Week of February 25, 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

UNTIL NEXT WEEK: I'm off to Philadelphia for the annual meeting of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's board of advisors. I'm not taking my computer and don't expect to be posting again until Monday night. In my absence, please check out the FIRE site. [Posted 2/28.]

MY LIFE AS A BLOG: Southern California blog fans can see Glenn Reynolds and Mickey Kaus discuss "My Life as a Blog: How Internet Weblogs are Changing the Shape of the Media" at the UCLA Law School on Wednesday, March 13, 4:00-5:45 p.m. in the Moot Court Room (1310) of the Law Building. The event is organized by my friend Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor, and co-sponsored by the UCLA Center for Governance, on whose advisory board I serve. Unlike FIRE (see above), the Center for Governance doesn't actually get much advice from me. But the least I can do is publicize their event. Glenn and Mickey are apparently too modest to mention it. [Posted 2/28.]

WAL-MEX: Wal-Mart de Mexico, a.k.a. Wal-Mex and already that country's largest retailer, has big expansion plans. It will add 67 stores over the next year and a half. Wal-Mart's growth is both a cause and an effect of Mexico's rising (by fits and starts) standard of living.

Back in the USA, struggling Kmart is pinning its hopes on the inner-city market. [Posted 2/28.]

MORE WAL-MART: Regular readers of this site won't be surprised at the topic of my NYT column: Wal-Mart's effects on U.S. economic productivity, as documented in a recent study from McKinsey Global Institute. (An introduction to the study is here and the whole huge thing can be downloaded, in pieces, with registration. "The Wal-Mart Effect" summarizes the retailing section.)

While I was finishing my column on Tuesday, reader Oren Grad called my attention to this Technology Review column on the same subject by my very smart friend Michael Schrage. (I declined to read the piece until after I submitted the column, lest Michael exercise undue influence on my own column, but now I recommend it.) [Posted 2/28.]

KRAFT CONTACTS: Several readers have sent in this link to email contacts for Kraft officers. Too bad GM isn't as forthcoming with its info. I guess it's not hard to see why.

If you write these people, please be polite and include informative URLs. The chances of any particular individual even knowing about the Kraft-Al Jazeera connection are low. The chances they'll sympathize are good—assuming they don't get annoyed at the onslaught. You want to change Kraft's ad policy, not make these individuals miserable. [Posted 2/27.]

SMART CITY: Reader Darren Cahr writes on the subject of livable cities and planning:

Your reference to the USA Today piece on a "sim city" contest really hit home for me. I'm currently about 2/3 through The Power Broker, the story of how Robert Moses centrally planned New York's neighborhoods into oblivion. It is easy to see how the attitude of "creation from above" can warp creative minds into the Le Corbousier fallacy—that a design elite can create a better life for the hoi polloi.

One of the most difficult things for me (as an urbanphile) was to recognize that whatever perceived benefits I may see in living in a city (and I believe that Chicago is the most livable big city in America) that the benefits of "sprawl" are no less valid. And Chicago's leadership (to its credit) sees it too, and has adopted some of the more useful suburban innovations. Big box retailers are encouraged to come into the city—not driven away. Poor Hispanics and wealthy yuppies alike on the Northwest side of Chicago can easily shop at Target, Home Depot, Costco, etc., without having to travel dozens of mile to the suburbs. It is not a coincidence that people are deciding to stay in the city in Chicago—because the city is made more convenient, more "suburban." And this hardly damages the unique urban culture of Chicago—instead, it has allowed the city to flourish, and small stores flourish too as they are forced to come up with clever ways to compete. All in all, a good result that other cities should examine.

Give people the benefits of both city and suburb and they'll stay in town. What a thought. Maybe that's why I love the old neighborhood in L.A. so much. You've got urban sidewalk life and malls—not to mention that special light and the sweet, but non-allergenic, smell of the foliage. [Posted 2/27.]

