Mad Social Scientist

Ostensibly because of a nanny-problem, Bernard Kerik has declined the nomination to DHS. I don't really think the nanny thing is so deadly (my understanding was that nowadays, that's no barrier to nominees; at least that's what Larry Meyer says). So is it because Kerik once had an outstanding arrest warrant? Has questionable experience? Poor managerial skills?

Maybe, but if a weak resume was such a problem, why did Bush nominate him? And look who we're talking about: Bush is a terrible businessman, probably was arrested for cocaine, definitely was arrested for DWI, etc. etc.

No, the real point is that in the Bush admin, unless you are Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfield (for whom any scandal is tolerated) if you start causing problems---especially if you become a magnet for media criticism---you are gone before the media gets out of hand. The famous Bush loyalty goes only one way.

It's not like Kerik was going to contribute anything policy- or management-wise. So the second he stopped being a nice symbol, he's gone.

Update: I'm thinking there's an even simpler reason to drop Kerik: he's accumulating scandals at a pace that would make Harding blush. Petty corruption, a possible mob connection---the Bushies had to dump this guy fast.

But honestly, picking him in the first place was a insult to the voters. Whatever the bloviators say, the crucial issue for Bush was terrorism, and the perception of a large bloc of voters that Bush could handle terrorism better. Kerik was their first choice to run the agency that tries to stop the bad guys?

Try it. I got 92% with 11 miles average error in 218 seconds.

Then try the advanced version (the states disappear after you place them). I got 74%, 27 miles, and 258 seconds on that one.

Feel free to post you scores in the comments. I'm curious to see who beats me (I have a feeling at least two of my regular readers will).

A world version would be very cool.

Update: Ask and the internet provides. There are a slew of world versions of the game. Some are fiendishly difficult, because you have to both rotate and place, say, all the African countries. So if you (like me) felt pretty good about your US score, there is a version that will provide your comeupance, unless you are some kind of human GIS.

A fiscal conservative? "Not my style", apparently.

In 2000, Gore lost his home state, Tennessee, and thereby the presidency. That was a major irony.

In 2004, Iowans essentially picked the Democratic candidate, on the grounds that Kerry was the most electable choice. Kerry lost two states which Gore had managed to win in 2000: New Mexico, and, yes, Iowa.

I guess those Iowans really didn't know too much about electability. You can't blame those "out-of-the mainstream" East Coast liberals for this one: the heartland couldn't read its own heart.

Something to think about as the DNC ponders its next chair.

Get yer constantly updated Washington state results here.

Since 9/11, Bush has shown a predilection from grand statements about politics.* But I usually have no idea what he means. Take today's example:

President Bush, appearing before cheering U.S. forces Tuesday, declared that terrorists won't be able to control Iraq's destiny because ``free people will never choose their own enslavement.''

Just eight words, but to anyone who's studied any history at all, it is hard to support. And what exactly does Bush mean by these words; in particular "free people", "enslavement", and "choose"?

From Bush's other statement, "freedom" appears to mean just two things: having elections (regardless of who contests them or how), and having as little state intervention in the economy as possible. Perhaps on these criteria, Iraq will count as "free" on January 30. But I doubt many political thinkers would call an occupied country with a boiling guerilla war, martial law, and a handpicked puppet government free.

What is "enslavement"? I suppose the opposite of freedom. But if freedom is having elections, even if they are rigged or restricted to favored candidates, I suppose enslavement becomes a logical impossibility. Because whatever "choice" the people make, so long as sham elections** continue to be held, they are still "free".

Any other stabs at this sentence? Perhaps Bush meant that in a free and fair election, people will never choose a party that promises to end democracy. As an empirical proposition, that holds little water. It also begs the obvious question: how can people ensure that their chosen party won't promise democracy, then bring on the oppression? Memo to neo-cons: Democracy is more than elections.

So what would be a truer statement? Try "Affluent societies never choose enslavement", which is the prevailing conventional wisdom in political science. But the same study finds poorer societies often "choose" to stop being democracies.

As my colleague Erik Wibbels points out, Iraq looks like a very poor candidate for democracy using the accumulated knowledge of social science. He estimates the probability of success at 2%, which may even be an overestimate.

But when did the neocons ever care about reality?

