Lots of interesting stuff out there today. I’m too lazy to comment on it all, so here are some links:
Juan Non-Volokh is doing Sunday Lyric Blogging, and Michael at Countertop Chronicles has followed up with Monday Lyric Blogging. Far be it from me not to jump on the bandwagon, so I hereby stake my claim on Tuesday.
Apropos of something or other, here’s the first verse of David Bowie’s “Savior Machine,” off his album The Man Who Sold the World (1970):
President Joe once had a dream.
The world held his hand, gave their pledge
So he told them his scheme for a Saviour Machine.
They called it the Prayer, its answer was Law.
Its logic stopped war, gave them food,
How they adored till it cried in its boredom:
Please don’t believe in me, please disagree with me.
Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now,
or maybe a war, or I may kill you all.
There's a moral in there somewhere. Or maybe it's just a stand-out track from one of Bowie's best albums.
Via Beth Plocharczyk at Crescat Sententia, I’m pleased to see that the Democratic and Republican parties don’t have a monopoly on nutjobs. From the campaign website of Michael Badnarik, who is campaigning for the Libertarian presidential nomination, we have a new idea about criminal justice:
Given the opportunity, Michael would like to change one aspect of prison life to increase the safety of the people guarding them. Instead of allowing them to lift weights and exercise several hours per day (making them violent AND powerful), Michael would require them to remain in bed all day for the first month, and twelve hours per day after that. This lack of activity would allow their muscles to atrophy, making them helpless couch potatoes incapable of inflicting very much violence on each other, the guards, or unsuspecting citizens should they manage to escape.
Elsewhere on the same page,
Michael Badnarik has studied the Constitution for twenty years, and has been teaching an eight-hour class on the subject for the last three years. All of his political positions are derived from the principle of individual rights, and are consistent with the Constitution. He would like to see strict enforcement of the Bill of Rights, and would establish a “zero tolerance policy” for all elected officials who violate the supreme law of the land.
Except for the Eighth Amendment, that is.
The Shelby County School Board has thumbed its collective nose at non-Christians, changing the name of the winter break back to “Christmas break”. (The article does not say what it has been called in recent years.)
Quoth Tim Wildmon of the American Family Association:
[Dissenters] should get over it and be grateful we live in a free nation that tolerates different religious views and not in some Islamic country that forbids anything that is not Muslim.
And board member Joe Clayton, who sponsored the measure:
This is Christmas break. I get offended when I see that pushed to the background.
Maybe they could compromise and call it "Xmas vacation".
Well, at least they haven’t tried to remove the word “evolution” from the biology curriculum.
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok summarizes his new paper on the disconnect between the economic theory of patents and the political reality of patent law. Prof. Tabarrok was kind enough to send me a pdf of the paper, in which he points out the absurdity, from an economic point of view, of rewarding “inventors” with 20-year monopolies on ideas of the kind that occur while taking a shower: ideas like Amazon.com’s infamous patent on “one-click purchasing.” He proposes a system in which the scope of the patent – its length or its breadth – would vary with the amount of sunk costs that go into the invention.
The best quote of the paper:
Edison famously that “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” A patent system should reward the ninety-nine percent perspiration, not the one percent inspiration.
Also noteworthy are studies he cites showing that “most innovations would occur without patents.” The notable exceptions – the chemical industry and the pharmaceutical industry, where firms do face major development costs.
(And the paper is accessible even to a non-economist like me. So if you have any interest at all in intellectual property law, get Prof. Tabarrok to send you a copy.)
My alma mater is hosting a lecture on string theory by University of Maryland professor James Sylvester Gates, Jr., tomorrow evening at 7 pm.
It looks to be terrificly interesting. Unfortunately, I have tickets for Hedwig and the Angry Inch at TheatreWorks tommorow evening – which my wife will undoubtedly enjoy more than a physics lecture.
Over at the Commercial Appeal, we learn that the Rendezvous has added vegetarian selections to its menu:
“Change is hard,” said owner John Vergos. “But we wanted to reach some of those groups who might not consider coming here because one or more of them didn’t eat meat.”
Well, sort of. Apparently vegetarians have two choices: red beans and rice, or a Greek salad.
It’ll take a better selection than that to get me to go to the Rendezvous. But I guess it’s a start.
