Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

French Marshall Petain declares over the radio an official policy of collaboration with Hitler.

Duncan Hollis writes:

What kind of immunity does the IMF Managing Director Have? The arrest on sexual assault charges of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Khan (or “DSK” as he’s known to the French tabloids) is big news this morning.... International Organizational immunity is a complicated topic...  

The relevant U.S. law, the International Organizations Immunity Act (IOIA), 22 U.S.C. 881, generally tracks consular immunity for international organization officers and employees. Thus, 22 USC 881d(b) provides:

(b) Representatives of foreign governments in or to international organizations and officers and employees of such organizations shall be immune from suit and legal process relating to acts performed by them in their official capacity and falling within their functions as such representatives, officers, or employees except insofar as such immunity may be waived by the foreign government or international organization concerned...

Thus, it seems at first glance DSK is entitled only to official acts immunity.... But, before we all assume official acts immunity is the governing framework, there’s a complicating factor — could DSK actually have diplomatic immunity?  Not all international organization officials are subject to official acts immunity, some of the most senior (see, e.g., the Secretary General and Assistant Secretaries General of the UN, senior OAS officials) get the same privileges and immunities as diplomats, meaning that they are absolutely immune in almost all cases from criminal arrest or civil suit.  And, at least some members of the IMF get this treatment as well:

principal resident representatives of members of a specialized agency and such resident members of the staffs of representatives of a specialized agency as may be agreed upon between the principal executive officer of the specialized agency, the Government of the United States and the Government of the Member concerned, shall whether residing inside or outside the headquarters district, be entitled in the territory of the United States to the same privileges and immunities, subject to corresponding conditions and obligations, as it accords to diplomatic envoys accredited to it...

Thus, if DSK were a “principal resident representative” (PRR) of the IMF...

He is not. The French Executive Director is a PRR. The Managing Director is not, because he is not representing any nation-state.

he might actually be immune from arrest entirely...

He isn't.

Indeed, Hollis goes on:

I’m guessing he does not qualify because he’s not representing anyone other than the IMF as its Managing Director...

Indeed.

But that creates the rather odd result that a lesser IMF official might have absolute/diplomatic immunity denied to the titular head of the IMF...

That result is not odd at all. The PRR for France is a French diplomatic official. The MD is a civil servant. One is not "greater" and the other is not "lesser" in any sense. There is no reason for the MD's privileges and immunities to be a superset of an ED's.

And Hollis appears to realize he has gone wrong:

(on the other hand, PRR immunity might be deemed more a function of the respect due the sovereign states these individuals represent rather than anything derived from their service to the IMF itself).

It is.

This is not to say that the court that decided Bush v. Gore could not let DSK go scot-free--the courts can do whatever the judges vote for.

But don't pretend that such a decision would have a foundation in anything other than international politics...

This time of year I always wonder why we don't wear our gowns more often...

(Or something like that anyway.) WJW:

Crowdsource, Please: Like every other midlist writer on the planet, I’m striving to get my out-of-print books and stories online so that (a) you can enjoy them, and (b) I can make a few bucks. To this end, I embarked upon a Cunning Plan.  I discovered that my work had been pirated, and was available for free on BitTorrent sites located in the many outlaw server dens of former Marxist countries.  So I downloaded my own work from thence with the intention of saving the work of scanning my books— I figured I’d let the pirates do the work, and steal from them.   While this seemed karmically sound, there proved a couple problems.

First, the scans were truly dreadful and full of errors... second, apparently a few of my books were so obscure that they flew under the radar of even the pirates! You can’t imagine how astounded I was when I discovered this. I could really use some decent scans of some of my books, and I figure some among you must have better scanners and OCR than the piece of crap that’s currently sitting on my shelf.

So I’m willing to trade.  Should any of you volunteer to provide scans of Days of Atonement, Angel Station, and Knight Moves, that lucky individual will get a signed, personalized copy of the WJW book of his or her choice (assuming I actually have a copy, of course). Plus, whatever book you scan will spend digital eternity with your name in it, along with my eternal thanks.  Sound good?

Crowdsourcing.  It’s so 21st Century!  You want to do this, right?

Let’s talk.

What Buce said:

The Fiscal Times is  back with another one of those counts of how life on $250k a year is not all ortolans and whipped cream.  It's temperate in its way, not early as delusional as the angry outburst of a Chicago law prof that caused such a stir last fall.  But it still fails to come to terms with its own fundamental reality, that is, how most Americans would kill for those problems.  Accepting every word the FT says as true (and I don't, really), still fact is that we are talking about a hangnail on the politic.  Somehow the vast majority of Americans are trudging along only only a fraction of that number.  And how will they pay for maid service, dry cleaning, higher education?  And you expect them to feel any sympathy at all for the beleaguered multitude...

