TONY ADRAGNA ON THE U.N.’S HUMANITARIAN FAILURES: Worth reading.

CASTRO’S FAILURE, VIA BRAD DELONG:

The hideously depressing thing is that Cuba under Battista–Cuba in 1957–was a developed country. Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. Cuba in 1957 had as many vehicles per capita as Uruguay, Italy, or Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had 45 TVs per 1000 people–fifth highest in the world. Cuba today has fewer telephones per capita than it had TVs in 1957.

You take a look at the standard Human Development Indicator variables–GDP per capita, infant mortality, education–and you try to throw together an HDI for Cuba in the late 1950s, and you come out in the range of Japan, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Israel. Today? Today the UN puts Cuba’s HDI in the range of Lithuania, Trinidad, and Mexico. (And Carmelo Mesa-Lago thinks the UN’s calculations are seriously flawed: that Cuba’s right HDI peers today are places like China, Tunisia, Iran, and South Africa.)

Thus I don’t understand lefties who talk about the achievements of the Cuban Revolution: “…to have better health care, housing, education, and general social relations than virtually all other comparably developed countries.” Yes, Cuba today has a GDP per capita level roughly that of–is “comparably developed”–Bolivia or Honduras or Zimbabwe, but given where Cuba was in 1957 we ought to be talking about how it is as developed as Italy or Spain.

To coin a phrase: Indeed.

SOME GOOD NEWS: There are roughly 50 new newspapers in Iraq already. But not that many weblogs. Yet.

(Via Jeff Jarvis).

SOMEBODY IS FIGURING IT OUT:

The public is fixated on Jayson Blair, the young reporter for The New York Times who hoodwinked his readers and editors with willful plagiarism, lies, and made-up sources, but a much less sinister occurrence undermines the credibility of most newspapers every day: the unintentional errors, large and small, that make their way into each issue. . . .

Mr. Rogers recalls a San Francisco Chronicle story from Afghanistan that referred to someone carrying a “300-millimeter pistol” – roughly the size, a reader pointed out, of a gun on a battleship. “A lot of us aren’t very good about firearms or the metric system,” he laughs. . . .

Still, editors and reporters both agree the issue of accuracy and its effect on readers’ trust is a serious one – one reason the ASNE sponsored a lengthy study several years ago. The conclusion: Everything from a misused “affect” to a mislabeled map erodes public confidence.

But a willingness to quickly correct mistakes goes a long way toward restoring it.

Yep. They could learn a lot from bloggers, that way. Fix errors promptly, prominently, and add the correction to the original story on the website. Putting corrections in an inconspicuous separate column, where you usually can’t even understand the original error in context (as, say, The New York Times and a host of other papers do) and you’re not really running corrections at all.

UPDATE: Reader Jonathan Guest emails:

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years: Whenever I hear “journalists” discussing a subject that I know something about, airplanes, manufacturing, guns, even bicycling, running, essentially anything that I have SOME familiarity with, I notice that the journalist is utterly ignorant about the subject. I wonder, don’t you have the same reaction about legal matters, nano-science, etc? I wonder if specialists of most every field have the same reaction, and because we don’t discuss it directly, no one realizes that the average journalists knows just about nothing about nearly everything.

Yeah. I mean, I realize that generalists can’t know as much as specialists know about their own field. But the number of butt-obvious boners (like “300 mm pistol”) coupled with — as above — a perverse pride in ignorance (“we don’t understand firearms or the metric system, tee hee”) does kind of support this theory. I blame J-school for this. If I ran a newspaper, I’d make my new hires take a 1000-question general-knowledge exam.

UPDATE: Carter Wood emails:

My prospective boss, Hasso Hering, made me take a test before being hired in 1986 at the Albany Democrat-Herald in Oregon. Things like, “When was the Second World War?”

Apparently, lots of applicants failed even that.

Sigh.

BRIAN MICKLETHWAIT HAS IT RIGHT: “First they went for New York, then they hit Bali, now they are hitting their own backyard. This is terrorism back in serious business?” He continues:

Why did they hit New York? Because they could. Now, they can’t. Why did they hit Bali? Because they could. Now they can’t. So why are they now hitting their own back yard? Because they can. And that’s all they can.

I think he’s right. I certainly hope so.

IT’S SKBUBBA’S ONE-YEAR BLOGIVERSARY! Drop by and wish him well.

A MATRIX REVIEW THAT REVOLVES AROUND CORNEL WEST: Not bad for a guy with only one line.

MATT ENGEL, of “Olive Garden” fame, has a new piece. It’s panned by John Cole here.

To be fair to Engel (though God only knows why anyone would want to do that) I should point out that he probably didn’t choose the headline.

