If we thought that convicted fraudster Lee Farkas could get past the colophon, we’d wonder if he had been reading James Gleick’s new book.

Mr. Farkas did not prove to be a very good witness on his behalf. He insisted no crime had been committed, but his understanding of the law seemed to be a little unusual.

Patrick F. Stokes, a deputy chief of the Justice Department’s criminal fraud section, asked Mr. Farkas if he thought Taylor Bean’s agreement with Colonial Bank allowed the mortgage firm “to sell fraudulent, counterfeit, fictitious loans” to the bank.

“Yeah, I believe it does,” he replied.

“It’s very common in our business to, to sell — because it’s all data, there’s really nothing but data — to sell loans that don’t exist,” he explained. “It happens all the time.”

PS: Floyd Norris filed this report. That makes the second time this week that our eye has been caught by a Times news story masquerading as a column. Trend?

PPS: What we really do wonder is whether this story belongs in our “Idiocracy” collection.

We really have no comment to make on Gail Collins’s column about anti-abortion math in today’s Times; we’re just filing it away in our Idiocracy dossier. And with our meditations at Matins in mind, we wonder what “transparency” would bring to this problem.

Welcome to the fact-free zone. This week, U.S. Senator John Cornyn gave an interview to Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune in which he claimed that the battle in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood “was really part of a larger fight about spending money we don’t have on things that aren’t essential.”

There are a lot of fiscal conservatives in the anti-abortion movement, and it’s apparently hard for them to admit that destroying Planned Parenthood is a money-loser.

There’s also a resistance to government support for contraceptive services. “There are some people in the pro-life movement who think birth control pills of all kind are abortifacients,” said Senator Bob Deuell, a Republican. “But I don’t see any medical evidence.”

Deuell is one of those rare abortion opponents who is dedicated to the cause of helping women avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place. He says his allies in the anti-abortion movement haven’t objected to his approach, but he admitted that they haven’t been handing him any medals either.

We’re currently stuck with a politics of reproduction in which emotion is so strong that actual information becomes irrelevant. Senator Cornyn, in his interview, was reminded of the great dust-up his colleague Jon Kyl of Arizona created when he claimed that 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood did involved abortions. When challenged, Kyl’s staff said the figure “was not intended to be a factual statement.”

So did Cornyn agree that Kyl screwed up?

“I’m not so sure,” Cornyn said.

We don’t think much of “transparency” as a tool of good government. It’s an essentially passive technology that leaves no one to blame when it fails. Transparency has done nothing to keep the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and even, it seems, the Koch Brothers from pressing their toxic misrepresentations on anxious audiences. Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel, authors of Blind Spots, argue that transparency, like fines, denatures the ethical content of troublesome decisions.

A solution often advocated for this lack of objectivity is to increase transparency through disclosure of conflicts of interest. But a 2005 study by Daylian M. Cain, George Loewenstein and Don A. Moore found that disclosure can exacerbate such conflicts by causing people to feel absolved of their duty to be objective. Moreover, such disclosure causes its “victims” to be even more trusting, to their detriment.

Our legal system often focuses on whether unethical behavior represents “willful misconduct” or “gross negligence.” Typically people are only held accountable if their unethical decisions appear to have been intentional — and of course, if they consciously make such decisions, they should be. But unintentional influences on unethical behavior can have equally damaging outcomes.

Our confidence in our own integrity is frequently overrated. Good people unknowingly contribute to unethical actions, so reforms need to address the often hidden influences on our behavior. Auditors should only audit; they should not be allowed to sell other services or profit from pleasing their customers. Similarly, if we want credit-rating agencies to be objective, they need to keep an appropriate distance from the issuers of the securities they assess. True reform needs to go beyond fines and disclosures; if we are to truly eliminate conflicts of interest we must understand the psychology behind them.

Peer Bork, a research scientist at Heidelberg, has discovered that human being living in the developed world fall into three entereotypes, or classes of gut-harboring microbes.

“Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example.

Or, he speculated, doctors might be able to use enterotypes to find alternatives to antibiotics, which are becoming increasingly ineffective. Instead of trying to wipe out disease-causing bacteria that have disrupted the ecological balance of the gut, they could try to provide reinforcements for the good bacteria. “You’d try to restore the type you had before,” he said. Dr. Bork notes that more testing is necessary. Researchers will need to search for enterotypes in people from African, Chinese and other ethnic origins. He also notes that so far, all the subjects come from industrial nations, and thus eat similar foods. “This is a shortcoming,” he said. “We don’t have remote villages.”

