Many conservatives like to bash the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, pointing out that in recent years it has had more decisions overturned by the Supreme Court than any other Court of Appeals. I’m no legal expert, but I’ve long suspected that this is because the Ninth Circuit has been faithfully applying precedents that the Supreme Court has been in the process of overturning over the past two decades. Which is exactly what a lower court is supposed to do. Other Courts of Appeals have, to a greater extent than the Ninth Circuit, been instead playing a game of “guess what the Supreme Court will say.” To the extent other Courts have been right in their guesses, they have been overturned fewer times.

Some support for this thesis is contained in today’s concurring opinion in the Newdow case by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court’s most conservative Justice. Thomas, who would have overturned Newdow on the merits, writes: “I conclude that, as a matter of our precedent, the Pledge policy is unconstitutional.” (Via the Volokh Conspiracy.)

I spent Memorial Day afternoon at the funeral of my uncle, Bill Sides. Bill Sides was a World War II veteran, who served with the 236th Engineers in China, Burma, and India.

This was the first funeral I’ve been to with military honor guard. The graveside ceremony was simple but moving. One soldier, out of sight, played “Taps,” while two others folded the flag that was draped over the coffin into a right triangle with only the stars showing. Each of the three soldiers saluted the folded flag before presenting it to a family member.

The complex of meanings that this ceremony invokes surely differ from viewer to viewer, and I find it difficult to sum up in words what I felt on seeing it. Suffice it to say that the ceremony managed to honor at the same time both my uncle as an individual, and all America’s military veterans who have passed on.

I learned from Mike Hollihan that the Libertarian party has nominated Michael Badnarik for president.

So despite my threats, I won’t be voting Libertarian in November. I couldn’t bring myself to vote for someone who doesn’t respect the eighth amendment.

UPDATE: According to the Blogcritics article linked to above, "Badnarik is clearly a genuine connoisseur of N/A beer." Like I said, he's a crackpot.

Well, not exactly. While ego-surfing last night, I came across this obituary for “Uncle Brock Sides,” a Confederate veteran who died in Texas in 1914.

On this page, there’s also mention of a Brock Sides, who may or may not be the Confedarate veteran mentioned above. This Brock Sides would be my third cousin twice removed, if I'm counting generations correctly. His great-great uncle, Benjamin Franklin Sides (a popular name for children born in 1786, I suppose), was my great-great-great grandfather.

And another Brock Sides was a Gilchrist Studios National Poetry Month Contest winner in 2000, at the age of 13, for this anti-abortion poem.

Micha Ghertner, who is far from a knee-jerk right-winger, and who is in my opinion one of the smartest bloggers out there, argues that prisoners should pay for their “room and board” while in prison:

Whatever your thoughts may be on charging wrongfully convicted prisoners for room and board, it makes even more sense to charge the guilty for their prison expenses. Why should taxpayers be forced to pay for other people’s crimes? Ideally, prisoners should be forced to work while in prison to pay off the costs of their confinement, rather than impose an additional burden upon them when they are released.

I’m of the opinion, based on my reading of David Friedman (whom I know Ghertner is familiar with), that inefficient punishments like imprisonment and execution should be expensive for the government. Otherwise, there’s too much incentive to just “lock ‘em up and throw away the key.” Ideally, the cost to the government of locking someone up should be exactly the same as the cost to the person being locked up. That way, the government will lock someone up only if the marginal benefit to society is greater than the cost to the person imprisoned.

This is especially true when a large portion of those imprisoned are being held for things that shouldn’t be crimes in the first place, such as drug crimes.

UPDATE: TChris at TalkLeft writes:

Every few months, it's worth remembering that your tax dollars are being spent to incarcerate Tommy Chong so that the Justice Department could send a message about pot pipes and bhongs.

It's a good thing imprisonment is so expensive to the taxpayers. Otherwise, there would be a lot more Tommy Chongs. (Link via Crooked Timber.)

Matthew Yglesias notes today that, at least in theory, affluent families in good school districts have little incentive to push for improving educations in bad school districts. If we could wave a magic wand and improve the quality of underperforming rural and urban school districts, "suburban property owners are screwed, since a significant proportion of their home equity is tied up in the proposition that owning property in District X entitles your children to a superior education."

Here's a bit of anecdata to support this, from an article in today's Commercial Appeal (obnoxious registration required) about White Station High School, a Memphis public school with a very high reputation:

It's that mystique that ratchets up home prices in the neighborhoods around White Station High, and causes homes to sell 10 days faster than most Zip Codes in the metro Memphis area. Prudential Realtor Laura Zarecor sold her clients' home at 4792 Cole in two weeks. One open house is all it took.

Back in March, I reported that Memphis Congressman Harold Ford, Jr., was among those in attendance at a coronation ceremony for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington.

According to local reporter Jackson Baker, Ford is denying having been at the ceremony. Baker quotes Ford as saying, “Unfortunately, public officials’ names often get used without their permission.”

Be sure to check out the blog of Moon-watcher John Gorenfeld.

I played two games of Princes of Florence this afternoon at Cafe Francisco downtown.

