Last month, I made some snarky remarks about Amber’s Army, an activist group started by the Commercial Appeal after the tragic death of Amber Cox-Cody, who was left in a day care van in the blazing heat of the Memphis summer.

Veronica Coleman-Davis, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Tennnessee, has written an excellent editorial on Amber’s Army. Coleman-Davis questions whether it is appropriate for the media to be engaged in this kind of activist organization. She writes, "Calling for community action under the heading of Amber’s Army is a risky entrance into the realm of shaping, not reporting, the news."

In other news, the day care workers whose negligence resulted in Amber Cox-Cody’s death, have been charged with first-degree murder. This surprised a lot of people in the community, including me, who thought that first-degree murder required premeditation. But according to Tennessee State Code 39-15-202 (2), first-degree murder includes any “the killing of another committed in the perpetration of … any first-degree murder, act of terrorism, arson, rape, robbery, burglary, theft, kidnapping, aggravated child abuse, aggravated child neglect or aircraft piracy.” (Note the interesting recursion in the definition. The recursion bottoms out in paragraph (1), which gives the usual “premeditated or intentional” definition.)

When you look at the definitions of “child abuse” and “aggravated child abuse” in 39-13-401 and 39-13-402, however, it seems that almost any action that results in the death of a minor may well fall under the classification of first-degree murder. Shouldn’t we be drawing some distinctions?

I’m back from a trip to San Antonio, where I spent a week with hightly-filtered net access where I was training. I quickly discovered that of my two favorite blogs (the Volokh Conspiracy and Calpundit), one of them, Calpundit, was blocked, as it was considered a “personal site” by the filtering software.

I saw no evidence of any systematic bias against “liberal” or “conservative” blogs. But the decisions about which blogs were “personal sites” seemed so arbitrary. When I go back in September for more training, I'll try a more systematic study of what blogs are blocked.

Oh, and I couldn’t get to my email either, since “external email sites” were blocked as well. When I returned, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I only had 29 copies of the Sobig worm waiting in my mailbox.

Downtown San Antonio itself is quite lovely. If you’re ever there, I highly recommend dropping by Jim Cullum’s Landing for half-price margaritas and live jazz.

I would, however, like to strangle whoever came up with the stupid marketing slogan “Don’t Mess with Texas”, which appeared plastered all over T-shirts and shot glasses in every souvenir boutique I saw.

It’s been three days now since “Summer Storm 2003”, as the local media have christened it, and like 175,000 other Memphians, I’m still without power. I’m guessing I’ll be among the last to get power back, since my power line is lying in the middle of my back yard, having been downed by a neighbor's falling tree.

I discovered an interesting fact about homeowner’s insurance: if your neighbor’s tree falls and does damage to your property, your neighbor (or his insurance company) is only liable if the tree was damaged or diseased. Falling tree damage is handled by a negligence rule, not a strict liability rule.

I’m wondering whether this is the correct rule, from the perspective of economic efficiency. Generally, a rule that places liability with the party most likely to prevent an economic harm is the more efficient one. The negligence rule for tree damage shifts some of the economic risk from the tree owner, who could easily trim his trees, to potential neighbor, who can at best choose not to buy property next to people with towering trees.

The negligence rule will be more efficicient, economically, only if there are sufficient positive externalities to having towering trees in residential neighborhoods. There are some externalities, of course. I like living in neighborhood with tall trees, and I get to enjoy this even though there aren’t any tall trees on my property. If enough other people enjoy this as well, this will be reflected in the market value of the property. But are these externalities sufficient to overcome the problem of property owners ignoring tree maintenance, and letting trees grow to the point where they could easily damage the property of others?

There will be a meeting Wednesday of Amber’s Army, a group founded after the June 25 death of Amber Cox-Cody, who was left for eight hours in a day-care van in the Memphis summer. This was the fourth such death in Memphis since 1996.

Now I don’t want to sound callous. There’s a real problem here. But “Amber’s Army”? I can’t think of any less appropriate use of the military metaphor. At least with the “War on Drugs”, there are men with guns out there kicking down doors, so it’s at least it’s something like a war. I’m envisioning armed men in fatigues outside day care centers, inspecting vans to make sure there aren’t any kids left inside.

I don’t have any good ideas for solving the problem of incompetent day care workers letting kids die in hot vehicles in the summer. And don’t know anything about the particulars of any of the cases, of why the kid was going to day care instead of being cared for, at home, by a family member. But the liberal in me suspects that welfare reform is partly to blame. I wonder whether it just might be a little more cost effective to take the money the state is spending on providing day care for poor children, and just pay one parent to stay at home and take care of the kids.

The amateur economist in me recognizes that the incentives need to be done right. For example, it should be the same payment, no matter how many kids you have in your care. And it shouldn’t matter whether it’s the mother or the father who stays home to care for the kids. And maybe you should only get paid to stay home and take care of the first two children. After that, you’re on your own.

I’m not a child welfare expert, but seems to me that pre-school children are almost always better off at home. And any system that provides perverse incentives to take them out of the home is broken.

Now back to sounding callous again. That logo of the crying teddy bear makes me want to retch. And if the Commercial Appeal is going to advertise the URL www.ambersarmy.com, they should make sure it works.

I’d been wondering all day how to introduce myself. Fortuitously, Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber gave me the perfect segueway, by reporting that the job market for philosophers is not as bad as I thought.

You see, I’m a philosophy grad school dropout. I have an ABD from the University of Rochester. I was in a PhD program from 1992 to 1997. In May of 1997, faced with a dissertation going nowhere, the loss of my funding, and a bleak outlook on the job market, I left Rochester and returned to Memphis, where I had attended Rhodes College as an undergrad. There, a friend of mine hooked me up with a job at a Mom and Pop ISP doing web page design and tech support.

And now Brian has gone and made me wistful for what might have been. I really can’t complain, I suppose. I really enjoy being an all-purpose computer geek, and I certainly make more money than I would in Academia. But I do miss the intellectual stimulation, the esoteric conversations that lasted late into the night. And I regret that I left just a few weeks before the death of Professor Lewis White Beck. I was one of his last students.

Anyway, check out my philosophy page if you’re into that kind of stuff. All the papers there date from grad school. And if you’re in Memphis, and feel like sitting around, drinking beer, and discussing philosophy, drop me a note.