I am, roughly, stunned. In of all places the Guardian, by a regular Guardian writer, Andrew Anthony, rather than, say, a token visiting Tory, the case is made that not only is burglary not A Good Thing, but that people should actually have the right to defend themselves against burglars.

In truth, liberal society has no more idea how to respond to the murder of someone like Mr Symons than it knows what to think of Kenneth Faulkner, the 73-year farmer who earlier this week was defended by a judge for shooting a burglar on his isolated property.

With Mr Symons, a kind of resigned shrug of "these things unfortunately happen in a society obsessed with material status" seems to be the unstated reaction. And with Mr Faulkner, as with Tony Martin before him, there is a half-articulated sense that burglars need protection from these people. After all, anyone who fires a gun must be a madman.

If so, it's a madness that it would be ignorant to dismiss as a product of reactionary country folk - not least because it's a madness from which urbanites like my friend and I partially suffer. A baseball bat may not be a shotgun, but if used as a weapon it could kill someone, or certainly do them serious damage. And as with all weapons, there's no point threatening to use one unless you are prepared to.

While I'm willing to admit that the baseball bat does not represent my sanest self, I'm not sure how to be rational with an intruder in my house at five in the morning. I once had one hide behind my sitting room door and wait until I had returned to bed before he emptied the house and took the car. I figured afterwards, in the cold light of day, that anyone who was prepared to do that would probably not comply with a polite request to leave. Hence the bat.

Both the Symons and Faulkner incidents refer to a threat, real and perceived, that is causing us to retreat further not only into our increasingly protected homes but also into an increasingly embattled mindset. For all the locks and window grilles in the world will not make us feel safer but, on the contrary, under greater siege. The more you protect your home, the more aware you are of the threat from outside.

The left's answer to this fear is pretty much: get over it. As someone [Zoe Williams, as it happens] wrote in this paper last year: "It's unpleasant to have your space invaded; it's grim when they make a mess; it's a bummer if you're not insured; but it's only stuff ... And this is all pretty cool. It's when people stop worrying about their videos that revolutions start."
.    .    .

My friend with the baseball bat, a man committed to egalitarianism and social justice, tried to laugh off the experience when I asked him about it. But later he admitted that he hadn't slept properly since it had happened. Burglary is not cool. It's not revolutionary. It's an attack on the very heart of society: the home. If we can't grasp that, then why, you have to ask, should the burglars?

Slate is fond of running an often bizarre and misleading column called Bushisms, in which they duly document that George Bush does not always speak in impeccably perfect prose. So they ought to hold themselves to the same standard, especially since written work always gives you a chance to rewrite before you publish. Slate has published a series of comments by its staff, explaining who they plan to vote for, mostly Kerry. (Good for them. Imagine CBS admitting most of its staff are Bush supporters, or the BBC admitting that the bulk of its staff are members of the Tony Benn wing of the Labour party.)

But we come to this one.

I'm voting for Kerry/Edwards because I'd like a change from all the meaningless rhetoric and lack of plans for the future.

Talk about physician, heal thyself.

When I lived in Seattle in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, it was easy to spot which ministers were heavily wrapped up in left wing politics. They always called people "folks". Well, it is back. David Horowitz flays an outfit called "Church Folks for A Better America." Horowitz has been accused of going over the top. In this case, he seriously undersells the critique. Horowitz limits himself to criticizing the ad. But Church Folks says its purpose is "to break the silence about the war in Iraq", as if the left had been quiet up till now. And to do that, it throws just about everything it can.

Church Folks is coordinated by George Hunsinger of the Princeton Theological Seminary. He began an attack on the Iraq war by referring to the "supposed victory in Afghanistan." Hunsinger has specifically defended Saddam against charges of using poison gas against the Kurds, claimed that weapons inspectors were kicked out by Saddam in 1998 because they were setting up Saddam for assassination, and defended Saddam against the charge that he was using the sanctions as a pretext for starving Iraq. Given that the Church Folks insist that Iraq was not a just war, they start with some unsavory credentials.

It is comical to see a leftie crowd linking to the Pat Buchanan crowd.

And of course, since this is all about Iraq, it just has to make attack Israel as well: here, here, here, here, and here, and of course linking to this.

Ed Prescott has argued that differences in working time between Europe and America are explained by differences in tax rates, not underlying cultural differences. In his Wall Street Journal piece, Prescott explains:

According to the OECD, from 1970-74 France's labor supply exceeded that of the U.S. Also, a review of other industrialized countries shows that their labor supplies either exceeded or were comparable to the U.S. during this period. Jump ahead two decades and you will find that France's labor supply dropped significantly (as did others), and that some countries improved and stayed in line with the U.S. Controlling for other factors, what stands out in these cross-country comparisons is that when European countries and U.S. tax rates are comparable, labor supplies are comparable.

This is a fascinating result, and conforms nicely to my belief (as distinct from ability to demonstrate conclusively) that everything, and I mean everything, can be explained by differences in relative prices. Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek sums it up this way.

So, the much-ballyhooed cultural differences allegedly separating Americans (or Anglo-Americans) from continental Europeans don’t really explain the observed differences in work patterns across these countries. In fact, the reason Americans work so much more in the market than do Europeans is that Americans’ taxes are lower at the margin.

Ruth Wisse explains some of the pleasures of dissenting from the "herd of independent minds."

Personally, I greatly enjoy being in the conservative opposition. My colleagues are cordial, and since I'm not looking for promotions I willingly sustain an occasional snub for the greater advantage of being able to speak my mind. Students making the transition from liberal to conservative are often wounded by their first exposure to the contempt that greets their support for the war in Iraq or opposition to abortion or whatever else separates them from the liberal campus. I suggest to them that, as opposed to living in constant terror of offending some received idea, they relish their freedom of expression. The self-acknowledged conservative never experiences intellectual constraint.