The United States’ arguably unintentional campaign to preserve the Cuban Revolution until the very last historico topples into his grave just breezed past another milestone, with the appointment of the first non-Castro leader, 80 year-old José Ramón Machado.

Mr. Castro acknowledged that his generation had lagged in preparing young leaders, saying Cuba lacked “a reserve of substitutes with the sufficient maturity and experience to take over the principal duties of the country.”

Some analysts disputed that, saying Mr. Castro’s moves merely solidified his power against any stirrings from those who are young and perhaps too progressive.

[snip]

Aside from being a fellow combatant during the revolution, Mr. Machado may have been an attractive choice to Mr. Castro for his role overseeing the inner workings of the party, in charge of an office approving promotions and developing ties with party leaders across the island, said Arturo Lopez-Levy, a lecturer at the University of Denver and former political analyst in the Cuban Interior Ministry.

“Machado will be a key factor in choosing not only the successor, but also the structure of separation of powers destined to replace, within the party and between party and government, the current model of ‘Castro in command,’ ” Mr. Lopez-Levy said.

“Down the road, the old leaders just gained some time,” he said. “Will they use it wisely? The congress gave some hope to the party members and the population about a serious economic reform. Now the old generation still in power would have to respond to these expectations.”

Let the naysayers cavil, but British monarchy’s aura of grandeur remains blinding enough for many happy observers of next week’s royal nuptials to behave as if some sort of coronation were in the offing. Why else speculate on the hopes that the bride’s stepmother, the Duchess of Cornwall, may harbor for parking her own derrière on the throne?

How much Camilla cares is a matter of debate. Some of her friends believe her concern is mostly for Charles, who has always said that he sees it as his destiny to become king, and has worked restlessly to that end, with a schedule of public duties that far outstrip any other royal family member, including his mother. Others say Camilla herself is not as come-what-may about the issue as she has sometimes suggested to friends, and would like one day to be back in the abbey, seated beside Charles, as crowns are placed on their heads.

Twice in recent months, the couple has hinted that they remain hopeful of turning the tide of public favor their way on the issue of Camilla’s becoming queen. In an interview in November with Brian Williams of NBC, Charles answered hopefully when asked whether Camilla would ever be the queen. “You know, I mean, we’ll see,” he replied, as if ambushed by the question. “That could be.”

In February, it was Camilla’s turn. “Are you going to be queen one day?” a little girl asked her on a visit to a children’s center in the Wiltshire town of Chippenham. “You never know,” Camilla replied, smiling.

In today’s column, David Brooks offers an irresponsible assessment of Donald Trump, hailing him as a “straight-talking, obnoxious blowhard” who, his admirers believe, might actually get things done. Wishful thinking! Mr Brooks himself concedes that Mr Trump is an overgrown boy “thrilled to have acquired a gleaming new bike, and doubly thrilled to be showing it off.” That’s not our frankly elitist view of accomplishment. It’s no surprise that we don’t like Donald Trump, but Mr Brooks’s column makes it necessary to insist that we do not tolerate him, either.

Now, I don’t mean to say that Donald Trump is going to be president or get close. There is, for example, his hyper-hyperbolism and opportunism standing in the way.

[snip]

But I do insist that Trump is no joke. He emerges from deep currents in our culture, and he is tapping into powerful sections of the national fantasy life. I would never vote for him, but I would never want to live in a country without people like him.

We disagree. We would be happy to banish Donald Trump to some other country that might actually benefit from his Gospel of Success. As for “deep currents” and “powerful sections of the national fantasy life,” we recommend the movies or, if absolutely necessary, team sports. There is obviously no place in political life for fantasy.

From the obituary (penned by Margalit Fox)of Arthur Lessac, legendary voice coach, who died earlier this month at 101: a tough way of dealing with a tough beginning.

Mr. Lessac was born in Haifa, at the time in Palestine, on Sept. 9, 1909. His original surname is unknown: throughout his adult life, he neither used nor mentioned it. He had no wish, his family said, to utter the name of the parents who had left him to his own devices when he was very young

At 2, he sailed with his birth parents to the United States. Their marriage soon dissolved, and they put him in the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society Orphan Asylum in Pleasantville, N.Y., where he would spend most of his childhood.

At about 12, working for the summer as a delicatessen delivery boy in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he befriended a family on his route, who were named Lessac. They took him in for a while, and with their blessing, he took their name.

So far, it’s a case without names. An investigation into narcotics trafficking inadvertently opened a window on a much broader corruption problem, and one that is arguably more serious; for while cops dealing drugs is a very bad thing, making traffic summonses issued for moving violations disappear exposes the public to dangerous drivers.

