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



Saturday, February 01, 2003 :::
 

President Bush's Remarks on Space Shuttle Columbia (link from the Kitchen Cabinet)
The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth, yet we can pray that all are safely home.


::: posted by Steven at 11:34 PM


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Colby Cosh regarding the shuttle
Much is being made, in the weblog world, of a claim that a CBC Newsworld interviewer questioned aloud whether "American arrogance" had had anything to do with this morning's accident. Disgusting if true, but I for one was almost equally offended by Adrienne Arsenault's repeated claims, on the main CBC network, that this incident will create "political problems" for NASA and enfeeble the American will to explore space. How little she knows about the United States. If history teaches one unambiguous lesson, it is the foolishness of underestimating America. I don't speak of "resolve" or "spirit": these are unsuitable words to denote the blind, guileless, elemental cussedness of an axe clearing a homestead, a pioneer crossing a salt flat in a thirty-cent wagon. For my part, I expect that the "arrogance" which sent the first free men into Earth orbit, and put them on the surface of a heavenly body, will be unblunted by these seven deaths.

That's just the ending of the entry. Go ahead and read the rest.


::: posted by Steven at 11:20 PM


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Bad Thing
The space shuttle Columbia appeared to explode and break up in the skies over Texas on Saturday with seven astronauts on board after it lost contact with NASA minutes before landing, followed swiftly by reports of debris on the ground.

I'm just old enough to remember Challenger.


::: posted by Steven at 12:07 PM


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Friday, January 31, 2003 :::
 
Want to learn to calculate the day of the week for any date? Here's John Conway's method.


::: posted by Steven at 6:46 PM


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Happy new year to those of our readers who are Chinese, as well as those who've simply botched January to the point where they need another go at reset.


::: posted by dWj at 5:55 PM


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It's a bit late for me to make this comment on the State of the Union address, but in observing various mentions of the clause in the Constitution that mentions the "State of the Union", little was made regarding how much the Constitution doesn't say. It doesn't say evening -- a practice that began with Lyndon Johnson. It doesn't say Tuesday (Clinton's last one was a Thursday), and it doesn't say late January (the late January tradition tends not to hold in Inauguration years). It doesn't say annual, it says "from time to time". It doesn't even say "speech" -- almost all "State of the Union addresses" before Wilson were written, with the notable exceptions of the first few.

The "State of the Union" clause, then, says very little about how modern State of the Union Addresses are given. It probably could have been left out, as obvious -- if the President isn't, from time to time, giving Congress information on the state of the union, what kind of a cheif executive is he?

PostScript: You'll also note that the Constitution doesn't require the President to describe the State of the Union as "strong".


::: posted by Steven at 5:32 PM


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Thursday, January 30, 2003 :::
 
I gave a stranger a jump start yesterday; while I always like cheap karma, I did it with particular alacrity because of my concerns a week ago that I might need one. Does this make it a selfish act?


::: posted by dWj at 5:34 PM


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Speaking of which, The Kitchen Cabinet is adding new bloggers. I'm wary of this. Instapundit, please note, still blogs alone (but points to others when they write something that catches his eye). As do Andrew Sullivan and Lileks.

I haven't often seen blogs improved by new members (the glaring exception being the time I added Dean). I stopped reading Sasha Castel after she added some bloggers (one of which later proposed to her, successfully) who I thought added more in quantity than in quality. I like the new Volokhs to a degree, and still read the site, but I often skip entries by the new people ("new" being defined as "new since I started reading" -- I read everything Sasha writes, except when I get busy and ignore the site for a few days; I read what Eugene writes, if it's not too long; and I tend to read what Juan writes -- Michelle was there before I started reading, but she never posts, and I'm not convinced that she -- or Abby Malcolm at the Kitchen Cabinet, for that matter -- exists).

This sort of makes sense -- if I'm reading a site, it's because I like the bloggers who are already there. Even if a non-reader would consider a new blogger to be an improvement, my tastes are attuned to what's already going on. So maybe sites that add new bloggers gain more audience than they lose, but the prior readers are right to be wary of change in something they love.

