DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY ONLY GOES SO FAR: The Israeli ambassador to El Salvador has been recalled. This might be why:

The Israeli ambassador to El Salvador has been recalled after he was found drunk, naked and bound in sexual bondage gear in his yard, an official said Monday.

Tsuriel Raphael has been removed from his post and the Foreign Ministry has begun searching for a replacement, said spokeswoman Zehavit Ben-Hillel.

Two weeks ago, El Salvador police found Raphael naked outside his residence, tied up, gagged and drunk, Israeli media reported. He was wearing several sex toys at the time, the media said. After he was untied, Raphael told police he was the ambassador of Israel, the reports said.

The British Broadcasting Corp. reported that he could identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth.

Frivolous motion on the joys of old-time radio:

For me, music is – always has been – about discovery. It’s what used to be amazing about listening to the radio (before it became choked with ads and regurgitated the same 20 tunes) – a random song you’ve never heard before comes on and is just perfect, hits just the right chord, at that singular moment in time. The joy in subsequently figuring out the artist, buying the album, and then popping it in your CD player was unbeatable. Being the first, telling your friends, sharing the experience of listening to something new and life-changing – being surprised by something you didn’t know even existed – that is totally what music is about. Was about.

Was about?
Yeah, like it or not, our listening patterns have changed. With the introduction of mp3 players (more honestly, the iPod) we were all given incredible levels of control over what we listened to at any moment. It’s simply next in the progression from LP (moving the needle from track to track), to cassette (pressing FF and guessing), to CD (pressing next, but still limited to one album). Now, at your fingertips, there is the power to pick any song, play it for any length of time, and skip to another song, and keep skipping until you find what it is you want to listen to.

While there is great, great joy to be had in simply shuffling at random (the wild success of the iPod Shuffle definitely illustrates this), I think all will agree that it is not enough. Now that you have control, how can you resist the temptation to take control? I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s set my iPod to shuffle during my morning commute, only to be aurally assaulted when a song by Melt Banana follows a song by Air. Likewise, who can deny the embarrassment and awkwardness when, in the midst of a tender, romantic, passionate make-out session, a Daniel Johnston tune pops up to destroy the moment entirely? (Note: I’m sure there are people in this world who love to make out to Daniel Johnston. That’s cool for them. Not for me.). Shuffling just isn’t practical, all the time. Part of the reason that radio used to work is that the playlists were hand-picked so that there could be surprises, but none like this:

A: Hey, guess what?
B: What?
A: Herpes! Are you surprised?
B: …

Inspired by my post at my own site on how much music is enough; more from Tyler Cowen here.

CREEPAZOIDAL: Check out FDR warning that the Supreme Court has too much power. It sounds like something he copied out of “Speechwriting for Megalomaniacal Dictators”.

CALL ME UNAMERICAN, but I flunk on all three counts:

We live in an age in which every American from Bakersfield to Nantucket likes lattés, has an idea for a psychological thriller, and knows that NBC is struggling to find a new ratings juggernaut, but hates latté-drinkers and Hollywood types.

Although I don’t actually hate lattes; I just think they’re dramatically inferior to a dry cappuccino.

WHO KILLED NEO-LIBERALISM? Matthew Yglesias fingers . . . neo-liberalism, with a cry of “Sic Semper Success”:

I think the primary cause of its declining fortunes is that, as tends to happen with once-ascendant political tendencies, it had a lot of successes. The most persuasive neoliberal ideas have become conventional wisdom. The netroots shares the neoliberal critique of interest group brokerage as a model of party-building. Absolutely nobody nowadays makes the sort of arguments that you heard from the 1980s-vintage left about the possibility of winning elections purely through increasing voter turnout. And a lot of the low-hanging policy fruit has already been implemented. Nobody thinks TANF will be re-reformed as an open-ended entitlement. Nobody thinks NAFTA will be rescinded. Nobody thinks we’re going to re-regulate the airlines or restore the government-sponsored telephone monopoly. I even think people have privately reconciled themselves to the fact that race-based affirmative action is going to fade away. And so on and so forth.

What tends to happen when a political tendency achieves a fair amount of success, however, is that what continues to make that tendency distinctive are precisely those strains with the least appeal and cogency. Similarly, insofar as neoliberals succeeded in reformulating a more politically viable conception of liberalism they’ve tended to render their own habits of mind less relevant since the revived, more viable liberalism wants more self-confident, more earnest advocates.