* Before 9/11, all Bush had to say about political theory was that Jesus was his favorite political philosopher. Which is very funny, because the main political statement associated with Jesus is "Render under Ceasar": i.e., pay your taxes.

** For our purposes, sham elections include those where no overt fraud takes place, but where the incumbent uses the power of the state to ensure an advantage for himself; e.g., by restricting campaigning of other parties, restricting the media, using the police to intimidate opponents, etc.

Richard Dawkins, recently declared England's premier intellectual, and in my view the sanest man on earth, has a new book out, The Ancestor's Tale. (See this interview.) Its clever conceit is to trace backwards the ancestry of humans, from earlier primates to the first bacteria, focusing on "concestors", those ancestors which are the earliest common ancestors of groups of presently existing species. The march of concestors towards the root of the Tree of Life is like the pilgramage of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Highly recommended and entertaining, though not as original as, say, the Selfish Gene. It also is beautifully illustrated with scientific diagrams; one almost wonders if Edward Tufte were a consultant.

Saletan writes up a new proposal for harvesting stem cells being considered by the bioethics committee: genetically engineer cells eggs cells to divide without ever forming an embryo. This avoids creating new human life under any definition currently espoused; instead, you can make a big mass of organs with no organizing principle. As I was reading, I first felt horror, then realized that my revulsion had little moral basis (just squeamishness). I suspect anyone who's actually taken gross anatomy or performed an organ transplant would find this mostly unobjectionable in itself. A clever end-run around the whole issue of when life begins.

My prediction is that conservative bioethicists will love it (because it fits with their moral views), but rank-and-file conservatives will deplore it as an abomination (because they are guided less by abstract notions of morality than by gut feelings about what is natural or unnatural). When they say "protect life", they really mean "no tampering in God's domain".

Which brings me to an interesting article on the commonalities of fundamentalism, fascism, and evolution; the argument being that fundamentalisms and fascist movements the world over seem so similar because they result from inherited territorial impulses. Interesting speculation, though I wonder how one would go about testing the hypothesis.

If you worry that Social Security is doomed to "bankruptcy", you should read today's Krugman column. The good bits:

The grain of truth in claims of a Social Security crisis is that this tax increase wasn't quite big enough. Projections in a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (which are probably more realistic than the very cautious projections of the Social Security Administration) say that the trust fund will run out in 2052. The system won't become "bankrupt" at that point; even after the trust fund is gone, Social Security revenues will cover 81 percent of the promised benefits. Still, there is a long-run financing problem.

But it's a problem of modest size. The report finds that extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending - less than we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of the revenue lost each year because of President Bush's tax cuts - roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes over $500,000 a year.

Given these numbers, it's not at all hard to come up with fiscal packages that would secure the retirement program, with no major changes, for generations to come.

It's true that the federal government as a whole faces a very large financial shortfall. That shortfall, however, has much more to do with tax cuts - cuts that Mr. Bush nonetheless insists on making permanent - than it does with Social Security.

But since the politics of privatization depend on convincing the public that there is a Social Security crisis, the privatizers have done their best to invent one.

My favorite example of their three-card-monte logic goes like this: first, they insist that the Social Security system's current surplus and the trust fund it has been accumulating with that surplus are meaningless. Social Security, they say, isn't really an independent entity - it's just part of the federal government.

If the trust fund is meaningless, by the way, that Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980's was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice.

But never mind: the same people who claim that Social Security isn't an independent entity when it runs surpluses also insist that late next decade, when the benefit payments start to exceed the payroll tax receipts, this will represent a crisis - you see, Social Security has its own dedicated financing, and therefore must stand on its own.

There's no honest way anyone can hold both these positions, but very little about the privatizers' position is honest. They come to bury Social Security, not to save it. They aren't sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic success.

For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it.

Kofi Annan oil-for-food resignation calls? Mote beam eye.

Sigh.

If, like me, you often find yourself thinking: "I could really go for sushi for dinner tonight, but where is there a sushi restaurant around here?", this site is for you.

In the unlikely event that any of my readers are interested in statistics, I note that Andrew Gelman has a neat presentation on multi-level modeling (e.g., hierarchical models) which argues they can and should be more widely used, especially where prediction is a goal. He also provides useful software and examples.

