RICK SANTORUM, HERO OF THE GOP....Apparently Republicans are now practically stampeding to support Rick Santorum. I guess they didn't listen to Karl Rove's advice to shut up and pray that the issue would go away.

Matt Yglesias has the details. These guys are a real piece of work.

GEORGE BUSH VS. THE WORLD....Good editorial in the Washington Post today about the Bush administration's senseless insistence on punishing everyone who disagreed with our decision to invade Iraq:

Overt U.S. measures, such as excluding France from NATO decision-making, will only help Mr. Chirac prove the point he has been trying to make to Europe and the rest of the world -- that the United States has become a reckless colossus and needs to be balanced by coalitions of other nations.

....The attack on Chile is even more senseless....Eighty-five percent of Chileans opposed a war in Iraq; their government responded by supporting a compromise in the Security Council that was intended to delay the war while making possible its eventual endorsement. If this solid hemispheric citizen is now to be punished for failing to fall in line with the United States, the world will indeed take a lesson -- and not the right one.

George Bush has been playing high-stakes politics ever since he became president, seemingly convinced that the way to win is to cow your enemies into submission by attacking at all times and never, ever backing down. The problem is that unless you truly have the power of a Chicago mob boss — and all appearances aside, we don't — this doesn't work in the long run. On the contrary, it just makes your enemies madder.

Domestically, Bush's show-no-mercy instincts are already coming back to haunt him, with the Democrats finally becoming genuinely pissed off enough to start playing hardball. Internationally, if he keeps this up, the same thing will happen: even Tony Blair, with his competing loyalties between the U.S. and Europe, won't put up with this forever.

The big question is this: are Bush's instincts just leading him astray, or does he actually want to get the rest of the world ganged up against us? It's hard to tell sometimes.

PRISCILLA OWEN....Walter Cole of Idols of the Marketplace recommends this Texas Observer article about Priscilla Owen and her part in the Miles v. Ford case. It's a bit of a long article, and Owen doesn't show up until near the end, but it's a pretty compelling story. Definitely worth checking out.

BLINDED BY SCIENCE....I read two posts today about the (generally poor) state of scientific knowledge of the masses. First, Megan McArdle:

It's dangerous that our humanities students are so alienated from the scientific way of thought that they can't evaluate science on its own terms. You don't need to be able to run a study yourself -- but you should understand the limits of experimental design, how data is used to build a case, and the frameworks of almost-sciences like economics that will let you understand where economists pronouncements are likely to be pretty solid (rent control) and where they're likely to be personal opinions dressed up as facts (tax policy).

We can't all be scientists, but we can, most of us, understand the scientific way of thinking. And since the scientific way of thinking is what's building most of the science that's building our world, and should be constructing the economic thought we expect to make us all richer, we'd better be able to follow it or we risk being led around by the nose.

I'm pretty sympathetic to this thought, but even so I can't help but wonder: is the "scientific way" of thinking really as important as she suggests? On the one hand, my experience in business leads me to think that it is: an inability to seriously analyze a set of numbers — and understand their limitations — is a real problem for an awful lot of people.

But it can cripple you as well. Libertarians, for example, frequently espouse the peculiar notion that their philosophy is somehow more "scientific" than others, failing to understand that (a) it isn't, and (b) deciding how society should be structured isn't a scientific question anyway. A scientific mindset is an excellent thing to have if you are addressing a problem susceptible to numerical analysis, but it's an albatross if you use it to analyze everything that comes across your plate.

There's another problem here as well: the level of discourse on topics like economics or environmental science is carried on at such a high level that it's simply impossible for laymen to evaluate the evidence and the models themselves. We have to rely on experts, and so we end up making decisions based not so much on the evidence as on which experts we trust. There may be some level of analytic ability that's useful in distinguishing real experts from bullshit experts, but there's also a distinct limit to how far that gets you.

The second post is from David Appell's Quark Soup, where he complains about a science writer who didn't understand a simple concept from physics:

It's far too acceptable in our society to profess ignorance of even basic scientific concepts (and this one is taught the first week of high school physics). Yet no person would be considered educated if they did not recognize certain key passages from Shakespeare, if they knew nothing of the Russian Revolution, or understood the concept of, say, supply and demand. Understanding the basic concept of gravitational acceleration falls into the same category--and one can't make a utilitarian argument, since they all have about the same degree of usefulness.

I'm not sure what to think of this. Once again my inclination is to agree, but when I step back I find myself wondering if this is really right. There are hundreds of important disciplines around, and it's unrealistic to expect most people to have more than a passing familiarity with anything but a handful of them. I know about gravitational acceleration, but I know nothing about ballet or opera. My sister is the opposite. Which one of us is a moron?

Still, from a "cultural literacy" point of view you could argue that there are certain key aspects of science that everyone should know about. But which ones? A knowledge of Shakespeare is helpful because allusions to Shakespeare are all around us, and you miss out on a lot if you don't understand them. Which scientific concepts have the same utility in helping us understand normal public discourse? Any ideas?

ATTENTION GAYS: YOUR ROLE IS TO PROTECT HETEROSEXUALS FROM THEMSELVES....The most breathtaking abuse of the slippery slope argument I've ever seen is on display today in Stanley Kurtz's NRO article about incest, homosexuality, and adultery. First he starts with incest:

To see the mechanism of our incest taboo at work, imagine a world in which consensual adult incest was legal. Once we see or hear of couples — even a relatively small number — who engage in legal, consensual, adult incestuous relationships, the whole idea of incest with minors becomes thinkable. Preventing incest with minors from becoming thinkable is the purpose of the taboo.

I'm pretty sure that the problem of adult incest is pretty tiny in any case, but does Kurtz seriously think that acceptance of adult incest would actually lead to acceptance of child abuse? What on earth leads him to believe that?

But this is just a warmup anyway, leading directly to his real argument: homosexuality, and in particular gay marriage, will lead via a slippery slope to more adultery among straight people. No, really:

Above all, marriage is protected by the ethos of monogamy — and by the associated taboo against adultery. The real danger of gay marriage is that it will undermine the taboo on adultery, thereby destroying the final bastion protecting marriage: the ethos of monogamy.