And, of course, Wisse does note the dangers of dissent:

But this enviable autonomy doesn't extend to graduate students or untenured colleagues. Recently, I had two encounters with sobering implications for the academy. A junior professor told me that when she began teaching at Harvard she resigned from several organizations that would have betrayed her conservative leanings. She hadn't wanted to give colleagues an easy excuse for voting her down when she came up for tenure; but now that the prospect of tenure was before her, she didn't know whether she wanted to stay on in such a repressive community. My second conversation was with a rare pro-Israel Muslim whose contract as lecturer hadn't been renewed, very probably because he was critical of the way his subject was being taught. This young man was in a great mood. He was leaving for Washington, where he could make a greater contribution to national security.

Earlier this month, I remarked on the large amount of evidence that free school fees are unlikely to have much effect on school attendance in poor countries, essentially because the bulk of the cost of going to school is

The New York Times carries a piece by Celia Dugger that offers some evidence to the contrary.

Overnight, more than a million additional children showed up for school last year when Kenya's newly elected government abolished fees that had been prohibitively high for many parents, about $16 a year. Many classrooms are now bulging with the country's most disadvantaged children.

Kenya is not alone. Responding to popular demand for education, it is one of a raft of African nations contending with both a wondrous opportunity and nettlesome challenge: teaching the millions of children who have poured into schools as country after country - from Malawi and Lesotho to Uganda and Tanzania - has suddenly made primary education free. Mozambique will join them in January when it abolishes fees.

.    .    .
In 1996, Uganda's newly elected president, Yoweri Museveni, abolished fees for four children per family. His message that education was free sounded through the country like a clanging school bell. In 1997, 2.3 million additional children showed up for class, nearly doubling enrollment to 5.7 million.

The track record is mixed.

Malawi's decade-old, underfunded and largely unplanned experiment is generally regarded as a disaster. The number of children in a first-grade class averages 100. Four out of ten of first graders repeat the year. Children's achievement scores are among the lowest in Africa.

Uganda, often held up as a model, also found that achievement fell as classes swelled with highly disadvantaged students.

But in the past eight years, donors have invested more than $350 million and the government also increased spending. Test results from last year show that achievement bounced back, though more than half of third graders still performed poorly in math and English.

Some experts worry that the drive to expand enrollment rapidly has overshadowed the push for quality. "Just herding kids into classes and counting that as education hasn't worked," said William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University who was a research economist at the World Bank for more than a decade.

Even those immersed in the basic issues of achieving universal primary education acknowledge the challenges. "You can get kids into school," said Paud Murphy, who recently retired as one of the World Bank's lead education specialists, "but keeping them there and making them learn involves a whole lot more than we've understood."

Here in the Malindi district, the most crowded in the nation, the teacher to student ratio among the 100 schools ranges from 1 to 17 at the least crowded school to 1 to 111 at the most crowded.

Even within primary schools, teachers in higher grades have much smaller classes than those in lower grades, which are swollen with the huge influx of first-time students since last year.

In part, those chasms reflect the difficulty of getting teachers to work in remote rural areas and big urban slums. But the problem is also a legacy of political patronage and mismanagement, experts and officials said.

Money alone will not fix things. It will require political will. Transferring large numbers of teachers to understaffed schools will mean taking on Kenya's powerful teachers' union, as well as communities and their political patrons who resist losing teachers to other areas.

And no discussion of schools would be complete without the petty, ugly stuff. I have no fond memories of primary school (scratch that: I hated every second of it), but it was a privileged utopia compared to this.

The students at Gahaleni Primary School, more than 900 strong, gathered for morning assembly under the spreading arms of cashew nut trees, their voices rising through the branches in sweet song.

But the moment of grace was shattered when the teacher in charge, Andrew Ngundi, ordered all children not wearing uniforms to come stand before the rest of the school. As part of its free education initiative, the government prohibited the expulsion of students who cannot afford uniforms - required for students in many African countries - but the new rule has not stopped administrators from pressuring poor children to get them.

"How come you're sitting there and you still don't have a uniform," Mr. Ngundi said sharply, pointing at a boy who was frozen in place.

Slowly, barefoot children in torn, filthy T-shirts and hand-me-down dresses with broken zippers separated themselves from students neatly dressed in orange shirts and green shorts or skirts.

Salama quietly slipped behind some taller students, hiding her shame - a skirt covered with big blowsy flowers she had bought used for about a quarter with her firewood earnings.

But Selina Malungu, a fatherless 8-year-old, stood before all her classmates in a grimy, red party dress adorned with torn lace and gay little bears climbing trees. It was her only outfit. The other children mock her for looking like a street urchin, she said.

Twelve-year-old Asha Charo's mother, Kadzo Menza, a gaunt woman abandoned by her husband, makes 50 cents a day swinging a hammer to break rocks into small stones, a common building material.

"I'll break stones until she gets an education," said Mrs. Menza, who never herself got the chance to study. "When she finishes school and gets a job, I will rest."

I got my absentee ballot in the mail, and it is a safe bet that it will make no difference to the outcome. I vote in Dennis Hastert's district in Illinois, and he will win handily. The Senate race in Illinois is not remotely close. And John Kerry is about as likely to lose Illinois as he is to win Texas. But I voted anyway, because I am a politics junky. (Or as a friend of mine puts it, he loves politics because it is the last remaining legal bloodsport.) But most people have more sense than to care that much about politics, preferring to leave their passions for more important things, like baseball. I would guess that a lot of people in Hastert's district who would plan to vote straight Republican (as I did), will stay home.

So I am puzzled by Daniel Drezner, who asks:

what are the odds that Kerry loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College? If that happened, how would both parties react? Would the Electoral College survive in its current form?

Okay. I admit it. I was wrong. Today's Guardian has an article by Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Brunel University. An academic and an administrator, writing in the Guardian, you just know it is going to be stupid and self-serving. Not so.