It is not clear if any of the officers under investigation received bribes or gifts for fixing tickets.

“From what I understand, it was taking care of friends, basically,” a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said. “Friends and relatives.”

The official who was briefed said that fixing tickets “is a way of delegates to maintain their status or popularity with the police officers they represent.”

As always, this systemic corruption shows that there is a problem with the system. Law enforcement officers aren’t getting the message that they and theirs will be held to a higher standard of conduct.

Floyd Norris considers Europe at an interesting tipping point: now that the bankers and their regulators have decided what must be done, voters may refuse to ratify the plans.

There is a risk over time that democracy will lead Europe to splinter. Germans are angry about having to pick up the bill for bailouts of other countries, which is one reason the German government felt called upon to insist on that “strict framework.” Others are resentful of the enforced austerity.

If European economies somehow grow enough, those resentments may not matter much. But if not, voter anger may intensify and demand that something change. Maybe the Germans will want to cut off their prodigal neighbors. Maybe the neighbors will decide they would be better off with a new currency and without overbearing demands for austerity that prevent recovery. In either case, populist politicians demanding the demise of the euro might win elections. The fact that European law does not allow for such a possibility would make the situation messier, but in the end voters would have their way.

The Postal Service has issued a “forever” stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty — the one in Las Vegas.

The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty “forever” stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists.

But the post office is going with it.

“We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,” said Roy Betts, a spokesman. Mr. Betts did say, however, that the post office regrets the error and is “re-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future.”

The service selected the image from a photography service, and issued rolls of the stamp bearing the image in December. This month, it issued a sheet of 18 Lady Liberty and flag stamps. Information accompanying the original release of the stamp included a bit of history on the real Statue of Liberty. Las Vegas was never mentioned. The whole mess was exposed by the stamp magazine, which this week ran photographs of both statues.

The rot begins when officials bull-headedly stick with their mistakes instead of falling on their swords in disgrace. That there should be anything at all accidental about a postage stamp (a kind of currency) is horribly worrisome.

Donald Trump’s emergence on the political scene occasions some interesting comment by Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight. He divides Republican presidential candidates into two groups, one of which (the Fairfax Five) has the party establishment’s blessing, while the other (the Factional Five) does not.

For the establishment Republicans, it must feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Just as Ms. Palin’s numbers decline, candidates like Mr. Trump and Ms. Bachmann — who could be nearly as problematic next November — pop up in her place.

As a result, the Fairfax Five are gaining no ground at all on the Factional Five — in fact, the opposite is true. In an average of four polls of Republican voters conducted in November and December, just after the midterm elections, the Fairfax Five collectively held 27 percent of the vote, to 31 percent for the Factional Five. In the three most recent polls, however, the Fairfax Five’s share has declined to 22 percent, while the Factional Five’s — mostly because of Mr. Trump — has risen to 44 percent.

[snip]

I’m not convinced that these markets are underrating the Factional Five, each one of whom has some significant liabilities as a candidate and several of whom may not run. I do wonder, however, whether the sorts of candidates that Mr. Will likes will ultimately have enough Main Street charisma and Tea Party bona fides to win over Republican primary voters, especially in conservative states like Iowa and South Carolina. There is plenty of time left, but at some point, for a candidate like Mr. Pawlenty to prevail he has to at least begin to poll in the high single digits rather than the low single digits, which would suggest he has some flesh-and-blood appeal.

How do you find governors for people who don’t like government?

Acting with tact and a dispatch, an American Air Force team based in Okinawa restored the airport at Sendai, now reopened and under Japanese control.

The situation was quite different after the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Then, Tokyo rejected assistance by the United States military, a decision that many Japanese criticized as possibly raising the death toll. This time, Tokyo accepted, and promptly.

[snip]

Within minutes of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March 11, some 1,400 passengers and workers in the terminal suddenly found themselves surrounded by black, churning waves that crumpled parked aircraft like paper toys.

The people were rescued, but the airport seemed a near total loss — until Col. Robert P. Toth, commander of the 353rd Special Operations Group, based in Okinawa, heard of the airport’s destruction. His unit specializes in turning ruined landing strips and patches of empty desert into forward supply bases for American aircraft, but usually in war-torn countries, like Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan.

“It was clear that opening Sendai Airport was the No. 1 priority, but everyone had written it off,” Colonel Toth said. He approached his superiors with a plan to turn it into a hub for American relief.

