there are many provable irregularities in the official American tsunami story that simply have to be recorded now, or forever be lost in the sands of time. It is beyond any doubt that a giant tidal wave (tsunami) smashed its way through South and South East Asia, and still had enough legs to continue all the way across the Indian Ocean to Africa, where it killed and injured a few hundred more. So the only question we must ask, is whether this tsunami was a natural or man-made catastrophe

"And reality will continue to be worse than any fiction I could write."

"I get a sense -- and you can't quantify this -- but I get a sense that the system may have become too prosecutorial, and without enough consultation between and among the regulators and the prosecutors. The sense that many businesspeople have is that they're under siege from serial investigations, and serial regulatory prosecutions, and criminal and civil prosecutions.

"That's what I worry about here. And I hope that we'll find ourselves getting into a more balanced environment.... I think that good judgment and common sense and balance are what's called for, so we don't have this perception by business that there is an uncoordinated, duplicative, and excessively harsh set of things they have to contend with all the time... what I'm talking about here is coordination among the SEC, U.S. attorneys, other regulatory agencies, and state's attorneys general."

In a 2000 New Yorker interview, Sontag said, "That I have had girlfriends as well as boyfriends is what? Is something I guess I never thought I was supposed to have to say, since it seems to me the most natural thing in the world."

Then in 2001, Time magazine reported that Sontag and Leibovitz were raising a child. This was mentioned in a People magazine obit.

A Times spokesperson told a New York Daily News gossip columnist that "Our extensive reporting in recent weeks did not substantiate the widespread reports of any relationship of Miss Sontag and Miss Leibovitz beyond friendship… We should probably have mentioned the friendship, but nothing further was warranted by the facts we could gather."

After "extensive reporting" over a period of "weeks," The Times was unable to locate the public sources I mentioned above? Perhaps I don’t understand the meaning of "extensive" or "reporting."

The Times did note that Sontag was once "photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka ad" and the Daily News columnist concluded that that "has to be the best euphemism for 'lesbian' I've ever heard."

The Times promptly made a liar out of its spokesman in a press statement issued by Daniel Okrent, the paper’s public editor. The "extensive reporting" apparently consisted of asking Sontag's son from her marriage to Philip Rieff and Leibovitz if the two women had a romantic relationship.

"Ms. Leibovitz would not discuss the subject with The Times, and Ms. Sontag's son, David Rieff, declined to confirm any details about the relationship," the statement read.

This is offensive for a number of reasons. It shows just how lazy the Times was in chasing down this fact.

More important, the newspaper effectively gave Sontag's son and Leibovitz a veto over what information would be contained in the obit by restricting its reporting on this subject to just those two people. That is not journalism.

Update [1/7/05]... Reader Matthew Harris says,

Just wondering how sensitive the Times is when the deceased, not quite out of the closet gay is a conservative, say Roy Cohn. And do kids of passed-away conservatives get to decide what the obit can and can't say?

Mario Puzo wrote in his classic Mafia novel, The Godfather, that “a lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” Spitzer, the consummate lawyer with his briefcase, stole nearly $3 million in broad daylight under the guise of an antitrust lawsuit, but that wasn’t enough. So now a 61-year man faces the loss of all personal liberty for up to seven years—the maximum penalty for perjury in New York—because he didn’t do a sufficient job of groveling when Spitzer and his thugs came to rob his company.

Respected and successful newspapers, much like respected and successful people, must know who they are and where they stand. Thus, our editorial pages espouse a clear and consistent philosophy that we summarize as "free people, free markets" and that encompasses a passionate belief in the virtue of individual liberties, free markets, free trade and even the free movement of people. We stand by this philosophy not just in the U.S. but around the world. Whether you call our philosophy conservative or classical liberal or libertarian matters little. The point is that we espouse it with clarity and consistency regardless of its popularity in any particular time or place.

I know we have stopped "corresponding," and that you claim such as a victory for your columnist corrections policy (imagine what a victory you could claim if you just stopped checking email altogether). But this one is so egregious I had to bother, though I'm sure it will go down the hole like all the others.

In today’s op-ed "Choose and Lose" by Barry Schwartz, the author states:

What's more, the administrative costs of keeping track of these private accounts, according to President Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security, will be 10 to 30 times the cost of administering the current system, eating up almost all of the hypothetical gains that equity investments could provide.