He tackles the serious and growing problem of grade inflation in British A-levels, which is essentially the college entrance exam. He offers sensible criticism of the Tomlinson Report on reforming education, as well as the Tory proposals.

His proposals to reform the education of pupils aged 16 to 19 include a change to the grading system. Specifically, he wants to provide finer discrimination at the top end of the performance scale by introducing A* and A** grades. University admission tutors will welcome this recommendation. By itself, however, it will not be enough. The social pressures that gave rise to grade inflation in the past are still as intense as ever. If we do nothing to prevent it, A grades will inflate to A* and A**.

Recognising this, the Conservative party recommends a quota on the highest grades. Rationing A grades to a fixed percentage of students would eliminate the possibility of marks compressing at the top end, but it also has drawbacks. Quotas make it difficult to know what students have actually learned.

Think of it this way: if we fix the proportion of students who can get an A in maths at 10%, then the top 10% of a poorly performing year group will get the same proportion of A grades as a population of high-performing students. Yet, the latter group may know a lot more mathematics than the former. Fixing the proportion of students who can get an A makes it difficult to tell whether student achievement is improving. To create a marking system that gives us an objective idea of how well a student has mastered a subject, we need a combination of the Tomlinson and Conservative proposals. We need an extended range of marks and a commitment to rigor, especially at the top end.

Schwartz has a record of being sensible in the Guardian. Last year, he wrote this:

Christopher Rathbone, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, looked at the differences between Oxford and Harvard.

"Oxford," he wrote, "is not obliged to compete.

"There are no challengers perpetually ready to depose Oxford from its pre-eminent position. Oxford unlike its American counterparts is not out to prove itself this lends composure and dignity

"Harvard's behaviour does not exhibit anything remotely resembling Oxford's sense of security, but then Harvard is incessantly obligated to spar with envious challengers. The capacity to take one's reputation for granted is invaluable because it permits the atmosphere of calm in which the mind is truly free."

This article was written 23 years ago. To quote Cicero, "o tempora, o mores". Oxford may still be pre-eminent among British universities, but this means a lot less than it once did.

While elite British universities remained composed, dignified and so calm they were practically comatose, American universities powered ahead.

Sir Thomas Gresham, financial adviser to Elizabeth I, is remembered for his "law" of monetary economics - bad money drives out good. According to Gresham's law, if two kinds of money have the same denomination but a different value (gold coins v banknotes, for example) the paper money will drive the gold coins out of circulation because people prefer to pay their debts with the low-value paper currency and hoard the gold coins. The solution is to reform the currency so that there is only a single standard.

The problem posed by Gresham's law can be fixed by setting a single currency standard, or it can be fixed by allowing prices to fluctuate, so that there is no longer a "bad" currency.

For the most part, British universities are required to rely on the A-levels, and so if the A-levels are a mess, the universities are in trouble. American universities, especially private ones, can use high school grades, interviews, the SAT, the ACT, and whatever other mix they wish. If grades are unreliable, put greater weight on test scores. Whatever works.

The Irish system is even more rigid than the British system. Points are awarded on the leaving certificate examination (maximum 600), and places are based entirely on that result. Has there been grade inflation on the leaving certificate? Look at the chart below, and note that most programs require a score of anywhere between 300 and 600. For example, in 2004, computer science at Trinity College required 350 points, medicine at University College Dublin required 570 points, and commerce at University College Cork required 450 points. The numbers in the table list the percentage of students each year who got at least that mark. In every category, the percentage rises steadily each year.

	300+	400+	500+
2004	54	28.6	7.9
2003	53.3	27.7	7.3
2002	51.9	26.8	6.7
2001	51.8	26.4	6.7
2000	50.3	24.8	5.7
1999	48.6	24.7	5.7
1998	45.6	22.9	5.1

Recently, Stephen Bainbridge posted some thoughts on the simultaneous growth of social dysfunction and the decline of Catholicism in Ireland. In particular, citing a subscription only piece in the Economist, he believes that Ireland's problems are in significant part a consequence of a decline in faith.

The birth rate has tumbled, and many more married women are at work. The abortion rate is estimated to have risen from around 4.5% of pregnancies in 1980 to over 10% in 2002 (mostly carried out in Britain); over the same period, births out of wedlock have soared from 5% to 31% of the total. The divorce rate is creeping up.
.    .    .
As for religion, although almost 90% of the population still claim that they are Catholic, the Catholic Church is not the force it was. It fought hard against the legalisation of divorce, but lost decisively. It is hard to imagine the church in its heyday tolerating a taoiseach living with a woman who was not his wife, as Mr Ahern did for many years.
.    .    .
It is not only churchmen who regret Ireland's growing secularism. David Quinn, a journalist at the daily Irish Independent, points to rising drug and alcohol consumption, a sharp increase in suicides, a greater incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and a growing “yob culture”. He suggests that with the decline of religion, society has lost a moral compass.

Some of these problems are not the result of a declining church, but of a dominant church. The dominance of the Catholic Church in Ireland, like any monopoly, was begging for abuse. When Douglas Hyde, the country's first president (and a Protestant), died in 1949, the government ministers sat outside the church, because the Catholic Church made it clear that they were not to go into a Protestant church.

The child abuse scandals hit the Church very hard here. Part of the reason was that people were afraid to challenge the Church. Another part was the refusal of bishops to accept that priests could behave that way. There is more to it than that, but I think these parts are important because they suggest that an authoritarian church is an unreflective church, and an unreflective church is a dying church.