IRANIAN TV: Speaking of the old neighborhood (which is full of Persian exiles and their various shops, restaurants, waxing salons, and doctors offices), Michael Lewis's NYT Magazine piece on National Iranian TV is a must-read. It tells the fascinating, funny, and ultimately sad story of how a satellite service for exiles became a beacon of freedom to Iranians, mixing politics with popular culture and mullah-mocking Saturday Night Live-style satire. The sad part is that nobody will buy ads on NITV, forcing it to scramble its signals like HBO and, hence, to cut off viewers inside Iran. It's disgraceful.

Reader Darren Kaplan writes with an idea, first calling my (and your) attention to this Forbes article, "which reports without comment that both General Motors and Kraft Foods are still advertising on the Al Jazeera Network.

That's right, an independent television station that broadcasts a pro democracy, pro freedom message to 70 Million people enslaved by a government our president rightly characterizes as 'evil' goes begging for sponsors while the official network of Osama bin Laden and Hammas (see this and this) enjoys the sponsorship of the companies behind Chevrolet and Macaroni and Cheese.

Here's a little idea I've cooked up. Since I don't believe for a second that either GM or Kraft wants to publicize its subsidy of a terrorist mouthpiece, we bring a little subtle pressure to bear on their marketing departments in the form of a mass e-mailing and boycott threat encouraged by all of those "bloggers" and loyal readers out there. Then, when GM and Kraft buckle under the weight of the protests and stops advertising on Al Jazeera, we force them to make amends by subsidizing NITV for a year or two.

This campaign will likely succeed because I am willing to bet that GM and Kraft's advertising on Al Jazeera was not approved at the high officer or director level. It seems unlikely that the directors of GM and Kraft want their companies to be known as the official sponsors of Al Quaeda, and the continued advertising on Al Jazeera is on some kind of corporate "auto pilot." If they are smart, I think they will fairly leap at the chance to make amends.

I don't have email addresses, but a list of Kraft's management and directors is here and .pdf files of the lists for GM can be downloaded from here. Aside from the bloggers, this sounds like a good job for Hugh Hewitt and his radio listeners. (I'll be back on the show this Thursday.) [Posted 2/27.]

HOW CAN THIS BE BAD? "A woman with a gene that is all but certain to cause Alzheimer's by her 40s gave birth to a baby free of the defect after having her eggs screened and selected in the laboratory," reports MSNBC. The baby is now 18 months old and healthy.

A lot of self-proclaimed ethicists will, of course, rush to proclaim the end of humanity because of this advance. But if you're carrying a gene like that, the only humane alternative to this sort of screening is sterilization. This woman and her family suffer just as much as smallpox victims—arguably more. The idea that genetic diseases should continue indefinitely is appalling.

The doctor said it best: "I can't speak for the public but it's a decision of the family and not the public." [Posted 2/27.]

LUNTZ WHOPPER: Roll Call (via Kausfiles) catches Frank "No Flags in L.A." Luntz in another whopper. This time he's claiming he doesn't work for Republicans. (Background on Luntz's anti-L.A. smear here, here, and here.) Why do people listen to this guy? He's obviously just making it up as he goes along. [Posted 2/25.]

CAMBODIAN DONUTS: To many readers, the most memorable fact in The Future and Its Enemies (I believe Brian Lamb said it was his favorite) is that 80 percent of the doughnut shops in Southern California are owned by Cambodian immigrants. The LAT profiled one here (via Matt Welch). [Posted 2/26.]

FLY BOTTLE: Quite a few interesting posts on Will Wilkinson's philosophical Fly Bottle blog. Like me, Will took a bit of time off to think and learn (he doesn't mention writing), rather than post. Now he's back. [Posted 2/26.]

BAD GRADES, LOW SCORES, NO PROBLEM: Linda Wertheimer of The Dallas Morning News reports on the scary unintended consequence of ending racial quotas in Texas grad schools: lowered standards for everyone, not just members of minority groups. Your future doctor may have trouble remembering chemistry or anatomy, but she'll be from a podunk town and have experience raising kids and working at McDonald's.

