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Jens 'n' Frens
Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.
"A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
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Friday, December 27, 2002 :::
John Derbyshire thinks we aren't going to war. As I've probably noted before, I don't know whether I support attacking Iraq, but I do support Hussein thinking we would attack Iraq if pissed off. The behavior of the administration is insufficient to determine which is its policy.
(I've often thought if I were President that I'd produce a short-list for secretary of state and let them spend an evening playing poker for the job. If this administration is playing poker, it's doing an admirable job of it.)
::: posted by dWj at 5:45 PM
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The Chicago Tribune (requires free registration) expresses ambivalence this morning about Bush adminstration changes to environmental regulations. I'll note that emissions fees would make a quite defensible compromise between allowing old sources of emissions to keep operating if they're not too bad — in which case forcing them to go away altogether seems to be a waste of those resources — but would require the sites to shut down if they're too dirty, and would certainly provide the right incentives to owners of old sources to clean them up when it becomes worthwhile; it generally makes it unnecessary to distinguish between "major" changes to old sources and general maintenance. They are a panacea that make war, pestilence, and death itself go away, damn it. We should do it now.
Anyway, "cap-and-trade" is very similar; allowing an old source with a generous cap to sell that cap if it proves worthwhile again creates exactly the right incentives as described in the previous paragraph. The one concern I have, though, is in the initial allocation of the cap; I expect the initial cap is being given out in proportion to pollution emited in the past, and giving out valuable commodities for past antisocial behavior grates on me somewhat. Expect to see terrible things done by polluters who expect their favorite emissions to fall under this regime in the near future. (The defense of this is that existing sources were built with a reasonable expectation that they would be allowed to dump at least a certain amount of emissions; certainly I generally oppose large, unexpectable burdens suddenly placed on reasonably-acting people and entities — I oppose ex post facto laws and support fair compensation for property taken for public use — but I also think actions taken when government activities are predictable should be less sheltered. This may argue for caps that are doled out for somewhat older sources of emissions, with the caps thus allocated diminishing over time, and the rest of the cap being auctioned off.)
::: posted by dWj at 10:31 AM
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Thursday, December 26, 2002 :::
Tuesday morning the Lincoln Park Zoo was shut down when a mysterious white powder was found nearby. It was soon identified as flour and chalk, having been left by a running club marking a course.
::: posted by dWj at 11:51 AM
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Successive iterations that scan better are welcome. (Let's share the blame.)
::: posted by dWj at 11:51 AM
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My brother and I found last night the secret to an edible curry: add water and boil the tar out of it. We got in last night; I've brought him in this morning and took him to the board of trade, where I left him to be unleashed upon the city after trading starts and he gets bored of watching it. I'll meet him for lunch, should he find my crudely drawn map sufficiently intelligible, at which point we'll make plans for the evening; I need to start my Christmas shopping soon.
::: posted by dWj at 11:50 AM
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Wednesday, December 25, 2002 :::
Virginia Postrel links to an old story about Paypal which looks interesting -- I don't really have time to read it at the moment.
::: posted by Steven at 11:13 AM
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Merry Christmas to both of our loyal readers.
::: posted by Steven at 10:17 AM
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Tuesday, December 24, 2002 :::
My brother's culinary skills far exceed mine, but there was an exception. Growing up, we had always used garlic in its powdered form, and I learned to deal with the fresh stuff during college. I gave my brother a somewhat mean introduction to the potency of fresh garlic.
He was visiting, and we were aiming to make two or three servings of spaghetti sauce. I had acquired a head of garlic for the occasion. I was just finishing the peeling of a clove, when he held up the rest of the head and asked, "will this be enough?" I looked down at the clove I had just peeled, thought for a moment, and handed it to Dean, saying, "eat this." Dean popped it in his mouth, bit down, and started hopping around, retaining the presence of mind to locate the sink before spitting it out.
I like to think that was worse than my usual treatment of him, and I hope he doesn't remember it too acutely when showing me his curry recipe later this week.
::: posted by Steven at 6:28 PM
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This is probably the last time I'm checking in before I head to Iowa again. I want to leave with what may be a bit of Grinchiness, though; I've told people that my favorite holiday is Ash Wednesday, and I more or less stand by that. While I spend some of my driving time running numbers, I do listen to the radio sometimes as well — my brother, in private communication, is right, "skater boy" is more frantic than I'd remembered — and there's one Christmas song I just occasionally hear but feel the need to comment on. This song features a singer expressing the hope to Santa that she'll get what she deserves this year; I wish to remind everyone that the point of Christmas is that we enjoy the great privelege of not getting what we deserve because the birthday boy indemnified us. God loves you anyway, even though you don't deserve it.
Merry Christmas.
::: posted by dWj at 2:06 PM
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In response to Dean:
High kudos to ABC sports for its handling of a fan running onto the field late last night on Monday Night Football.
I think not showing that sort of hooliganism has become an industry standard. ("The Bachelor", you'll note, is an entirely different sort of hooliganism.) I was half-watching the hockey game last month where a streaker cimbed over the boards onto the ice, catching a rather sensitive part in a gap in the barrier in the process -- they didn't show him, either, though maybe that was partially a broadcast-decency-standard call.