I went to Catholic schools in Chicago in the 1960s when Catholic parents were terrified of sending their children anywhere else, and the bullying by teachers was intense. Still, I have been startled at the number of intensely bitter stories I have heard, from reasonably devout Catholics, about the regular beatings they got in school. I know several people with one Protestant parent who described the almost maniacal determination of the nuns and the brothers to beat the evil out of them. I am inclined to believe them. (Full disclosure: my father was raised as a non-denominational Protestant, and converted to Catholicism solely to get the nuns to lay off me and my sister. You can take a guess what it is like to a six year old to be kept after school so that the nun teaching his class can emphasize to him how important it was that his father end his evil ways.)

It is clear that the reported suicide rate is rising, a mix of increased reporting and increased incidence. A 2001 report, "Suicide in Ireland" offers this unhappy diagram, showing the suicide rate for men in Ireland and in the EU.

Shame can be a good thing, when it makes you think about what you do. But it can be destructive when it gets people to do the wrong thing. I know a fellow, about 50 or so, who spends his days chatting with people in the pub, not working, and almost certainly incapable of it. When he was a teenager, he suffered what we used to call a severe nervous breakdown. His parents shut him up in his room, because they were ashamed to let anyone see him. He got his meals in his room. He lived there, 24 hours a day, year in and year out, for something like twenty years, until both his parents died. His parents let their shame nearly destroy their son.

I am not trying to dump all the blame for Ireland's difficulties on the Catholic Church. The fellow who was locked in his room for twenty years was brought out by a local priest, who had spent years trying to get his parents to behave better. The child abuse scandal is horrendous, but Fr. Sean Fortune(a monstrous predator who commited suicide in 1999 while awaiting trial on 66 counts of sexually abusing boys) was protected by more than the bishops. He was protected by a climate of silence. Recently, a man was sentenced for repeatedly beating and raping his daughter over a 15 year period. She complained bitterly that people in the area knew, but would not say or do anything. The near mania for silence and secrecy in this country defeats my attempts at explanation. I have frequently heard in Ireland variations on this joke:

An Irishman goes on a quiz show. To the first question, "What church does the pope lead?" he says "pass." To the second question, "What was Jack Lynch's last name?" again a pass. To the third question, "What year was the 1916 uprising?" yet another pass. And from the audience, another Irishman shouts "That's it, Paddy. Don't tell him a thing."

The Irish Catholic layman David Quinn has written about the distinction between an authoritarian church and an authoritative church. The Catholic Church in Ireland has lost its authoritarian position, but has not become authoritative. In other words, it has not dealt with its loss of power by emphasizing clear moral standards and a clear theology. Instead, it has rambled on as if it were a group of social workers. It lets the radical priest, Sean Healy of the Conference of Religious of Ireland, be its regular spokesman. By all the accounts I have heard, Fr. Healy is a good and decent man, but he presents the Church as primarily a social work agency. (That I think his policy proposals would increase poverty in Ireland is not relevant here, which I guess is why I mention it.) The Church is not first and foremost about social work. If it were, then it ought to be more important to the poor than to the rich.

I agree with Bainbridge that Ireland is in important ways in trouble, and that those troubles are partly connected to the decline of the Catholic Church. But it seems to me extremely important to the survival of the Church (and the state of the country) that it begins to reflect on how its previous dangerously authoritarian position is at least partly responsible for its downfall. Not to sit around feeling guilty, but to ask instead how a Church becomes central to people's lives.

And here is my tiny contribution to doing so. Recognize that sin is not just about feeling bad, but also about the joy of redemption. I know I am going to make no friends writing this (but why give up a habit of a lifetime), but I do not understand why the Irish revel in misery. Frank McCourt made fun of this in the opening of Angela's Ashes:

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.

Above all — we were wet.

Questions and Answers, the weekly RTE public affairs show hosted by pseudo-journalist John Bowman, had a comical question last night, asking the panelists who they would vote for in the upcoming US elections. Two of the panelists, journalist Eoghan Harris and Brigid Laffan, a politics professor at University College Dublin, actually answered the question (Harris for Bush, Laffan for Kerry). Willie O'Dea, the defense minister, declined to answer. That is hardly surprising, although in fairness to the man, he did discuss reasons he thought Bush or Kerry's election would be more advantageous to Ireland.

But of course then there was Mary Lou McDonald, from Sinn Fein, who refused to answer the question, and refused to say why. Perhaps she backs Senator Spitball, because she thinks he would be soft on terrorists like her, and does not want him burdened with an endorsement from a terrorist group. Or maybe she thinks Bush will win, and she has been told by her own Lord Voldemort to keep her mouth shut, because Sinn Fein's standing in Washington is already low enough. So that there are no doubts where McDonald's sympathies lie (although as a Sinn Feiner, she always sympathizes with butchers everywhere), she insisted that it was important to "hand back" power to Iraqis. That assumes that Iraqis actually had power.

And there was Lara Marlowe, Robert Fisk's former squeeze, whose record as an anti-American bigot and incompetent hack is well known.

She said she will not vote for Bush (or for Nader), and whined extensively about Bush. [Harris accurately described her as a college boy snob.] She would not, however, say who she would vote for, spouting drivel about votes being confidential. This may speak well for Senator Spitball, since Marlowe may not have wanted to admit voting for the CPUSA candidate or whatever loony she actually marks on the ballot.

The Guardian put together a project called Operation Clark County. Clark County in Ohio was very nearly evenly divided in the last election, and the Guardian suggested that, in view of the effects of the election on the rest of the world, its readers might consider writing to voters in Clark County to try to persuade them to vote one way or the other.

Tim Blair used it as an excellent excuse to have a lot of fun at the expense of the Guardian, always a worthy enterprise, but more than a few bloggers took umbrage at the idea.

Count me out of the grumbling. Actually, I thought it was kind of a charming idea. Granted, I will read almost anything, but I think it would be kind of interesting getting a letter from someone in a different country, asking me to consider changing my mind. It was set up to avoid spamming.