I’ve been deliberately avoiding posting anything about Iraq. I didn’t support the war, and in retrospect I still wouldn’t have, but I don’t really have anything terribly insightful to say, and frankly I find the topic rather tiresome. But one of the cover stories from today’s Wall Street Journal deserves more attention than it’s getting in the blogosphere. The headline:
How a 24-Year-Old Got a Job Rebuilding Iraq’s Stock Market
Choice quotes:
At Yale University, Jay Hallen majored in political science, rarely watched financial news, and didn’t follow the stock market. All of which made the 24-year-old an unlikely pick for the difficult task of rebuilding Iraq’s shuttered stock exchange. But Mr. Hallen was given the job immediately after arriving in Baghdad in September.
In early November, Mr. Hallen traveled to Baghdad’s Hamra Hotel for a lunch meeting with Luay Nafa Elias, who runs an investment company here. Mr. Elias says he was expecting to meet a middle-age man and therefore was astonished to see the baby-face Mr. Hallen sit down at the table and order a plate of Kabobs. “I had thought the Americans would send someone who was at least 50 years old, someone with gray hair,” says Mr. Elias.
As the lunch continued, Mr. Elias found himself impressed by Mr. Hallen’s confident tone and his repeated promises to quickly open a stock market that is the envy of the Arab world.
Mr. Elias’s faith in Mr. Hallen, however, began to evaporate when the market’s opening was delayed without explanation, first to the middle of this month, and then into February. “Maybe someone older and more experienced could have gotten this done on time,” Mr. Elias says.
That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the Coalition Provisional Authority's ability to turn Iraq into a stable democracy.
Peggy Noonan does a bit of Clark-bashing in today’s OpinionJournal. I wouldn’t bother following the link; it’s just the usual drivel I’ve come to expect from her. But one quote stood out as particularly laughable:
It is true that Americans respect and often support generals. But we like our generals like Eisenhower and Grant and George Marshall: We like them sober, adult and boring.
Grant? Sober?
(Yes, I know that historians disagree about the extent of Grant’s love affair with the bottle. But given the disagreement, “sober” is hardly the word that leaps to mind when describing him. And let’s not forget two other beloved American generals – Patton and McArthur – who can hardly be described as “boring.”)
Will Baude posts today on another way to ruin perfectly good bourbon.
And today I was watching the Xmas episode of Futurama on DVD. Fry has this fantastic quote:
Every Christmas my mom would get a fresh goose, for gooseburgers, and my dad would whip up his special eggnog out of bourbon and ice cubes.
Now that’s my kind of eggnog!
Visiting today some regions of blogspace I usually avoid, I found one of Clayton Cramer’s observations about racism:
In general, racism of any sort tends to be strongest among people that are at the bottom of the economic ladder—and need someone below them to look down upon. If you can’t take pride in anything that you have accomplished, you can at least take pride in your race!
I wonder how Clayton would explain
vile anti-gay bigotry.
Juan Non-Volokh complains that fiscal conservatives have nowhere to turn:
Last night’s State of the Union included the usual laundry list of costly new proposals, further cementing President Bush’s record as a profligate spender. Even with increased economic growth, pursuing these initiatives will further delay deficit reduction. Alas, fiscal conservatives don’t have anywhere else to turn, according to this study by the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. To the contrary, based on their campaign platforms, NTUF found that every one of the contenders for the Democratic nomination would increase spending even more than it has grown under President Bush.
But the question should not be “what Bush will spend” vs. “what Democratic candidate D says he will spend“. The question should be “what Bush will spend” vs. “what Democratic candidate D will spend“. Any Democrat in the White House would have a powerful brake on his profligate spending plans that President Bush does not, viz. a Republican Congress. Andrew Sullivan has realized this, even if he can’t bring himself to support any of the Democratic candidates because of such important matters as endorsements by obnoxious jerks.
Of course, the worst federal spending (being not just wasteful but downright counter-productive), viz. farm subsidies, aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. But aside from farm subsidies, a Democratic president would have a hard time finding enough common ground with a Republican Congress to pass any major new spending initiatives. And with the House gerrymandered into Repblican hands for the forseeable future, there’s not much danger of a Democratic Congress coming around and allowing a Democratic president to have his way with the Treasury.
Tyler Cowen, noting that drastic fall in violent crime during the 90s may be partly explained by the fall in popularity of crack cocaine, speculates on the reasons that the cocaine business, unlike the marijuana business, is so associated with violent crime.
Is it more due to intrinsic properties of cocaine, such as its addictive nature, and its being a stimulant instead of a depressant? Or is it due to extrinsic features of the drug, such as its centralized production outside the U.S.?
Perhaps some light could be shed on the matter by comparison with the crystal methamphetamine business. I’m not an expert, but from what I’ve read it would seem that crystal meth shares a lot intrinsic properties (such as being a stimulant) with cocaine, but shares with marijuana extrinsic properties such as decentralized production.
