues that Americans discuss, then I’d recommend this book warily. If you already understand something of the world around you, then What You Should Know About Politics is just a recipe for continued frustration.

The most liberal estimate — i.e., the one that gives McCain the benefit of the doubt and doesn’t factor in the fact that he’s a cancer survivor — says that his probability of dying within the next four years is about 1 in 7; his probability of dying within eight years is about 1 in 3. Thus spake the Social Security Administration. The math is easy: if your probability of dying in a given year is 2%, and your probability of dying in the next year is 3%, then your probability of dying within two years is 1-(1-.02)(1-.03) = 1-(.98*.97) = .05. And so forth.

I’ve been looking for similar tables for melanoma survivors. If anyone can spot them, I’d love to see them.

(Here might be the place, apropos of nothing, to quote John McCarthy: “Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to speak nonsense.”)

With the help of my inestimable friend mrz, I have gotten iTunes to sync properly with an iPhone from within Linux. It works flawlessly. Here’s what I did:

• Install VMWare Workstation 6.x. I tried with 5.x and had not much luck. In fact I believe when I first installed VMWare on this laptop, I had installed VMWare Server. I had even tried the variant of VMWare Server which uses a web GUI; I cannot testify strongly enough against it. Moral: go with Workstation 6.x. (Thanks to mrz for making this crucial suggestion. Its value is even more apparent later in our story.)
• Create a new VMWare Windows XP image. I chose an 8-gig image, for no particular reason. (And in fact, now that I have everything running properly, I’ll see if I can knock that down. I have about 3.7 gigs left, and can’t imagine using any more than a gig of that.)
• Install Windows XP. I paid something like $50 for a copy direct from the Microsoft store, courtesy of a close friend who will remain nameless.
• Install all your various Windows service packs by going to the Start menu, then Run, then typing iexplore http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/. There may be other ways to do this, but that one has always been surefire for me. Keep doing this, along with the necessary restarts, until you have no more updates left to install.
• Install VMWare Tools into the image. This is under the “VM” menu.
• Install iTunes into the image.
• Within VMWare Tools, turn on Shared Folders. This allows you to share a chunk of the filesystem from the host OS (in this case Ubuntu) with the guest OS (Windows). I used this so that I wouldn’t have to copy MP3s that are already available in Linux into Windows. The shared-folders feature is only available under Workstation, so far as I know.

• Here’s the cool part: even though Linux doesn’t really know what to do with the iPhone, VMWare can dig it. This seriously impressed me. Normally when I plug in the iPhone, Ubuntu recognizes the phone’s camera and asks me if I want to open it in F-Spot, but doesn’t do anything with the iPod component or the various installed apps. But lsusb tells me that I have an iPhone: it says Bus 005 Device 002: ID 05ac:1292 Apple Computer, Inc., and lsusb -v dumps out 303 lines of information; clearly it knows that something’s up. It’s just that Ubuntu doesn’t know how to make use of that information.

  Fortunately VMWare does. Under the “VM” menu, then “Removable Devices”, then “USB Devices”, we have “Apple iPhone (EHCI Port 1)”. Select that item. Voilà: the iPhone has now been passed through to Windows. Windows recognizes the device, the same way it would recognize any USB device that you plug into a USB port. Give Windows some time to load the appropriate drivers. Then launch iTunes. After a few moments, you should see an iPhone in your leftmost pane.

• Now you want iTunes to see the files from your shared folders. Go to the VM menu, then Settings, then Options, then Shared Folders. Select “Always Enabled”, because why not. Add a folder with some descriptive name (like “MP3s”) pointing to a path on the host OS (here Linux). I would select “Read-only”, but I don’t know whether iTunes needs to write into my MP3 directory.

  Here I ran into some problems, which may or may not have had to do with various quirks of my particular install. I had to use a little hack to make Windows see a host called \\.host. (You put an entry in the lmhosts file which manually specifies that .host == localhost.) I also had to reinstall the VMWare Tools, per a somewhat unrelated knowledge base entry. Without these two steps, there was no .host machine, hence no shared folders available within VMWare. With those steps taken care of, I mapped a drive letter to my MP3 collection. You can do this any number of ways: net use f: \\.host\Shared Folders at the command line (Start → Run → cmd) will work, as will My Network Places → Tools → Map Network Drive.

And there we go: you now have a VMWare instance from which you can run iTunes under Linux — and possibly from any other VMWare host OS.

…Huh. Looking at it just now, it appears that my Workstation install never expires. How does that work? I was actually more than willing to pay $50 just now to register this thing. Man. Thanks, VMWare!

Lots of people, myself included, have been talking about the probability that a President McCain would die in office. So let’s have at it: does anyone have the actuarial tables on the probability that a 72-year-old military veteran would live four more years?

Obviously the probabilities will be different for McCain than for the average veteran. If he has a heart attack, his odds are somewhat better than those of a homeless veteran. So run the numbers in various ways: probability of death within the four-year interval after age 72 for a wealthy nonsmoking man; probability of death for an Arizonan; and so forth. Maybe the estimates will vary a lot; maybe they won’t.

In general I’d love to know where to look for this kind of actuarial data.

P.S. (8 October 2008): I worked out a baseline estimate of the probability.

Here it’s necessary, by the way, to hand the mic over to Fafblog!:

Things are looking up for John McCain. Last week ended with a bang with the announcement of his fresh-faced new running mate Sarah Palin, who should provide McCain many more years of extended existence through gradual consumption of her life force, and, if needed, a new host body should his current vessel fail him. But McCain’s true masterstroke is his planned convention trip to the permanently hurricane-ravaged wasteland of New Orleans, where he will demonstrate his awesome powers of Presidentiality by climbing atop a mountain of corpses and emitting a series of ear-piercing shrieks before unfurling his once-gnarled bat wings to absorb the radiance of the city’s succulent Death Energy. He will then speak on the need for sacrifice, courage, and a new spirit of national unity in these times of extraordinary crisis before loping off to strangle and devour an aid worker.