I just saw an advertisement in the Memphis Flyer for Anheuser-Busch’s new B^E, described in the ad as “beer with something extra,” i.e. caffeine, guarana, and ginseng.

Coming soon from Anheuser-Busch: Beerplus, with vellocet, synthemesc, or drencrom. It sharpens you up, and makes you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

UPDATE: I bought, and consumed, a four-pack this afternoon. As I expected, it's a little pricey -- four ten-ounce cans for $4.99. And believe it or not, it's not bad tasting, once you get over the expectation that it should taste like beer, which it does not. At first I thought it was awful, but by halfway through the first can, I didn't mind it.

The alcohol content is not indicated on the can, but it seemed low compared to a twelve-ounce regular beer. The caffeine/guarana/ginseng does a pretty good punch as a stimulant, after a couple of cans. Overall, a pretty good beverage to drink while playing Dungeons and Dragons, which is what I was doing.

Steve Landburg, guest blogging at Marginal Revolution, writes:

Amid all the scaremongering about a nailbitingly close election with a disputed outcome, it is worth observing that if you really believe in democracy, and if the election is close, then it doesn't much matter who wins. The theory of democracy (stripped down to bare essentials, and omitting all sorts of caveats that I could list but won't) is that the guy who gets more votes is the better guy. Surely, then, it follows that the guy who gets only slightly more votes is only the slightly better guy. And if one guy's only slightly better than the other, then a miscount is no great tragedy.

Bullshit.

There are two things that make democracy the best form of government. First, democracy is a system under which ambitious men and women can compete for power without spilling blood. To depose a king, you must kill him; to depose a president in a America, you only need to get enough people in enough states to vote for his opponent. The aftermath of the 2000 presidential election was pretty ugly, and the aftermath of the upcoming election may be as well; but no one was killed over the 2000 election, and it’s fairly safe to say that no one will be killed over this one.

The second great thing about democracy, as Matthew Yglesias has pointed out, democracy has salutory effects on the behavior of office holders who will be seeking reelection in the future:

Democracy, they say, is the worst form of government except for all the others. But why would that be? Not, certainly, because of the superior wisdom of the voting public who, if you read any of the public opinion literature you'll swiftly see, have almost no grasp of substantive policy issues and only a very vague familiarity with what the different candidates stand for. And yet, it seems to work pretty well. This is, I think, primarily because the voters have a habit of kicking incumbents out of office when thinks don't seem to be going well, and reelecting them when things are going well.

This is often not a very sound analytic approach. Candidates get blamed for economic problems that are not really their fault (see, e.g., Jimmy Carter in 1980) or get praise beyond what they deserve for improvements in living conditions (see, e.g., Rudy Giuliani in 1997). Nevertheless, this crude approach has certain merits. In particular, it encourages officeholders to try and make things better. If an incumbent mayor knows that whether the crime rate rises or falls will seriously impact his electoral fortunes, he has reason to try and make the crime rate fall. If an incumbent president knows that a solid macroeconomic situation will benefit him on Election Day, he'll spend at least some time trying to make it come about.

Knowing what we do about the American electorate, it would seem highly dubious that the elections are in any way a reliable selection mechanism for selecting the best candidate, by whatever objective standards you might appeal to, and even more dubious that a close election would indicate that the two candidates are equally good. If an election happens to select the best candidate, it’s mostly by chance.

And one certainly doesn't have to hold to Landsburg's naive "theory of democracy" in order to "really believe in democracy."

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman makes a similar point:

Just remember: Watching democracy in action is pretty depressing if you think of democracy as a noble project of collective self-government. But it doesn't look nearly so bad if you think of elections as an alternative to civil war.

Economist Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution argues in favor of prison privatization in the Pasadena Star-News.

More than two decades of experience with private prisons in the United States, Great Britain, Australia and elsewhere attest to the fact that private prisons can be built and operated at lower cost than public prisons.

Cost savings of 15 to 25 percent on construction and 10 to 15 percent on management are common. These are modest but significant cost savings in a $5.7 billion state system that continues to grow more expensive every year.

Private prisons not only have lower costs than public prisons: by introducing competition they encourage public prisons to also innovate and lower costs.

Back in August I wrote

If one is of a libertarian bent (as I am) with regard to victimless crimes such as drug use and prostitution, the problem would seem to be that imprisoning people doesn’t cost the government nearly enough. After all, the marginal prisoner is a lot more like Tommy Chong than Charles Manson.

To put it another way: if California were to save 15% on the per prisoner cost of incarcerating someone through privatization, how much of that savings would be returned to California taxpayers (through lowered taxes or paying off California’s debt), and how much would be used to incarcerate even more people through “tough on crime” measures like California’s three strikes law?

About two weeks ago, a cedar bench on which an eighteen-year-old cadet at Brooks Air Force Base carved “Johnny loves Vivian” in 1951 was discovered on the San Antonio River Walk, in front of the La Mansion hotel.

“Vivian” was the seventeen-year-old Vivian Liberto, a student at Saint Mary’s Catholic School. The Air Force cadet was Johnny Cash. Vivian later became Cash’s first wife, for whom he wrote I Walk the Line.

Tonight I’m going to a Halloween party as the great Stupid White Man himself, complete with blazer, badly home-made “no-GM” T-shirt, a “Proud to be a Democrat” baseball cap I picked up for $5 at Wal-Mart last night, and a vague attempt at simulating Moore’s permanent bad facial hair day, based on two days’ growth of beard and lots of little hair clippings from my electric razor.

Like Sebastian Holdsclaw, I was pretty well convinced that Osama was worm food. I guess that’s what they mean by an “October surprise.” Damned if I know what it means, or how it will play into things on Tuesday. (I guess it’s possible Osama made several tapes with different Democratic opponents, so I wouldn’t call it completely dispositive on his survival into recent months, mind you. But Occam’s Razor suggests that, if it was Memorex, he’d have made some vague reference to a Democratic challenger instead of making multiple tapes.)

Henry Farrell unearths a tongue-in-cheek article from PS, and hilarity—at least for political science geeks—ensues (þ: Orin Kerr).

Update: Dan Drezner takes note of my approval (in comments at CT) of footnote 5 in the piece, which is simultaneously hysterically funny and completely true; next fall when (if?) I teach research methods, that one’s going in the lecture.