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that this type of article is not the result of malevolence or corruption--but simply of a profound cluelessness and lack of even basic monkey curiosity...

WSC:

Yes, it is America's Finest News Source Again:

Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Uninsured Sick People: BELMONT, MA—Though Mitt Romney is considered to be a frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the national spotlight has forced him to repeatedly confront a major skeleton in his political closet: that as governor of Massachusetts he once tried to help poor, uninsured sick people.

Charlie Stross:

Radioactive turd, meet punchbowl: If this report is true, then: a) Reactor 1 at Fukushima Daiichi melted down within sixteen hours of the quake (about eight hours after all active cooling was lost), b) TEPCO management knew about it, c) The press were systematically nobbled (an early report of the meltdown was withdrawn), d) Going by his rather extraordinary remarks during the subsequent weeks, the Prime Minister, and presumably the rest of the Japanese government, were systematically misled by TEPCO.

Will Shipley:

(1) Twitter / Home: Nathan Myhrvold: Egotistical patent troll, or the lowest form of life on Earth?

Josh Rosenthall:

Is Nathan Myhrovld’s Intellectual Ventures behind the iOS in-app purchase patent troll job?: It’s been confirmed today that a company called Lodsys recently sent out a number of letters to independent iOS developers, including James Thompson - the developer of PCalc - and Dave Castelnuovo, creator of Pocket God , informing them that their use of in-app purchases in iOS infringes upon on this particular patent. Of course, Lodsys is going after small developers who lack the resources of larger development companies to fight back, presumably to frighten them into striking a licensing deal as soon as possible.

So who exactly is behind this unabashed case of patent trolling?

Well, we did a little leg work and though we can’t say with 100% certainty who is pulling the strings, it’s looking a lot like Intellectual Ventures is behind this disgraceful lawsuit. Intellectual Ventures was founded in part by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The company’s business model is simple - it purchases and applies for a ton of patents. It then licenses out those patents to others under the threat of litigation coupled with a promise not to sue if a deal is struck.

So my Mac has been very sluggish today.

And now I find out why.

I opened up one of Feynman's "Character of Physical Law" lectures this morning, and then paused it.

Now I find that Microsoft Silverlight Safari plug-in has been burbling away in the background, chewing up 30% of CPU time all day--doing absolutely nothing except waiting for me to click and shift it from "pause" back to "play".

Why does this company still exist? Why can't the market deal it the sudden, immediate, and merciful death it so clearly deserves?

I owe Dan Rubinfeld a big apology for ever doubting his judgment that the breakup of Microsoft would be an enormous economic win for the world...

A few more musings on Ron (and Rand!) Paul's claim that the Civil Rights Act has made him less free and an oppressed victim of big government because he cannot call the police to remove and arrest for trespass Black people who come to eat at the lunch counter he owns...

Before there were police forces so that you could run to the government to get it to evict trespassers from your land and recover your stolen stuff, there was... seisin: had you actually ploughed the land and reaped the harvest, protected the villages from Irish or Viking raiders, administered justice--or had others done so, or had the jobs been left undone? if you weren't man enough to do the job, it wasn't yours...

Matthew Yglesias on Ron Paul:

Ron Paul And The Civil Rights Act: I watched Ron Paul on Hardball yesterday afternoon talking about his opposition to the Civil Rights Act.... The real issue here is Paul’s perfectly sincere [complaint that the]... Civil Rights Act is... a genuinely large infringement of people’s private property rights. It says that just because you own a hotel doesn’t mean you can decide to bar black people from staying at it. It says that just because you own a bus, you can’t decide to make black passengers ride in the back. It says you can’t buy—at any price—a seat at a whites-only lunch counter. It’s a massive instance of big government medaling in people’s private business.

Paul Krugman writes:

Monetarist Pathos: I feel David Beckworth’s pain. Really, I do. Beckworth and a few others are trying to keep the spirit of monetarism alive. What I mean by that is that, like Friedman, they’re trying to reconcile a conservative view of government’s proper role with a bit of macroeconomic realism. They accept that a recession represents a huge market failure demanding policy action.... [T]hey want to keep that policy action narrowly technocratic, limited to open-market operations by the central bank. As I’ve argued before, this doctrine has failed the reality test: liquidity traps are real.... But what our modern monetarists are facing is a different problem: it turns out that they have no political home. The modern American conservative movement has no room for nuance, for the idea that some forms of government activism are a good idea. Ayn Rand, not Milton Friedman, is their patron saint; in fact, if Friedman were alive today, he’d be shunned as a dangerous radical with inflationary ideas.

