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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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Saturday, March 29, 2003 :::
South Dakota State wins D-II title. This is women's basketball. I think it's great that a team nicknamed the "Jackrabbits" is a champion anything (the nickname isn't mentioned in the story, so you'll have to take my word for it).
Speaking of jackrabbits, Dave Barry points us to this story about a relocation plan for the jackrabbits at Miami's airport.
::: posted by Steven at 11:38 PM
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You always hoped it existed: The Official Funkytown Website
::: posted by Steven at 10:43 PM
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I missed this on Monday.
Harry Potter author J K Rowling has given birth to a boy.
The baby - named David Gordon Rowling Murray - was born at the new Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh.
::: posted by Steven at 9:23 PM
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I disagree with Maserati, and side with Glenn Reynolds regarding the professor at Columbia University who advocated a "million Mogadishus". He should be socially ostracized, but a university should allow its faculty to say appalling things.
::: posted by Steven at 8:36 PM
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Friday, March 28, 2003 :::
Quoth Steyn:
[G]iven the way Mr Patten's "smart development assistance" to Yasser Arafat appears to have wound up funding the intifada, America's smart bombs now cause fewer deaths than the EU development budget.
Nice jab.
::: posted by Steven at 3:34 PM
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This from Andrew Stuttaford, at the Corner.
This may be apocryphal but it’s too good not to repeat. UK defense minister Geoff Hoon has reportedly described Um Qasr as being “a city similar to Southampton" [a port town in the south of England], a remark that produced the following response from two British soldiers seen, apparently, on Sky News:
First soldier: "He’s either never been to Southampton or he’s never been to Um Qasr."
Second soldier: "There’s no beer, no prostitutes and people are shooting at us. It’s more like Portsmouth."
::: posted by Steven at 11:41 AM
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I haven't been hit by any meteors, but by something I'd call flu if it involved more nausea. I'm thinking anthrax, but that's not the opinion of any licensed practitioners of medicine.
As for the delinquents making the case for nothing so much as the repeal of the 26th amendment, I was thinking of them when I heard about the fight against terrorism in Northern Iraq. My first thought is that the world is now a safer place for them, too, than it was a week ago, whether they recognize it or not.
My next thought, though, is that the chaos demonstrated in the demonstrations, to the lament of the sober anti-war crowd, is not that different in nature from the chaos we're fighting world-wide. It's superficially paradoxical that we arrest assaulters, jail kidnappers, execute murderers, and bomb enemies of world order, and the kids who think it more peaceful for them to obstruct traffic than for the police to arrest them for it may not be making any new mistakes.
::: posted by dWj at 10:08 AM
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Thursday, March 27, 2003 :::
News from the UK: Doctors in trouble for not giving man cervical smear
A family doctor has been summoned to a formal hearing over his refusal to put a 34-year-old male patient on the list for screening for cervical cancer.
Also from Dave Barry.
::: posted by Steven at 7:25 PM
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I'm disappointed that Ananova doesn't list the specific cleaning products involved in this incident. Link from Dave Barry.
::: posted by Steven at 7:24 PM
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Dean, any meteor stories?
The midnight sky flashed an eerie blue early Thursday over four Midwestern states as a meteorite exploded in the atmosphere, sending rocks as big as softballs crashing through some houses.
... [T]he debris field appears to cover a path about 80 miles long by 20 miles wide from north of Bloomington, Ill., to Chicago's south side and possibly part of northwestern Indiana.
::: posted by Steven at 6:48 PM
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Here's an anti-war protester who laments the tactics of some of his brethren.
"If that's what the antiwar crowd is like, then I'm joining the other side" is too common and dangerous a reaction to risk.
::: posted by Steven at 3:55 PM
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Dixie Chicks Backlash Hits Home On Albums Chart
The disparaging remarks the Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines made about President George W. Bush in London two weeks ago ("Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas ..."), has hit Home, so to speak. In response to outrage from many Bush supporters, the country trio's songs were pulled from several radio stations' playlists, despite Maines' public explanation ("My comments were made in frustration ...") issued almost immediately after the news broke. The controversy took its toll at retail, as sales of Home fell by more than 42 percent, from 123,000 copies to 71,000. The LP, which has resided near the top of the chart for 30 weeks, will slide three spots to #7.
Who's thinking of the Simpsons' "Radio Bart" episode?:
And our new number one hit, ``I Do Believe We're Naked'', by Funky-See Funky-Do, replaces ``We're Sending Our Love Down the Well'', which plunges all the way down to number 97.
It's probably just me.
::: posted by Steven at 3:51 PM
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George Will on Moynihan
The Senate's Sisyphus, Moynihan was forever pushing uphill a boulder of inconvenient data. A social scientist trained to distinguish correlation from causation, and a wit, Moynihan puckishly said that a crucial determinant of the quality of American schools is proximity to the Canadian border. The barb in his jest was this: High cognitive outputs correlate not with high per-pupil expenditures but with a high percentage of two-parent families. For that, there was the rough geographical correlation that caused Moynihan to suggest that states trying to improve their students' test scores should move closer to Canada.
For calling attention, four decades ago, to the crisis of the African American family -- 26 percent of children were being born out of wedlock -- he was denounced as a racist by lesser liberals. Today the percentage among all Americans is 33, among African Americans 69, and family disintegration, meaning absent fathers, is recognized as the most powerful predictor of most social pathologies.
At the United Nations he witnessed that institution's inanity (as in its debate about the threat to peace posed by U.S. forces in the Virgin Islands, at that time 14 Coast Guardsmen, one shotgun, one pistol) and its viciousness (the resolution condemning Zionism as racism). Striving to move America "from apology to opposition," he faulted U.S. foreign policy elites as "decent people, utterly unprepared for their work."