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas used to automatically reject applicants with lousy grades and low test scores. It's not that easy anymore.

Because of a new state law, the admissions process is more complicated for the medical school and for all graduate schools in Texas. The measure, passed in June, says graduate programs may not use test scores as the sole or primary factor in admissions.

Instead, the law throws in 11 other factors schools must consider, including applicants' hometowns and whether they grew up in poverty.

A sidebar lists the criteria grad schools may use now that standardized test scores have been outlawed as the primary factor in admissions:

High school and college academic records.

Socioeconomic background during elementary and secondary school and college.

Proficiency in more than one language.

Responsibilities while attending elementary and secondary school and college, including whether the applicant worked and helped raise children.

Region of residence and where the applicant lived during high school, to allow for geographic diversity. Community activities.

A demonstrated commitment to a particular field in college.

Whether the person's hometown has a shortage of professionals in the medical or law fields, if the applicant is applying to medical or law school.

The applicant's interview.

Whether the applicant was automatically admitted to a university under the state's top 10 percent law.

Comparing the applicant's performance on test scores with students from similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

Michael Lynch told me this would happen years ago, and he was right. State schools will never give up the pursuit of more black and Latino students, even if that means diluting admissions standards for whites and Asians as well. If you have no academic tests, you can admit whomever you want without provable racial bias. [Posted 2/26.]

VULGAR CULTURE: Chuck Freund's great Reason article on vulgar (a.k.a. popular) culture, freedom, and identity is now online. He traces the "Cultural Sputter" from Ruskin (Boo Rembrandt! So vulgar!) to Quindlen (Boo movies and VCRs!) And he tells the story of remarkable people who've used vulgar culture to define themselves despite repression: Stalin-era stilyagi with loud ties and ducktail hair, Algerian rai singers, "singing of alienation, poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, and forbidden sexual desires," and, weirdest and saddest of all, Kazakh "Tolkienists," who have been tortured for engaging in fannish behavior. (For an article on the Tolkienists, click here.) [Posted 2/25.]

BAR CODES AND CONSUMER CHOICE: Reader Brian Carnell sends this link to a story on the 25th anniversary of bar codes in Great Britain. Writes BBC News Online correspondent Mark Ward:

Thanks to barcodes, the number of products in shops has mushroomed.

Mr Satterthwaite said that in the late 60s and early 70s food shops only stocked at most a couple of thousand or so product lines. This was because of the work involved in putting price stickers on all those boxes, packets or cans, the intellectual load on staff who had to know how much each one cost and also because of inflation.

"Even though you had a small product range you could have a thousand price changes over the weekend because of inflation," he said.

In the 1970s UK inflation peaked at 28%, now it hovers around the 2% mark.

"Its no wonder they didn't open on a Sunday," he added, "they couldn't not because they were spending all day changing all the prices."

Now the average supermarket carries around 25,000 product lines and they can only do that because barcodes make it easy to maintain a database of a store's stock in which prices can be changed with the click of a mouse.

As you'll see in my NYT column this Thursday, some of the most important economic advances of the past few years come from better logistics and retail operations—and bar codes are a big part of that story. [Posted 2/25.]

SIM CITIES: USA Today reports on a national contest designed to encourage middle school students' interest in engineering—by teaching them that cities are planning projects that can be designed from scratch. The kids are imaginative, within the parameters of middle school propaganda, but the contest is redolent of a 1930s planning mentality. It does nothing to recognize the diverse desires of city residents or the unpredictable creativity that gives city life its zest. It rewards young people for thinking of cities as static, easily manipulated models, not dynamic communities. According to the press release announcing this year's winner:

The competition asks students to create—first on computer and then in large 3-D scale models—their visions of the city of tomorrow. Students work with engineer mentors who help guide the youngsters through the rigors of building a functioning city. Using SimCity 3000™—donated by Maxis, a software firm in Walnut Creek, Calif.—the students fabricate a metropolis from the ground up, balance a city budget and deal with intractable social issues such as pollution and unemployment, solving intricate problems of math, science, and technology along the way. Then they present and defend their city to engineer judges at the competition, write an essay about research, exploration, generation, and conservation of energy and an abstract describing their city and its services.