Bravo.

The remarkable non-stop life of Sidney Harman has come to an end, cut short by acute myeloid leukemia at the age of 92, less than a year after Harman purchased Newsweek and forged its alliance with The Daily Beast.

At a time when sophisticated hi-fi radio required a tuner to capture signals, a pre-amplifier, a power amp and speakers, Mr. Harman and Bernard Kardon, Bogen’s chief engineer, quit their jobs in 1953, put up $5,000 each and founded Harman/Kardon. It produced the first integrated hi-fi receiver, the Festival D1000.

It was hugely successful, and by 1956 the company was worth $600,000. Mr. Kardon retired, and in 1958 Mr. Harman created the first hi-fi stereo receiver, the Festival TA230. In later years, the company made speakers, amplifiers, noise-reduction devices, video and navigation equipment, voice-activated telephones, climate controls and home theater systems.

In the 1960s Mr. Harman was an active opponent of the Vietnam War, and for a year taught black pupils in Prince Edward County, Va., after public schools there were closed in a notorious effort to avoid desegregation. From 1968 to 1971 he was president of Friends World College, a Quaker institution in Suffolk County. In 1973 he earned a doctorate from the Cincinnati-based Union Institute and University.

In the early 1970s he created a program to provide employees at his Bolivar, Tenn., automotive parts plant with training, flexible hours and work assignments, stock ownership and other benefits that eased tensions with management and raised productivity. It was hailed as visionary and scorned as impractical. But President Carter was impressed, and made him deputy secretary of commerce. He served in 1977-78

Regrettably, the principled, activist nudists of Barcelona are going to be denied their freedoms by new regulations aimed at the very unprincipled behavior of mass tourists.

Indeed, nudism’s few local proponents are themselves divided. Just Roca, 56, a specialist in sexology who participated in Mr. Tunick’s mass photo, quit Mr. Ribas’s association over “philosophical differences” about nudity and founded his own group called Aleteia, a rendering of the Greek word for truth. Nudist beaches and camps, common enough in Spain, he said, “are born of a culture that says being dressed is normal — I say nudity is the natural situation.”

Mr. Roca compares the campaign against nudity to a parallel proposal to ban the wearing of the Muslim women’s veil, often called the burqa, in public places, as several nearby cities in the Catalonia region have done and as the Barcelona City Council is considering. Mr. Roca called both measures forms of segregation. “It’s like ‘No Negroes,’ ” he said. Just as politicians fear that a burqa-clad woman has something to hide, he said, “they imagine an undressed person has something to hide, too.”

Guy Reifenberg, 37, whose travel agency, Kokopeli, organizes adventure tours, said that the proposed sanctions were less a crackdown on nudity than a way to rein in the excesses of mass tourism, which is currently swamping Barcelona.

“The city’s afraid of the kind of tourists it’s attracting,” said Mr. Reifenberg, a native of Israel who has lived here for six years. These tourists, he said, go for “cheap alcohol, partying, hanging out in the street, and not spending money.” As a result, the city’s business community — hotels, restaurants, bars and retail outlets — has put pressure on the mayor, Jordi Hereu, a Socialist who faces an uphill battle for re-election in May.

After thirty years of inconvenience, Fordham University and the New York Botanical Garden find themselves once again on Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. The ill-considered renaming of a stretch of roadway after a dentist and local historian, Theodore Kazamiroff (accent the first syllable, if you can), has been reversed.

When the street was renamed for Dr. Kazimiroff, he said, the City Council went a step beyond an honorary designation and legally renamed the road. “Part of the problem was they never really consulted a lot of folks, including the U.S. post office,” Mr. Muriana said. “So the post office for years refused to recognize the Kazimiroff name and wouldn’t deliver mail.”

The Botanical Garden, which also supported the change, lists its address as 200th Street and Kazimiroff Boulevard, which resulted in daily phone calls from befuddled visitors, garden officials said. GPS devices had trouble, too. “They’d have to spell Kazimiroff perfectly accurately, including Dr. Theodore,” Mr. Muriana said.

But Lloyd Ultan, the current Bronx historian, dismissed the idea that the address had proved confusing, calling those charges spurious.

“What was asserted was that nobody could find Dr. Theodore Kazimiroff Boulevard, which I find hard to believe,” Mr. Ultan said.

Still, Dr. Kazimiroff remains an obscure figure to many Bronx residents.

“I’d say most people here don’t even know him,” said Kathleen A. McAuley, a director at the Bronx County Historical Society, which, as it happens, Dr. Kazimiroff founded in 1955.