I don't mean to be too negative, here. The Cabineteers seem to have good taste -- their blog-roll is pretty good, even though we're there pulling it down. I just hope they don't dilute themselves too much.


::: posted by Steven at 11:46 AM


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Lily and I will be cheering for different teams this Saturday. Even if you don't care who wins, though, it should be a good game.

Yes, there is someone here besides Dean.


::: posted by Steven at 11:21 AM


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Eight European nations back U.S.
Eight European leaders affirmed gratitude to the United States Thursday and wrote that U.S.-European ties "must not become a casualty" of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's attempts to "threaten world security."


In an indirect reference to opposition by France, Germany and Russia to U.S. plans to disarm Iraq militarily, the leaders of Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Denmark used the op-ed column to thank the United States for "bravery and generosity" in ensuring peace in Europe.

It has been said that the administration views our allied support as being like a donut; we'd really like France and Germany there in the middle, but we do have a lot of support from a lot of allies. Slate suggests that "it can't be long before someone declares the need for regime change in Paris."
In June 2000, during President Clinton's last year in office, France was the only one (talk about unilateralism) of 107 countries to refuse to sign a U.S. initiative aimed at encouraging democracy around the world. A year earlier, State Department spokesman James Rubin complained, "We do find it puzzling and passing strange that France would spend so much energy and focus so much attention on the danger to them of a strong United States rather than the dangers that we and France together face from countries like Iraq." The French oppose the United States, quite simply, for what it is—the most powerful country on earth.


::: posted by dWj at 10:24 AM


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Governor Hair showed up for jury duty yesterday. He was not selected for a jury. G.W. was summoned (and appeared) for jury duty when he was governor of Texas.


::: posted by dWj at 10:18 AM


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Wednesday, January 29, 2003 :::
 
Back when I was an undergraduate writing a paper, I would occasionally come across the realization that what I had written was so incoherent that I was going to be starting over from scratch, but probably not even that particularly soon. Kate Malcolm has responded to a post I wrote like that, and asks a question. I really have nothing to add, but that clearly didn't stop me before, so here goes:


I'm not entirely sure what the phrase "state action" is supposed to mean; even when delivering the State of the Union address, I don't think President Bush invoking faith in God is terribly troubling, even if giving that address is a Constitutionally mandated act performed by him because he is the President. There seems to be something different about putting together the personnel of government, though; I guess I'm willing to say that the appointment is a state action, and the nomination is a big enough part of that that it must, too, be a state action. I think voting in Congress is a state action, at least on bills (perhaps less so on "sense of the body" type resolutions).


I have a lot of confusion about corporate (i.e. on behalf of a group) actions in general. If the mission of an entity is tied up in evil acts, certainly it should be held liable for them, but if an individual takes an action on his own it doesn't make sense that every organization of which he's a member should be liable for that. The nomination and vote seem to me integral parts of the action of the state; the details of the presentation of the state of the union do not, though I can't quite say why.


If I asked what the law has to say about group liability, would it distract you enough to prevent me having to answer questions to which I haven't an answer I can satisfactorily defend?



::: posted by dWj at 6:11 PM


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Kate Malcolm offers a reason to smash harddrives; Homer Simpson has his own:
Homer: Come on, Marge! It's fun to smash things. [hits it] Heh heh, I
smashed it good!


::: posted by dWj at 2:14 PM


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The State of the Union address, which was probably already available somewhere else. Now it's there.


::: posted by dWj at 2:10 PM


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Kate Malcolm is a law student and a total nerd. That's why we read her.


::: posted by dWj at 2:01 PM


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Tuesday, January 28, 2003 :::
 
We've had the longest string of sub-freezing high temperatures in the past seven years; it's been 19 days. We may or may not get to 32 today; if not, the string probably runs to Friday.

Update: yesterday's high was 31. The string may break tomorrow, though.