And no amount of data will change their minds.

Indeed.

AH:

Employment, Interest, and Money: Fixing What’s Wrong with the Taylor Rule: I see four problems with the original Taylor rule: It’s not really a rule at all... [but] depends on an estimate of potential output... the discretion that goes into central banking is in the estimate of potential output.... It doesn’t self-correct for missed inflation rates.... It leaves the price level indeterminate in the long run.... It leaves the central bank without an effective tool to reverse deflation.... It reduces the credibility of central bank attempts to bring down high inflation rates, because the bank always promises to forgive itself when it fails.... It doesn’t allow for convexity in the short-run Philips curve. If the estimate of potential output is too low, for example, and the coefficient on output is sufficiently low, then, if the short-run Philips curve is convex, the central bank will allow output to persist below potential output for a long time before “realizing” that it has made an error.... It can prescribe a negative interest rate target, which is impossible to implement....

Paul Krugman:

Paul Krugman: Today, by contrast, the [global] picture is full of seeming contradictions. Are we in a runaway boom, or is growth weak? Is inflation low, or is it spiraling out of control? The answer to all of these questions is yes. China, India and Brazil are growing much too fast for comfort; America, Europe and Japan remain depressed. Inflation is running high in the emerging world, while the prices of oil and food, which are determined in global markets and are largely driven by demand from those emerging nations, have soared; but underlying inflation in the wealthy nations remains low. In short, at this point we’re living in a world that is characterized not so much by the sum of all fears as by some of all fears. Whatever you’re afraid of, be it inflation or unemployment or fiscal crisis, it’s happening somewhere — but the problems are different in different places....

3,600 Jews are arrested in Paris

Remarkable:

Althouse2: "Wonder if this has anything to do with Ann’s objective (and thus, anti-administration) coverage of the Wisconsin protests?": FRIDAY, MAY 13, 2011: Asks Moe Lane at RedState:

Well, isn’t this interesting: apparently Blogger/Google has decided to remove Ann Althouse’s blog. They’re also being neither particularly helpful in either explaining why, nor sounding particularly sympathetic that it’s been taken down, either.

You know, I'm beginning to suspect that there's some behind-the-scenes campaign to report my blog as abusive. People who hate/fear the Althouse blog could make a loud noise to Google.

Back in 2004, 98% of Google employees gave money to Democrats...

It would seem so:

Ron Paul Tells Chris Matthews He Favors Enforcement of No-Blacks Covenants in Deeds?]: Richard said... Is it wrong for me to wonder when Paul said "property rights and states rights" whether those same words would have applied in slavery days?

Matt said... I'm sure, if pressed, Sen. Paul would also be against the Emancipation Proclamation; after all, talk about messing with "private property"! Clearly he'd have preferred the "free-market" solution...

Not sure I believe this...

In the Wall Street Journal, Stanford's John Taylor asks:

If government agencies and programs functioned with 19% to 20% of G.D.P. in 2007, why is it so hard for them to function with that percentage in 2021?

He does not understand the two most important and obvious features of demand for what the federal government does: the aging of America, and improving health-care technologies.

Paul Krugman is on the case with the elementary arithmetic of American long-run fiscal policy:

RA:

Monetary policy: Conservatives chasing bad ideas: MIKE KONCZAL notes that the nomination of esteemed economist and Nobel prize winner Peter Diamond to the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors is almost certainly dead.... Views on the efficacy of countercyclical fiscal policy obviously differ, though prior to the election of Barack Obama Republican legislators had no compunction about voting for stimulus packages (though tax cuts were obviously favoured). The turn against monetary policy is a disturbing and potentially quite dangerous development. Once upon a time, Milton Friedman—a man who basically blamed the Depression on tight money—was the leading economic intellectual of the conservative movement. Now top GOP members can't stop talking about the importance of "hard money" for recovery. Everyone from Rand Paul to Tim Pawlenty to Paul Ryan is on the bandwagon.

This is quackery. It should be noted that mainstream conservative intellectuals strongly back the use of countercyclical monetary policy, and some of the most aggressive critics of too-timid Fed policy—academics like Scott Sumner—have been on the right. Even the punditocracy is not entirely on board with goldbuggery. The National Review's Ramesh Ponurru has been a vocal critic of knee-jerk opposition to Fed policy.