Don't make any assumptions about the voter with whom you have been matched. His or her name comes from the publicly available voters' roll. The voter has not registered any party affiliation. (We don't want individual Clark County voters bombarded with lobbying letters so this site will assign only one name and address to each user - please don't pass yours on to anyone else.)

I do not think it will have much effect on the election, but it did produce one very funny parody, absolutely not to be missed.

Now. As in immediately. Don't wait. Just go read him. I am still laughing.

UPDATE: He has even more, including nailing a group of clearly pro-Saddam lefties.

Ireland's reputation as a sort of literary paradise is perhaps overrated. But it does produce some great lines. Over the weekend, I was at a meeting in a nice hotel in Blarney, just north of Cork. After the event, we went outside to go to the bar at the other end of the hotel, passing a wedding reception. Several of the wedding guests were outside, engaged in an unpleasant exchange of obscenities, and as we passed, one well dressed woman with too much to drink departed from the rest with a string of obsenities and various gestures. One member of my party said to the rest of us: "All dressed up but you still can't take her out."

Labour party politician Roy Hattersley, often credited with much of the responsibility for breaking the power of the radical left in the Labour Party during the 1980s, and for bringing about New Labour. According to the Guardian, however, he is a butcher and mass murderer. Hattersley writes a regular column for the Guardian. His latest is headlined "How I became a militant," is an argument that Britain has moved to the right, making him look more left-wing. The headline was presumably the choice of the Guardian editors, not Hattersley. According to the Guardian, Hamas is a militant group. The group that murdered Paul Johnson in Saudi Arabia this summer was a militant group. And, according to the Guardian's Sunday paper, the Observer, the bombings in Spain were similarly the work of the militant group al-Qaeda.

The Madrid bombings which killed 200 people were dramatically claimed by the Islamic militant group al Qaeda early on Sunday morning.

Is the Guardian attempting to suggest that all those killers are not really so bad? After all, they really are no different than Roy Hattersley, are they?

Several bloggers have already written about time inconsistency, part of the reason for the Nobel prize given to Edward Prescott and Finn Kydland. David Warsh, the experienced economics journalist who produces Economic Principals, explains the historical context in which those ideas arose.

When I wrote about the open letter on Iraq by a pack of academics yesterday, I thought it was shallow and lacking in direction. But I did not suspect any scams. Silly me. There were academics involved. Of course there was going to be a scam. Lawrence Kaplan at the New Republic offers background.

he New York Times ran an unusual editor's note last week. It alerted readers to the fact that the Times had asked Charles A. Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, to review two books critical of President Bush's foreign policy. It also alerted readers to the fact that Kupchan serves as "an unpaid adviser to John F. Kerry's presidential campaign. Had The Times known of that affiliation, it would not have asked him to review political books during an election season." Times culture editor Jonathan Landman explained the decision to run the note this way: "We're not blameless. We didn't ask him if he has an affiliation."

Why should they have to? Because Kupchan is one of many Kerry foreign policy advisers who, publicly at least, decline to bill themselves as Kerry foreign policy advisers. They fail to do so even though they have signed formal agreements with the Kerry campaign making them exactly that, even though they chair or belong to the campaign's "policy teams," and even though, in many cases, they act as its surrogates.

David Shipley, op-ed editor at the Times, says the question of campaign affiliations is "something we ask [contributors] pretty much right off the bat. Then we go through as many of the different shadings and levels of involvement as possible." As for the hundreds of media outlets with less stringent checks, if more than one foreign policy expert per page has kind things to say about Kerry, make an assumption: They probably work for him.

I was a teenager in the 1970s, and therefore came from possibly the only generation not to think it had invented sex. That is because the sixties crowd never, ever shut up about it. Therefore, my generation seems to have concluded that we invented non-boring sex.

I thought of this because, while walking across the university, I heard one student say to another that he had experienced "the worst hangover in the history of the universe". While it is a more clever description of a hangover than usual, he was surely wrong. Kids today are soft,; they don't know what a real hangover is. In my day, we really knew what it was like to have a hangover.

The late George Stigler once remarked that there did not exist a petition so stupid that it could not get a dozen Nobel laureates to sign it. And so, last week Mark Kleiman tried to hawk one of these petitions, pretending that a bunch of left wing social scientists were some sort of natural Bush constituency.

Henry Farrell and Dan Drezner link to a public letter signed by close to 700 academics, who call themselves a "nonpartisan group of foreign affairs specialists". Farrell and Drezner, who know about a lot more of these people than I do, agree that it is a diverse bunch. But I remain unimpressed, because the letter offers no counter-factual, or, in other words, no evidence of how things could have worked out better.

The misleading reference to the Duelfer report is suggestive. The letter mentions that the report concludes that Iraq had no WMDs, but makes no mention of this conclusion:

Saddam’s primary goal from 1991 to 2003 was to have UN sanctions lifted, while maintaining the security of the Regime. He sought to balance the need to cooperate with UN inspections—to gain support for lifting sanctions—with his intention to preserve Iraq’s intellectual capital for WMD with a minimum of foreign intrusiveness and loss of face. Indeed, this remained the goal to the end of the Regime, as the starting of any WMD program, conspicuous or otherwise, risked undoing the progress achieved in eroding sanctions and jeopardizing a political end to the embargo and international monitoring.

In comparative terms, Iran is and was much the greater sponsor of terrorism, and North Korea and Pakistan pose much the greater risk of nuclear proliferation to terrorists.

the failure to articulate an alternative strategy (which, to be fair, was probably impossible with such a diverse group of signatories).

What do they show would have worked better

In the course of a dreary piece in the Guardian, the NAACP is referred to this way:

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the most obvious choice here - an influential, well-organised, non-partisan body whose get-out-the-vote activities are extremely likely to end up helping the Democrats.

What is the written equivalent of a derisory snort?