Needless to say, there are no economists, developers, or Jane Jacobs devotees among the judges. (This year's essay question, which determines the shape of the contest entries, addresses energy issues without any regard for economic analysis.) While this contest is no big deal in the scheme of things, it's important to the creative kids who participate in it. And it's indoctrinating some of our brightest students with a warped view of how cities flourish. [Posted 2/25.]

SUGAR PROTECTIONIST RACKET: In a little reported move, Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has gone on a crusade against Mexico's imposition of what he calls "totally unwarranted, discriminatory tax of from 10 to 20 percent on soft drinks sweetened with high fructose corn syrup." What chutzpah. In his outrage, Grassley doesn't mention that the reason U.S. soft drinks are sweetened with Iowa-favored corn syrup rather than sugar is that the U.S. government operates its own protectionist racket.

As Mark Groombridge writes in this Cato Institute paper, "Nowhere is there a larger gap between the U.S. government's free-trade rhetoric and its protectionist practices than in the sugar program. Through preferential loan agreements and tariff-rate quotas, the U.S. government thwarts price competition to maintain an artificially high domestic price for sugar—a price that can be twice the world market price or higher."

This protectionism hurts U.S. consumers and U.S. companies that use sugar (the subject of this op-ed by Cato's Dan Griswold). It offends environmentalists by encouraging uneconomic sugar production that degrades the Everglades. It blocks opportunity for poor, sugar-producing countries, including many of our closest neighbors. But the sugar lobby is amazingly powerful, and it has folks like Chuck Grassley to do its bidding. Grassley is a great favorite of companies with an interest in continuing that protection. In 1996, he got $34,270 in contributions from Big Sugar, plus another $13,000 from Archer-Daniels-Midlands and $12,000 from ConAgra, both of which have big interests in corn syrup. I don't find that level of detail on his reelection fundraising in 1998, but he was popular with agribusiness donors, including processors like ADM. [Posted 2/25.]

OUR GOOD FRIENDS THE SAUDIS, CONT'D: Last fall, NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia raided the offices of a Saudi aid agency in Sarajevo—and found gobs of terrorist materials, including photos of targets, maps of Washington, and information on using crop dusters to spread pesticides. This wasn't some renegade agency. It was the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia and has close ties to the royal family. Although the raid took place months ago, the story just broke last week—if "broke" can be applied to one paragraph in the "Briefly Noted" section of The New York Times. The British press gave it a bit more attention, including this report from The Guardian's David Pallister:

The new evidence will be hugely embarrassing to the Saudi royal family, which has consistently shrugged off reports that Saudi-backed charities have been used as a front for al-Qaida operatives.

A few weeks after the raid six men, including an administrator at the commission, were arrested by the Bosnian authorities for suspected links to al-Qaida. They were believed to be plotting to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo....

The raid netted computer files on the use of crop duster aircraft, instructions on how to fake US state department identification badges, and photographs and maps of Washington marking government buildings. About £70,000 worth of local currency was found in a safe, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-US computer material for children.

Saudi aid operations in Bosnia have long worried Bosnians and others who don't like the way the Saudis are advancing extremist Wahhabism and destroying historic Bosnian mosques, replacing them with Saudi-approved "hospital white" architecture. (Links to before and after photos of one mosque are here.)

The Saudis' latest Mideast peace offensive, in conjunction with Tom Friedman of the NYT, looks a lot like a play to curry favor with the United States before we officially notice a rather important, but hitherto unmentionable, point in the Axis of Evil. The New York Times seems determined to buy them time. [Posted 2/25.]

ABSENCE: I'm back, after a break to concentrate on my book while holed up in L.A. (ah, the best city on earth). This site is fun, but it's mighty distracting. [Posted 2/25.]