Is he serious? The reason to oppose gay marriage is because it's the only thing that keeps all us heterosexuals from cheating on our wives?

Men have been cheating on their wives since the dawn of marriage itself, and the popularity of this activity has stayed high through thick and thin. If Stanley Kurtz thinks that adultery has been under control all this time but will suddenly overwhelm society if gays are allowed to get married — well, he's living in a different universe than I am.

Is this really the best that NRO can do to try and convince libertarians that it's OK to be a Republican?

SCHOOL CHOICE....I've written a few posts recently about education — this is mostly a coincidence, I assure you, not a sudden new crusade of mine — and even went so far in one of them as to wonder if math should be a required subject beyond sixth grade. This suggestion was, ahem, poorly received.

However, the prize for audacity in educational reform ideas must now go to Scott Martens of Pedantry, who suggests today that the answer to improving our schools is....to stop making kids go to school. Make it optional. And let the kids themselves make the choice.

Yowza! This is tentatively going onto my Top Ten List of All-Time Worst Ideas, but I sure have to give Scott credit for willingness to rock the boat. There's nothing like a little sacred cow bashing to get people to listen!

The funny thing is that the reason I so strongly disagree with Scott is not the obvious one: his assertion that most people don't actually learn much in school beyond basic literacy and numeracy. I suspect he's right about that for about two-thirds of high school students.

Rather, my disagreement is on the subject of socialization. Aside from learning the various things that schools teach — and in the end it may not matter all that much what those subjects are — schools serve a critical function in instilling habits: you have to show up every day, you have to sit at your desk quietly, and you have to do what the teacher tells you. This enforced regimentation, of course, is what most people hate so much about school, but the unpleasant fact is that it's also one of the most important roles that schools play.

Kids who don't get this kind of discipline end up being unable to survive at practically any job available in the modern world, and this is becoming more true, not less, as blue collar jobs decline and the service economy grows. It's practically impossible to instill the discipline necessary to succeed at an office job unless it's done at a very young age, so kids who opted out of school would essentially be doomed to a lifetime of menial jobs or complete unemployment.

Scott is quite right to suggest that schools would be infinitely better if the 10% of extreme troublemakers all left. Unfortunately, this improvement would come at the cost of creating an even larger pool of unemployable people than we have now, and the societal costs of that would be large indeed. It's a bad idea.

TAXES....On Monday I wrote a post that made two points about the U.S. economy since World War II: (a) tax rates on the rich have steadily declined and (b) overall growth rates have also steadily declined.

As I said in comments to that post, my point was not really to claim that declining taxes on the rich have caused slowing growth. Rather, it was to show that declining taxes on the rich certainly haven't accelerated growth, as conservative economists keep promising. In fact, within a fairly broad range, tax rates have very little impact on economic growth.

Here's a thought experiment: design any personal tax system you want. You can decide whether it's an income tax or a consumption tax, you can decide what kinds of exemptions are allowed, etc. When you're done, you'll have your very own ideal tax system designed for maximum efficiency and economic growth, and you'll have one job left: you have to set the tax rates themselves on various income groups. The only restriction is that they have to raise enough money to fund whatever government operations you also have in your ideal world.

Given that the actual rates (i.e., flat vs. progrssive) don't have much impact on economic efficiency, the only real reason to choose one set of rates over another is based on what you think is fair and equitable. There's no such thing as a "neutral" system, either. You have to choose rates of some kind, and any set of rates you choose is a reflection not of economic arguments, but of philosophic ones.

My view is that a progressive tax system is best, for reasons of basic equity and fairness. Why? I'll leave that for another post, but for now I just wanted to make a point that often gets hijacked by lengthy discussions of economic minutiae: in reality, tax rates are a reflection of what we value in a civil, democratic society. That's what the argument should be about, and we shouldn't allow partisans — either conservative or liberal — to avoid the subject by pretending that their proposals are nothing more than neutral arguments about economic growth. It's just smoke and mirrors to take our minds off what's really important, and we shouldn't let them get away with it.

TORY CAT BLOGGING....Since I just finished making fun of British Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, reader James Lucky thought I should see the latest from the Guardian. Apparently they decided to play a practical joke on him by creating fake ads and trying to get him to pose in front of one them. They succeeded. (The complete set of photographs is here.)

You just have to love this kind of stuff. Can you imagine a serious American newspaper pulling a gag like this on John Kerry or Howard Dean?

STANDARDS....I'm sorry, I have my standards. I refuse to link to this post of Tom Spencer's about the Missouri proposal to raise money by taxing besiality, masturbation and sadistic or masochistic abuse.

Sorry, just not gonna do it.

NEVER SHOW FEAR....Pretty much every analyst in the world thinks that Tony Blair's Labor party, which currently has a majority of about 160 seats, will cruise to an easy victory when they call the next election. But Iain Duncan Smith, leader of the Conservative party, begs to disagree:

"I am very upbeat," he said. "Put money on it. We are going to win the next election, I absolutely believe that. I am not bullshitting. It's right there. This Government is on the edge of complete failure. I promise you."

How come American politicians aren't allowed to talk like that?

KERRY VS. DEAN....ByWord takes a look at the recent Kerry vs. Dean dustup and concludes that Kerry is more devious astute than he's being given credit for. And that's a good thing!

I don't know if I agree, but I don't know if I disagree either. I have to admit that most of the time I find myself wondering if the candidates have any strategy in mind before they wake up each morning. In any case, you can read ByWord's explanation and decide for yourself.

POLITICAL SOFTBALL....Amy Sullivan reviews Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media? today for The American Prospect, but the best part is actually the opening paragraph, which has nothing to do with the book:

Everyone knows that conservatives win when they play hardball. But they also win at softball. Among congressional staff in Washington, the hallowed summer tradition of softball games on the National Mall is, in many ways, a microcosm of the larger political struggle between liberals and conservatives. Liberals let everyone play, even if it means benching their home-run hitters while the guy who whiffs every pitch gets a turn. Conservatives pick their nine strongest players and send everyone else out to buy beer. Liberals often have four or five women on the field. Conservatives play only the required three and sometimes even insist that different rules apply to women. Liberals have such fierce team names as Jeffords' Vermont Saps or the Daschle Prairie Dogs. Conservative teams are more likely to follow the lead of the Helms Hitmen.