If there’s a high rate of violence associated with the crystal meth business, we should look to the intrinsic properties of cocaine to explain the violence associated with the cocaine business, whereas if there is not, we should look to production factors to explain the difference between the cocaine and marijuana businesses.
In public corruption, that is. Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, we learn that the Corporate Crime Reporter has listed Mississippi as the most corrupt state in the country, closely followed by North Dakota and Louisiana.
As for the rest of the Mid-South, the full report reveals that Tennessee comes in at number 19, and Arkansas is way down on the list at number 42. Nebraska is apparently the least corrupt state in the nation.
Congratulations, Mississippi!
UPDATE: Damn, Chris beat me to the post by 24 minutes.
Keith Burgess-Jackson is upset with the banner ads that Ads By Google is serving up at the head of Animal Ethics.
Over the course of a couple of reloads, I’ve seen ads for “Jackson Hole Choice Meats,” “SterlingSilverMeats.com,” “Prime Beef,” “USDA Certified Steaks,” and “Kobe Beef from $29.99.”
It seems that Google’s keyword technology can tell what a site is about, but can’t tell you whether the site is for or against it.
Rather than letting it ruin his day, I think Keith should try to find the humor in it. After all, these companies are presumably paying by the impression, and they aren’t likely to get any sales from these ads.
David Bernstein writes that the best deal for vegetarian fast food is the Taco Bell bean burrito at 79 cents.
I haven’t set foot in a Taco Bell in several years, myself. But if you are fortunate enough to live in a city with a Back Yard Burgers franchise, I highly recommend their Gardenburger. BYB is a little more expensive than the usual fast food dreck, but this is definitely a case of getting what you pay for.
John Holbo notes that not only did Hollywood commit the unpardonable sin of making the dreadful 3rd and 4th Alien movies, they’ve now added insult to injury by mixing Greek and Latin roots on the DVD boxed set.
Forget this wine blogging fad. Will Baude is bourbon blogging. He recommends Jim Beam Black, and provides a Manhattan recipe.
I don’t know about this Manhattan business, since I drink mine on the rocks. But I’ll put in a plug for W. L. Weller Special Reserve. It’s an excellent buy at about $17 a bottle at Joe’s Liquor in Midtown Memphis. It goes well with a game of Settlers of Catan, which is how I spent New Year’s Eve.
The Mississippi Board of Education is considering making a change to its math requirements in order to comply with the No Child Left Behind Act.
It seems that the NCLBA requires states to test students on the highest level of math required by the curriculum. Currently, Mississippi requires geometry, but only gives standardized tests on Algebra I.
So rather than comply with federal law by giving standardized tests on geometry, the Mississippi Board of Education is considering dropping the geometry requirement.
Yet another illustration of the law of unintended consequences.
From a Wall Street Journal article today on federal fuel economy regulations, and the perverse incentives they create for auto makers:
While light trucks represent 36% of all registered vehicles, they are involved in about half of all two-vehicle crashes with passenger cars, highway safety regulators say. In such crashes, over 80% of those killed were in passenger cars.
So if you bought that SUV for “safety,” just keep in mind that you bought that safety at the expense of the safety of others.
And if you bought it just so you would look cool … well, you don’t.
UPDATE: James at OTB correctly points out that the statistics I cite don't make it clear to what degree the 80/20 death ratio in SUV-car crashes is a matter of a higher fatality rate in cars vs. a higher survival rate in SUVs, comparing with car-car crashes.
The source for the WSJ factoid wasn't hard to track down. It's from the Feb. 23 testimony of the Administrator of the NHTSA before a Senate commitee. Here's a better statistic that the WSJ should have used, one which does support my thesis:
When controlling for impact location, and comparing light trucks to passenger cars of comparable weight, we found that light trucks were more than twice as likely as a car to cause a fatality when striking a car.
Keith Burgess-Jackson claims to have refuted consequentialism:
Consider an example: My neighbors are having a pleasant meal. I can easily disrupt it, but choose not to. I am therefore morally responsible for the pleasure of my neighbors. Generalize: I can spend my entire day preventing good deeds from being performed by others. If I choose not to do so, I am morally responsible for all the good that is done. It turns out that I’m morally responsible for a great deal of good, just by sitting in my study!
I agree that Prof. Burgess-Jackson has refuted a certain thesis: the thesis that whether one is “responsible” for an state of affairs is solely dependant on whether one’s action or inaction causally contributed to that state of affairs.