Irish newspapers are remarkably expensive. I pay $59 per year for my online Wall Street Journal subscription, which includes the U.S., European, and Asian editions, plus Barron's. For the Irish Times, also a daily, I would have to pay €79 per year ($98), and at least the Journal knows that Detroit is not in Ohio. The two papers I have handy are the Irish Examiner (€1.50 per day, or $1.86) and the Sunday Business Post (€1.80 each Sunday, or $2.23). The papers here are expensive and not very good. They badly need blogs to keep an eye on them. And it appears they know it. The Sunday Business Post writes thus:

If you're following the race online in the American media, have a look at the one of the hundreds of 'blogs', or weblogs, that are following the campaign. Many of the authors of these internet diaries are following the campaigns in the manner of 'real' political journalists and are travelling with the candidates.
Conscious of the massive following that some of the bloggers have, the Bush and Kerry campaigns have set up facilities for them at events. Many have larger followings than big metropolitan papers.

Freed from the requirements of fact-checking and balance that, say, the New York Times imposes on itself, political blogs span the full ideological and sanity spectrum.

Wonkette is funny and profane; Mickey Kaus on Slate is pretty good at political analysis, as is Andrew Sullivan.

British Labour MP Tony Wright takes to the Guardian to ask what are the anti-fox hunting fanatics thinking.

How on earth did we get into this mess? It is difficult for many of us to get very worked up about foxhunting, but it is easy to get worked up about the idiocy that has brought us to where we are now.
It was obvious from the start that it would end badly. The loss of proportion is staggering. Whatever progressive politics is about, or worth taking on opposing interests for, it is not about views on alternative methods of pest control. Talk of invoking the Parliament Act is like declaring a state of emergency because of a patch of fog on the M4.

I dislike the idea of blood sports. Some of the people who engage in them seem especially unlovely. Unseating the toffocracy is appealing. The trouble comes when we start converting personal prejudices into state action. Not only do we stir up all sorts of unnecessary trouble, we wander into a bog of hypocrisies, inconsistencies and contradictions.

Many of my colleagues have a passion for the issue that is in inverse proportion to its significance. Others have allowed themselves to be imprisoned by pressure groups. Some (including Tony Blair and most of the cabinet, I suspect) would just like it to go away.

It is the last stand of a kind of gesture politics that Labour has taken much trouble to banish on other fronts. The alarm bells first rang for me a few years ago when a packed meeting of Labour MPs howled down the suggestion of an independent inquiry on the issue. The government did set up an inquiry, but it need not have bothered. Minds were already made up.

And why is the fox special? This, as regular readers know, is Mazal.

Last night, Mazal went sort of nuts, pouncing around for a bit until she found one of these in the house.

It will not surprise anyone with a cat that the mouse did not survive the encounter. Nor will it surprise anyone with a cat to learn just how long it took the mouse to die: at least two hours. Will the anti-hunt fanatics ban cats, or is it really true that they are more interested in hating people than protecting the fox?

By the way, if they do decide to ban cats, I recommend they keep their distance from Mazal. She has claws and is not afraid to use them.

The Nobel prize in economics came out, and it went to Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott for work on dealing with children. Okay, not exactly. The announcement mentions their important work on time consistency. It works like this. You tell your teenage kid to mow the lawn, and promise you will drive him to the mall if he does. But you do not want to drive him to the mall, because you are tired and do not feel like driving. So, when he finishes the lawn, you renege on your promise. A good deal, no? Except that your kid can figure out that it is in your best interests to renege on the deal, so he does not believe your promise and does not mow the lawn.

Take a different application, if you are not keen on children. Governments would like to promise low taxes to encourage higher output. Then when the higher output shows up, they have an incentive to raise taxes on all that income. Taxpayers expect the government to renege (because it is in the government's interest to do so), and so do not produce the extra output.

The problem arise because of discretion. You have the discretion to renege on your promise to drive your kid to the mall. The government has the discretion to raise tax rates after promising to keep them low. Discretion may be bad for you.

After reading the New York Times this morning, I concluded that the New York Times' position is that it acceptable for Democrats to vote for the Nazi Party. If you go to the website of the National Socialist Movement, an American Nazi party, you will find that the party is down on war profiteers, and advocates a higher minimum wage, nationalized health care, stricter pollution control including stricter controls on greenhouse gases, and the setting aside of more land for wildlife preserves. Okay, granted, they want to throw out all the Jews, homosexuals, and non-whites, but surely that is only one point against five points already listed.

Are you nearly red-faced with outrage at this point at the suggestion that vicious Nazi hate-mongering can be given equal weight with their advocacy of more land for wildlife preserves? Well, you ought to be. I have never met, and certainly never want to meet, a Democrat who would give equal weighting to a candidate's views on the minimum wage and throwing out over a quarter of the population based on "impure blood". And a damned good thing too.

The New York Times would never dream of suggesting that every issue can be given equal weight so that it could endorse a Nazi. So why is it trying the same scam on abortion. Today, it coughs up Mark Roche, a dean at Notre Dame (who also teaches German and philosophy).

The parties appeal to Catholics in different ways. The Republican Party opposes abortion and the destruction of embryos for stem-cell research, both positions in accord with Catholic doctrine. Also, Republican support of various faith-based initiatives, including school vouchers, tends to resonate with Catholic voters.

Members of the Democratic Party, meanwhile, are more likely to criticize the handling of the war in Iraq, to oppose capital punishment and to support universal heath care, environmental stewardship, a just welfare state and more equitable taxes. These stances are also in harmony with Catholic teachings, even if they may be less popular among individual Catholics.

When values come into conflict, it is useful to develop principles that help place those values in a hierarchy. One reasonable principle is that issues of life and death are more important than other issues. This seems to be the strategy of some Catholic and church leaders, who directly or indirectly support the Republican Party because of its unambiguous critique of abortion. Indeed, many Catholics seem to think that if they are truly religious, they must cast their ballots for Republicans.