SALAM PAX has a post that casts some (more) doubt on the BBC’s version of the Jessica Lynch story, mentioned below:

While talking to them about what they are supposed to do the name “Jessica” is dropped. Aseel, one of the female volunteers, tells us that this is the hospital where Jessica was held in captivity. Both main hospitals in this city were turned into command centers. One had fedayeen in it and was bombed to the ground by the Americans and in the other Ali Hassan Al-Majeed was holding court for a while, before he moved to another place. When the American forces came to rescue Jessica “chemical” Ali was already out, the manager of the hospital and a couple of doctors were asked to get dressed in civilian clothes and get out as fast as they can. The hospital was not damaged.

Would American special forces, getting to a “command center” just after its commanders were hustled out, really show up firing blanks?

UPDATE: Toby Blyth has an observation about the BBC’s main witness that the BBC seems to have missed: “Funnily enough, this doctor now claims that she was well treated and he was going to deliver her up to the Americans anyway. Odd, isn’t it, that this same doctor would be guilty of a war crime if the allegations of Private Lynch’s mistreatment as a POW are true.”

You can trust him, though, because he’s not an American.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s more: “It’s almost too easy to beat them up. They absolutely never had any military sources or even bothered to check.”

REALCLEARPOLITICS on Jayson Blair:

Sheesh. I haven’t seen such a deluge of commentary on one subject since 9/11. Not even the War in Iraq produced this much chatter. But I guess this is what happens when our narcissistic media culture gets hold of a topic that combines two issues they are totally infatuated with: diversity and themselves.

Indeed.

SHANTI MANGALA WONDERS why the world is ignoring Africa’s latest problems.

A HANDS-ON FUTURE? I look at job prospects for the next generation, over at GlennReynolds.com.

NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME: The FBI, while shadowing Dr. Steven Hatfill, ran over him with a car.

Dr. Steven J. Hatfill suffered a bruised foot and abrasions after the incident Saturday but wound up getting a ticket for “walking to create hazard” that carries a $5 fine, according to a copy of the citation provided Monday by Washington police.

Hatfill’s the one with the bruised foot, but it’s the FBI that looks lame here.

MORE ON TENNESSEE’S LOUSY “SUPER-DMCA” LEGISLATION, which would make you a felon for installing TiVo without the cable company’s permission:

The House Budget Subcommittee hearing on HB457 has been moved up to TOMORROW, May 20th, at 10:00am! This also the same day that the Senate Judiciary Committee meets at 3:30pm. We fully expect the bills supporters may also try some fancy footwork througout tomorrow to lead astray any opponents of the legislation so that it might move on through to the General Assembly.

I don’t know why this hasn’t gotten more attention from the state’s mainstream media, but perhaps some folks will show up and ask tough questions at the hearing tomorrow. People should start with this question asked by the Rocky Mountain News:

Did you get permission from your cable company before you bought your kids a new VCR? Did your telephone company say you could use a modem to log on to the Internet? Did your Internet service provider give written approval for your Webcam?

Do you think you should have to ask them?

Perhaps some media folks might ask the legislators if they think the voters think they should have to ask permission.

DON’T MIND THE MAGGOTS: Megan McArdle has a piece on New York budgeting over at TechCentralStation.

DAVE KOPEL WRITES that Congress should bar “junk” lawsuits that are actually aimed at infringing people’s constitutional rights:

Suing someone in revenge for their lawful exercise of First Amendment rights is known as a SLAPP – a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. Many legislatures have enacted laws against such litigation abuse, and congressional action against one particular form of SLAPP is a good first step towards a nationwide ban on all SLAPPs.

The form in question? Well, read on:

At an American Bar Association symposium in 1999, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys for the antigun lawsuits explained that the attorneys had read the Dun & Bradstreet reports on the firearms companies, estimated how much the companies could spend defending themselves against litigation, and then filed so many cases in so many jurisdictions that the gun companies would not be able to spend the money to see the cases through to a verdict. . . .

There is no right to file abusive lawsuits that chill the exercise of constitutional rights. That is why the Supreme Court, in the 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan, restricted libel suits that infringed on First Amendment rights. Pennsylvania, like most other states, has enacted legislation affirming that gun laws should be made by the legislature, not by trial attorneys trying to end-run the democratic process.

Sounds like an evil, anti-rights conspiracy to me. Somebody investigate these guys. You know that the New York Times would be all over them — and rightly — if this were a conspiracy to bankrupt abortion providers via frivolous lawsuits.