REWRITING HISTORY? If true, this is an enormous scandal:

. . . replication is impossible if someone else has changed the dataset since the original analysis was conducted. But that would never happen, right? Maybe not. In an interesting paper, Alexander Ljungqvist, Christopher Malloy, and Felicia Marston take a look at the I/B/E/S dataset of analyst stock recommendations “made” during the period from 1993 to 2000. Here is what they found:

Comparing two snapshots of the entire historical I/B/E/S database of research analyst stock recommendations, taken in 2002 and 2004 but each covering the same time period 1993-2002, we identify tens of thousands of changes which collectively call into question the principle of replicability of empirical research. The changes are of four types: 1) The non-random removal of 19,904 analyst names from historic recommendations (“anonymizations”); 2) the addition of 19,204 new records that were not previously part of the database; 3) the removal of 4,923 records that had been in the data; and 4) alterations to 10,698 historical recommendation levels. In total, we document 54,729 ex post changes to a database originally containing 280,463 observations.

. . . Not surprisingly, they find that these changes typically make it appear as if analysts were (a) more cautious and (b) more accurate in their predictions. The clear implication from the paper is that analysts and their employers had a vested interest in selectively editing this particular dataset; while I doubt that anyone cares enough about most questions in political science to do something similar, it is an important cautionary tale. The rest of their paper, “Rewriting History,” is available from SSRN. (Hat tip: Big Picture)

The I/B/E/S database keeps track of analyst recommendations for 35,000 companies. It’s used in research into financial markets, as well as by people who rank analyst performance. Altering the database is pretty major, though it’s not clear whether this is something like grade-grubbing, where analysts only correct the mistakes that make them look bad, or whether it’s actual fraud.

I always read these things with a slightly admiring air—not for the researchers, though this is great work, but for the criminals. I get all nervous and blushing when I lie to telemarketers in order to get them off the phone. I would never in a zillion years have the guts to bribe someone to alter my past recommendations in a database. I don’t admire it, exactly, but I’d like to know where I could buy some of that nonchalance.

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM . . . . The carnival of the recipes is up. This week’s theme: what to serve guest bloggers company.

LAURA MCKENNA: Brooks is right. The world is growing more left.

I’m not sure I agree with this. The world has gotten a lot more anti-Bush. And the left is getting more left . . . but the left is not the world. Does a swing against Bush mean America is ready for national healthcare, expanded affirmative action, gay marriage, and so on? Colour me sceptical.

MEDPUNDIT SAYS you might want to cancel that early lung cancer screening.

Most people believe intuitively that doing a periodic chest x-ray has the potential to save them from lung cancer. The worst scenario is when a patient is diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and then blames their physician for never doing a chest x-ray or CT scan, even if they didn’t have any symptoms. In fact, you could have a chest x-ray every month and still die of advanced lung cancer. Lung cancer is one of those cancers that has many faces. There are some that are so aggressive, finding them early makes no difference. By the time they’ve shown up, they’ve already spread. There are others that are slow and passive and easily treated, even if we only find them once they become symptomatic. But try telling an angry cancer patient that. Especially one who read the first set of news stories touting the benefits of routine CT scans, but missed this weeks’s news.

THE NEW YORK TIMES is worried about the mortgage market, and by extension, the market for homes. Here in DC, where I’m living right now, the bottom has clearly dropped out of the market. But in New York City, my permanent home, my mother the real estate agent reports that the buying market continues to be hot. She says her colleagues all marvel that there is still so much money left in the city. This may be because New York City, where sales often-have to get past co-op boards or condo management, was much less driven by sub-prime mortgages than other areas of the country.

DAVE SCHULER asks some questions about subprime loans.

LIBERTARIANS ON IRAQ: One of the more interesting and lively debates on Iraq I’ve read in a long time.

