Steve Reads

The set of intelligent newspaper commentators is very, very small. It may, in fact, only contain Paul Krugman. So I don’t know why I even bother to think or talk about David Broder, who wrote himself into irrelevance maybe 15 years ago. Likewise George Will. It’s just that Josh Marshall linked to an awe-inspiringly blind piece by Broder about Bush’s response to Katrina. I read further and found this quote:

He argued that Vietnam and Watergate had really ended the concept of what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. first termed an imperial presidency and contended that globalization has eroded presidential power by increasing the importance of economic activities regulated by independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are not directly under control of the White House.

This seems to contain, in the space of a paragraph, at least three absolute misconceptions of the state of the world. I invite you to stand back with me in deep respect for the mind that could produce such a thing. It’s truly a thing of unconscious beauty.

I don’t have time to write much at all about it right now, so I’ll just say that Mark A.R. Kleiman’s book Against Excess: Drug Policy For Results is a really insightful, exhaustive, clearly-written read. It’s available for free on the internets/tubes/information superhighway/cyberinfobahn, so you can check it out that way if you want, though it’s also available on Amazon used for just over $1. All the questions that most of us have had about the drug wars — what are the successful forms of rehab, how responsive is drug demand to increases in price, how much does the street price rise when, say, the Medellín cartel collapses, etc. — are tackled in Against Excess fairly, clearly, and in a scholarly way. I highly recommend it as a first dive into the subject.

Please write complete documentation that doesn’t blow. Take a note from Perl’s documentation.

Love and kisses,
Steve

P.S.: I’m diving into asynchronous programming with Twisted for work. It’s making my head hurt.

I know virtually nothing about books written outside of the US, the UK, France and Russia. Does anyone know much about the canon in other countries? To quote Saul Bellow, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.”

Speaking of Bellow: letters between Bellow and Bill Parcells. (Funnier if you’ve read “The Adventures of Augie March”, which I actually wouldn’t recommend you do. Letters included below the fold.)

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Probably every city has some guy who walks around with a sign telling us that we need to find Jesus to be saved, or that there’s some unfathomable conspiracy that the sign-holder has fathomed. Boston’s guy in that vein is Bob the Evangelist. (Berkeley, California has a guy — I wish I could find a photo of him — who carries around a sign declaring that there is an intergalactic conspiracy centered at the White House, having something to do with racism. My friend Nick has a photo, which I’ll ask him to provide for this here blog; it’s fascinating.) I didn’t know that Bob the Evangelist was called Bob the Evangelist until I listened to Adam Weiss’s Boston Behind The Scenes interview with him. It’s great. Makes me feel bad to be one of those people who just walk by him and avoid making eye contact. Weiss talks with him, and he turns out to be an altogether reasonable guy whose motivations are just different than mine. Give the podcast a listen.

P.S.: I love love love the fact that googling for ‘“intergalactic conspiracy” berkeley’ reveals that the Berkeley dude’s name is Frank Chu. I also love that Chu has his own Wikipedia entry. The above-mentioned sign has its own photo (or a larger version elsewhere, which I’ve cached). There are days when the Net makes me very happy.

P.P.S.: There are 426 photos in Flickr tagged ‘frankchu’, and another 578 tagged ‘frank’ and ‘chu’. I guess I’m late to this party.

P.P.P.S.: Not really in the same category, except the category of “dudes holding signs,” but: the guy who stands in front of the Vatican embassy in D.C. all the time is named John Wojnowski. A search for ‘vatican protest site:washingtonpost.com’ and many similar ones brought up nothing, even though I’m certain I read an article about Wojnowski in the Post within the last couple years. Maybe it’s the article that the Wikipedia linked to.

I can’t decide whether the article with that title (included below the fold) is sick, or just intensely pointed and honest and vicious. Or maybe it’s both.

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A good reason to keep a cached copy of everything you mention on your website.

Reminds me of the line Brad DeLong is often reciting: he’ll stop calling the Bush Administration “Orwellian” when they stop using 1984 as their playbook.