However, that thesis is not consequentialism.
Consequentialism is the thesis that the rightness or wrongness of a possible action, and which of all possible actions at a given time an agent should do, is solely a function of that possible action’s consequences. Consequentialism by itself does not have anything to say about whether an action is praiseworthy or blameworthy, or whether an agent is “responsible” for that action’s outcome.
Let’s look at another example:
Smith and Jones are standing near a swimming pool. Smith is an excellent swimmer, but Jones cannot swim at all. A small child falls into the pool. There is no way for the child to be saved unless Smith jumps in to save him. Smith does just this: jumps in and saves the child. Jones refrains from doing anything that would hinder Smith in her rescue attempt.
In conjunction with an axiology (theory of value) that entails that a drowned child is the worst outcome of all of Smith and Jones possible actions at the time, consequentialism entails that each of their actions, Smith’s rescuing the child, and Jones refraining from hindering Smith, were the right things to do. Consequentialism entails that nothing other than the possible outcomes of their action was relevant. It would not be relevant if the owner of the pool had forbidden Smith to swim in it. It would not be relevant if Jones had promised the owner of the pool to prevent Smith from swimming in it. It would not be relevant if Smith had made a deathbed promise to her mother to never go swimming.
Smith, of course, is a hero. And Jones is not. But consequentialism does not entail this. Nor does it contradict it. All it entails is that Smith and Jones both did the right thing. Consequentialism lays silent on the praiseworthiness of Smith's and Jones's actions.
Mike Hollihan at Half-Bakered has a post on discriminiation against atheists in the Tennessee Constitution. The relevant paragraph is Article IX, Section 2, which reads
No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this State.
Earlier, however, in Article I, Section 4, the Tennessee Constitution declares
That no political or religious test, other than an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and of this State, shall never be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under this State.
Now how exactly can requiring that someone not deny the existence of God, or “future state of rewards and punishments,” not amount to a religious test? It would seem to even exclude Christian Universalists, who hold that everyone will be saved and no one will go to Hell.
And I wonder how broad the phrase “any office in the civil department of this State” is supposed to be. Are atheists not allowed to be Tennessee State Troopers?
Paul Muller at Heretical Ideas asks for feedback from Democrats on the reactions of Democratic presidential candiates to the President’s dropping the steel tariffs. Here are some quotes from the AP article:
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean (news – web sites) said that despite Bush’s claims “the steel industry needs additional breathing room to get back on its feet.” Rep. Dick Gephardt (news – web sites), D-Mo., said Bush’s action demonstrated a “callous disregard for the workers and the communities whose jobs and livelihoods have been decimated by unfair competition.” Former Gen. Wesley Clark (news – web sites) said Bush needed to “listen to the 2.6 million manufacturing workers who’ve lost their jobs” while he has been in office.
I for one am extremely dissappointed in these three candidates. Well, Gephardt I expected it from, he’s Mr. Protectionist. But Dean and Clark are both smart enough to know that tariffs are not good for the American economy, and their pandering to the steel industry is just as pathetic as the President’s pandering was. (Although fortunately they can’t back up their pandering with real tariffs. Not yet anyway.)
It’s looking more and more like I’ll be sitting out the Democratic primary, assuming Lieberman drops out before the Tennessee primaries, and then voting Libertarian in the general election.
Here’s a question for the Constitutional Law experts out there. Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution grants to Congress the power "to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises". Article II does not grant the President any such power. How is it that the President has the power to impose tariffs on steel?
I’m guessing that some law passed by Congress granted this power to the President. But why wouldn’t that be an unconstitutional delegation of power? Have the federal courts ruled on this specific issue?
Keith Burgess-Jackson attempts to explain liberal anger from his converative viewpoint. His specific targets are Brian Leiter and Henry Farrell, but he lumps all liberals in with them:
Deep down, liberals know that they have lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people. They control the media, Hollywood, the courts, and academia, but little else. They sense that all is lost—that what they perceive as rollbacks will be permanent. ... What we are seeing is a grown-up tantrum.
So how do you explain all the angry conservatives, Keith?
My suggestion to everyone out there, left and right, is to quit the armchair psychoanalysis of the political opposition. It’s a load of patronizing bullshit when liberals do it, and it’s a load of patronizing bullshit when conservatives do it.
An ancient Roman 20-sided die (circa 2nd century), with astrological symbols on each face, is being auctioned off at Christie’s.
Estimated going price, $4000-6000.
Now that would be an impressive die to pull out of the obligatory Crown Royal bag at MidSouthCon 22.
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