DANIEL DREZNER points out that Jake Weisberg’s argument that we should replace sanctions with engagement has a tiny little hole in it:

The constructive engagement approach rests on an odd assumption — that the leaders of a rogue state are somehow unaware that they will become trapped in a web of economic interdependence. The truth is that applying constructive engagement against as a means to induce economic and political change tends not to work either. Put crudely, if a regime wants to stay in power at all costs, all of the economic openness in the world is not going to make much difference, because the government that wants to stay in power will simply apply strict controls over trade with the outside world. If the United States were to unilaterally and unconditionally lift all barriers to exchange with Cuba, the government in Havana would immediately erect a maze of regulations designed to limit Cuban trade with the United States.

SPEAKING OF BLOGS The Economist has a piece (not written by me) in this week’s print edition on economists who blog.

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION: After long quiescence, inflation is making a comeback. Obviously, high oil prices are a big part of this. But there’s another part of the story: the entrance of China (and to a lesser extent India) into the global labour market has effectively held down prices in developed countries, even when those economies are running at full capacity. Economic bottlenecks and problems with the financial system in China are making it harder for China to effectively export deflation (deflation is the opposition of inflation), which means consumer prices may rise still further.

That, in turn, is forcing central banks to raise interest rates even when the economy isn’t that strong. Both the European Central Bank and the Bank of England did so today, and while the former was all-but-foreordained, the latter move was a big surprise to everyone. If you have a subscription to The Economist (and if you don’t, what are you waiting for?! We’re giving away four free trial issues right now), you can read about it here; that’s what I’ve been labouring on under the sweltering August sun*.

Why should I care? I hear you cry. Why, because in these days of global markets, we’re all as interconnected as characters in an MCI ad; when the European Central Bank sneezes, your stock portfolio catches cold. Plus, if we want to be able to take a break from buying all the tea, (and televisions, and turkey basters, and tricycles) in China, we need Europe to get off le divan and get some gosh-darn economic growth. Which is harder to do when the interest rate on Das MasterCard just went up another two points.

*Well, technically I am under it–it’s just that there’s a roof and some air conditioning between us.

I’VE LONG SAID that if the Palestinians had had a Gandhi, they would have had their own state years ago. Matthew Yglesias makes the point at more length:

(continued below the fold, to accomodate those who do not come to Instapundit for my marathon-style post length. Those who are interested can pretend it’s a hyperlink to another site.)

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GIVE HER SOME AIR! In New York City, where I am, an unexpected side effect of the heat and humidity–I can’t breathe. I have mild asthma, and the air quality must be some kind of bad, because the bottoms of my lungs have that burning soreness you get when you’ve had a bad cough, or decided to run a 5K after seven years on the couch. Which, incidentally, I had to sleep sitting up on last night so I could breathe easier.

Meanwhile, tempers are fraying. I saw two ladies nearly come to blows yesterday over the last iced mocha at the local deli.

One more day until it breaks. Must . . . stay . . . alive . . . one . . . more . . . day . . .

MATTHEW YGLESIAS sums up the frustration of many economists who want efficient gas/carbon taxes, rather than next-to-useless alternative fuel subsidies and surprisingly ineffective increases in CAFE standards:

Tragically, if you tell people you’re going to tax their ft ossile fuels, they freak out and your political career dies a swift and merciless death. But if you tell people you’re going to subsidize alternative energy sources the people will like that. Functionally, however, these are basically the same thing, except for the fact that the tax method works much, much better.

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES Chris Anderson, the brilliant editor of Wired, says that digital photography isn’t just making film cheaper, or special effects more spectacular; it’s changing the way actors make movies.

THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE on men not at work has gotten a lot of coverage here and elsewhere. It has inspired a provocative post on gender roles over at Family Scholars:

The great gender challenge of our day has been defined by our elites as the fact that men still do not contribute as much as women do to the domestic sphere. . . .

But I wonder if the great gender challenge of the rest of this century will be the abolition of the norms and practices that have supported the male breadwinning role–the idea that men should, indeed, must work, often in jobs not to their taste, throughout their adult lives on behalf of a wife and children. According to the distinguished anthropologist David Gilmore, the danger with men is that they often drift towards entropy unless they are given a unique and highly valued role to play on behalf of their society. This entropy certainly seems to be on full display in this sobering NYTimes story on grown, able-bodied men in the U.S. who refuse to or are unable to work.

WONDERING ABOUT the Floyd Landis doping test? Chemist and blogger extraordinaire Derek Lowe has the scoop.