Practically anything can be a metaphor for politics, can't it?

RUMMAGING....The Telegraph has been rummaging around burned out Iraqi ministry buildings and come up with evidence that MP George Galloway accepted millions of dollars from Saddam Hussein. A few days later, after more rummaging, they came across evidence that Saddam had connections with al-Qaeda.

The London Times, meanwhile, has been doing its own rummaging and discovered evidence that France had been giving Saddam regular reports on its dealings with America.

This is all very interesting, but I have a couple of questions:

• What are these guys doing rummaging around Iraqi ministries? Shouldn't the coalition forces be carefully scouring those buildings themselves?

• And even if rummaging is permitted, where's the American press? Three big scoops for conservative British newspapers, but the Americans, with many more reporters on the ground, haven't come up with anything. What's the deal with that?
  

Am I the only one who thinks there's more here than meets the eye?

UPDATE: In comments, Brad Johnson points to this Guardian article indicating that British intelligence doesn't think there's much to these stories.

JUST TRYING TO BE PATRIOTIC HERE, FOLKS....I missed this a few days ago, but apparently the Pentagon is under pressure to break a contract with a German company to supply it with paint. As usual, the demand comes from a congressman who wants to the contract awarded to a local firm.

The war with Iraq sure has been good for constituent services among our congressmen, hasn't it?

UPDATE: And Matt Yglesias points to a TAPPED post reminding us that one of the companies that won a rebuilding contract in Iraq is part-owned by the bin Laden family. Not that there's anything wrong with that....

A REMARKABLE RETRACTION....Take a look at this rather extraordinary retraction printed in this week's Economist. You need to read the whole thing to get the full flavor:

In our article “Nigerian Scams: Sharia Shenanigans” (December 14th 2002) we reported that Chinonye Obiagwu went on a fund-raising drive through Sweden falsely claiming to be the lawyer for Amina Lawal, a Nigerian woman sentenced to death for adultery, and had received money from people in Sweden on the basis of this false claim. The article also suggested that Mr Obiagwu's behaviour was comparable to fraudulent Nigerian “scamsters” and the “biggest crook of all”, Nigeria's former dictator, Sani Abacha. This was quite wrong. Mr Obiagwu has never claimed to be Ms Lawal's sole legal representative and has never sought or received any money from anyone in Sweden or anywhere else in respect of Ms Lawal's case.

Mr Obiagwu is a respected human-rights lawyer working both in Nigeria and internationally and is National Co-ordinator of the Legal Defence and Assistance Project in Lagos. As part of his activities in promoting the cause of human rights in Nigeria, Mr Obiagwu is a member of a group of lawyers who provide legal insight and other support to Ms Lawal's case. Mr Obiagwu was in Sweden at the invitation of a Swedish non-governmental organisation to give seminars on impunity and Sharia law.

The Economist apologises to Mr Obiagwu and deeply regrets any embarrassment or distress caused to him by the article. The Economist also regrets the delay in publishing this apology.

This is remarkable. It's not just a misquotation, or an incorrect fact or figure, it's an admission that, basically, the entire story was made up out of whole cloth.

As usual for these kinds of things, the Economist corrects what it said but doesn't explain just how this all happened or why it took four months to print the apology. I'll bet there's an interesting story of some kind behind that.

UPDATE: Ah, here's the background. Sounds like almost bloglike sloppiness on the part of the Economist.

MEDIEVAL....Andrew Stuttaford today in The Corner:

All this talk about ancient science reminds me of a story I read some years ago in the Economist quoting a report that looked at the level of scientific knowledge held by the UK's teachers (excluding, I presume, science teachers). The conclusion? Depressing. Significant portions of the scientific wisdom of the late medieval era (Sun goes round the Earth and so on) were still believed by a substantial proportion of the nation's "educators."

This is the kind of thing that drives me nuts. Do teachers, for example, believe that heavy objects fall faster than light ones? Maybe — especially since it's perfectly true on any planet with an atmosphere. But do they believe that the sun revolves around the earth? I think not.

I don't doubt that there are problems with our educational system, but it's shrill "can you believe that our kids don't know [blank]?!?" stuff like this that gets big headlines but completely poisons any reasonable discourse.

I don't suppose there's anyone out there who knows which study Stuttaford is talking about? Hopefully I won't have to eat my words about this....

UPDATE: John Derbyshire agrees that this is horrific. This is from the same guy who told us just the other day that he didn't really care if his mechanic — or his president — believed in evolution.

UPDATE 2: I just got back from lunch and read the comments, and I guess I'd better clear something up. My throwaway line about heavy vs. light objects was meant to refer to the fact that given two otherwise identical objects, the light one will generally fall more slowly due to air resistance. That's all.

And speaking of physics oddities, did you know that the kilogram is a measure of mass while the pound is a measure of weight (i.e., force)? I have not yet succeeded in persuading my mother of this.

THE UNITED NATIONS....Writing the post below (about reconstructing Iraq) reminded me that I get asked a lot why I think we should continue to take the United Nations seriously. The UN does indeed have a lot of problems, some of them inherent in any international organization, but regardless of this there are only a few options for how we can conduct both the war on terrorism and our broader relations with the world. If I can be simplistic for a moment, the options are these:

• On our own. This is a nonstarter: America may be the most powerful country in the world, but we are not omnipotent and we simply can't reach our goals without help. In fact, this path would almost certainly lead to ever increasing hostility from the rest of the world and the eventual marginalization of American interests.

• Ad hoc bilateral relations. This seems to be the primary strategy of the Bush administration and it might work for a short time. In the end, though, our partners will quickly realize that we are interested in them only as long as they support our positions, and no one is going to be willing to support all our positions all the time. Thus, before long, the alliances will break down unless the U.S. is willing to compromise, and if we're willing to compromise why not keep the international organizations in the first place? There's a lot of useful infrastructure there that can't be duplicated by bilateral alliances.

• A new international organization to replace the UN. This sounds good in bull sessions, but in the real world it's just not going to happen. This option is hardly worth discussing.

• The United Nations. The only option left.
  

So that's it. Despite its myriad problems, my view is that the UN is the best of a bunch of difficult choices. It's only one piece of the total foreign relations picture, but it's an important one that can be steadily improved if we stick with it.