Matt:

The practical irrelevance of the Friedman rule: In his recent Economist debate with Brad DeLong on whether the inflation target should be raised, eminent monetary economist Bennett McCallum emphasizes the Friedman rule as an important determinant of the optimal long-term rate of inflation:

First, in the absence of the ZLB, the optimal steady-state inflation rate—according to standard new Keynesian reasoning—lies somewhere between the Friedman-rule value of deflation at the steady-state real rate of interest (therefore something like –2% to 4%) and the Calvo-model value of zero, with careful calibration indicating that the weight on the latter may be considerably larger. Second, a theoretically attractive modification of the Calvo model would imply that the weight on the second of these values should be zero, so that the Friedman-rule prescription itself would be optimal (in the absence of the ZLB). Third, even when the effects of the ZLB are added to the analysis, the optimal inflation rate is (according to this line of analysis) probably negative—closer to –2 % than to 4 %…

The Friedman rule follows naturally from a basic model of monetary policy. “Money” is a good that is costless to provide, yet valuable to consumers and businesses; for the sake of efficiency, it should be priced at cost, which means that the risk-free nominal interest rate should be zero (so that you don’t lose anything from holding wealth in the form of cash rather than Treasury bills). Since real interest rates are usually positive, this means that we need long-term deflation...

Noam Chomsky asserts equivalence between Osama bin Laden and... himself:

Guernica / Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death: There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement...

Peter Boettke asserts equivalence between Augusto Pinochet and Bill Clinton:

Friedman, Pinochet and the Moral Responsibility of Those Giving Economic Advice: Friedman's letter [to Pinochet] is limited to economic advice on debt, inflation, and economic freedom.  Why does this indict Friedman?  I mean this seriously, as I am not sure what the inference is supposed to be. As I said in the comments, should Brad DeLong be held responsible for Clinton's foreign policy in Bosnia; or Clinton's personal policy with respect to female interns; or only the Clinton economic policies that Brad was involved in designing?...

Some people are off their meds.

Just saying.

David Dayen:

McCain’s Rejection of Torture Puts Brakes on Neocon Assault: We heard from Marcy that John McCain had a decent op-ed today in the Washington Post, denouncing torture and laying out the facts on the role of torture. He affirmed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lied under torture about key facts related to the courier which harbored bin Laden, and he also provided more information on subsequent intelligence from other sources, none of which, he says, was gained through torture.

But he didn’t stop there. McCain took to the Senate floor and spoke for 20 minutes on the same subject today. He criticized sharply the stance that torture yields good intelligence, and added that it harms our effort in both counter-terrorism and the greater Muslim world. The most important part of the op-ed was the acknowledgement that the Arab uprising, not bin Laden, is the most important world-historical event we have to get right at this time....

Paul Krugman writes:

The Doctrine of Immaculate Crowding Out: I’ve written before about the doctrine of immaculate transfer in international macroeconomics, which is a common fallacy but not, I’ve suggested, one that rises to zombie status. There is, however, a somewhat related doctrine — call it the doctrine of immaculate crowding out — which has now, I’d argued, achieved true zombiehood. That is, it keeps coming back no matter how many times you kill it. The most recent example came from John Boehner’s Wall Street talk, where, as Bloomberg puts it,

Boehner’s statement in his Wall Street speech that government spending “is crowding out private investment and threatening the availability of capital” runs counter to the behavior of credit markets. “Look at interest rates. Look at capital spending,” said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist of IHS Inc., a research firm based in Englewood, Colorado. “It’s very hard to come to a conclusion that there’s any kind of crowding out.”

BBC:

BBC News - Setbacks at Japan nuclear plant: A reactor at Japan's crippled nuclear plant has been more badly damaged than originally thought, operator Tepco has said. Water is leaking from the pressure vessel surrounding reactor 1 - probably because of damage caused by exposed fuel rods melting, a spokesman said.... Work to restore cooling systems had been most advanced at reactor 1, the smallest and oldest at the site. But a spokesman for the power giant said when a faulty gauge had been repaired, it showed water levels in the pressure vessel 5m (16ft) below the level needed to cover fuel rods.

DD:

D-squared Digest -- FOR bigger pies and shorter hours and AGAINST more or less everything else: In which I continue the time-honoured internet tradition of providing unsolicited consultancy to political parties which I do not support....

The point that Liberal Democrats don't seem to understand is that they have entered into a coalition government with the Conservative Party and that there are consequences which flow from that. This is odd, as one of the things Nick Clegg is fondest of telling us all, is that he is in a coalition with the Conservative Party and that there are consequences of that. But "political realities" is a term with general application; it doesn't just mean "I am about to break some promises and there is f----all you lot can do about it". Here's the political realities as I see them.

1. The LibDems entered into a coalition with the Conservative Party
2. Therefore, the LibDems lost the presumptive trust of the Labour Party
3. Therefore, arguments based on adding LibDem votes and/or seats to Labour votes and/or seats and calling it "the centre-left" have lost credibility
4. Therefore, one cannot assume as of right that Labour voters will support electoral reforms that chiefly benefit the LibDems.

