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Friday, October 25, 2002
 
On the subway this morning, my heart was nearly broken. A man got on with 2 little girls at Downtown Crossing (Washington St.). The younger one, about 5, got a seat immediately. I stood up and the elder, about 8, sat down a few seats away, and sat scowling, looking at the floor. The man stood by the younger one.
She asked "Who was that little boy?"
"He's older than both of you. His name is Junior."
"But who is he? Is he part of our family?"
"Yes, he is."
"Then why doesn't he live with us?"
"He lives with his mother."
Silence.
"Daddy, are you going to live with us now?"
"Yes, I am."
More silence.
"Daddy, if you promise to never go away again, then I won't be mad at you."
 
On the Bellesiles issue for what is very likely the last time, Instapundit tells us that Prof. Michael Bellesiles has resigned from Emory after the committee investigating the charges against him found that they could not prove falsification. This was mainly because the supporting documentation he provided was so poor that they could not tell whether it was fraud or just incompetence. Some of the documentation he provided was just unexplained tickmarks on yellow legal paper. In any event, the sloppiness and inability to show how he got the results was professional misconduct. You can read the committee's report, and Bellesiles' reply (Instapundit links to the .pdf documents) to judge for yourself.

I'm a CPA (though not working in that field now), and before Arthur Andersen raised the bar, one of the worst things a staff auditor could do is what is called "ghost-ticking." This means marking your workpapers to indicate that you performed a procedure without actually having done so. Anyone caught doing this was immediately fired (this was a long time ago, as you can tell). I occasionally suspected it myself when the prior year's workpapers showed everything done in record time without exception, while I was finding missing, inaccurate, or incomplete records in the same client's records the next year, but with last year's staff gone, there was nothing to be done. One incident when I was still a staff auditor involved a young woman who breezed through difficult areas and often left early. The in-charge accountant on the job saw that the time she devoted to the work was nowhere near what he expected it to require and eventually laid a trap. He removed some pages from the middle of several reports and asked her to check the client's totals. She reported back that it all added up without exception. She was escorted out of the building that day.


Thursday, October 24, 2002
 
The Nation has a breathtakingly incompetent defense of The Arming of America by Michael Bellesiles. The Guardian, hardly a haven for right-wing gun nuts, also summarized the criticism of Michael Bellesiles' work. The Guardian, though, cites a finding that completely obliterates the position taken by the Nation. The Nation argues that because the disputed records in San Francisco pertained to the period around 1850, they have no bearing on the central thesis that gun ownership was rare before and during the period that the Second Amendment was crafted. Indeed, they were at worst tangential and could even support the Bellesiles theory of the 19th century origin of widespread ownership.

According to the Guardian, Lindgren went over the same Vermont probate records from the late 18th century that Bellesiles cited. Instead of the 14% of households owning guns that Bellesiles found, Lindgren found 40%. This is a very strong argument against Bellesiles and a significant demonstration of fraud or incompetence. Not surprisingly, the Nation omits the stronger argument and attacks the weaker in order to prove its point.

Another fine example of the Nation cherry-picking its facts is its citing the battles of Lexington and Concord as an example of Americans' unfamiliarity with the use of firearms, and I quote:

"One of my favorite examples: Of the famous Minutemen at Lexington Green in 1775, only seven actually fired their muskets, and only one Redcoat was actually hit."

True enough as stated, but there is more to the story.

After the quick and easy victory at Lexington, the British advanced to Concord. We Americans were rarely stupid enough to stand up in close ranks and trade musket volleys with the British regulars. Instead, the Minutemen reverted to the tactics they had learned in 100 years of intermittent Indian wars (I wonder what weapons they used in them? No matter, I suppose). The British retreat was harassed all the way back from Concord to Lexington by hidden marksmen. They were slaughtered in an ambush at Bloody Angle and routed at Fiske's Hill, suffering 273 casualties out of a force of 700 vs. 94 losses from a smaller American force. The arrival of a relief column at Concord prevented their annihilation or surrender. Not bad for people who had few guns and didn't know quite what to do with them.