I'm certainly open to opposing arguments on this, as long as they are rooted in the real world and don't assume that the United States is completely unchallengeable, so feel free to take your best shots. Comments are only a link away!

RECONSTRUCTING IRAQ....Never one to let a challenge slip by, I clicked over to the Washington Post yesterday to read an op-ed by OxWife Rachel Belton in which she argues that a multinational coalition is a bad way to go about nation building:

Coalitions diffuse responsibility. When Bosnia failed to arrest war criminals, each coalition member could blame its compatriots. No one felt responsible for ensuring the legitimacy of the coalition -- or the success of the country.

....Reconstruction efforts often become the battlefields for unconnected struggles between coalition members. To gain the upper hand, "internationals" dissipate their time and energy playing politics against one another.

No real argument so far. In fact I might even go further: some members of a broad coalition might be actively hoping for failure as a way to prove that they were right to oppose the war all along. Not a pretty thought, but an all too human one, I'm afraid.

Unfortunately, while Belton lists several knocks against international coalitions, she fails to address their biggest positive: they provide a broad acceptance of the effort that the United States is almost certain to lack on its own. In fact, the occupation of Germany and Japan after World War II, which she uses as examples of unilateral nation building by the U.S. military, actually contradicts her thesis. Both of these reconstruction efforts, even if they were led by the United States, had the full support of nearly the entire World War II coalition, and that was key to their success. Legitimacy was never an issue.

More important, however, is that World War II is simply a lousy historical parallel. Comparing the conclusion of a 4-week war in Iraq with the conclusion of the longest, bloodiest, war of the 20th century just doesn't wash, and I'm surprised to see a comparison like that from a serious writer. Kosovo and Afghanistan are better examples, which she sees as failures of international cooperation, but which strike me failures of will instead. We simply haven't been serious enough about them.

The growth of democracy in the former Iron Curtain countries is another reasonable parallel, but this doesn't fit her thesis and therefore doesn't get mentioned. These countries have done quite well, and a big part of the credit has to go to the EU, which provided aid, technical assistance, and the promise of eventual entry to the EU club. In this case, an international organization did quite well.

In the end, though, it turns out that Belton and I partly agree:

The United Nations and other international organizations are staffed by many capable, intelligent, well-intentioned people. They should be encouraged to run humanitarian relief efforts in Iraq and should create a broad, multilateral coalition to control Iraq's oil revenue to expunge the accusation that this has been a war for oil.

That's exactly right, and for the right reason: giving the UN control over oil revenue would prove — at least partially — that we went to war for the right reasons, and like it or not, this is something that a large part of the world doesn't believe. In the real world, this is a compromise I could live with for now.

MOHAMMED UPDATE....Mohammed, the Iraqi lawyer who helped U.S. forces find Private Jessica Lynch, is apparently for real and has been granted asylum in the U.S.

There have been some questions about that whole story, so I thought everyone would like to know the latest.

MORE NEWT....Josh Marshall today:

...one can denounce underhanded scheming and still be able to respect it when it's ably done.

Quite so, quite so.

This is apparently a seque into a discussion of how Newt Gingrich's recent underhanded scheming against the State Department wasn't ably done, and indeed it wasn't. Gingrich, I'm afraid, forgot his own cardinal rule: you're supposed to attack your enemies, not your friends, and he forgot to ask which one Colin Powell is supposed to be these days. It's a little surprising that Newt Gingrich, of all people, would need to be reminded of this.

EARTHQUAKE....According to South Knox Bubba, they had an earthquake out in the vicinity of Knoxville this morning. 4.5 on the Richter scale.

Ha ha ha. We don't even notice anything below about 7.0 out here, SKB. You wake up in the morning and your garage has collapsed? Rebuild it and stop whining!

Sheesh. I'm not even sure I could get to sleep each night if we didn't have our evening 4.5. That's why California is the economic powerhouse of the country, by the way: we're tough out here.

NANO-SOLDIERS....Jimm Donnelly of Project For A New Century Of Freedom has an interesting post about a project to use nanotechnology to create, among other things, new military "uniforms" with rather remarkable properties. It sounds like science fiction, but apparently it's not really that far off. Check it out.

This story from the Washington Post also has a nice summary.

OUR SUFFERING MILLIONAIRES....Max Sawicky notes today that if the standard personal exemption had kept up with inflation since 1948, it would be $12,941 today. In reality, it's only $3,000.

	Since 1948, effective tax rates have risen from 5% to 25% for average taxpayers while plummeting from 75% to 26% for the rich.

This change in emphasis in the federal tax code over the past 50 years has been truly stunning, and it doesn't get enough attention. For the middle class, the standard exemption has decreased significantly while payroll taxes have increased. For the rich, the top marginal rate has plummeted, the estate tax has been eliminated, and rates have been halved on capital gains (and soon on dividends as well if Bush has his way). The net result is that an average family paid about 5% of its income in federal taxes in 1948 and today pays about 25%. During the same period, the effective tax rate on millionaires declined from about 75% to 26%.

Despite the fact that this has been accompanied by steady declines in both economic growth rates and labor productivity, conservative economists continue to tell us that if we keep at their program just a little while longer things will turn around. Their standard fairy tale is that (a) millionaires are overtaxed and (b) this acts as a drag on growth. In fact, both are false. The rich are taxed quite lightly in the United States, and there is no evidence at all that higher rates on millionaires would do anything except possibly improve the economy.

Economic growth is most robust when money is in the hands of people who spend it: the poor and the middle class. Sometime soon this lesson needs to be relearned.

JOHN LOTT UPDATE....Why did John Lott remove his name from the response he wrote to the Stanford Law Review article that savaged his research? Instapundit has an update (at the bottom of the post) giving Lott's side of the story.

EDUCATION....Ampersand writes today about one of my favorite pet peeves: the steady stream of allegations that education has gone completely to hell in America. Today's example is a New York Times article about a report issued by the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges that, unsurprisingly, finds that schools don't put enough emphasis on writing.

Well, maybe they don't, but as Ampersand points out, the Times accepts the report's conclusions without presenting any evidence at all for them. So how do we really know?

