Thoughtful essay by Godfrey Hodgson…

Whatever you think of the war in Iraq, the absence in the middle east of part of the Mississippi national guard was hardly the reason for the administration’s tardy and incompetent response. The explanation of that is simpler: it is to be found in the callous indifference among conservatives towards the poor.

While it is true that the class bias of the Bush administration’s domestic and budget policies has helped weaken the ability of both state and federal agencies to respond to an almost unprecedented domestic disaster, it was nevertheless an absence of sympathy, not a lack of means, which motivated the low priority given to poor, mostly black victims…

Over and above the horror and the tragedy and the devastation of the Katrina disaster hangs a bigger question: about the ability of an advanced industrial nation to cope with large-scale disasters that are man-made rather than orchestrated by nature.

FEMA — the US federal agency that is supposed to deal with what happened in New Orleans — has been rolled into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the super-department created to make the US secure after the 9/11 attacks. (This may explain, by the way, why Bush & Co apparently knew so little about the impending threat to the Southern states. It’s clear that FEMA had always ranked the flooding of New Orleans as one of the three biggest disasters that could befall the US. In the old days, the head of FEMA had a seat at the Cabinet table and might even have had the ear of the President. But now, advice and information from FEMA has to be filtered through another layer of bureaucracy — the Homeland Security Secretary, who is probably obsessed with terrorism. It would be interesting to know when the impending hurricane made it onto the agenda for the President’s daily security briefing — if indeed there were such briefings during Dubya’s five-week summer vacation.)

But I digress. There is a connection between New Orleans and the kind of global terrorism that obsesses the Homeland Security boys. The connection exists because one accepted scenario involves Al-Qaeda getting hold of a nuclear weapon — either as a Russian army-surplus item, or as a homemade ‘dirty’ bomb made by mixing conventional explosives with some radioactive materials — and setting it off in a major Western city. In such an event, an entire city would have to be evacuated and effectively sealed off — much as Chernobyl was over a decade ago.

What the New Orleans case suggests is that such an evacuation is currently beyond the competence of the US authorities. There was clearly no plan for getting people out of the threatened city — just exhortations and injunctions and advice to people to get the hell out of it. But those in charge must have known that something like 100,000 of the city’s poorest residents possessed neither the means nor the vehicles to flee. The police service clearly did not have the resources to nudge or force them into action. There was no serious provision of free public transport for these people. And so on.

Which leaves me with the thought that despite all the hoo-hah about ‘Homeland Security’, despite all the border checks and fingerprinting and watch lists, despite the DHS’s $41 billion budget, the US would be unable to do what would need to be done in the event of an Al-Qaeda ‘spectacular’ along the lines suggested above.

I’m sure that there are lots of people in Washington — in the civil service and the Congress – who are thinking about this. But I doubt that the Bush regime will be much moved by such thoughts. As Paul Krugman pointed out, this is a regime that lives in a reality-distortion field, uninterested in the real responsibilities of governing, and hijacking the resources of the state to pursue private obsessions (stopping stem cell research, outlawing abortion, toppling Saddam, ignoring global warming and looking after the oil and aerospace industries). This is a regime that believes you can invade a country without doing any planning for the aftermath, that you can wage war without killing American soldiers, that you can treat the global environment with contempt, and that you can do all this while reducing taxes.

Timothy Noah has two lovely essays in Slate, taking the mickey out of what he calls Summer-House Lit. In England we would call it Second-Home Lit. Part 1 – “On not owning a vacation home” is here. Part 2 is here.

Terrific NYT column by Paul Krugman. Sample:

I don’t think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn’t rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn’t get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I’d argue, our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government. They like waging war, but they don’t like providing security, rescuing those in need or spending on preventive measures. And they never, ever ask for shared sacrifice.

Yesterday Mr. Bush made an utterly fantastic claim: that nobody expected the breach of the levees. In fact, there had been repeated warnings about exactly that risk.

So America, once famous for its can-do attitude, now has a can’t-do government that makes excuses instead of doing its job. And while it makes those excuses, Americans are dying.

Andrew Brown has written a terrific profile of the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. Sample:

In the early 70s, as a graduate student at Harvard with no formal training in biology, he wrote five papers that changed forever the way that evolution would be understood. He came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs. Then he analysed the reasons why, in almost all species, one sex is pickier about who it mates with than the other; then the ways in which children can be genetically programmed to demand more attention than their parents can provide. Even the way in which patterns of infanticide vary by sex and class in the Punjab is predicted by one of Trivers’s papers.

None of which persuaded Harvard to give the man a professorship, btw. Great universities can be very stupid sometimes. Think of Cambridge and FR Leavis (or William Empson, for that matter). Or Brian Josephson, who won the Nobel Prize for physics and yet hadn’t been deemed good enough for a Cambridge Chair!