Instapundit shoots some more holes in the Nation. It's just a big fat slow target -- who could resist?

 
The Boston Globe covers the Harvard divestiture story. Five professors who signed the anti-Israel divestiture petition all got together and agreed with themselves that, yes indeed, they were right all along. Most of the audience disagreed.

The reporting was actually more balanced than the usual Globe article, which could have taught its parent company, the New York Times, some new tricks about biased reporting. Some of the facts presented were soft-pedaled, so let me stress what they did not:

  >  > The audience did not shout down the speakers, as is the custom with leftist and pro-Palestinian audiences. They let the speakers finish and then asked questions. There were some boos and catcalls.

  >  > The article mentions 74 signatures at Harvard and 56 at MIT (Noam Chomsky must have signed a dozen times himself) in favor of divestiture and states that the petition drive is gaining momentum. As an aside, it mentions that there are "several hundred" signatures at these schools on petitions against divestiture. It sounds like the force of friction is gradually reducing the momentum. Maybe it's rubbing against reality.


Tuesday, October 22, 2002
 
Mark Steyn follows the continuing saga of Barbra Streisand's gallant battle with the English language and foreign policy.

Maybe it's just me, but why does anyone care about Barbra Streisand's views on foreign policy? Does anyone out there think she has any expertise in this area? If she is being heavily recruited by the Kennedy School of Government, or in line for an ambassador posting or State Department policy post, it's news to me.

Perhaps we're overlooking a great intellectual resource here. If she has solved the Middle East problem, maybe it's time for her to move on to other things. I hear that Europe is devoting more resources to nanotechnology, with a view toward overtaking the US. Hah! We'll trump their ace by putting Barbra's special powers to work on this, and soon we'll be exporting our cheap and abundant buckyballs, nanotubes, and artificial spider silk.

And I would dearly love to hear her review of the proof of Fermat's last theorem -- does the proof stand up? Inquiring minds want to know!

Alternative theory: Ms. Streisand has more money than brains, making her a member of a key constituency of the Democratic Party in California. When a fool with money calls, Mr. "Gebhart" picks up the phone. Or the fax. What colors go through the fax machine best? Ms. Streisand is clearly missing a couple of colors from her set of Crayolas.


Saturday, October 19, 2002
 
In re-reading the last post, I saw that I might have misled you about the materialist thing. It's not me.

About a month ago, the parents' meeting for the swim team had to get canceled because the library room we had booked was going to be used the same day by the World Church of the Creator, which like the Holy Roman Empire or Meals Ready to Eat (US military field rations), comprises three distinct lies -- it's a US neo-Nazi organization that certainly has nothing to do with the God of Jesus, Moses or Abraham (Jews all three). The library advised us to cancel because there might be trouble, and there was (see the local newspaper article in the Wakefield Daily Item). I went down to see the freaks and found two sets of them, since the street was occupied by the Progressive Labor Party chanting "Death, death, death to the Fascists." Very enlightening. Naturally, I started looking around for a brick, figuring this was a target-rich environment, but there were approximately 250 police there keeping things from getting even uglier, so I settled down to watch the show. I noticed that the Communists tended to affect Lenin-style goatees rather than the Stalin soup-strainer, no doubt because Lenin got better press. The Nazis tended to be clean-shaven except for their eyebrows, but I noticed again that white supremacists don't present very convincing examples -- these looked like cleaned-up hicks and sounded like dull normals, at best. If these losers are the master race, I'm going to the courthouse to have my species legally changed.

There was some pantomime violence, someone whacked someone else with a stick from a protest sign and a half dozen jerks were arrested for other infractions, nothing that would get you a game misconduct penalty in a hockey game. We locals got to watch the 1930's being reenacted right here at home. Spanish Civil War reenacters -- whodathunkit?