I could go either way on this one. On the one hand, businesses these days mostly treat writing as a specialized skill: people are assumed to be lousy writers, and either no one cares or else their writing is simply passed along to experts who clean it up. Obviously, this speaks poorly for general writing skills.

On the other hand, about a year ago I ran across a prize winning senior essay written by my great aunt in 1906, and it was pretty mediocre. What's more, some of it was almost certainly plagiarized, a fact that apparently went unnoticed by her teachers. So perhaps our ancestors weren't quite as superheroic as they are sometimes made out to be.

Like Amp, I wish there were some real evidence on this score. It might well be that the critics are right, but it's pretty hard to tell based on the conflicting and often panicky pronouncements of the education Cassandras. I would love to see some kind of comparison between current generations on a standardized test of some kind, perhaps given to a cross section of 20-year-olds, 40-year-olds, and 60-year-olds. In practice, though, that's probably pretty hard to do, so we'll never know for sure how they actually compare to each other.

That's too bad. Given both the importance of education and the huge amounts of money we spend on it, it would be nice to know how we're really doing.

WOMEN IN IRAQ....Jeanne d'Arc today:

One of the things that struck me watching the crowds tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein was that I didn't see any women. Another thing that struck me was that no one commented on this -- as if streets without women were entirely normal. Pardon my stereotypically feminist response, but to me a world wiped clean of women is a little disturbing....

I think we all understand that there are lots of areas that could stand improvement in Iraq, but it would be nice to think that the folks busily rebuilding institutions there consider this to be one of them. We'll wait and see.

VIRAL JOURNALISM....This week brings yet another example of the bold, creative, and freespirited approach to journalism of our major newsweeklies: not only do they all have the same cover story — not unreasonable under the circumstances — but their art departments all had exactly the same idea for their cover pictures. I guess the Economist gets a modest bit of extra credit for using Mao's picture underneath the mask, but you really have to wonder what's going on when not one of them managed to come up with a unique way of illustrating this story.

The big news of the day, of course, is the SARS riot in Chagugang, brought on by residents fearful that a local junior high school would be turned into a ward for urban SARS patients (fears that appear to have been well founded, despite the spin of Chinese officials that "The villagers are unscientific, and trusted rumors.")

The New York Times reports that Chagugang is a "rural town," and Matt Yglesias remarks that "The fact that this is taking place in rural China rather than the urban/student/intellectual crowd strikes me as significant."

Take this with a grain of salt, however. Chagugang is a small town, but it's only a few miles north of Tianjin, a city of 10 million, and is home to the "Liudaokou lndustrial Zone," which somehow doesn't strike me as the kind of thing you'd find in a pastoral little village. (Not coincidentally, I'm sure, it's also only about 40 miles from Beijing.)

Overall, SARS news is mostly bad. It's peaked in a few places, but still expanding in China, and possibly also in India and Indonesia. The crisis is far from over.

NORTH KOREA....What does North Korea want? Colin Powell says "something considerable" but declined to elaborate. The Chinese, however, in an apparently unusual gesture, briefed Western diplomats about the talks:

One envoy quoted the Chinese Foreign Ministry's top North Korea expert as saying North Korea had sought "credible security assurances" from the United States during the talks.

....The first diplomat quoted the Chinese official as saying Pyongyang had demanded Washington negotiate "on the basis of equality and mutual sovereignty."

North Korea also sought compensation for a delay in the completion of light water reactors under a 1994 pact in which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its nuclear program in return for them, they said.

Publicly, at least, these negotiations always seem to get down to two things: money and security. Money, I assume, is not really a problem, which means the big issue now and always has been security.

I quite realize that nothing is what it seems when it come to negotiating with North Korea, but I sure wish I understood a little more about what they're really after. Are they truly afraid we might attack them? Perhaps. People certainly talk about it often enough in the United States. So what would reassure them on this score? A final treaty? Withdrawal of troops from the DMZ? What?

A final peace treaty combined with diplomatic recognition seems pretty trivial to me if it were linked to some kind of genuine, verifiable dismantling of their nuclear program, so there must be a lot more to it than that. But what?

MARKETING RULE #1: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE....Yet another WMD find turns out to be bogus. By itself, of course, this is perfectly understandable: you would expect that lots of places would be searched, preliminary analysis — designed to be "better safe than sorry" — would indicate some suspects, and that more thorough analysis would narrow it down even further. The fact that preliminary analysis is ultra cautious and doesn't usually pan out is perfectly normal.

Given that this is normal, however, the real question is quite different: why is the Pentagon releasing these preliminary results every time one pops up? Take this latest one, for example:

The mobile labs were definitely "not labs," Captain Cutchin said. The vehicles MET Bravo found were "probably for decontamination or some kind of fuel filling, consistent with the rockets found at the site," he said.

This was the latest example of a recurring pattern in efforts to track down unconventional weapons in Iraq....By the time MET Bravo arrived at Bayji, for example, journalists who had already been briefed about the findings were already at the site.

(Emphasis mine.)

Why had reporters "already been briefed" before the MET team even showed up? Doesn't the Pentagon realize that this is eroding their credibility daily?

Of course they do, but these reports aren't aimed at journalists or news junkies like blog readers. Rather, they are designed to build up a vague impression among casual news consumers that we've been finding WMD all over the place. Say it often enough, and everyone starts to get foggy about which reports panned out and which didn't — or even whether any of them did. Most people are simply left with the idea that we have lots of busy teams spread out all over Iraq and they keep finding stuff.

Like any good marketing organization, the Pentagon knows its audience. And it isn't anyone reading this blog.

MIKE HAWASH....Via Emma Goldman of Notes on the Atrocities, there's a "Free Mike Hawash" rally planned for tomorrow at 8:30 AM at the U.S. courthouse in Portland. If you live in the area, you might want to think about attending.

Like everyone, I have no idea of whether Hawash is guilty or innocent of anything. What we do know, however, is that he is a U.S. citizen, he is being held practically incommunicado as a "material witness," he is not charged with a crime, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that he's a flight risk, and all proceedings in his case are secret. It's a disgrace.

UPDATE: Via TalkLeft, Hawash has now finally been charged:

The Justice Department said Hawash was part of a Portland-based group of six other suspects who have already been charged in the alleged plan [to support al-Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11].