… from Steven Johnson, writing via the Los Angeles Times

July 27, 2005

Dear Sen. Clinton:

I’m writing to commend you for calling for a $90-million study on the effects of video games on children, and in particular the courageous stand you have taken in recent weeks against the notorious “Grand Theft Auto” series. I’d like to draw your attention to another game whose nonstop violence and hostility has captured the attention of millions of kids — a game that instills aggressive thoughts in the minds of its players, some of whom have gone on to commit real-world acts of violence and sexual assault after playing. I’m talking, of course, about high school football. I know a congressional investigation into football won’t play so well with those crucial swing voters, but it makes about as much sense as an investigation into the pressing issue that is Xbox and PlayStation 2.

Lots more good stuff in the letter. I particularly like this passage:

Another key question: Of all the games that kids play, which ones require the most mental exertion? Parents can play this at home: Try a few rounds of Monopoly or Go Fish with your kids, and see who wins. I suspect most families will find that it’s a relatively even match. Then sit down and try to play “Halo 2” with the kids. You’ll be lucky if you survive 10 minutes.

But the irony will probably be lost on the former First Lady.

I do not live or work in London, but I go there often for meetings and sometimes for fun. Like millions of others who use the London tube system, I’ve been pondering what I should be doing in the wake of the bombings. My conclusion is that I should continue to use the tube because (a) the probability of being injured or killed is still vanishingly small, and (b) one should not be intimidated by terrorists. At first sight, (a) looks like a rational response, while (b) seems merely emotional or rhetorical. But the Economist pointed me to “Fear and the Response to Terrorism: An Economic Analysis”, a fascinating paper by Gary Becker (who is a Nobel laureate in economics) and Yona Rubinstein which has made me think that perhaps both are rational responses.

The society which has had the most experience of living with suicide bombing is Israel, and Becker and Rubinstein had the brilliant idea of examining how Israelis have responded to the threat. They looked at, for example, how bus bombings affect passenger behaviour. In the year November 2001 to November 2002, Israeli buses suffered an average of one suicide attack a month. This apparently had a profound effect on passengers — use of public buses went down by 30%.

But when they looked more closely at these figures, Becker and Rubinstein found significant differences between the responses of casual and regular bus users. Casual users (those who bought tickets on the day of travel) were much more likely to shy away (each attack cut their numbers by 40%). Regular users (who bought season tickets) seemed to have been largely undeterred.

Well, you say, maybe this is because season-ticket holders have no alternative. But Becker and Rubinstein found a similar pattern in patrons of cafes (also a target of suicide bombers). As the number of cafe-bombings increased, casual users stayed away, while habitues indulged their habit as usual. And nobody could really argue that one ‘has’ to use a cafe in the same sense that one may ‘have’ to use a bus to get to work.

The key to all this is the distinction between risk and fear. There is a non-linear relationship between the two which is what terrorism seeks to exploit: a small increase in risk leads to a disproportionate increase in fear. But, say Becker and Rubinstein,

Fear can be managed. Persons can handle their fears. They do so by accumulating the necessary skills. Like other investments in human capital, it is not a free-lunch and it does not pay back the same to anyone. Those who are more likely to benefit from the risky activity will invest and overcome their fears, while others will substitute the risky activity by other consumption or production plans.

So the rational response to the London bombings is business as usual. Bombers can nudge up the statistical risk a little. But only we can increase the fear.

From BBC NEWS…

Sir Richard Doll, the scientist who first confirmed the link between smoking and lung cancer, has died.
Oxford University said the epidemiologist died at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, after a short illness. He was 92.

The UN Working Group on Internet Governance has produced its report. The BBC summarises it thus:

WGIG has issued its report about net governance and has tabled four possible futures for what should be done about policy issues, such as spam and hi-tech crime, that fall outside Icann’s narrow technical remit.

Option One – create a UN body known as the Global Internet Council that draws its members from governments and “other stakeholders” and takes over the US oversight role of Icann.

Option Two – no changes apart from strengthening Icann’s Governmental Advisory Committee to become a forum for official debate on net issues.

Option Three – relegate Icann to a narrow technical role and set up an International Internet Council that sits outside the UN. US loses oversight of Icann.

Option Four – create three new bodies. One to take over from Icann and look after the net’s addressing system. One to be a debating chamber for governments, businesses and the public; and one to co-ordinate work on “internet-related public policy issues”.

The one common aspect of all four proposals is the creation of some sort of talking shop that will give governments and others a say in how the net develops.

En passant one’s confidence in the UN’s approach to all this is not exactly reinforced by the fact that they choose to release the report in Microsoft Word format as well as PDF.