The Economist can always be counted on for a few fascinating articles, even when it arrives in your mailbox a week after it's been published (the downside of living in the boonies). One of the Christmas edition's gems: this article on a 5-day Guinness delivery in Cameroon (subscription required) — one that in Western Europe or North America would have taken six hours on a bad day. Among the stats: 47 roadblocks, a U-turn due to a washed-out bridge, three flooded-out sections of road, and a largely unpaved route. Their conclusion:

But there is no substitute for building and maintaining better infrastructure. In some areas, such as telecoms, private firms will do the work if allowed to. Thanks to private investment, mobile telephones have spread throughout Africa with the pace and annoying chirrups of a swarm of locusts. In Cameroon, Guinness now finds it much easier to contact employees than it did a couple of years ago, although the firm also frets that mobile telephones are gobbling up scarce disposable income that might otherwise be spent on beer.

The private sector does not, however, spontaneously provide roads, because the beneficiaries cannot easily be charged. Tolls can meet some of the cost of maintaining highways, but it is hard to squeeze money out of peasants on feeder roads.

The World Bank estimates that at least $18 billion needs to be pumped each year into African infrastructure if the continent is to attain the sort of growth that might lift large numbers of people out of poverty. Investment currently runs at less than a third of this. In the current economic downturn, private companies in the West are in no mood to rush into risky investment, least of all in Africa. The gap can only be filled, the Bank reckons, by governments and foreign donors.

In short, the governments of poor countries ought to pay more attention to their roads. A good first step in Cameroon would be to lift those road-blocks and put the police to work repairing potholes.

Nick Gillespie at Hit & Run notes the latest attempt to abuse eminent domain for private gain, this time in the Cincinnati 'burbs. Not only is the practice blatantly unconstitutional, it's also bad public policy: delegitimating a tool intended to ensure property owners are fairly compensated when their land is unavoidably taken. The local politicos deserve the reaming they'll surely get from the Institute for Justice on this one.

Bill Hobbs also passes on word that Gerald Nicely, the former head of Nashville's Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, is Phil Bredesen's choice to head the Tennessee Department of Transportation (also reported by the AP); he plans to promote a needs-based program for new roads and concentrate on rural highways as an economic development tool.

If he can continue to push forward major needed projects like the Knoxville Outer Beltway (I-475), the south leg of TN 840, the Collierville-Arlington Parkway and Interstate 69 in West Tennessee with better attention to the environment and public relations than his predecessor, his appointment will be welcome. If, however, his appointment leads to diversion of transportation user fees (such as the gasoline and diesel fuel taxes) from highway maintenance and construction to general government purposes, Tennessee's taxpayers will be poorly served.

Bill Hobbs has an interesting op-ed on reforming Tennessee's tax system in today's Memphis Commercial Appeal; it's worth a read. Most of the objection to the Sundquist income tax was that it would potentially open the floodgates for profligate spending by the legislature; Bill's plan would help allay those fears.

His plan's probably worth implementing in Mississippi, too, which already suffers from a byzantine income tax (with bizarre effects at the low end) and relatively high sales tax.

This time, it's Democrat Patty Murray of Washington. I haven't seen a display of moral relativism like this since I was taught the positive contributions of Adolph Hitler in 7th grade. Murray deserves to be nibbled to death by cats.

There apparently was a power outage this morning that took down the system that blog.lordsutch.com is hosted on. While it was down, I took the opportunity to replace the motherboard and CPU (upgraded from a P-III 450 to an Athlon 750) and upgrade the system memory (from 512 MB to 784 MB), since I had the spare parts laying around the house gathering dust anyway.

I pass this link along without any comment whatsoever, except to say that I do not recommend attempting this at home (or at least without my personal supervision).

Just got back from seeing The Twin Towers with friends. Jacob T. Levy has a comparison between the novel and the film, and Glenn Reynolds comments as well. I enjoyed the film for the most part, especially since my recollection of the book is so dim that it's entirely possible I never read it. It's a bit like Shakespeare though; you already know the ending (even without having read the book), so ultimately the execution is key. Now I have to dig out my Fellowship of the Ring DVD.

A letter writer in today's Memphis Commercial Appeal:

But for the fact that the holier-than-thou finger-pointers have made an issue of it, most people would never have known that Thurmond ran for president on a ticket that included segregation in its platform.

I'm not sure if this is an indictment of our education system or just of the letter writer's general intelligence; either way, it's profoundly disturbing.