''In a nutshell, Hawash was charged as a co-conspirator with the other six,'' said U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jones, who is handling the case.

More to come, I'm sure.

SHORTER NEWT GINGRICH....Over a decade ago Newt Gingrich wrote a pamphlet called Language, A Key Mechanism of Control, a primer on how to "speak like Newt." Among other things, it contained a list of negative words to be used when speaking of your enemies. These words, he said, should be repeated over and over and over.

Well, Newt is still Newt, and that list of words still forms the core of his speeches. In fact, it pretty much defines his speeches, including last week's all-too-typical blast at the State Department. The speech itself is too long for most of you to want to bother reading it, so instead here is Shorter Newt Gingrich:

... failure ... failure ... politics ... appeasing ... corrupt ... excusers ... murky ... deceptive ... failed ... failure ... ineffective ... incoherent ... pathetic ... hand-wringing ... desperation ... failed ... ineffective ... ludicrous ... unimaginable ... undermine ... watered down ... distorted ... disaster ... coddling ... corrupt ... absolute failure ... entrepeneurial failure ... disaster ... bureaucratic ... failures ... broken ... broken ... broken bureaucracy ... defensive ... dangerous ... collapse.

Got that?

UPDATE: William Safire chimes in on the same subject today in "Invective's Comeback." It's a little thin, but still entertaining.

THE DEMOCRATIC HORSE RACE....Patio Pundit has a pretty good rundown of the Democratic field here. It won't be big news to anyone, but it's a nice, succinct, summary.

However, in this post he brings up a familiar complaint: the entire field is weak because it's mostly senators and congressmen, who can't get elected because they don't have executive experience. I'm not sure I buy the whole argument about congress critters being unelectable, but if there is something to it I'll bet it has nothing to do with the differences between being a good legislator and being a good governor. Rather, it may be because national legislators have too much of a track record and it makes them easy to attack. Governors tend to be more of a blank slate on national issues, and this allows them to take any position they want without having to explain away a flip flop. Mighty convenient, isn't it?

THE MIRROR OF HISTORY....Yesterday I wrote a post about math education that attracted a lot of interesting comments, including a couple from a Fields Medal winner. (My new motto: "Calpundit — Home of Commentary from Fields Winners!") That was pretty cool, so today I think I'll try another pedagogical category: history.

This is a subject that I talk about frequently with my mother (an actual teacher, mind you), trying to figure out why it's such a disliked subject. After all, we like history, but surveys routinely show that it's the least liked subject, ranking even below obvious suspects like math and spelling.

Why is it so disliked? Who knows, really, but it's probably because it seems so remote from normal life. It's pretty hard, after all, for most teenagers to get very enthused about a long-ago debate over the Missouri Compromise that has only the most tenuous connection to the present day.

So in the true spirit of blogging (especially weekend blogging!), here's my dumb amateur idea about how to teach history: do it backward.

It's hard for kids to get interested in century old debates without knowing all the context around them, but they might very well be interested in current day events. So why not start now and explain the events that got us here? War on terrorism? Sure, let's teach it, and that leads us backward to a discussion of how the current state of affairs is the successor to the bipolar world that came apart in 1989. And that leads back to the Cold War, and that leads back to World War II, etc.

In other words, invert cause and effect. Try to get them wondering about the causes of things they already know about, and then use this curiosity to lead them inexorably backward through history.

This is for teenagers, of course, not grammar school kids, who are probably best off with pilgrims, ancient Egyptians, and other picturesque topics. But it might work in high school and junior high school.

All we need now is to get a brilliant historian together with the guy who directed Memento and we'll have it made. We can call it "The Mirror of History."

UPDATE: Over at Atrios, a commenter makes the point that recent history isn't really even taught at all in high school, let alone as part of a broader history curriculum. As Atrios suggests, this is probably because recent history is so overtly political that it's hard to teach it without offending a lot of parents, but even so, how ridiculous is this? Really, which is more important: understanding the American Revolution or understanding the Cold War? An entire year devoted to understanding the most recent few decades of history would probably be one of the most valuable classes a kid could have.

PEACHY....Hey, have you been following the Georgia flag controversy? Me neither, really, but here's the nickel version from CNN:

1956: Georgia changes their flag to incorporate Confederate "rebel" flag.

2001: Gov. Roy Barnes gains adoption of new, more neutral flag, but subsequently loses reelection because of it.

2003: Yet another new flag is proposed and is now ready for adoption.

The CNN story indicates that "The new flag is modeled after the 'Stars and Bars' national flag used by the Confederacy," but unfortunately their picture doesn't really give you a good idea of what "based on" means.

The Calpundit Art Department is on the case, however, and you can see the result for yourself. I suppose you can make the case — and the designers did — that using the original Georgia flag is a decent compromise all around, but if that's the case then why did they deliberately make changes to make it more similar to the Confederate flag than the original 1879 state flag ever was?

It's true that the new flag doesn't pack the emotional punch of the old battle flag motif — and at least they had the decency to use 13 stars instead of 7 — but still. When it comes to the Confederacy, Georgia Republicans sure do turn out to be surprisingly studious history buffs, don't they? Go figure.

(Thanks to Tacitus for the idea.)

UPDATE: blogoSFERICS points out that on Friday the legislature finally approved a slightly different flag, apparently removing "In God We Trust" from the middle bar, and approved a referendum that doesn't include the old 1956 flag as an option, thus gaining enough Democratic support to pass. The whole story is here.

A GLUT OF CHALABIS....I suppose this is common knowledge among people more plugged into the Iraqi exile community than I am, but it turns out that the Pentagon's choice to head up Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi, has a cousin, Fadhil Chalabi, who is now the favorite to run the all-important oil ministry. It's nice to keep everything in the family, isn't it?

According to the Observer, Chalabi

said he would be prepared to serve the Iraqi oil industry if a democratically elected government was in place.

....'Privatisation or partial privatisation is the way to secure this investment.'

Basically, the trial balloon he's lofting is that Iraq should (a) leave OPEC, regretfully of course, (b) pump lots of oil, thus bringing down the price, and (c) sell off Iraq's oil assets to private companies.