::: posted by dWj at 5:34 PM


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ABC News reports
Television polls after voting ended showed Likud winning 32 to 36 seats in the 120-seat Knesset and the center-left Labor 17 to 19 seats, a dramatic decline for the party that blazed the trail of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking [sic].

The terrorists have succeeded; people are terrorized, and are voting for security.



::: posted by dWj at 5:34 PM


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Dobby == Putin?

To hear Dobby, the friendly, computer-animated elf who stars in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets , Warner Brothers' latest film about the schoolboy wizard, you might not get a sense of the controversy the character is currently stirring.

But take a look at Dobby and you might get a better idea. With his long nose, buggy eyes and somewhat dour expression, the computer-generated house elf bears a startling resemblance to Vladimir Putin, president of Russia.


Me, I don't see it.


::: posted by Steven at 3:37 PM


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A group of Danish professors has written a letter criticizing the commission that criticized Lomborg. Read about it at The Volokh Conspiracy.


::: posted by Steven at 2:05 PM


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Suspected attacker shot and killed
A Tulsa man shoots and kills another man who police believe was sexually assaulting a woman.


::: posted by Steven at 2:02 PM


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Monday, January 27, 2003 :::
 
George Will on Howard Dean (link from The Corner)
"I don't like extremism," he says, adding that unless Bush is defeated, "Next thing, girls won't be able to go to school in America. You watch"

Yeah...


::: posted by Steven at 7:09 PM


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According to the Buffy Guide, UPN is re-running "Help" tomorrow night (8:00 Eastern and probably Central), which is the best episode I've seen from this season. You can watch the State of the Union immediately afterward, at least in this time zone.


::: posted by Steven at 4:56 PM


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Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication, if Lincoln had had "powerpoint" or its ilk. Link from Volokh.


::: posted by Steven at 4:43 PM


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Incidentally, I think we should pour resources into North Korean intelligence, find out where all their nukes are as best we can, and take them out. But then, I am a cowboy, at least today. Even supposing no dire international consequence, I probably find myself scraping my political future off the sidewalk.


::: posted by dWj at 4:07 PM


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"Look, my fellow American chaps and chapettes, I'm doing this because the Middle East is terminally f***ed up and as my secretary of defense says,'If you can't solve a problem, make it bigger.' If we don't do something—and do you really want to wait for the French to do it?—this bastard is going to have nukes. You all saw from my not inspiring volte-face over North Korea that once a country has nukes that is pretty much it. You do not threaten a hostile nuclear country run by a maniac who wouldn't hesitate to go for the scorched earth option. You offer them fuel incentives and dispatch New Mexican governors to make nice with them. So, we either do this now or forever hold our peace and proceed with another 2000 years of Middle East Peace Process. So, what shall we do, then?"
From Slate, in fact.


::: posted by dWj at 4:05 PM


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LILEKS (James) The Bleat

[I]f Bush has been acting like a cowboy, then it's the curious sort of cowboy who spends a year rounding up a posse and sending deputies into the bad-guy's hideout to look for stagecoach loot before he acts on a warrant issued 11 years ago.


Also read the paragraph a bit later, starting "And that's a crucial point."

There was one comment from the White House recently that I really liked. Someone -- probably Ari Fleischer -- was confronted with a poll saying that most Americans are wary of a war on Iraq. He said that if we go to war, the American people will be on board.

In a previous administration, this could have referred to governing by polls. I took it to mean that the administration would still prefer not to use the big stick it's been building in the Persian Gulf, and that if it comes to that, everyone -- except the lunatic fringe, like my sister -- will agree that it's come to that.


::: posted by Steven at 3:27 PM


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Dave Barry has a Blog. Link from Colby Cosh.


::: posted by Steven at 2:53 PM


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Iraqi officials have failed to fully account for banned weapons programs and have resisted arms inspections, U.N. inspectors reported today. U.S. spokesman John Negroponte reacted to the report by saying Iraq was failing to comply with U.N. disarmament demands and calling on the U.N. to "face its responsibilities."