The theme of the game is Medici-era Florence, and the goal of the game is to gain the most prestige, which you get by building a magnificent Palazzo, with lots of buildings and landscapes, and by commissioning works from artisans, artists, and scholars.

Turns in the game consist of two phases, an auction phase and an action phase. In the auction phase, players bid to add landscapes to their Palazzo and hire architects and jesters. In the action phase, players build buildings and commission works. Each artisan, artist, and scholar has a preferred type of building to work in, a preferred type of landscape for recretation, and a preferred freedom (travel, opinion, or religion), which makes the works they produce more valuable.

There are three things about this game that make it one of my favorites.

First, the auction mechanic acts as a natural balancing mechanism for the game. There can be no consistent winning strategy for the game. If there were a winning strategy, everyone would pursue it in the auction phase, bidding up the value of the items. This would give an advantage to anyone not pursuing that strategy, since they could buy the items they need cheaply.

Second, the game appeals to the amateur economist in me, since it illustrates so well the concept of opportunity cost. Each player can only buy one item in each turn’s auction, so even if you get a good deal on, e.g., hiring a jester, you might have gotten a better deal on hiring an architect. The game is won by getting a better deal than everyone else at the auction.

Third, the goal of the game illustrates Aristotle’s virtue of magnificence. It’s good to earn money, but only because it lets you do great things with it.

If you live in the Memphis area and would like to play Princes of Florence or other strategy board games, you should sign up for the Memphis Strategy Board Gaming Community Yahoo group. We meet to play games at least twice a month, once in downtown or midtown, and once out east.

I get four or five credit card offers per week in the mail, and I usually just throw them away without even looking at them.

Today, though, my wife and I both received credit card offers from CapitalOne. On the outside of each envelope were terms for balance transfers. My envelope offered

2.99% fixed APR for life on all balances transferred.

My wife’s envelope, on the other hand offered

3.99% fixed APR for life on all balances transferred.

My wife's reaction to this blatant inequity: “I didn’t want their crummy credit card anyway.” Neither did I.

I suppose the whole blogosphere will be linking to it soon, but I’m linking to it anyway, because everyone should read this:

Tacitus posts a eulogy for Nick Berg, written by JakeV, a friend of Mr. Berg.

Link via Obsidian Wings.

It’s a little early to nominate entries for Best Blog Post of 2004, I suppose, but I think it will be hard to beat Mark Kleiman’s list of five epistemic principles for thinking about politics:

1. Being aware of your own tendency, and those of your allies, to demonize the opposition.
2. Being more skeptical of news that tends to confirm your presuppositions, and more credulous of news that tends to challenge them, than is comfortable.
3. Trying to imagine how the people whose actions you dislike can see those actions as justified.
4. Discounting somewhat, in figuring out how far you're justified in going to make sure your side wins, your subjective certainty that you're right. Given that means and procedures are immediate and easy to see, while outcomes are hard to see, this means giving more weight to means and procedures, and less to outcomes, than a simple decision analysis based on your current beliefs would justify.
5. And still, in spite of your carefully-cultivated doubts, fighting hard for what you believe in, because if the people capable of irony allow irony to demobilize them, the fanatics will win.

Mark Lane of the Miami Herald urges everyone to support the Truth, Beauty, Decency, Cute Little Children and Free Beer for Everyone (with Proper ID) Act of 2004.

If I could add one amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it would be something like Article II, Section 17 of the Tennessee Constitution:

No bill shall become a law which embraces more than one subject, that subject to be expressed in the title. All acts which repeal, revive or amend former laws, shall recite in their caption, or otherwise, the title or substance of the law repealed, revived or amended.

Tennessee courts have struck down laws because of this Constitutional provision, notably the “toy towns” bill of 1997.

But I’d settle for a Constitutional provision forbidding the use of contrived acronyms in the titles of bills.

David Bernstein posts another blog entry in his seeming quest to turn the Volokh Conspiracy into LGF.

Personally I don’t think that T-shirts designed to foment ill-will between religious groups on campus are “cool.”

In addition to my fondness for hats, I also like ties. (They're pretty much the only part of a man's business wardrobe that can be expressive.)

So I was horrified this morning to discover, upon removing the laundry from the washing machine, that I had accidently laundered my favorite tie. It was based on a Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass window from the Coonley Playhouse in Riverside, Illinois. It's the blue one:

Here's a picture of the original stained glass window, now housed at the Museum of Modern Art.

If they're found guilty, I hope these assholes go to jail.

Because when the Islamist pricks do this kind of thing to our soldiers, I want to be able to go after them with a vengeful spirit.

Why not just hope those assholes go to jail because what they did was morally wrong? By adding the qualification, it seems as if the only reason Profs. Volokh and Reynolds are outraged is that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners (or “alleged” mistreatment, as Prof. Volokh writes) will no longer let Americans hold the moral high ground in the ongoing war in Iraq.

To be fair, the quote Reynolds pulls from Citizen Smash does recognizes the wrongness of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. But the quote from du Toit is the most prominent one in Reynolds’s post.