One of the really handy features in Perl’s regular-expression engine is the ability to search for patterns that don’t precede other patterns. If you want to find all the references to someone named “Smith,” but not to John Smith, you can search for

$string =~ m/(?<!John) Smith/ 

which employs Perl’s famously readable concision. See the Perl regular-expression manpage for more. (Note that if you knew all the Smiths you wanted to search for — say, Mike Smith, Andy Smith, and Jane Smith — you could just search for

$string =~ m/(Mike|Andy|Jane) Smith/ 

and skip the lookaround stuff. With a long list of non-John Smiths to search for, you could do something a little trickier like so:

my @smith_first_names =
    qw( Mike Andy Jane Martha Doozer ... Bradley );
my $smith_first_names_re =
    join '|', @smith_first_names;
$smith_first_names_re = qr#$smith_first_names_re#;
$string =~ m/($smith_first_names) Smith/; 

)

I just discovered that vim has this feature too; see :help /zero-width, and particularly :help \@<!. (I guess vim is just borrowing the Perl notation here.) To find all the non-John Smiths, do

/\(John\)\@<! Smith 

which employs vim’s famously readable concision.

Atul Gawande will be speaking at the Brattle Theatre on April 9 at 6 p.m., to promote his new book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes On Performance.

I particularly hope that The Babe comes with me to Gawande’s talk, given how strongly she reacted against his article “The Score: How childbirth went industrial” (included below the fold). It’s a terrific article, no matter how you view the debate, though I think it’s got an agenda that it’s trying hard to cover up. The Babe — a mother of two — thinks it’s a pretty terrible agenda. Reading Gawande’s book along with her, then going to see him speak, would be fun.

In any case: anyone in the area should come along. I bet it’ll be good times.

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 . . . goes the headline (included below the fold). I guess what we’re supposed to take away from this is something like, “Oh man, Gonzales is so screwed, now that his own party is deserting him.” What I take away from this is that, if Gonzales gets the axe, he’ll

1. be the fall guy for an administration that is rotten to the core, and
2. land quite firmly on his feet away from the White House.

Bush will, of course, not abandon Gonzales. And the latter will surely not go to jail. Seems to me that we really need to address item #1, both through public relations and through actual policies. I find it encouraging, along these lines, that Democrats are taking the first steps to find out why the president shut down an investigation into the warrantless-wiretapping program.

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Um  . . .  well duh. I don’t know about all y’all, but in my experience all lefty protests have had this same feel for as long as I can remember. There are good arguments that a protest isn’t as much about what happens there as about what happens between protests, but in any case: this is precisely the reason that I’ve avoided protests (with one exception) even if I agree with them. I simply don’t want to be attached to a bundle of ideologies with which I don’t agree. Kind of like my friend Seth’s observation that the “Revolutionary Communist Party” hijacked every vaguely leftist idea at MIT for its own ends. Not my scene.

 . . . is Nancy Seasholes’s Walking Tours of Boston’s Made Land. Her Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston seems to have lots of neat content (I checked it out of the library recently), but it’s unfortunately not the right size for actual reading; it’s too large to carry onto a train or read while laying back in bed, so the only real option for it is as a coffee-table book. I don’t have a coffee table, so I guess I’m scrod.

Along the same lines is Krieger and Cobb’s Mapping Boston. I’d have to guess that if you want a book filled with maps, it can only be one of a few possible sizes. Sad.

In any case, I’ll soon have Walking Tours on hand, just in time for Boston’s glorious summer — when walking around the town is precisely what I’ll want to do. Just a couple notes on walking in Boston, and the Seasholes book:

1. I understand that the book focuses on Boston’s landfill (“made land,” to use Seasholes’s term — “landfill” is a different beast), but I still wish for a walking tour of Boston that acknowledges the 20th century, or for that matter the 19th. Boston is a historically important city, not just because of the colonists.