Eugene Volokh comments on some weird results he's finding in perusing some Los Angeles Times poll data.

Contemporary social scientists would argue that a lot of what Eugene is seeing is due to a problem that political scientist/sociologist Philip Converse first identified around three decades ago, something he called “non-attitudes”. His basic point is that responses to survey questions often don't reflect respondents' true attitudes about things; if they don't have a real attitude, often they just make something up on the fly to stand in for it. Others have argued that “public opinion” is merely constructed; there is no such thing as public opinion until you start asking questions.

Political scientist John Zaller (who I've mentioned before in this category, and is probably the leading authority in public opinion research today) doesn't necessarily agree that there are non-attitudes; rather, people in responding to survey questions sample from their relevant “considerations” (or underlying attitudes) based in large part on question wording.

Getting to Eugene's quandry: the concept of "weapons of mass destruction" may activate particular considerations in women that it doesn't in men — women may have a more visceral reaction to the possibility of Saddam nuking innocent civilians than men do, for example. The second question uses "George W. Bush" as part of its wording; since women are less supportive of Bush than men, the gender disparity may be due to the “Bush considerations” being more heavily weighed here. One need not believe that “many voters' views are ill-formed” (which I think would be Converse's argument) to accept these results as valid.

One of the world's oldest legislative bodies — the British House of Lords — is on a slow, but sure course to extinction. Its importance has been diminishing for centuries; the importance of the Commons was greatly increased by the 1689 Bill of Rights, and the 1911 Parliament Act stripped the Lords of most of their powers. In 1999, the House of Lords Act removed the voting rights of all hereditary peers (excluding 92 who retain their voting rights until the reform is complete).

Since 1999, the effort to reform the Lords has stalled. Some have speculated that current Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair likes the Lords the way it is — emasculated and without any democratic legitimacy. Its current composition is most similar among democracies to that of the Canadian Senate: dominated by the “life peers” who are appointed by the prime minister of the day with the assent of the monarch.

In the past week, the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform issued its First Report. The report recommends a chamber of 600 members serving 12-year terms, most likely with some proportion of the membership appointed and the remainder elected (there are also options for a fully-elected and fully-appointed chamber). The report does not envision giving any additional powers to the chamber; it would still be limited to delaying “money bills” no longer than one month and other legislation (except that extending the duration of a government more than five years) no more than one year.

The lack of additional powers for a more representative upper chamber is troubling; the reason the Lords lost most of its powers in the first place is due to its lack of democratic legitimacy. If the upper chamber is to be more legtimate, it ought to have powers commensurate with that legitimacy. At the very least, the reformed upper chamber ought to have power to indefinitely block any legislation that amends the “constitution” — whatever that may be. More importantly, it ought to have oversight powers over the executive, similar to the investigative powers of the U.S. Congress over the bureaucracy and presidency.

As to the upper chamber's composition, I believe a smaller, fully-elected chamber is appropriate. The Commons functions with over 600 members mainly because (a) the Commons largely functions as an electoral college for the executive and a ratifier for its decisions and (b) the business of the Commons is largely orchestrated by the government of the day. The upper chamber would neither choose the prime minister nor would it largely operate in the interests of the prime minister. An upper chamber of 160–240 members seems appropriate.

The chamber should also be fully elected. Assuming a twelve-year term, my recommendation would be to elect a quarter of the membership every three years via party list proportional representation (as Britain already uses for “top-up” seats in the Welsh and Scottish parliaments and for elections to the European Parliament). Vacancies arising through death or resignation could be filled by appointment by the prime minister, or by nomination of the departed member's party.

An upper chamber reformed in this way would be an effective bulwark against overreach by the government of the day while still retaining the prerogatives of the Commons as the primary legislative chamber.

Iain Murray has also discussed Lords reform in his blog.

If I were my cousin, I'd be singing myself happy birthday. That's something she really enjoys doing, pretty much any day of the year.

(Technically, my birthday was yesterday... hence the lack of blogging.)

I won't even dignify this debate with links... bottom line, in my opinion, all the bloggers involved deserve credit for keeping this one alive when every single "mainstream" media outlet in America except the Washington Post was ignoring it and nobody on the Sunday shows thought it was a big deal (and the WaPo would have buried the story too if it hadn't gotten mainstreamed after the weekend). Special kudos to Josh Marshall for his exemplary research. And, like it or not, the Professor did make sure it crossed over outside the liberal wing of the Blogosphere. (For what it's worth, Virginia Postrel is the one who got me most interested in the issue, but that's neither here nor there.) Beyond that, feel free to childishly bicker...