So anyway, the next week a local woman wrote in to the Daily Item celebrating the glorious victory over Fascism, and recommending that the heroes of the class struggle arrested for such thrilling deeds as sucker-punching another fool in Dunkin Donuts should be set free by a grateful populace. She is the materialist I was referring to. Sorry for the confusion.


Thursday, October 17, 2002
 
Thanks for the mention, Haggai. Don't let up on the clueless ninnies!
I went to get pizza last night, and saw that they had felafel on the menu as well. I love falafel, so I ordered that, too. The woman behind the counter started chatting with me and my 10 year old daughter. She had never tried the felafel (it turned out to be excellent) and asked me where it came from (Middle East -- it's the one thing everyone there agrees on). They don't have felafel in Brazil, where she and her husband came from, so she asked if I was from the Middle East. We wound up all laughing about an Irish guy buying Arab food in an Italian restaurant from a Brazilian, and I told the bunch of them (the rest of the staff had joined in by then) about going to get my dry cleaning down the street and listening to the shop owner talking to her kids in Hungarian while the seamstress chatted with her husband in Vietnamese. All this in a smallish town (22,000 souls and one materialist).
Lessons learned:
1. I don't know if it will ever happen, but if humanity ever outgrows tribalism, it will happen in the USA first.
2. Americans are fat because we invented pizza.

Wednesday, October 16, 2002
 
About these posts
I started writing the content back in August, twiddling with the blogskin in my spare time. No, I didn't read all this stuff in a day. After I finally realized I was never going to be happy with the look of the free weblog, I decided to back up the truck and kick the whole load off the tailgate. Maybe I'll fix it later. MaƱana, inshallah, whatever.

Oh no, it's gone! Oh, wait, there it is again!
Arts & Letters Daily has shut down. The website was the property of Lingua Franca, another keenly regretted loss. The editors of the site, Denis Dutton and Tran Huu Dung, immediately started a new weblog called Philosophy and Literature. Marvelous to relate, it looks and reads a lot like the old site. If anything, the design is cleaner. Whatever mental illness or defect causes these two to persist in their behavior, I hope no one finds a cure for it. Thanks, guys, and welcome back!

Currently reading
I just finished the second volume of The Open Society and its Enemies. Popper gave a good brisk beating to Plato in volume 1, then severely punished Hegel in the opening of volume 2. Hegel, as Popper tells it, justified the Prussian militarized autocracy as the "highest" freedom and the acme of the realization of the collective spirit of the nation. This should sound sadly familiar. Hegel, in effect, was a hack and a toady.
Imagine my surprise when he let Marx off lightly. Marx's big problem, to Popper's mind, was historicism, the idea that there are immutable laws in history that can be discovered. Marx did not allow for the possibility that we can learn and change things. Capitalism did not fail - it was reformed by moral suasion and democratic intervention. Child labor laws, unemployment insurance, collective bargaining and other innovations have kept the machine running without overheating, and were accomplished without civil insurrection. The genius of democracy is its ability to detect and correct systematic failures. The capitalism of Marx's day is long gone and unlamented, but what replaced it was nothing Marx envisioned. Since Marx founded his system on its historic laws and their inexorable operation, it stands or falls based on his predictions. They are consistently wrong. So why does Marx escape a well-deserved drubbing? The usual reason: his good intentions. I was a little disappointed that Popper spared him a flogging, but since the hideous results of his system were not clear until after his time, and we already have seen that he was not good at prophecy, it would not be fair to hold him strictly accountable for the whole sanguinary failure.

Thinking deep thoughts
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?

Currently reading
Mr. Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard. I didn't think I had to explain this author, but a friend who reads mysteries had never heard of him. She caught on quickly when I mentioned Raymond Chandler. Writers love this guy. His style is spare, not a word wasted, and you can hear the characters speak. Think about J.J. Cale or Steve Cropper playing guitar and you get the idea.