2. I’m about to take a walk over to the Common, which is maybe 30 to 45 minutes. Google Maps advises me to walk over the Longfellow Bridge. Advice to those who haven’t walked around the city before: the route down Main Street and over the Longfellow is really boring, and even the river somehow manages to look less inspiring there than over the MIT Bridge. So while it’s less efficient, I’d suggest walking down Mass. Ave., over the Mass. Ave. Bridge, then going another 3/8 of a mile or so, taking a left onto Newbury, and following Newbury until it ends at the Public Garden. Walk through the Garden until you reach Charles Street, cross Charles and voilà: you’re at the Common. It’s my favorite walk around here. Hopefully Seasholes will introduce me to more.

Suppose that tomorrow, the U.S. government forced all beef and chicken in this country (along with their substitutes, like veal and seafood) to be produced in ways that are healthier for the American public — say, all cows must be fed on their native diet (namely grass), must not be fed antibiotics, must not be fed the brains of other cows, must be allowed to roam freely on pastureland, etc. Likewise, suppose all fruits and vegetables were required to be free of various pesticides.

Under these conditions, my question is: how much could we expect the price of free-range beef and organic produce to drop? I assume that if you reduce the quantity of pesticides, you can’t grow as many apples on a given acre of land. Long-term, it’s not as clear, but assume for the sake of argument that the land will be just as productive, into the indefinite future, even under heavy pesticide loads. How much could we expect the price of these healthier foods to drop under mass-production conditions? Could they even be produced on the scale needed to satisfy American demand? That is, do we have enough pastureland to accommodate all the cows that would now be fed on grass? Assume that our focus — the goal of all of this — is to improve American health by reducing cows’ consumption of antibiotics, reducing the quantity of pesticides in our vegetables, and so on. That is, we don’t particularly care about the health of the animals, except inasmuch as it impacts human health. So if the cows feed on grass, but they’re packed cheek to cheek on pasturelands, we don’t mind. In fact, if they’re still inside factories, but eating grass from troughs rather than corn, that’s okay too.

In practice, I wonder how much of the system would have to change if cows were fed grass rather than corn. One of the main benefits to feeding them grass is that there’s a natural cycle: they eat grass, roam the land, and defecate on the pasture, thereby fertilizing the land and allowing more grass to grow. How much of this cycle could industrialization reproduce? It would be simple enough to keep cows in factories eating grass from troughs, then catch their feces (as I assume factories do now), spread it outside on grasslands, mow those lands and return the grass to the troughs inside the factories.

Maybe none of these changes would be cost-justified. Maybe, for instance, it doesn’t harm American children all that much to be eating pesticides through their apples and antibiotics through their meat. It seems naïve to hope that a continuous accumulation of these chemicals has no harmful effects, not to mention the harmful effects of filling groundwater, lakes, and rivers with pesticides.

Keep in mind also that there’s nothing especially “natural” about producing cows for meat. The number of cows alive and roaming the fields doesn’t rise and fall based on any natural feedback loop. Indeed, it seems fair to say that the American food supply has little to no connection anymore with a natural food chain. Spreading cow feces on fields, then, isn’t necessarily all positive: the number of cows we raise may well spread more feces than the land can accommodate, in which case raising a large number of grass-fed cows may cause its own set of problems similar to groundwater runoff from industrial pesticides.

In any environmental debate of this kind — global warming is another — it seems like the question ought to be, “Could we put in place a beneficial change at a reasonable cost?” In particular:

1. Could we make the food supply safer without burdening the poor? (It seems to me that no one in this country ought to worry about something as basic as whether he can put food on the table, so this shouldn’t even be a question we need to ask. If the price of meat rose, the poor shouldn’t have to pay it.)

2. How much could we reduce the output of carbon dioxide without substantially reducing GDP or industrial production?

Unfortunately, the debate never gets framed that way. Which is too bad.

It’s certainly worthwhile to spend the time on scientific studies asking, for instance, whether antibiotics in meat have any impact on child development. Unless I’m just missing some facts, though, no one seems to argue that the absence of those antibiotics harms children — except inasmuch as those antibiotics allow for cheaper meat, which means that poorer kids can eat more of it and thereby grow healthier. If we could cut out the antibiotics and still let the poor eat well, that would seem to be a win all around.