This position has two problems. First, abortion is not the only life-and-death issue in this election. While the Republicans line up with the Catholic stance on abortion and stem-cell research, the Democrats are closer to the Catholic position on the death penalty, universal health care and environmental protection.

Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. While the Church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace, not war, and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment. There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia.

By way of Newmark's Door, I have learned about another academic blogger, Michael Munger, the chairman of the political science department at Duke. Read and be mystified how this man got tenure in a political science department, and at Duke, no less. Especially someone who says stuff like this:

The fact is that most academics are fiercely in favor of free speech for everyone that agrees with them.

I really need to take the time to update my blogroll, but I have no time just now. But for these two, I will make an exception.

He sends Bianca Jagger over the edge.

"I think President Bush is in my view, if I may say so, the most dangerous man in power today," Bianca Jagger said.

"There is a threat not only for the people of the United States but if he is elected, I feel it would be a threat for the world and would unfortunately put us in a position where we will be confronting the possibility of a third world war," Jagger said.

UPDATE: Stephen Bainbridge agrees with me on a very good reason for hoping Bush wins. (He has more readers than I do, so I suppose I should say that I agree with him.)

In 1999, when the Republican presidential primaries were underway, I felt much better about Bush when I learned two things. First, he liked to pronounce "intellectuals" as "int-eye-lektuals." Second, he liked to wear his Texas Air National Guard jacket to class are Harvard Business School, just to annoy all the lefties there (and no, I can't remember where I read either of them). How can you not like someone who enjoys driving the left nuts.

Brad DeLong still has nothing to say about Edwards' advocacy of protectionism. And now Mark Kleiman is similarly driven so nutty he is reduced to frivolous scams. Okay, not really. But he does assure us that we are to take seriously criticisms of Bush by Joe Stiglitz, because Stiglitz is a really, really smart guy who won a Nobel Prize. While it is true that Stiglitz is really, really smart and won a Nobel prize, it says little about his skills as a policy analyst, which are a mix of arrogance and ineptitude. By Kleiman's reasoning, because Einstein was really, really smart and won a Nobel prize, we should take seriously his views on the use of nuclear weapons, rather than dismissing them asapologetics for Stalin by a Communist dupe.

Kleiman also refers happily to an open letter attacking Bush, signed by 169 business school professors, including 56 from Harvard. (Kleiman's post says 200. KLEIMAN LIED! LIED, I TELL YOU!) Clearly, Harvard is mad that George Bush sullied their reputation for pristine liberalism. Recall James Wilson's comment, in his 1967 Commentary piece on Reagan, that not only did he not agree with Reagan, but that "even if I thought like that, which I don't, I would never write it down anywhere my colleagues at Harvard might read it."

The b-school profs' letter is pretty standard stuff, and I would write about it if I could stay awake through the whole letter. I am more interested in examining Kleiman's "look at all these hotshots" argument. Kleiman says of them:

Note these are business school professors, not pointy-headed liberal academic economists.

No doubt these are smart people, but that does not give them any special expertise on fiscal policy. Some on the list do have expertise in that area, but this list is not being sold as a list of fiscal policy experts. It is being sold as a list of business school professors. And frankly, it is being sold that way for exactly the reason Kleiman is using it: an attempt to say that these are down-to-earth people, not typically left-wing academics. Business schools are filled with historians, sociologists, psychologists, and economists, who are just as pointy-headed (to use Kleiman's term) as any other academic.

And this, folks, is what is known as a scam. The letter begins "As professors of economics and business . . .". Alfred Chandler is a fine historian, but he knows no more about the consequences of a current account deficit than, say, a specialist on George Eliot in Harvard's English department.

UPDATE: I misread Kleiman's post, and mistakenly thought that Stiglitz had organized the letter. It is not clear who organized it. Accordingly, harsh comments about Stiglitz have been removed.

I caught the debates in replay early this morning, and it was pretty much what I expected. Edwards was the really annoying bratty teenager and Cheney was his tired but patient old man. I was more curious about reactions. My favorite was Brad DeLong. His predictably silly rants were less interesting than the dog that did not bark. Says Edwards during the debate:

The administration says over and over that the outsourcing of millions of American jobs is good. We’re against it. We want to get rid of tax cuts for companies sending jobs overseas.

Thats why we have a plan to create jobs, getting rid of tax cuts for companies outsourcing your jobs, give tax cuts to companies thatll keep jobs here in America.

Part of the case for Bush and Cheney is they send the left insane. DeLong is willing to give up free trade for Spitball and the Ambulance Chaser.

Meanwhile, Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber is hawking a new outfit for what he calls "the thoughtful ex-Blairite left". It has a conference coming up with 27 speakers. Brighouse mentions five of them. On his short list is Michael Meacher, the raving loony conspiracy theorist who thinks George Bush knew all about the September 11 attacks beforehand, but let them go ahead so he could attack Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, Meacher is part of the "thoughtful" left. I am fascinated by what the thoughtless left would be.

Maybe Bush and Cheney really did drive the left insane.

The Guardian can always be relied on to publish apologetics for pretty much every butcher under the sun, but heck, they do have Lucy Mangan, who explains the joys of the less than ideal jobs.

Then I worked in the bakery at the end of the road, which taught me a number of things about the workings of a small family business. Number one, the mother does the cleaning while the son and father vie to see who can press you up against the poppyseed split tins most often. Number two, it's the father. Number three, saying, "Is that a baguette in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?" does nothing to ameliorate the situation. Number four, sexual harassment is well worth putting up with when you are allowed to take home your own bodyweight in iced buns, jam doughnuts and Death by Chocolate cakes at the end of the day.

That was the job that taught me that feminism and pragmatism are often at war in the modern world, but at least I know which has the upper hand with me.