Duncan Black:

Thursday is New Jobles Day: 434K new lucky duckies.

Bad news.

Admiral Günther Lütjens and his staff arrive on the Bismarck.

Haaretz:

Hamas accepts 1967 borders, but will never recognize Israel, top official says - Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News: aking to Palestinian news agency Ma'an, Mahmoud Zahar says recognition of Israel would deprive future Palestinian generations of the possibility to 'liberate' their lands.

Hamas would be willing to accept a Palestinian state within 1967 borders, a leader of the militant group, Mahmoud Zahar, told the Palestinian news agency Ma'an on Wednesday, adding, however, that Hamas would never recognize Israel since such a move would counter the group's aim to "liberate" all of Palestine.

YouTube - The Golden Age:

Let me pick up and quote from Featured Guest Andrew Harless:

[S]tability is the main advantage cited for a low-inflation regime. We are comfortable with 2% per year inflation, but higher rates could be a slippery slope, as in the 1960s and 1970s. And even if we do not slide down the slope, its potential existence will make people nervous, be a drag on the economy and produce excessive volatility. Yet that does not seem to have been a major problem from 1983 to 1991, when the Fed successfully maintained a stable inflation rate in the 4-5% range. If economic stability is our goal, the real resilience provided by a higher inflation rate should trump the illusory comfort provided by a lower one...

Between the end of the early 1980s recession and the end of the early 1990s recession, inflation in the United States fluctuated between 1.5% and 6.0%--but at no time was there any lack of confidence in the Federal Reserve's long-run commitment to low inflation, at no time did the United States slide down the slippery slope, and if there were any complaints that any average inflation rate of 4% during that decade noticeably degraded the functioning of the price mechanism, I have not heard them.

The New York Times now hires reporters who have a demonstrated commitment to inaccuracy. Digby:

Hullabaloo: A while back I wrote about the recent media tour of James B Stewart, the author a recent book called Tangled Web: How American Society is Drowning in Lies about the culture of lying in America. I commented because this is a person who knows a lot about lies since his book Blood Sport was filled with them. I quoted this passage from Conason and Lyons' The Hunting of the President....

Still other celebrated journalists continued to predict the first lady's probable indictment as the election year began, most notably Pulitzer Prize winning author James B Stewart. Published by Simon and Shuster in 1996 to the accompaniment of a multimedia publicity campaign, Stewart's book Blood Sport claims to be the inside story of "the president and first lady as they really are." Set forth as a sweeping narrative, it includes dramatized scenes and imaginary dialog purporting to represent the innermost thoughts of individuals whom the author had in some cases never met, much less interviewed. "Scenes that Mr Stewart could never have observed first hand," complained New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, "are recounted from an omniscient viewpoint. Mr. Stewart rarely identifies the sources for such scenes not does he take into account the subjectivity and oftens self-serving nature of memory. The reader never knows whether the quotes Mr Stewart puts into the mouth of an individual... are from a first or second hand source."

Felix Salmon starts with some throat-clearing:

The business of digital journalism: CJR... a 146-page report... “The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism”. It includes the story of Gabriel Sherman’s 463-word story on nymag.com about Roger Ailes and Sarah Palin, and Jack Mirkinson’s 237-word distillation of the story for HuffPo.... [T]he HuffPo version was still much more popular than the original. The CJR report doesn’t examine why... the fact that HuffPo’s story is in its headline, for instance, while NYMag went cryptic with “Going Rogue on Ailes Could Leave Palin on Thin Ice”, and didn’t get to the actual news until the third paragraph. But the anecdote packs a punch all the same: if you blather on too long, people are liable to ignore you.

So let me try to find some of the good bits for you, since I know you’re not going to read the whole thing, and especially because the most interesting stuff — at least as far as I’m concerned — doesn’t even begin until page 110...

And since you are unlikely to surf over to or read all of Felix Salmon, let me try to find some of his good stuff for you. Felix:

Yes, it is time for the Newt Gringrich Presidential Campaign Slogan Contest.

(Via Matthew Yglesias.)

Matthew Yglesias's view:

Yglesias » Competition in Higher Education: [T]he key point I would make is that of course the universities do compete against one another. If a skilled administrator leaves University A to get a higher paid job at University B that’s a wash from the perspective of American higher education as a whole but it certainly makes a different to both University A and University B.... [T]his form of competition happens at all kinds of levels. Universities bid against one another for “star” faculty members, etc. Most of all, since university quality is primarily measured in America based on the quality of the inputs (average SAT score of entering freshmen, etc.) they spend a lot of effort bidding against one another to recruit the best students. But it’s not possible for every university to have an above-average freshman class.