POLAND STANDS TALL, France and Germany act small:

Hard to believe, but Poland is now arguably a more consequential global power than either France or Germany. And the angry reactions in Berlin, Brussels and Paris to this news speaks eloquently to the tectonic shift under way in Europe after Iraq. Their diplomats grumbled widely that the Poles were vassals to the U.S., ingrates willing to take European Union subsidies and undermine efforts to build a common European foreign policy. “Mercenaries,” a German ambassador on the Continent called them in an interview with us.

Lacking other arguments, France and Germany call the Poles, and the majority of current and future EU countries that backed the U.S. over Iraq, “bad Europeans.” This appeal is a new form of euro-chauvinism–in other words, the advocates of a vital trans-Atlantic link (such as Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar) are traitors who’ve made the wrong choice.

Euro-chauvinism, indeed. Meanwhile, Roger Simon deals a cruel blow:

The problem with the French is not their knee-jerk anti-Americanism–it is that they are second rate. They don’t do it well anymore. And I’m not just talking about the decline of French music (since the 40s), French film (since the 70s) or even French food (still okay). I’m talking about FRENCH ART itself.

You’ll have to follow the link to see what he’s talking about. I think he’s being unfair — it doesn’t look like art to me. Oh, wait. . . .

I ACTUALLY DON’T LIKE WAL-MART — I prefer the trendy atmosphere of its upscale competitor Tarzhay. It’s like shopping at your favorite nightclub! Er, if your favorite nightclub is actually a discount retailer with an upscale feel, anyway. But the New York Times is dumping on Wal-Mart again, and it’s getting dumped on in turn by Susanna Cornett and, very amusingly, by ScrappleFace.

THE ELF SCANDAL’S TENTACLES apparently reach to Venezuela:

Massive under-the-table dealings with the Venezuelan government of 10 years ago have involved witness accounts of espionage, Swiss bank accounts; brown envelopes filled cash for politicians, luxury Paris apartments and mansions in Corsica, bribes and treachery.

Perhaps it would be simpler to provide a list of officials who did not receive bribes from ELF.

ARI FLEISCHER IS RESIGNING. I suspect that we’ll see some other people step down this summer, as it’s the last chance to do so before the campaign gears up.

LAST WEEK’S MAIL brought a copy of Eugene Volokh’s new book, Academic Legal Writing: Law Review Articles, Student Notes, and Seminar Papers. I’ve looked at it over the weekend and it looks quite good; I plan to require my seminar students to buy it.

I’ve used Eugene’s Writing a Student Article piece since it came out, and found it helpful. This is in a similar vein, but there’s a lot more to the book. And the subject is important, and under-treated. As Alex Kozinski says in the introduction:

It is difficult to overstate the importance of a written paper for a young lawyer’s career, especially if the piece is published. Grades, of necessity, are somewhat grainy and subjective: is an A- that much better than a B+? Letters of recommendation can be more useful, but they still rely on someone else’s judgment, and they often have a stale booster quality to them. Words like “fabulous” and “extraordinary” lose their force by dint of repetition. . . .

A paper is very different. It is the applicant’s raw work product, unfiltered through a third-party evaluator. By reading it, you can personally evaluate the student’s writing, research, logic and judgment. . . . Writing a paper engages so much of the lawyer’s art that no other predictor of likely success on the job comes close. A well-written, well-researched thoughtful paper can clinch that law firm job or clerkship. It is indispensible if you aim to teach.

That’s absolutely right. That’s why I encourage my students who write first-rate papers to have them published, and I’m happy to say that quite a few have. (The law review note-writing process is nice, but there’s so much structure and hand-holding in that process that it’s a poor substitute for a true article, in my opinion, since it’s harder to judge the writer’s work, and self-starting character, from a note.) This book provides a lot of useful guidance for students — and, I suspect, rather a lot of junior faculty — in a slim and easy to assimilate form, on everything from how to choose a topic and title, to how to edit your own work, and deal with editors, to how to get published. I expect that it will do very well.

HOWARD KURTZ OBSERVES:

Blair seemed untouchable not just because of race, some Times folk say, but because he fit the Raines mold of a young, hungry, single go-getter who could parachute into places and quickly produce a story. Thus, even when prosecutors denounced Blair’s reporting on the Washington sniper case, Raines sent him a congratulatory e-mail.

Had this sort of sweeping breakdown occurred in a government agency, the Times would be the first to demand that senior officials be held accountable. Yet Sulzberger is not inclined in that direction. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives,” he told his paper.

Didn’t Ken Lay say something similar? But don’t worry: Operation Grey Lady Freedom is underway.

MICKEY KAUS reports on “astonishing, even stunning” evidence that welfare reform is working.

DAVID CARR IS LAUGHING IN BILL THOMPSON’S FACE. Bwahahaha!

DIGITAL WARRIORS: Steven Den Beste has an op-ed in the WSJ’s OpinionJournal.