HUGO CHAVEZ HAS MADE enormous changes at PDVSA (pronounced Peh-deh-VEH-sa by those in the know), the Venezuelan state-run oil company, since he came into power. This Page One article in the Wall Street Journal details many of them.

In some cases, Mr. Chávez has literally taken PDVSA assets and handed them to the poor. The elegant five-story headquarters for PDVSA Servicios, a subsidiary that oversaw communications and technology services for the oil giant, has been turned into the Bolivarian University of Venezuela. The university’s 5,000 students get a free ride: tuition, materials, health care and food are paid for by the oil company.

Students and teachers view the campus’s marble-lined elevators, expensive artwork and baseball field as evidence that PDVSA’s executives lived too cushy a life for a poor nation before Mr. Chávez came to power. As a group of students and teachers play baseball, 36-year-old English teacher Claire Bendahan looks on in approval. “This is socialism in action,” she says. “Now our country’s oil money is being used for the poor.”

Unfortunately, as the WSJ piece documents, that oil revenue is eroding–by my understanding, because Chavez sacked all the managers who knew anything, and replaced them with reliable political supporters who spend money on social programmes instead of oil exploration. The only thing saving Chavez from himself is steadily rising oil prices; if they reverse, it’s a good bet that the Venezuelan government will fall, doing serious damage to the resurgant left-wing populist strain of Latin American politics. I’m told that PDVSA used to be known as the only state-run oil company that was competitive with the majors in terms of expertise and efficiency; now it is rapidly descending past other state-run firms in terms of competence. Since Venezuela’s oil is unusually heavy, sulphurous, and difficult to extract, that decline will be a disaster for Venezuela’s poor, who may be enjoying those marble elevators without electricity to run them if oil falls back towards $25 a barrel. This is not some grim gloating of a classically liberal economics writer at having been proven right. If PDVSA screws up the Venezuelan oil supply, consumers around the world will suffer, the poorest worst–and the poorest Venezuelans worst of all.

IS MEL GIBSON MANIC DEPRESSIVE? That’s about the only conceivably exculpatory thing I’ve heard, since some manic-depressives do suffer from paranoia and hallucinations. But even if it were true–and whether or not it is, I bet we hear about it on a very special Barbara Walters–I doubt it will save his career.

A NUMBER OF Y’ALL have emailed me (and I presume the other guest bloggers) about the various claims that Qana was a hoax, based either on the time stamps on the rescue photos, or the fact that the building seems to have fallen down hours after the airstrike.

As I wrote to several people, having spent a year working at Ground Zero, I have a very high level of scepticism about these sorts of conspiracy theories. The photo conspiracy seems to be based on the ignorance of how wire services work; its author has confused the dateline, which indicates when the wire service loaded the photos into their system, with a digital timestamp. And the claims that the building couldn’t have collapsed after so much time sound remarkably like the WTC Building 7 conspiracy theories, which were based on the fact that 7WTC, the farthest from the twin towers, inexplicably collapsed nine hours after the planes hit, even though it suffered no apparent structural damage.

In the “fog of war” all sorts of rumors get started–remember how tens of thousands were thought killed in the WTC, or the various reports of impending terror attacks in the days that followed? And when something bad happens, it’s normal to look for reasons it’s not your fault, especially if it was an accident. But I need a pretty high standard of evidence to accuse the victims of a tragedy of staging it to make us look bad. Meanwhile, it’s not exactly helpful that many of the people arguing against the conspiracy theories are making remarks that sound like borderline anti-semitism, trending into grand Zionist conspiracy theories.

I’ve never managed to convince anyone of anything on the Israel/Palestine conflict, and perhaps it’s impossible (though perhaps I’m just a lacklustre debater). But I think there are helpful and less helpful ways to express the deep rifts that divide us, and looking for grand plots in the chaos strikes me as among the least productive.

TIMES SURE HAVE CHANGED. Greg Mankiw points out that it wasn’t all that long ago that the New York Times was editorialising against the minimum wage.

My position on the minimum wage is like that of many economists: I’m agin it. It does a lousy job of targeting poverty, because most of the people who get it aren’t poor, and most of the people who are poor don’t get it. To the extent that it does help the poor, it often does so by transferring money from other poor people–those who lose jobs due to the higher minimum wage, and those who shop at places that pay the minimum wage. Instead, I favour the Earned Income Tax Credit.

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