On net, all this expenditure on competition for the best administrators, the star professors, the most lavish physical facilities, merit-based scholarships for the top tier of students, etc. simply serves to drive up the overall cost structure of the entire system without doing anything to improve quality of instruction. Cheaper travel and better information technology have made it more feasible than ever for students to study at out-of-region universities, bringing much more intense competition to the market. And in most markets, that kind of intensified competition would be creating a healthier market. But in higher education, it just further accelerates the cost increases. And that, in turn, is how you end up with these ever-growing debt levels among graduating seniors.

Rudolf Hess tries to turn World War II from a war between Nazi Germany and Britain to a war between Nazi Germany and Russia by flying to Britain to try to broker a peace:

Rudolf Hess - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Like Goebbels, Hess was privately distressed by the war with the United Kingdom because he, influenced by his academic advisor, hoped that Britain would accept Germany as an ally. Hess may have hoped to score a diplomatic victory by sealing a peace between the Third Reich and Britain,[22] e.g., by implementing the behind-the-scenes move of the Haushofers[clarification needed] in Nazi Germany to contact Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 14th Duke of Hamilton.[23]

On 10 May 1941, at about 6:00 P.M., Hess took off from Augsburg in a Messerschmitt Bf 110, and Hitler ordered the General of the Fighter Arm to stop him (squadron leaders were ordered to scramble only one or two fighters, since Hess' particular aircraft could not be distinguished from others).[24] Hess parachuted over Renfrewshire, Scotland on 10 May and landed (breaking his ankle) at Floors Farm near Eaglesham.[citation needed] In a newsreel clip, farmhand David McLean claims to have arrested Hess with his pitchfork.[24]

It appears that Hess believed the Duke of Hamilton to be an opponent of Winston Churchill, whom he held responsible for the outbreak of the war.

His proposal of peace were: "1. In order to prevent future wars between England and Germany spheres of interest shall be defined. Germany's sphere of interest is [Continental] Europe; England's sphere of interest is her Empire. 2. Return of German colonies. 3. Indemnification of German nationals who had their residence before the war or during the war within the British Empire and who suffered damage in their persons or property through measures of a Government of the Empire or through any occurrence such as tumult, pillage etc. Indemnification on the same basis by Germany of British subjects. 4. Armistice and peace to be concluded with Italy at the same time" (interview with Lord Simon on 9 June 1941;[25] the same ideas in interviews with Ivone Kirkpatrick and Lord Beaverbrook).

Live at the Economist: Economist Debates: Inflation: Guest:

First, the question is not whether the Federal Reserve should raise its target inflation rate above 2% per year. The question is whether the Federal Reserve should raise its target inflation rate to 2% per year. On Wednesday afternoon, Federal Reserve Chair Bernanke stated that he was unwilling to undertake more stimulative policies because "it is not clear we can get substantial improvements in payrolls without some additional inflation risks." But the PCE deflator ex food and energy has not seen a 2% per year growth rate since late 2008: over the past four quarters it has only grown at 0.9%. At a 3.5% real GDP growth rate, unemployment is still likely to be at 8.4% at the end of 2011 and 8.0% at the end of 2012--neither of them levels of unemployment that would put any upward pressure at all on wage inflation. It thus looks like 1% is the new 2%: on current Federal Reserve policy, we are looking forward to a likely 1% core inflation rate for at least another year, and more likely three. A Federal Reserve that was now targeting a 2% per year inflation rate would be aggressively upping the ante on its stimulative policies right now. That is not what the Federal Reserve is doing. Would that we had a 2% per year inflation target.

Live at the Economist: Economist Debates: Inflation: Guest:

Some of Bennett McCallum's arguments seem to me to be simply wrong—or at the very least unsupported. For example:

In developed economies … there is now a downward bias in the reported inflation values … Today we pump our own gasoline, arrange our flight schedules without the help of a travel agent, and ring up our own grocery purchases … our product purchases now come supplied with fewer services … [and so while] true inflation was often overstated in the past, today it is most likely understated by the official price statistics."

Some of Mr McCallum's arguments I simply do not understand. For example:

An increase in the target inflation rate would tend to undermine the rationale for central bank independence. Furthermore, it would constitute an additional movement away from recognition of the economic necessity for intertemporal discipline. Indeed, legislators could take an increase in the inflation rate expected over the future as a signal that their society is not willing to embark on serious budget-cutting fiscal reforms."

What does choosing between 2%, 3% or 4% as your long-term target inflation rate have to do with central-bank independence? Or intertemporal discipline? Or with the willingness of a government to—as did the Clinton government I worked for—try to balance spending promises and taxes, as opposed to the unwillingness of the governments Mr McCallum has supported—the Reagan and Bush governments—to do so?