We hold that changing street names from the top down is a Soviet-style wickedness. We wouldn’t have our Major Deegan any other way, even if we don’t know who the hell he was! (But don’t bring back Anderson Field.)

At the beginning of the liturgical year in November, American Catholics will celebrate the Mass in language much closer to that of the Latin rite that was displaced almost forty years ago, in the wake of the second Vatican council. Will the laity’s response be as skittish as the clergy’s has been?

“The first time I saw some of the texts, I was shocked,” said the Rev. Richard Hilgartner, who as executive director of the American bishops’ Secretariat of Divine Worship is overseeing the introduction of the new missal in the United States.

“But the more time I’ve spent with it, the more comfortable I became with it,” he said. “The new translation tries to be more faithful to the Scriptures, and a little more poetic and evocative in terms of imagery and metaphor.”

“But the more time I’ve spent with it, the more comfortable I became with it,” he said. “The new translation tries to be more faithful to the Scriptures, and a little more poetic and evocative in terms of imagery and metaphor.”

Father Hilgartner said, “We know that people aren’t going to understand it initially, and we’ll have to talk about it. I’ve said to priests, we will welcome and crave opportunities for people to come up and ask us about God. It’s a catechetical opportunity.”

In other reactionary news, “scholars are sifting” through the official condemnation of Quest for the Living God, by Fordham University theologian Sister Elizabeth A Johnson.

Because prosecutors withheld ten pieces of exculpatory evidence, John Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row. A jury verdict against the prosecutor’s office that would have awarded him a million dollars for every year that he spent facing the death penalty was recently overturned by the Supreme Court’s reactionary majority.

I don’t care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed are not in jail themselves. There were no ethics charges against them, no criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no one can be sued.

Worst of all, I wasn’t the only person they played dirty with. Of the six men one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Because we were sentenced to death, the courts had to appoint us lawyers to fight our appeals. I was lucky, and got lawyers who went to extraordinary lengths. But there are more than 4,000 people serving life without parole in Louisiana, almost none of whom have lawyers after their convictions are final. Someone needs to look at those cases to see how many others might be innocent.

If a private investigator hired by a generous law firm hadn’t found the blood evidence, I’d be dead today. No doubt about it.

If only these really were the End Times — of the conservative decadence in the United States.

While the beleaguered employees of Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and many local newspapers, suffer widespread layoffs and furloughs, the boss, Craig Dubow, is doing very nicely, thank you. David Carr simmers.

In announcing that Mr. Dubow would receive a hefty package, double the previous year, Gannett hardly shied away from part of what was driving the award: “The company achieved substantial expense reductions through a variety of efforts, including continued centralization and consolidation efforts and salary freezes, positioning the company for growth as economic conditions improve.”

Ken Doctor, an analyst at Outsell and the author of “Newsonomics,” suggested that Gannett is mostly in the business of managing entropy.

“There has not been a lot of strategy other than cost-cutting to maintain profits and some small bets in digital that have not had any significant impact yet,” he said.

While their approach may be lacking in imagination and long-term strategy, Mr. Dubow and his team can be credited with being prudent in difficult times. Prudent, except when it comes to their own compensation.

We are itching to say that such a class of clueless privilege has not walked the earth since the days of the ancien régime, but we’re feeling pretty clueless, too. How can this sort of thing go on and on and on?

Clyde Haberman’s last NYC column. Has it been only sixteen years? Mr Haberman’s city voice was and is ageless.

Certain themes recurred in NYC:

Hate-crime laws, for example, essentially punish thought deemed impure by adding prison time for certain acts that are already crimes. The steady expansion of state-sponsored gambling lifts dollars from the pockets of those who can least afford it. The rejection of civilian trials for terrorism suspects is a capitulation to fear. The knee-jerk cancellation of political activity every Sept. 11 makes a mockery of the chest-thumping about how the terrorists didn’t win. Democracy took a severe pounding when the mayor and the City Council overrode the expressed will of the people to give themselves third terms.

And the Catch-22s of bureaucracy make the mind reel. A man named Marc La Cloche was taught how to be a barber while in a New York prison on a robbery conviction. After his release, the same state then denied him a license to work his trade because he had been in prison.

NYC focused on all those subjects more than once. At last sight, hate-crime laws are intact, state-sponsored gambling continues to expand, terrorism suspects are headed for military tribunals, politics is still taboo on Sept. 11 and the mayor is well into his shaky third term. As for Mr. La Cloche, he died without ever getting his barber’s license.

So much for the power of the press.