Oh yes, he sounds like he should do just fine. I wonder if there are any more of these Chalabis around to fill up the other ministries?

POSTWAR CONFUSION....More bad news about the search for WMD in Iraq:

The Pentagon originally planned to deploy about 20 "mobile exploitation teams" of up to 30 people each to scour weapons sites, interrogate scientists and analyze documents. But only two such teams are now hunting for weapons in Iraq. Because relatively junior warrant officers are leading the teams, their reports must go through multiple layers before reaching senior commanders.

The Pentagon hasn't supplied enough transport helicopters and military guards to the teams. This limits the teams' movements and their ability to use two highly sophisticated chemical and biological laboratories that were left at an air base in northern Kuwait in shipping containers. "They've been totally unusable," one official said.

Because of the delays, scores of suspect Iraqi military sites, industrial complexes and offices were stripped of valuable documents, equipment and electronic data before U.S. forces or the exploitation teams reached them. Not all the looting appears to have been random, and U.S. officials believe Iraqi officials deliberately burned or removed some critical evidence to prevent detection.

There's a common — and peculiar — strand in how we've handled postwar Iraq, and it makes itself visible in the looting, the destruction of the museum, the confusion over humanitarian aid, and now the fact that we were obviously unprepared to look for WMD once the war was over. This last especially makes no sense since even if the Bush administration didn't really care about enhancing their credibility by finding the much hyped WMD, they surely saw the importance of locking it down so that it didn't get into anyone else's hands.

Is it possible that there's no WMD to find? Sure, although that seems unlikely to me, and elsewhere in the story intelligence sources insist that we really did have "conclusive" evidence of an ongoing problem.

My best guess, for now, is a different one: all the cakewalk talk notwithstanding, they expected a much longer fight. They weren't prepared for a lot of the postwar activities because they didn't figure there would be a postwar until May or June. The fall of Baghdad seems to have taken the army by surprise every bit as much as it did us, and now they're scrambling to figure out what to do.

Of course, if June rolls around and they're still scrambling, then I'll have to think up another theory....

UPDATE: Some good comments below, several of which point out that another explanation for the postwar confusion is the small invasion force that Rumsfeld insisted on. It was enough to win the war, but not enough to keep control of the country after we won. There's also another possibility: all along the administration expected the UN to cave at the last minute, so they'd have UN peacekeeping and humanitarian forces right behind them. When that didn't happen, they weren't able to gear up a set of revised postwar plans fast enough.

INFINITE SETS....It turns out that one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, has been in Southern California for the past year, teaching at nearby Pomona College. The LA Times has an interview with him today.

Apparently his current project is nonfiction, a book about the "founder of set theory." I can't tell who this is supposed to refer to (Boole? Cantor?) but it certainly sounds like an interesting departure.

ATTITUDES TOWARD GAYS....On a personal level, support for gay rights is grounded in a respect for basic human decency. As a campaign issue, however, it's grounded in practical politics: how do most Americans actually feel about the various issues surrounding gay rights? And how should the issues be framed for maximum impact?

My personal thoughts on this haven't changed since I was a teenager, but my personal thoughts don't mean a thing since my views are highly atypical. Rather, what got me thinking about this as a campaign issue was reading some polling results a few months ago about various gay rights issues, specifically this report by Kathryn Bowman of AEI, summarizing attitudes toward gays over the past three decades.

There's good news and bad news here, but mostly good news, I think, so here's a quick summary. As a baseline for comparison, 37% of Americans today believe that premarital sex is wrong. Compare this to the following gay rights issues:

• The baseline attitude toward homosexuality — is it wrong? — has improved dramatically. In 1973, 80% thought it was always or almost always wrong. Today that number is 64% and other polls put it at around 55%. Still a majority, but declining steadily.

• Should it be legal? Those saying yes has gone up from 43% in 1977 to 52% in 2002.

• Employment: 86% think gays should have equal employment opportunities. 72% think they should be eligible for the military. 63% think they are OK as high school teachers.

• Marriage: only about a third approve of gay marriage, but nearly half approve of civil union.

• Benefits: 62% think gay spouses should be allowed to inherit, 64% think Social Security benefits should be paid to gay spouses, and 58% approve of health benefits for gay spouses.

• Nearly half think gay couples should be able to adopt.
  

Bottom line: attitudes have improved enough that there's probably a decent sized segment of moderate Bush supporters who might think less of him if he could be painted as intolerant — or even merely insufficiently supportive — toward gays. It's true that there is still widespread personal discomfort with gay relationships, but it's also pretty obvious that large majorities oppose discrimination against gays and basically feel that attitudes like Santorum's belong to a bygone era. It would be fascinating to compare the poll numbers above with similar surveys about civil rights from the early 60s, an era that turned out to be ripe for legislative change.

POSTSCRIPT: I know that Andrew Sullivan is not exactly a prototypical voter, but when he says this...

It is hard to express fully the sheer discouragement of this past week, capped simply by a calculated and contemptuously terse political gesture by a president I had come to trust. It makes me question whether that trust is well founded. And whether hope for a more inclusive future among conservatives is simply quixotic.

...it's hard not to believe that there are some fence-sitting moderate voters for whom this could be an issue that nudges them toward a Democratic candidate.

(Can I just ask, though, what the hell has Sullivan been thinking? Whatever else you think of him, he's a very smart, very politically astute person, so what could possibly have led him to believe that George Bush might actually be willing to take any kind of electoral risk to support gays? 9/11 must have really addled his brain for him not to understand something this basic and this obvious. I almost feel sorry for the guy.)

SHORTER TIM LAMBERT....Say it after me: "John Lott is a hack, John Lott is a hack....."

Here's the nickel version of today's installment: a couple of guys have written an article for the Stanford Law Review in which they say that Lott's statistics are all wet. Now, econometricians are forever telling other econometricians that their models are no good because they have failed to take into account some obscure variable or another, so us laymen could be excused for nodding off at this point and just waiting a couple of years to see if a scholarly consensus emerges.

But there's more, and this doesn't take an advanced degree to understand: basically, the SLR article took Lott's model and applied it to more recent data. Result: nada. So Lott and a couple of other guys responded by doing their own analysis, and their conclusion is that the model does work. Unfortunately, it's not just a matter of competing analyses: Lott and his partners actually miscoded the data, and by coincidence it was systematically miscoded to favor their hypothesis every time. Can you imagine?