So says CNN. Doesn't sound a lot different from what we've had before, but our drip drip drip seems increasingly confident. I heard an interesting theory that Hussein thinks there's more glory in a (losing) war with the U.S. than with the U.N., and wants to cooperate just enough that we lose our allied support but not so much that we don't pick up his regime and throw it against a wall (as someone at National Review once put it).


::: posted by dWj at 2:49 PM


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I'd like to make a contribution to a discussion among Lily Malcolm, Jack Balkin, and Kate Malcolm on whether the President is allowed to take race into account in judicial nominations (and what makes it different from college admissions), but will satisfy myself with the following comment instead: I don't think the President should take race into account in nominations, because any restriction on what can influence state action has to be a restriction on its constituent parts. As a practical matter motives can be difficult to ascertain, but as a theoretical matter they are all-important for these kinds of considerations. If there is an action that, based on defensible criteria, Congress should take, but it has a disparate impact, tending to make things worse for one race (or simply not to make things as much better for them as for other races), then for Congress to take the opposite action would make things worse, relative to the alternative and relative to other races in the alternative, for the other races than for that one race. What I'm saying (since you can't figure it out from the text) is that, where action is a sequence of choices between alternatives, any "disparate impact" is a property of the whole set of alternatives, not of any one in isolation. (When it is suggested that a policy has a "disparate impact", it is usually being compared to either the status quo, or to the government deciding to do nothing in some isolated arena. Neither is necessarily appropriate.) We cannot, then, be expected to act in such a way as never to affect different races differently; it's just not possible. On the other hand, if we are at any point deliberately and systematically choosing policies because they particularly benefit one race, that's no good, either. (I have less problem with choosing an alternative in part because its benefits are spread differently from the way the benefits were distributed from previous decisions, but I can't defend that, it may change, and it's not to be quoted back to me in the future. In any case, affirmative action is different from this in that it is explicitly and deliberately racial, and not just a policy that happens to benefit certain races to the detriment of others in the process of doing something else.)


I'm more supportive of affirmative action when it's in action taken by private institutions, which I think should be able to seek just about any goal they want, but I'm also less opposed to affirmative action in police departments, where it may be able to improve the function of the department through improved community relations, for example. I'm still wary of it, though, because it does seem to be unconstitutional — and it makes sense the government should be disallowed from certain classes of action, even where they may seem to serve everyone's interest, because they so often will not and it's much easier to impose a hard-and-fast rule than to get in arguments for each implementation as to whether an exception should be made. That returns everything to the realm of politics, and vitiates the whole Constitution and the protections it tries to provide.


In summary, if President Bush chose Thomas because Thomas was the best candidate available, then the fact the Thomas is black shouldn't be held against him. If he chose Thomas because Thomas is black, then I'm rather more wary of the decision. If he chose Thomas because he thought Thomas was the best candidate available because Thomas is black, then I'm confused.



::: posted by dWj at 10:28 AM


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Sunday, January 26, 2003 :::
 
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's whether you beat the spread." - Howie Carr

Do you think Oakland would have been happier with a one-point victory (they were favored by about four)? I think so. As it happened, the Tampa Bay defense outscored the Oakland offense, even if we give Oakland's offense credit for their field goal.

My favorite commercial -- at least the one that comes to mind -- was Smirnoff's commercial right before the fourth quarter (Brad and Alex's blind date). It was funny and it was sweet.


::: posted by Steven at 10:18 PM


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The Super Bowl half-time show is on, and Gwen Stefani does indeed sound better in the studio.

One could say something similar of the Oakland Raiders. Their offense, of course, is not the first to magically stop playing well when facing Tampa Bay. And, as I write this, there's still a second half.

Finally, regarding the pants commercial with the herd of buffalo, I think (hope) I speak for a lot of people when I say, "huh?"


::: posted by Steven at 8:30 PM


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Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political.


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