(Mental note: find the latex package he used to get those cool on-slide buttons in the header and footer)

Washington is currently mired in a hand recount of it's governor's race, which came out with a 42 vote margin in the last count. An article here reviews the usual arguments that so close an election can never be definitively counted, due to random errors in either machine or human counting.

That argument is fine under the assumptions, which seem to be a fresh start every time, combined with distractable/fallible/tired humans or machines that lack the imagination to discern unusually marked ballots.

But why start fresh every time? After they are collected, let's number each ballot with some unique identification number. At each recount (i), for each ballot (j), you determine the vote v_ij, such that v_ij = 1 if it's a Rossi vote, and v_ij = 0 if it's a Gregoire vote. As the number of recounts i increases, for each ballot you get a vector of results, v_.j. If v_.j = {0,0,0,0,0}, then we can be pretty sure that's a Gregoire vote; at no stage of the process has a machine or human disagreed. But if v_.j = {0,1,1,0,1}, say, we have identified a problem ballot that needs extra scrutiny.

As the rounds of voting progress, we can segregate the ballots into three bins: those that always count for Rossi, those that always count for Gregoire, and "problem ballots" that get counted different ways. The goal of counting should be to resolve as many ballots in the problem category as possible to everyone's satisfication, and then stop the recounting process when the size of the problem pile is smaller than the margin of victory.

Even with fallible machines and humans, this procedure seems to have a reasonable chance of generating a reliable, accurate count for arbitrarily close elections, provided the counters are fairminded.

Iraq's new color alert system.

The last few posts have been depressing, so here are a couple of funny posts from a humor blog.

And even the White House is getting in on the fun. After running for re-election without mentioning the environment (because they knew the public disagrees with their anti-environmental inclinations), the Bush admin has discovered a mandate to dismantle environmental protection from their resounding 3 point victory. Those clever Bushies, always trying to give the Onion a run for its money. Like Bush always says: "I'm an oil president. That's my style."

In recent posts I've talked about the role of fear in Bush's America, and about the dangers of dehumanizing the peoples of the Middle East as, in our growing paranoia, we lash out at anyone who might possibly be a threat---sometimes, anyone who moves.

Israel has long since reached this point, and is now a place where the following monstrosity can happen (caught by Andrew Sullivan):

The officer, identified by the army only as Captain R, was charged this week with illegal use of his weapon, conduct unbecoming an officer and other relatively minor infractions after emptying all 10 bullets from his gun's magazine into Iman al-Hams when she walked into a "security area" on the edge of Rafah refugee camp last month.

...

But the tape recording of the radio conversation between soldiers at the scene reveals that, from the beginning, she was identified as a child and at no point was a bomb spoken about nor was she described as a threat. Iman was also at least 100 yards from any soldier.

Instead, the tape shows that the soldiers swiftly identified her as a "girl of about 10" who was "scared to death".

The tape also reveals that the soldiers said Iman was headed eastwards, away from the army post and back into the refugee camp, when she was shot.

At that point, Captain R took the unusual decision to leave the post in pursuit of the girl. He shot her dead and then "confirmed the kill" by emptying his magazine into her body.

The tape recording is of a three-way conversation between the army watchtower, the army post's operations room and the captain, who was a company commander.

The soldier in the watchtower radioed his colleagues after he saw Iman: "It's a little girl. She's running defensively eastward."

Operations room: "Are we talking about a girl under the age of 10?"

Watchtower: "A girl of about 10, she's behind the embankment, scared to death."

A few minutes later, Iman is shot in the leg from one of the army posts.

The watchtower: "I think that one of the positions took her out."

The company commander then moves in as Iman lies wounded and helpless.

Captain R: "I and another soldier ... are going in a little nearer, forward, to confirm the kill ... Receive a situation report. We fired and killed her ... I also confirmed the kill. Over."

Witnesses described how the captain shot Iman twice in the head, walked away, turned back and fired a stream of bullets into her body. Doctors at Rafah's hospital said she had been shot at least 17 times.

On the tape, the company commander then "clarifies" why he killed Iman: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over."

Most people would be appalled if a dog were treated so callously. Iman al-Hams was a 13 year-old girl.

Let anyone who thinks that Islamic fundamentalists have a monopoly on cruelty and evil remember her.