Lott has been using this miscoded data for a while, but it turns out that he took his name off the SLR response before it was published, so presumably he knew what was going on and didn't want to put his name to it in a journal article. Or maybe he was just covering his ass. Or maybe the sheer force of the SLR argument has actually convinced him to change his mind.

(Ha ha, just kidding on that last one, folks. I do slay myself sometimes, yes I do.)

As usual, Tim Lambert has all the gory details.

KARL SPEAKS!....OR RATHER, DOESN'T....Via Atrios, Republicans really, really, really don't want to talk about gay sex:

Santorum's defenders are under a gag order. Officials at the White House and Republican National Committee told GOP insiders yesterday, by conference call, voice mail and e-mail not to comment about Santorum's comments, letting him speak for himself.

....Also not responding to requests for comment were: U.S. Reps. Todd Platts, R-York; Tim Holden, D-Schuylkill County; and Joe Pitts, R-Chester County. Also not returning calls were state Senate President Pro Tem Robert C. Jubelirer, R-Blair; state House Speaker John Perzel, R-Philadelphia; and about a dozen top GOP officials.

The fact that Republican strategists are so terrified of this shows just how good an issue it is for Democrats. Karl Rove is no dummy, and although conservatives like to tell us liberals that we're kidding ourselves to think that our social agenda is popular with Middle America, he knows better. The majority of Americans might not be ready for gay marriage quite yet, but by large numbers they are opposed to both overt homophobia and social nannyism of the type that's common in the Republican party.

When Karl Rove is running scared, we've got a good issue. And he's running scared.

FORCING 'EM OUT OF THE CLOSET....Virginia Postrel writes today about the policy questions regarding gay rights — should sodomy be illegal? — vs. the constitutional question — should the federal government be allowed to overturn a state law on this issue?

The policy question is also the one to which Andrew Sullivan has primarily addressed his remarks. It's far more interesting--and, in my view, much easier--than the constitutional question. But it's the question conservative pundits mostly want to dodge.

I couldn't agree more. Too often we allow conservatives to retreat into abstract legal arguments instead of forcing them to take a simple stand: in this case, do you think the government should prohibit gay sex or don't you? Not should it be able to, but should it? Not is it sinful, but should it be illegal?

The result of this fainthearted approach is that instead of exposing Rick Santorum's ideological kin as flat out supporters of bans on gay sex, a position that is generally unpopular among moderates, we allow them to hide behind technical discussions of federalism and church-state relationships and slippery slopes that don't exist in real life. So how do we force them — so to speak — out of the closet on this? What's the right issue?

WHO'S AFRAID OF MATHEMATICS?....Despite the problems Britain is allegedly having with declining math proficiency — or perhaps because of it — a teacher addressing a conference in Bournemouth recently suggested dropping math as a compulsory subject. Simon Jenkins said "huzzah" to that in the London Times, and Chris Bertram had this reaction:

It is always a comfort to find a view with which I strongly disagree being promoted by Simon Jenkins in the Times, for that fact on its own strengthens my confidence that I am right. Today's diatribe is against the teaching of mathematics in schools....

The more I think about this, though, the more uncomfortable I become. I am a considerable mathophile myself, and even intended at one point to major in math. I've long considered calculus to be one of the most elegant and beautiful creations of the human mind, and Isaac Newton is my hero for inventing it. (And let's hear no talk about Leibniz on this score, OK?) Even today, I enjoy reading about mathematics, and I imagine that lunch with John Derbyshire would be quite enjoyable if we stuck to discussions of mathematical puzzles and prime numbers.

And yet, despite all this, I frequently find myself wondering if there's a practical point to all this. After all, the fact that I love math doesn't make it a law of nature that everyone should love — or even learn — math. I can't honestly say that I actually use it much, and the vast majority of people probably never perform any math beyond addition and subtraction.

(In fact, I suspect that if you took a hundred people off the street, 95 of them would be unable to perform long division. And they wouldn't care.)

So aside from the 10-15% of people who take up professions that require a mathematical background, is there much point in teaching math beyond about the sixth grade to the rest of them? I suspect it serves little purpose, and despite what people like me would like to think, I very much doubt that it instills any useful habits of mind either.

Frankly, if I had to make a choice, I'd prefer that high school students were more thoroughly grounded in history or geography — or even simply more thoroughly grounded in basic math — than in advanced mathematics. Then again, maybe I'm missing something. Any thoughts?

GAY RIGHTS....Josh Chafetz of OxBlog makes a point that I've seen repeatedly recently: sure, Republicans might be anti-gay, but so are Democrats:

It distresses me even more that, some Democrats' claims to the contrary notwithstanding, this is an attitude which plagues both parties. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, shameful both in its treatment of gay couples and in its disregard for principles of federalism, passed the House on a 342 to 67 vote, passed the Senate on a 84 to 15 vote, and was signed into law by President Clinton.

A pox on both their houses.

I sympathize with Josh's feelings, since I also think it was disgraceful for Democrats to support this bill (although, yes, I do understand electoral realities). However, it's also disingenuous: the 15 senators who opposed the bill were all Democrats, and the 67 congressmen who opposed the bill broke down 65 Democratic, one independent, and one Republican.

So let's keep some perspective here. Sure, Democrats have a ways to go on this issue, but that's a far cry from the position of the Republican party, which is monolithically anti-gay, is a happy home to any number of proudly and virulently anti-gay congressmen, and shows absolutely no signs of changing. Anyone who takes the issue of gay rights seriously ought to acknowledge this, and should also acknowledge that the only hope of making progress on this issue comes from the Democratic party.

UPDATE: Jesse Berney of Wage Slave Journal points us to the DNC site itself, which highlights some print ads that make the same point.

WHITE HOUSE HOMEROOM....Does Ari Fleischer remind you of your junior high school homeroom teacher? As Greg Saunders of the lively and entertaining blog The Talent Show points out, apparently some reporters are beginning to feel that way.

You know, if the White House press corps actually had (a) some spine and (b) enough combined IQ to figure out that they need to work together on this, they mi