On the other hand, a game in the little league world series this summer was delayed by a squirrel running onto the field, and the cameras followed him around quite a bit.
there's a contest looking for the biggest football fan to whom to award tickets to the Super Bowl; I heard this and thought, hey, what about us half-assed fans? (I must be one, having prefered Dennis Miller to John Madden.) We'd like to go to the Super Bowl, too, kind of.
Half-assed fans get to "kind of" go to the Super Bowl in the sense that they get to watch in their living rooms. It's a better view, frankly.
Speaking of John Madden and Super Bowls, I reminded Dad last night that during the Patriots' winning drive at the last Super Bowl, Madden kept saying that they should be running out the clock and going for overtime rather than risk losing the ball. This, of course, is stupid. Let's suppose it had gone to overtime, and the Pats had won the coin flip -- would Madden suggest they take the ball first, or let the Rams have it? If he thinks the Pats should take the ball themselves, how would they be any better off than they were with a minute left in regulation?
::: posted by Steven at 1:58 PM
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For Internet-connection-related reasons, I'm going to write a single entry regarding several links from the Instapundit.
- In a discourse on the differences between neo-cons and paleo-cons, Jacob Golbitz pens the following:
All conservatives worthy of the appellation harbor a prudential pessimism regarding the ability of politics to cure the ills of man
But if this is true, what is the idea behind "social conservatism"? Why is the social engineering of the right so different from the social engineering of the Marxists? Perhaps there's a difference in scale, but I'm deeply skeptical of both.
You'll note the distinction, I hope, between politics and culture. I think there's much to be gained from a culture which encourages family-building and contributing to charity, but taking that beyond social pressure and into compulsion is anathema to a free society and likely to do more harm than good.
- If you haven't had your fill of commentaries hammering "Bowling for Columbine", here's another.
- Finally, a woman was saved by breast implants.
::: posted by Steven at 1:38 PM
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My cookies last night turned out better than they had previously. The curry did not. For some meaning of the word spicy, it may have been the spiciest thing I've ever been near. One or two bites would cause my nose to run in a manner the prolific nature of which can't be fairly described without the use of more graphic terms than I wish to subject you to. I thought that I should cut back next time on the things it seemed to have too much of, but I then concluded that that would constitute halving the recipe — there was simply too much of everything that was in it. I'm not sure what went wrong.
::: posted by dWj at 1:16 PM
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Steve, when you come over, you'll bring the Lomborg book, yes? Look up for me the benefit he associated with Kyoto and its corresponding carbon dioxide reductions. Running the numbers on my drive back Sunday, I came around again in favor of a carbon tax, but more of those numbers came from thin air than I'd prefer.
(On a not terribly related note, I had a physics professor once — Robert Geroch, whom the great John Wheeler has called his smartest student, thus smarter than Feynman or Kip Thorne — who was taken aback by a question as to why special relativity needed axioms to be derived mathematically. "You can't just get special relativity out of thin air," he said; "if you could, it would have been discovered ... well, shortly after the discovery of thin air." It was moments like these that made me excited to go to my 8:30 class; I don't think I ever missed his class, even though I was hungover once.)
::: posted by dWj at 1:16 PM
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High kudos to ABC sports for its handling of a fan running onto the field late last night on Monday Night Football. The fan was never shown on the broadcast, where the Al briefly mentioned that that was what was going on and most of the time was filled with a conversation between him and John in which John was uncharacteristically lucid.
On that last point, there's a contest looking for the biggest football fan to whom to award tickets to the Super Bowl; I heard this and thought, hey, what about us half-assed fans? (I must be one, having prefered Dennis Miller to John Madden.) We'd like to go to the Super Bowl, too, kind of.
::: posted by dWj at 1:16 PM
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Kate Malcolm hopes for a white Christmas. My impression is that the storm to which she links is to go to the south of Chicago, but that Chicago may pick up some lake-effect snow tonight.
::: posted by dWj at 1:16 PM
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Mona Charen writes:
It never seems to have occurred to Lott that he could prove his bona fides on racial matters by pointing to school choice, faith-based charities and welfare reform.
Spot on, assuming she has his positions right. Later, she writes:
The Horton ad was about a black criminal released by liberal Gov. Mike Dukakis who raped and murdered a couple in Maryland.
Governor Dukakis did a lot of bad things, but I didn't think he ever killed anyone...
::: posted by Steven at 9:53 AM
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Monday, December 23, 2002 :::
Incidentally, much as I love y'all, I like my new job as well, and it keeps me much occupied. I confessed to my brother the other day that I don't read instapundit; in fact, I only occasionally catch Colby Cosh (who expresses well my feelings about Christmas), Lileks, and Discriminations; the only blogs I still read regularly are the Kitchen Cabinet and us, and I read us mostly out of politeness.
::: posted by dWj at 4:42 PM
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Charlie Krauthammer doesn't get it. As apparently a traditional conservative, I didn't believe that Lott shouldn't resign on principle because principle isn't something to resign on, or because backing segregation isn't resignable, but because Lott never backed segregation. If verbal sloppiness were resignable, we'd never have even one President Bush.
::: posted by dWj at 4:38 PM
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The Mount Union Purple Raiders rolled past Trinity (Texas) 48-7 to win Stagg Bowl XXX. It's their third consecutive national title, their sixth in seven seasons and their seventh overall.
::: posted by dWj at 1:54 PM
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