Not all the news on race in Mississippi this week was bad. It turns out that an apparent racist incident at the University of Mississippi this fall was actually an ill-considered prank played on some friends by three African-American freshmen. While the incident didn't get much play outside the state, it did embarrass the university during the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of James Meredith's admission to Ole Miss.

From today's Clarion-Ledger:

Two former Jefferson County jurors say 60 Minutes owes them more than $6 billion after airing a program that called the county a haven for "jackpot justice."

Nah, Mississippi doesn't need tort reform...

Hit & Run has also picked this one up.

Tacitus has written a good essay on the role of race in both the Republicans and the Democrats. Choice quote:

Of course some Republicans and some conservatives are racists. From the moment that Barry Goldwater -- a Jew without a racist bone in his body -- decided to stand on principle for the ideal of free association, the racists of the South knew they had a socially acceptable and morally justifiable cover for their loathesome proclivities. And so the "Southern strategy" was born, and so the old Confederacy was won for the Republican Party. (And so, in sick counterpoise, was the Democratic Party made the natural home for the nonwhite racists of America.) Is this a badge of shame -- the original sin of the modern Republican movement?

What can I say? This show keeps getting better. Characters get fleshed out more, bad guys get fragged, and we get to see Kaylee on TV.

Discussion, as always, at the TiVo Community Forum.

It's official: Ole Miss faces Nebraska in its umpteenth trip to the Independence Bowl. Rebels win by 10 (Nebraska has no pass defense, and Ole Miss can put 8 or 9 in the box against Nebraska's rushing attack since they have no pass offense either).

It looks like everyone's favorite lightweight browser has hit the 0.5 release; get it here (a lightly tested Linux build with Xft for all your antialiasing needs; for Windows, grab a build from here). Don't forget to visit the official and unofficial sites to pick up your favorite extensions and themes (still using Qute here).

Still, Virginia Postrel's new photos demonstrate why she has to make any red-blooded male's "Top Ten Reasons To Be A Libertarian"; her book The Future and Its Enemies should also appear on that list. Meanwhile, the InstaWife isn't exactly chopped liver.

BTW, I'm with Glenn; the middle photo is the best of the three.

My two complimentary copies of Running Linux, 4th ed., showed up today. Since I wrote a few pages of it (and did a technical review on the rest), I can't give an unbiased review.

I did note a few whoppers (a couple of my notes didn't make it in: most notably, bzImage isn't compressed using bzip2), and I think enscript gets discussed twice for some odd reason, but overall I think it brings Running Linux into the 21st century while retaining the spirit of Matt's original; there's something in here for all but the most seasoned Linux veteran, and it's still the first book you should buy before installing Linux, no matter what the flavor. (I remember being excited when Linux Installation and Getting Started, the predecessor of RL, came out, which will give you some idea of how long I've been a Linux afficianado.)

Incidentally, the material I wrote is in one of the two free chapters (Chapter 7; PDF pages 25–32 — real pages 196–203) available at O'Reilly's website.

The Institute for Justice just won an appeal of its Tennessee casket monopoly case. More coverage from the Volokhs.

The only downside is that the Sixth Circuit didn't take up the Privileges or Immunities clause argument that I.J. made. The Slaughter-House decision is one of the last vestiges of stupid interpretations of the 14th Amendment, from the same brain trusts who gave us Plessy v. Ferguson; at least Plessy got the boot it deserved.

A recent thread in the TiVo Community Forum brought back this blast from the past... all I can say is, I'm glad I'm not losing my hair (yet!).

Well, it's over for Coach Fran in Tuscaloosa. Apparently the motivation is the Crimson Tide's NCAA problem going from bad to worse; it's hard to imagine any penalty forthcoming from Indianapolis short of the so-called Death Penalty, especially after the infractions committee specifically pointed out that the only reason the Tide avoided it before was for being fully cooperative.

Shutting down the Tide isn't good for either them or the SEC in general. It might be a good thing for college football in the long term, though, as an instructive example. On the other hand, it might push a lot of I-A schools to abandon amateurism completely and withdraw from the NCAA. One thing's for sure: it's going to be a long nine months in Tuscaloosa.

Look at Page 2. Then compare Exhibit B. I'm flattered that a congressman thinks I'm a good photographer, even if the caption is completely wrong (the photo is from El Dorado, nowhere near I-49). ;-)