UPDATE: More on Reynolds's reaction from Jim Henley. Henley points out that "[i]t takes four sentences for Glenn Reynolds to start whining about John Kerry in his attempt to condemn the Abu Ghraib abuses," and also notes that Dan Drezner "devotes most of his passion to resenting that Arabs have gotten indignant about it."

There’s a must-read article (no matter what your political leanings are) over at Reason Online, about the federal government’s “ever-expanding criminal code.”

Those of you in Memphis might like to note that the first two cases mentioned by the authors, USA v. Mahoney and USA v. Logan, were tried in Jackson and Memphis, respectively.

I discovered today that I am (or, rather, this blog post of mine is) the number one result returned by Google for ”grad school dropout.”

Will Baude anguishes over the apparent demise of men’s hats as a fashion accessory.

Have faith, Will! One day, men’s hats will come back in style, and you and I will be ahead of the fashion curve.

Everyone who knows me “in real life” knows that I’m a big fan of hats. My wife has compared going hat shopping with me to going shoe shopping with a woman.

Right now I own three hats: a straw Stetson, a felt Bailey, and my newest hat, a straw Scala. Here’s a picture of me wearing the Bailey in San Antonio in January. The lovely lady in the picture is my wife.

A word of advice to men shopping for hats: do not buy a hat over the internet. Two hats of the same brand and style will fit slightly differently. You have to try each of them on to find the one that fits you best.

In Memphis, the place to shop for a hat is Mr. Hats.

From the Washington Times:

Mr. Boone said that if he were in charge of standards, there would be stringent controls on material.

"It must be majority approved ... voluntary ... and self-imposed," he said, clad in a yellow blazer, black slacks, a canary yellow tie and white leather shoes. "Censorship is healthy for any society, and that goes for arts, entertainment, anything. Self-imposed means that the majority of people say that is what we want, and it can be changed if people's attitudes change, which is how a democratic society works."

Good thing Mr. Boone is not in charge of standards. (Link via Marginal Revolution.)

Julian Sanchez has an interesting economic speculation about why New York radio is so lame:

My guess - pure speculation - is that because current technology and spectrum policy limit the number of FM stations to well below what the New York Market could bear, what ends up happening is that the market is actually able to sustain at a profitable level enough Clear Channel-style top-40 schlock stations that the more interesting independent sorts that pop up in less dense urban areas get crowded out. Imagine every town in America got exactly five movie theatres, regardless of size. Ironically, in the smaller towns, three or four theatres would probably satisfy the total demand for the mainstream Hollywood movies coming out, and one or two would be left catering to the minority that was interested in art-house or foreign flicks. In Manhattan, though, those five theatres could easily sell out every showing of The Punisher or Scooby Doo 2 and still have lines at the door, so with a limit on the number of theatres in place, they stick with plucking that low-hanging mass-market fruit.

Interesting thoughts, but why is Memphis radio so bad? Answer: it wasn't, until George Flinn killed the Pig. We still have WEVL, I suppose, but it seems like every time I turn on WEVL they're playing Celtic music. Shudder.

From CNN:

Judge deals blow to Bryant defense

Judges have been saying that their salaries are inadequate, but who would have thought a judge would stoop to dealing drugs?

UPDATE: Reader Xrlq emails to point out yet another reading of the headline:

Actually, when I first read the headline, I thought of a third meaning: this judge's deals aren't just kinda bad for Kobe. To his defense team, they blow.

Since Chris is doing it, so will I.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

My result:

Limes are used a great deal in Asian cooking, and the rind can be used to flavor curries, marinades, and dips.

At Cafe Hayek, George Mason University economics professor Russell Roberts quotes James Surowiecki writing in the New Yorker about the Bush administration’s manipulation of economic statistics for political gain:

Statistical expediency and fiscal obfuscation have become hallmarks of this White House. In the past three years, the Bush Administration has had the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop reporting mass layoffs. It shortened the traditional span of budget projections from ten years to five, which allowed it to hide the long-term costs of its tax cuts. It commissioned a report on the aging of the baby boomers, then quashed it because it projected deficits as far as the eye could see. The Administration declined to offer cost estimates or to budget money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A recent report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers included an unaccountably optimistic job-growth forecast, evidently guided by the Administration’s desire to claim that it will have created jobs.

Prof. Roberts then goes on to praise Bush for this:

[T]his indictment of the Bush Administration is disappointing. I was expecting to read that Bush had leaned on the bureaucrats to redefine unemployment or some such measure in order to look good in November. But except for the BLS example, Surowiecki's examples are examples of where the Administration has made inaccurate forecasts that led to more palatable political results. That's a good reason to ignore most forecasts....

Administration lies are good when they lead to political results that Prof. Roberts likes.

(Link via Marginal Revolution.)

(Updated to correct Prof. Roberts' institutional affiliation and link to Marginal Revolution.)

White House “drug czar” John Walters blamed Canada for a doubling of “pot-related emergency room cases,” explaining that hydroponically-grown Canadian pot is “seven times more potent than the marijuana baby-boomer parents may remember.”

“Canada is exporting to us the crack of marijuana and it is a dangerous problem,” said Walters.