Naomi Klein charges that American forces in Iraq are killing, imprisoning, or intimidating doctors, journalists, and clerics to prevent word of civilian casualties from getting out. Her story fits with the facts as we know them (accounts of "anyone who moved" being killed in Falluja, including doctors, the targeting of hospitals and clinics for bombing and take-over, the refusal of the US to do bodycounts, and the estimated 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq).

Most of these stories get little mention in the American press. Klein is writing in the Guardian, and the US acting ambassador complained; a US publication would doubtless find its access to the White House curtailed for such a disloyal publication. But the institutional constraints on media coverage of the civilian costs and immoral conduct of the war are just half the story. The US media has been reluctant to explore or consider the conflict from the point of view of ordinary Iraqis. To be sure, its increasingly hard to do, given how dangerous it is to conduct journalism in Iraq. And Abu Ghraib was a brief exception (but they had pictures, the sine qua non of media in the television age. But the American media seems reluctant, even incapable of framing stories from a Iraq point of view---not just the view of a particular Iraqi on the street, but the view from Iraqi society. Instead, the frame is that the US knows what's best for Iraq, and anyone who disagrees is an insurgent terrorist evil-doer.

But we are doing horrible things to Iraq in the name of freedom and democracy. They will not forget, nor will the rest of the world. I suspect we will be paying for these crimes for a long time. Not least by turning Iraq into the kind of terrorist haven we incorrectly charged it with being.

But then, the Bush administration doesn't really need to stop terror attacks on the US. They want to exploit the symbolism of the terrorist threat, and perversely, that's easier to do it that threat isn't squelched. So they replace cardboard cut out and fingerpainter Tom Ridge with Bernard Kerik, a tough-looking, tough-talking symbol of 9/11 who happens to have awful managerial skills. The job? Only coordinating dozens of uncoordinated, uncooperative agencies, something both he and the Department of Homeland Security are ill-prepared to do. (Pre-Enron, the Bush administration supposed to bring private sector manegerial competence to Washington. They don't talk about that so much anymore.)

After the 9/11 commission identified the importance of inter-agency coordination in preventing further attacks, you'd think we'd get better people to run our agencies. But instead we get loyalists (Rice, Gonzalez), f***-ups (Rumsfield), and symbols (Kerik).

Both at home and in Iraq, the US government is not being held accountable for failure and misconduct. And the electorate just flunked its once-every-four-years chance to impose accountability, so the Bushies have decided to throw what little caution they had to the wind. We will all be paying for this party of fools for a long, long time. But right now, most Americans (or rather, most Red Staters) don't even want to look at the looming crisis.

on global warming from Kieran at CT.

Here's an amusing list of 10 awful Christmas specials that might have been.

(The post title above is from an anti-Christmas special that was; Futurama's second episode with the evil robotic Santa that was pre-empted for a year because it was too much for Fox. Yes, that Fox.)

Before the Ukrainian election, I was keeping an eye on it because the challenger is a former central bank governor, and I keep a database of the political careers of such people. I made a mental note to look for the brief Reuters item that would report the outcome, lest I miss it entirely.

But now every twist and turn of this election is top of the page NYT news. It's always funny when you're aware of a story before it makes it into the papers. I guess my biggest finds on that score are Ebola, which I was following back in 1993, when there were only a handful of epidemiology publications on the topic, and one or two lay publication, and Barrack Obama, whom I had been following when he was looking at being an also-ran in a seven-way primary, because I'd heard good things about him from a Chicago student.

"[a]s the first head of the newly created department, Mr. Ridge became known best for, well, playing with colors." --- NYT editorial.

Ouch.

The rest of the editorial dwells on what you might call the Political Fear Cycle---the opportune "alerts" at sensitive points in the media cycle and in electorally sensitive areas, designed to keep Americans "very afraid but not so afraid that, as Mr. Ridge once reminded Americans, you fail to appreciate President Bush's leadership."

I miss the old-fashioned Political Business Cycles, the kind where they sent you your Social Security check a few weeks early. That seemed right for a creaky old welfare state democracy. Political Fear Cycles seem more appropriate for a fascist or even totalitarian regime.

Hmm.

Today's Bushism.

I got to vote in the closest state-wide race in American history. It still could go either way, but we won't know for weeks.

One on Crooked Timber: A discussion of inflation, and who benefits and loses from it. The comments are particularly good.

One on Brad deLong's page, a nice discussion and links/excerpts on the dollar and the deficits, here here, and here, and see also here.