Which is a way of saying: sometimes we can’t wait for the science. A question such as how much antibiotics harm our children, or how much CO₂ emissions cause global warming, is necessarily massive — it ties together too many systems for us to expect that we can get a controlled study. The best we can hope for are good hunches and heuristics. And it seems to me that the precautionary principle should hold in all these cases. It’s sort of Pascal’s wager. The matrix looks like this:

• If we wait and there’s really a danger, there’s a large negative cost.
• If we wait and there’s no danger, there’s no cost.
• If we act quickly and there’s really a danger, we reduce the cost.
• If we act quickly and there’s no danger, we incur a limited cost.

This needs to be argued more carefully, of course, by explicitly estimating the costs and benefits. But in both the case of global warming and that of making the food supply safer, everything I’ve heard suggests that it’s approximately right, and that acting to fix the problem won’t impose any substantial cost. Indeed, if we accept Al Gore’s point that becoming earth-friendlier may in fact create new industries, action may turn out to be a net economic positive.

I wonder if there are any good methods to estimate how good a book is based on how many used copies are available on Amazon. All else being equal, I’d expect the number of used copies to be proportional to the age of the book, and also proportional to how well the book sold — there will be more copies of the Da Vinci Code than of, say, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman. So then if I found a bestseller with few available used copies, I’d take that as a good sign of the book’s quality. There are complications, of course, and the modeling would be a little tricky. But it’s probably not a bad start.

I wonder if Amazon’s done any studies along these lines, correlating the used-book market with their users’ ratings or with more rigorous surveys of their users.

The administration would like to, but it can’t, because then it would have to respect their rights as human beings.

While I’m at it, National Security Letters have been served on thousands of Americans with limited Congressional oversight, and the recipients can’t tell anyone that they received one.

Oh, also, United Fruit CompanyChiquita Bananas paid Colombian death squads long after those squads were labeled terrorists. (See also Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!) Time to spend some extra money on fairly traded bananas.

When linking to the New Yorker the other day, I forgot to link to Packer’s article. The premise of it is that the U.S. has betrayed those Iraqis who volunteered to be translators for the American troops (included below the fold).

Some days the news makes you want to crawl back in bed.

Also, in re the Bush administration: you really have to wonder what Bush thinks the word “freedom” means when he says that the U.S. is a country that believes in “peace and freedom,” or that freedom is every human’s birthright. Clearly his policies don’t square with that principle. It seems to me that his policies leave one of two options open:

1. He believes that Americans deserve a higher standard of treatment than the rest of the world — and indeed, that we should strive to keep treatment of foreigners strictly worse than that of Americans. Otherwise, why fight to keep prisoners off American soil, where they would be subject to judicial protection? You could argue that the rules of war apply here, and hence that we should treat these foreigners no better than we treat anyone else whom we bomb or shoot. But the longer we keep people in military prisons in Cuba, the less this interpretation holds.

2. He believes that Americans deserve the same terrible treatment as everyone else in the world. Hence the Administration’s steadily declining respect for the rule of law, even here in the U.S.

I’d like to make a slightly more general point, while I’m at it. Bush has long advertised himself as a principled president — one who doesn’t change his policies based on shifts in the wind. Even ignoring the fact that this is false, it points out that principles are worthless — absolutely without value — if they’re divorced from policies that put them in place. If your policies don’t reflect your principles, then your principles count for nothing. Yet I think there are still Americans who are willing to engage Bush on the level of principles. Principles are easier to talk about, and they’re certainly grander. But when the rubber hits the road, Bush has been an abject failure.

(Of course, I also reject his principles. And I don’t think he believes the ones he professes.)

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I wonder if I should read it. Anything that came out before 9/11 will probably be thinking about such issues more soberly than we’re capable of now. Then again, one man’s sobriety is another’s naïveté. But still, seems like it might be worth reading. Rob Kunzman and Robert Bernheim, if memory serves, are the ones who introduced their Holocaust class at CVU to Benjamin Barber; either that, or it was Kunzman alone in AP English, or Sam Intrator.