Enron and WorldCom for dummies
First, a little Accounting 101. Debit and credit don't mean bad or good. All they really mean is left and right. Assets (the stuff in a business) go on the left. Debts and owner's equity (the ones who own the stuff) go on the right. Revenues are left, expenses are right. When you record a transaction, you have to put something on the left and something on the right, and they have to come to the same amount on each side to balance.

WorldCom had a very simple way of doing things: if they had to record a "left," they picked an asset instead of an expense.

Suppose the accountant should have done this:

(Debit)Expense $3.8 billion
(Credit)Cash paid $3.8 billion
Memo: Miscellaneous expenses

Instead, they just did this:

(Debit)Imaginary asset $3.8 billion
(Credit)Cash paid $3.8 billion
Memo: Don't spend a lot of time looking for this asset

Voila, you just made $3.8 billion.

Enron was a little more complicated. It had to be complicated to work at all, but the theme was this: eat tomorrow's supper tonight. Enron would enter into a contract to deliver something (maybe natural gas) over a period of years. That would usually mean that they would have to take in the income several years as they got paid. What they did instead was set up partnerships that were sort of, kind of, but not really separate from Enron. So now they "sell" this contract to the partnership at a profit. Ta-dah! Instant profits! The partnership has nothing else but this contract, so they "pay" for it with borrowed money. Enron is a co-signer on the debt, but since it was borrowed by the partnership, they can just forget about putting it on their books.

As they say on the television show, these people are professionals, so don't try this at home.

Currently reading
The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. 1, by Karl Popper.
Popper was the philosopher who made clear one of the main principles of scientific investigation. In his famous example, a good scientist is one who, having hypothesized that all swans are white, looks for a black swan to invalidate his rule. The number of white swans observed is not enough. A theory can be considered valid if there are no meaningful exceptions. (By the way, there are black swans native to Australia.)

You have to admire the man's audacity in this book. He sees in Plato's works the beginnings of 20th century totalitarianism. Plato's Republic is meant to be an ideal city-state. The rulers rule, and the workers work. The caste system is immutable. The rulers should apply the same principles of breeding humans as they do in breeding horses. The state is everything, the individual is nothing. Justice is what tends to serve the state's interest. Having come as close to the Ideal as possible, all change should cease, since change would be deterioration.

It's not hard to see the connection, once it's pointed out. The "leading party," eugenics, racism, revolutionary justice, Marx's true communism, the thousand-year Reich. Popper cites Plato's call to drive everyone over the age of ten out of the city, in order to start afresh. This to me was a chilling foreshadowing of Pol Pot's "Year Zero" program some thirty years after this book was written.

Popper sees the idea of historicism at the base of utopianism. The idea that "scientific" laws can be squeezed out of history is probably related to the patterns people see in winning lottery numbers. There is a quirk in human intelligence that sees more patterns than really exist, and then makes predictions based on the patterns. What claim to certainty can historicism make? Not deductive certainty — none of the systems stand up without begging the question. Not inductive certainty, either - why did socialism maintain and extend its reach in the last century despite an unblemished record of failure? And whatever happened to the alienation and pauperization of labor that Marx said was inevitable? Did I miss something? If you want to claim the scientific method, you rely on small-scale experiments, accurate recording and publication of the results, comparison of the results to the prediction, reproducibility, challenge and defense of the method, and ruling out other explanations. Instead, utopians simply explain away their disasters and start a fresh one.

I have long been a skeptic of Utopianism. The idea of "investing" in current human misery — even death — for a golden future is a sucker's game. The future keeps receding as the corpses pile up in the present.

Popper's notes are indispensable. Don't skip them - use two bookmarks. They contain a sharp answer to utilitarianism: human happiness and human suffering are two different things. One does not offset the other, and they are certainly not transferable. We are obliged to relieve or avoid causing suffering, but each of us is best able to know and look after our own happiness. If we want to contribute to our neighbor's happiness, very good, but let's not force it on him.

 

 
   
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