None of these are clear to me.

Jonathan Chait watches the latest dirigible explosion:

"Mediscare" And The Conventional Wisdom: The Washington Post editorial clucking its tongue at Democratic attacks on the GOP Medicare plan is a useful encapsulation of the vacuity of the conventional wisdom on this subject. It's worth paying some attention to the editorial, because it takes at least a half step toward making explicit the assumptions that undergird most of the coverage of this issue. Here are all the parts of the editorial that make, or gesture toward, arguments. First:

Oliver Reichenstein:

Information Architects – Business Class: Freemium for News?: I had a perspective changing talk on the subject of pay walls with the chief executive of a big publishing company (no, I can’t tell you who). He asked me what I think about pay walls. I told him what I always say: The main currency of news sites is attention and not dollars and that I believe that it is his job, as a publisher, to turn that attention into money to keep the attention machine running. He nodded and made the following, astonishing statement:

I can’t see pay walls working out either. But we need to do something before we lose all of our current subscribers. Sure. It’s a tough business environment, but… But the flight industry is a tough environment too, and they found ways. So tell me: Why do people fly Business Class? In the end, an airplane brings me to the same place regardless of whether I fly Economy or Business Class and the massive price-increase I pay doesn’t compare the difference in value.

He asked whether I knew of a way to apply this logic to online news. What would a Business Class news site look like? People pay for Business Class because they don’t want to be tortured in Economy. They get faster lanes at the terror check. They get an extra glass of champagne. The stewards are more attentive. They get off the plane more quickly. They get the feeling of a higher social status. And he added that he wished that there was a way to lead each reader through the business class to Economy again and again to show him what he misses....

Pay walls weaken the main attractor (content) of your site and complicates the user experience (login on different platforms). Some leave social media back doors for pro users, but that’s not a good long term strategy either.... The idea of creating a business around the terrible online news experience is not that extravagant: Instapaper, Readability, FlipBoard & Co. are already profiting from the terrible reading experience of current news sites....

How would a business class version of a news site look in detail? We are currently working on a behind the scenes consulting project dealing with that problem.... No, you don’t need to make the free one ugly on purpose (apparently, they purposely torture us in Economy class). The traditional CPV/ad model design requirements will do the job for you.... Business Class idea would only work for titles like The New Yorker, Die Zeit, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Monde.... So here is our question for you: as a regular reader of Le Monde, NYT, or Die Zeit, how much would you be ready to pay for a Business Class version of your news site?

Paul Krugman this morning:

The Unwisdom of Elites: [W]hat I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that [our economic disaster] is mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.... The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people.... Let me focus mainly on what happened in the United States, then say a few words about Europe.

British capture Nazi U-110 and its Enigma cipher machine.

Tony Long:

May 9, 1941: German Sub Caught With the Goods: 1941: British destroyers capture a German submarine, U-110, south of Iceland. The British remove a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known to the Allies as Enigma, and then they let the boat sink -- to keep the fact of their boarding secret. The Enigma machine, used by the Kriegsmarine to encode and decode messages passing between shore command and ships at sea, was taken to Bletchley Park in England, where cryptographers including computer pioneer Alan Turing succeeded in breaking the naval code. The Germans, assuming U-110 had foundered with her secrets intact, failed to realize that their code was broken. The subsequent information passing before British eyes helped the Allies enormously in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Several versions of the Enigma machine existed, but the working principle -- a rotor system activated using a keyboard -- was the same. The machine itself had been around since the early 1920s and was used by other nations, too, although it is most closely associated with Nazi Germany. The Enigma used by the German army was decrypted as early as 1932 by Polish cryptographers, who later passed their methodology along to the British and French. In light of subsequent events (the Germans drove a Franco-British expeditionary force out of Norway and then crushed the French in a six-week campaign in 1940), the military value of this early intelligence is debatable.

But breaking the German naval code, made possible in large part by the recovery of U-110's machine, provided the British with a leg up at a time when the war at sea was very much in doubt. The capture of a U-boat on the high seas was a rare and considerable achievement, since submarine crews scuttled their boats rather than let them fall into enemy hands. In this case, the U-boat’s commander, Kapitänleutnant Fritz Julius Lemp, thinking he was going to be rammed by an oncoming destroyer, ordered his crew to abandon ship. (His precise order, according to one survivor, was "Last stop. Everybody off.") Seeing the Germans leaving the boat, the British commander managed to veer away and avoid a collision. Lemp, already in the water when he realized his boat wasn't going to be rammed, was swimming back to U-110 to scuttle her when he was either shot by the British (according to the Germans) or simply disappeared (according to the British)...