Then I was a shop assistant in the local bookshop, which is where I learned the truth of that famous statistic that 99% of people buy one book a year and hollow it out to keep their sandwiches in. I remember perhaps most fondly the conversation my manager, a man who started drinking the moment a new David Pelzer was announced so that he could sell copies to customers rather than beating them about the head for their execrable taste, had with the Darwinian rebuke of a man who came in looking for a book his girlfriend wanted.

DR: "I don't remember the title."

Boss: "That's fine."

DR: "Or the author."

Boss: "Less fine."

DR: "But it's got a blue cover."

Boss: "Well, why didn't you say so? It'll be over there, on our blue covers table."

DR: "Really?"

Boss: "No, not really, arsewipe."

DR: "I think I'll get her a Body Shop basket instead."

Boss: "They're over there, on our 'Gifts to make your girlfriend dump you' table."

But then came the Illinois State lottery to save us. At the end of the specialties counter, they set up a separate register just to sell lottery tickets. A breeze of a job. All you had to do was rip off (an apt description of the lottery, but never mind) tickets and take fifty cents for each one. No effort at all. The two of us working at the counter would switch between specialties and lottery tickets every half hour. At first, you switched to lottery tickets with glee. No more hassles for half an hour, just a line of mostly little old ladies lining up to buy their weekly lottery ticket. But that glee lasted for only a few weeks, as we realized how utterly mind numbing it was to sell lottery tickets. And every sweet little old lady would sweetly say the same thing: "One ticket please, and make sure it's a winner." The first time that is sweet and endearing. The tenth time it is less so. After a steady diet of it for half an hour, you are screaming, desperate to get back to abuse from the manager and the jerk in the three piece suit. And then, one day my poor fellow worker cracked. She had one more "make sure it's a winner" than she could take, and she said, "I'm sorry, ma'am, but we only sell losers here." You can just imagine the stink, and boy did the assistant manager on duty have a lot of apologizing to do. Fortunately, he thought it was pretty funny, and she was one of the few clerks who could do complex stuff like add, so she survived.

In the Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby writes about the difficulty of getting universal education.

Last week Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rep. Nita Lowey, her fellow New York Democrat, unveiled a bill that would make universal education in the poor world a U.S. government objective. Yesterday James Wolfensohn, the World Bank's president, spoke extensively about this goal in his speech at the bank's annual meeting.
.    .    .
Why is universal education unattainable in the next decade or so? The advocates of foreign assistance tend to stress the lack of aid resources. "Three point six billion dollars in additional aid flows is needed each year, for the next seven to eight years, to ensure that all children complete primary school," Wolfensohn said yesterday. "That comes to $1,200 per class of 40 children to pay for the teacher, books and classroom." But the truth about education is more complex. To get children into school, you need to address not just the supply of schools but also the demand for them.

What Clemens reports is something known for some time, but documented more and more thoroughly: the direct costs of schooling are a fairly small fraction of the total costs of schooling. Heavy expenditures on making schools even cheaper and more readily available will have a fairly small effect on the number of children attending school. Getting children into school is much harder than that. It can involve teaching illiterate parents about the value of literacy. It can involve subsidizing parents for the lost productivity of their children in primitive agriculture. It can involve improving capital markets so that lower interest rates make education a more attractive investment. Greater investment in physical capital can raise the returns to schooling. Of course, it has to be for stuff people want, as opposed to Stalinist fantasies about heavy industry. Milton Friedman once pointed out that

The cathedrals of medieval Europe, the pyramids of Egypt, the monuments of the Moghul empire in India are all testimony to the possibility of a high rate of in vestment in physical capital without a growth in the standard of living of the masses of the people.

But aid, however constructive, cannot achieve utopian targets like universal education except in the very long term. And targets that wind up not being met tend to fuel the cynicism of aid critics.

Do you have really obnoxious neighbors in your apartment building? Is the jerk upstairs a Kerry supporter who plays Kerry speeches loudly when you are trying to stay awake? Does the twerp next door play Madonna doing whatever it is she does? Do you want revenge?

Then go out and get yourself one of these. This is one French import you particularly do not want to boycott.

Yes, I am blogging about Elizabeth Hurley because I really do not have any great urge to blog about the boring debates. I woke up early this morning to catch the debates on the New York Times site, and watched Kerry try to copy Mondale in 1984 by pretending to be at least a quasi-hawk, invoking the legacy of Ronald Reagan. I should have got the extra sleep. Although I grant that it was entertaining to listen to Kerry pretend that the U.S. used to have such good relations with De Gaulle.

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian writes about straight to video movies. This was his assignment:

In a spirit of whimsical sadism, I was ordered to watch a bunch of s-2-v clunkers back-to-back, a Calvary of critical pain I endured one terrible day with the curtains drawn.

The real queen of straight-to-video is, of course, our own Elizabeth Hurley. She rules the video store. She is the empress of rental. I watched her in non-cinema releases like The Weight of Water, starring Sean Penn and directed by Kathryn Bigelow - formidable names - and in Bad Boy, with her mate and habitual co-star Denis Leary and also Serving Sara, a romcom thriller with Matthew Perry. Ever heard of those?

Hurley always looks fantastic. If there was a Looking Sexy event at the Olympics, she would get gold. But she moves everywhere with a clockwork spring-heeled sashay as if she's on a fashion runway, and speaks woodenly with that low-pitched, husky patrician drawl that sounds like she's derisively reading out the menu at Sketch.

Yet I always like Elizabeth Hurley. She is the Joan Collins of our day. Where most actors - talented and untalented alike - are wearisomely earnest, Hurley always looks as if she's not taking it too seriously. In some ways, I suspect she's too intelligent for the acting business. If she were just a film producer, or a model (and she is both of these things), everyone would adore her a lot more. As it is, she has an oeuvre mostly doomed to waste its sweetness on the desert air of the video store. But Elizabeth Hurley always endows the inferno of straight-to-video with a certain insouciant style.