Here is the report of the Commission. On page 9 and again on page 97 it sets the administrative costs at 30 basis points, which means 3 tenths of one percent. This figure was agreed by the Commission and the Office of the Actuary of the Social Security Administration.

Here is the statement of the Social Security Trust Fund from its Board of Trustees. You can see that administrative costs for the existing system are $4.6 billion on an asset base of $1530.8 billion, or 30 basis points. The costs are the same. They are not "10 to 30 times."

Why the Times would have ever let a professor of psychology mouth off about the administrative costs of Social Security I have no idea. But I'm sure you and Gail Collins will come up with one.

"Thanks for the post on Barry Schwartz's error. Molly Ivins, in the column sent out by Creators Syndicate today, repeats the '10 to 30 times' error (and since she is an unrepentant plagiarist, we know where she got it, don't we? but we won't say so) and because of your warning we took that paragraph out."

I guess the unasked question is -- why does an editor of a regional paper feel it's OK to regularly run the work of a writer he considers an unrepentant plagiarist?

And today there are two more on the op-ed page. One is from Gene Sperling, the Kerry campaign's top economic advisor (that's a helluva credential), arguing that the richest 1% of Americans are just going to have to pay higher taxes to right Social Security's finances (but didn't Krugman say that the system has no problem?). But it's the second one today that is truly remarkable -- by Barry Schwartz, a psychology professor at Swarthmore. He spends the first half of his op-ed offering his opinions on the pitfalls of investing in stocks (that makes sense -- don't you seek your investment advice from psychology professors?). But then he gets down to his real business -- the idea that the increased choice and control Social Security participants would have through personal accounts is in and of itself a bad thing:

"Whether people are choosing jam in a grocery store, essay topics in a college class, or even potential partners in an evening of 'speed dating,' the more options they have, the less likely they are to make a choice. In other words, increasing options induces people to opt out of choosing altogether, and this comes into play when people decide how to invest their money for retirement."

Schwartz goes on to cite various "scientific" evidence for this view -- without even hinting at any substantiation that it applies in this case -- that offering people a couple of index funds to choose from in a personal account would in fact cause them "to opt out of choosing altogether." And he never explains why such opting out, even if it did occur, would leave anyone worse off than he is now. But that's the way it is with public intellectuals like Schwartz -- the pseudoscientific talk is just a rationale for a political agenda that has nothing to do with any of the cited evidence. If you have any doubt about Schwartz's agenda, check out this column he wrote for The New Republic in August, defending Kerry's plan to increase taxes on the rich. According to Schwartz, it's practically our duty to tax them because it will make them feel better.

"...if people already have more choices in life than they can handle, then adding wealth only exacerbates the problem. Conversely, it should be possible to make the rich better off by reducing their wealth. ...The point is simply that we now know there is some significant subset of people likely to be made better off through heavier taxation, and that these people reside at the top end of the wealth distribution. Given that a concern for people's welfare has traditionally been one of the chief moral objections to taxing wealth (at least among those sympathetic to redistribution in principle), a policy of heavier taxation for the very wealthy may be the only moral course of action."

Don't you love the way pseudoscientists talk? Consider the presumption and the arrogance when he says, "we now know there is some significant subset of people likely to be made better off through heavier taxation." Who is "we"? Well informed scientists, as opposed to the grubby masses laboring under the delusion they want to keep the money they earned? Why "now"? Because, at last, "we" have finally performed conclusive experiments that absolutely prove it? And what does it mean to "know"? Do experiments in psychology produce definitive knowledge that can be applied to public policy? And what does it mean to "be made better off"? According to whom? "We"? What do the people in question, themselves, have to say about that? Did "we" even ask them? This is precisely why plaintiff's attorneys love pseudoscientists, and pay them vast sums to testify in product liability trials. They articulate fundamentally ungrounded and deeply opinionated views with such conviction, and with such great credentials, that they appear to be facts -- and the attorneys only bring in the pseudoscientists whom they have pre-screened to be sure they will represent the plaintiff's cause. And so it is with the Times, calling this expert witness in this political trial for the future of Social Security.

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Tuesday, January 04, 2005

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Monday, January 03, 2005

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