Felix Salmon explains why every day that Bill Keller remains at the head of the New York Times diminishes its chances for long-run survival. Much of it is standard Clayton Christienson clueless-management-keeping-an-organization-from-dealing-with-disruptive technological change:

Felix Salmon: The hermetic and arrogant New York Times: The NYT employs some of the smartest and ablest users and analysts of social media: it’s probably the most sophisticated newspaper in America on that front. And then it has dinosaurs like Bill Keller and Arthur Brisbane, whose respective columns this weekend betray the fact that the people with the bully pulpits are stuck in a completely different world, seemingly ignorant of some of the biggest stories in social media. Brisbane... the NYT’s... describes the way that the paper broke the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death. Well, he can’t do that, because the NYT didn’t break the news... he ignores the people who did break the news, and just tells the story of how the official NYT machine worked. His story starts at 10:34 last Sunday night, when a source told NYT reporter Helene Cooper that Osama had been killed. By 10:40, an alert was up on nytimes.com. Then, by Brisbane’s account, Twitter got involved.... All of [Brisbane's] links are internal; none are to the actual tweets in question....

And the nonexistence of which makes the substantive case for a shift to more expansionary fiscal and monetary policies stronger than at any time in my life:

1) An inflationary wage-price spiral. Paul Krugman comments:

The Inflation Monster Under the Bed: I’m glad to see Greg Mankiw agreeing with me on the absence of any inflation risk in the current environment. Maybe he should have a word with everyone else in his party.... [W]ages have gone nowhere. Commodity prices, on the other hand, have gone up.... So here are a couple of questions.

1. Do you see any sign that workers are about to (or are even able to) demand higher wages to compensate for the higher prices of gas and food?

2. Do you any sign that employers are getting ready to make more generous wage offers?

3. Have you heard anything about companies feeling that they have room to raise prices by substantially more than the rise in their raw material costs?

The answer to all three questions is clearly no. So what we have is a rise in raw material prices, which will largely get passed on the consumers, but no hint that this is spreading into a wider rise in prices; and with labor costs flat, that means we get a one-time jump in consumer prices, but no persistent rise in inflation. If you want to insist otherwise, you have to tell me how this is supposed to work. And I haven’t heard any coherent explanations to that effect.

Andrew Samwick:

It May Be a Broken Record, But the Sound Is Still the Best: The right reasoning is that with aggregate demand lower by hundreds of billions of dollars a year, there are unemployed and underemployed workers and underutilized capital whose services could be purchased on the cheap. If we have projects that add long-term value, this is the right time to be undertaking them. Plenty of those projects are to repair and maintain our seriously degraded infrastructure. Others are to make the upgrades necessary to plan for a future with different forms of energy transmission and communication.  Instead of fighting about which multiplier is the biggest and clingng to the misguided notion that all measures be "timely, targeted, and temporary," we should be building while it's cheap.

We should have started this years ago. Given the continued worry about the fragile state of the recovery, we should start it now.

Ezra Klein:

When Jim DeMint hated your freedom: My argument that mainstream Democratic politicians hold many of the same policy positions as mainstream Republican politicians from the early 1990s somewhat underplays the fact that those Republicans didn’t change their opinions in 1995, or 2002. They changed them in 2009. For instance, here’s conservative hero Jim DeMint endorsing Mitt Romney for president in 2008. Why did he endorse Romney in 2008? His individual mandate-reliant health-care plan, of course. “There’s no one in the race like Mitt Romney who’s proved in business and in his volunteer work and as governor of Massachusetts that he can solve a problem,” DeMint said. “Not by creating more government but by making freedom work for everyone. He’s done it with health care.” Brian Beutler has much more, including DeMint telling Fox News that Romney’s health-care plan is “something that I think we should do for the whole country” and the Weekly Standard reporting that “DeMint especially praises Romney’s original health-care plan.”

Tim Berners-Lee T.B. Lee:

Daring Fireball: The Great Ephemeralization: For example, a couple of years ago, Google waved a magic wand that transformed millions of Android phones into sophisticated navigation devices with turn-by-turn directions. This was functionality that people had previously paid hundreds of dollars for in stand-alone devices. Now it’s just another feature that comes with every Android phone, and the cost of Android phones hasn’t gone up. I haven’t checked, but I bet that this wealth creation was not reflected in GDP statistics. And it’s actually worse than that: as people stop buying stand-alone GPS devices, Google’s innovation will actually show up in the statistics as a reduction in GDP. […]

But the real lesson here may not be that the American economy is stagnating, but rather that the government is bad at measuring improvements in our standard of living that come from the software industry.