(I just noticed that probably my three favorite teachers in high school have all gotten Ph.D.’s and gone on to work in academia. It’s surely good for them, and good for a generation of teachers who will learn from them, but an absolutely irreparable loss to CVU.)

I don’t know what it says that I routinely use three of them (bc, ldd, and lsof) and occasionally use mkfifo. The most interesting part of the command list, it seems to me, is the awk bit; I’ve never used awk, and it’s always seemed like something that Perl supplants. But their use of awk '{print $2}' to print the second column of a (by default) whitespace-delimited file is just handy. Normally I use cut for something like that, but cut can’t handle multi-character field delimiters; if your fields are separated by multiple whitespace characters, you’re out of luck. cut is handy if you have a single-character delimiter, like the ‘:’ in /etc/aliases. To get the same feature from awk, apparently, you’d do

awk -F':' {print $2} /etc/aliases 

As for nl, the #5 command on their list, it seems largely superfluous in the presence of the -N argument to less. Or you could do it with a six-line Perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; while(<>) { print "$. $_"; } 

One question I have, amidst the attorney general scandal: why are they appointed at all? By appointing them, don’t you make it more likely that they’ll enforce the laws in a politically biased way? I guess a couple of the alternatives — lifetime appointments à la Supreme Court justices, and civil-service exams — have their own problems. But it does seem weird to appoint them, doesn’t it? It makes sense to appoint, say, a Secretary of Labor, whose very point is to formulate and implement the president’s desired policies. But attorneys general are there to enforce the laws; isn’t that a job that shouldn’t exist at the whim of a president?

• “The Wisdom of Children”. Any article including this block

  FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!

  DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.

  MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden!

  DAD: I’m angry, too! We’re angry at each other!

  MOM: Now everything is fine.

  DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.

  MOM: There was a big sex.

  FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!

  (Everybody laughs.)

  MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy!

  cannot be disappointing. This is a fact.

• Anthony Lane’s review of Premonition, following his review of the new Adam Sandler movie “Reign Over Me”:

  The new Sandra Bullock film, “Premonition,” is about a wife and mother who foresees that her husband is about to die. Then he dies.

  [ . . . ]

  The chronology is all chewed up, with Linda waking the day after the funeral to learn that Jim is still alive, then waking again to find the opposite, and so on. It might have been simpler to call the movie “Groundhog Death.” Slowly, a plot emerges. Just as the two daughters are seen, early on, carefully putting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle—well, now their mom has to solve a puzzle of her own. (“Reign Over Me” pulls an almost identical trick. I live for these delicate hints.) Linda discovers, thanks to her Sibylline gift, that Jim is about to sneak off with a colleague named Claire (Amber Valletta), and that it is en route to the tryst that he will crash and burn. According to Linda, “Maybe it was supposed to happen. Even though he didn’t do anything yet, maybe it was enough that he was going to.” This was a new one to me: “Minority Report” for the lustful. In short, the moral of “Premonition” is that you can expect to be killed for wanting to sleep with Amber Valletta. According to my calculations, this means that ten million Americans will die by tomorrow morning, half of them in the shower.

  I repeat: the minutes between now and when you buy Lane’s collection Nobody’s Perfect are moments you will never get back.

• There’s a George Packer piece about Iraq this week. Packer never disappoints. I am convinced that his book Blood of the Liberals contains everything that we liberals need to get back on track. Everyone has been nuts about his Assassins’ Gate since it came out; it still seems to be the only game in town for books about Iraq. Used copies of Assassins’ Gate start at around $3 on Amazon, plus shipping — maybe $6.50 altogether.

More highlights as I read more of the magazine.

The anti-Hillary Clinton “1984” ad spoof made me go back and watch the original “1984” ad. I’ve probably watched it 20 times in my life, and still it actually brings tears to my eyes. Which is remarkable, because I’ve realized for a long time that Apple’s image — first the anti-IBM, now the anti-Microsoft, and through it all somehow the tool of underdogs who can afford premium-priced computers — is a pure fiction, though a beautifully marketed one. And yet the ad still makes me tear up. I can only imagine that when the ad first aired, the audience was blown away.