Their "common denominator, apart from an incapacity to deal with ideas, was a fear of making a scene, a form of good manners that is a kind of substitute for ideas." Except they did have one idea, that "the behavior of other nations, especially the developing nations, was fundamentally a reaction to the far worse behavior of the United States."
Moynihan carried Woodrow Wilson's faith in international law, but he had what Wilson lacked -- an understanding that ethnicity makes the world go round. And bleed. The persistence of this premodern sensibility defeats what Moynihan called "the liberal expectancy." He meant the expectation that the world would become tranquil as ethnicity and religion became fading residues of mankind's infancy.
::: posted by Steven at 1:05 PM
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Tiger Woods supports the troops. Link from the Corner.
::: posted by Steven at 12:55 PM
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Dahlia Lithwick covers the Texas homosexual-sodomy (Lawrence v. Texas, as the lawyers call it) arguments before the Supreme Court. My position has generally been that the law is bad but constitutional, but the lawyer for Texas seems to have done an abysmal job, and it would be kind of a shame if he won.
There's also a list of related newspaper stories over at SCOTUSblog.
::: posted by Steven at 12:09 PM
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Colby Cosh passes along a fairly detailed map of the war scene. I believe the map is at least somewhat speculative.
::: posted by Steven at 11:21 AM
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As you've no doubt heard by now, former Senator Pat Moynihan (D-NY) died yesterday. He wasn't always on the right side of the issues, but he was often one of the most knowledgible members of the Senate on particular issues (mostly welfare and security, I believe), and always worth paying attention to.
Lily of the Kitchen Cabinet quotes him today.
::: posted by Steven at 10:36 AM
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Wednesday, March 26, 2003 :::
I really like this joke, more than I can justify.
::: posted by Steven at 8:56 PM
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Sex Tips from Donald Rumsfeld, courtesy Team Volokh. Rated PG-13.
::: posted by Steven at 12:39 AM
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Tuesday, March 25, 2003 :::
MSNBC and Fox News report on an uprising in Basra against the Iraqi army, apparently encouraged or aided by the British army.
::: posted by dWj at 5:05 PM
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At the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr, secured by U.S and British forces after days of fighting, soldiers made last-minute preparations on Tuesday for the imminent arrival of a team of specially trained dolphins to help divers ensure the coastline is free of danger before humanitarian aid shipments can dock. MSNBC
::: posted by dWj at 3:50 PM
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It appears — here and here — that those permanent members of the UNSC who haven't seriously violated the UNSC weapons embargo on Iraq are unanimously in favor of the current military action.
::: posted by dWj at 1:52 PM
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Good news:
Thanks to an alert delivery driver who tipped authorities, a 14-year- old Michigan girl missing for nearly a month was found unharmed Monday in rural Lassen County, and her alleged abductor — a convicted murderer — was arrested without incident. San Francisco Chronicle link provided by Google; I saw the story on the hard copy of a local paper.
::: posted by dWj at 12:22 PM
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I don't, incidentally, think that Hussein's viciousness against his own people is a reason for us to invade. It does, though, ease qualms about the fact that some civilians will find themselves in the way through no fault of their own. If he had been kind to his people while supporting terrorists on the side, it might give us a reason not to invade, but because of his cruelty I think the civilian casualty arguments lose a lot of their weight.
::: posted by dWj at 12:20 PM
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Al-Jazeera is reportedly showing footage of dead Iraqi civilians — there are reportedly a handful — which they blame on the Americans. The appropriate counterfootage would be video of the civilians being killed by the Iraqi regime over the next five years that they will be unable to kill because of our actions. This footage, unfortunately, is exceedingly difficult to come by; preempted hypotheticals don't leave compelling video. The next best thing might be torture footage of actual victims of the regime up to this point; supposing they took such footage and left it lying around for U.S. Marines to find, it will be interesting to see what is done with it.
I made that distinction, that what is more relevant are the otherwise future victims and not so much the past victims, and I think it's worth repeating one more time that exactly the same is true of American victims of terrorism (which, since the largest costs are systemic, are all Americans). Comparisons of the costs associated with the Iraqi theatre of this conflict to the costs of 2001's New York theatre are relevant only insofar as the latter are indicative of the costs of a typical event that we might be trying to erase from our future.
::: posted by dWj at 12:20 PM
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Speaking of the Kitchen Cabinet, go visit Lily over there. Kate's busy, Iris and Alan are MIA, and I called their bluff regarding the existence of an "Abby" quite some time ago, so Lily's on her own.
She's been talking about clothes, posting recipes, and quoting Gloria Steinem. She points out the suit on the woman in this picture, which is the most bizarre thing I've seen on the international stage since John Howard's eyebrows (his left one is my favorite). She also says:
If I ever win the Best Actress Oscar (I'd be wearing something tasteful in navy -- oh c'mon, you've thought about it too)
If I were up for an Oscar for "best actress", I see myself wearing a denim mini-skirt with a blouse from the "revealing, but not too revealing" category -- or possibly something Bjorkian. Definitely not something tasteful. But if you didn't already know that Lily is more tasteful than I, you haven't been paying attention.
::: posted by Steven at 1:24 AM
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I think Dean may be a little premature in calling the Kitchen Cabinet NCAA pool done, but it's mostly done. I've figured out that I'm mathematically eliminated, but I'm guessing most people's sweet-16 brackets aren't quite as beat-up as mine.
On a completely unrelated note, if we can bomb individual buildings in Baghdad, and decide which window to send the missle through, why are some of our missles landing in Syria and Iran? I guess not all of our missiles are precision-guided -- is that what's going on, or are these supposedly precision-guided missiles with defective guidance?
::: posted by Steven at 12:46 AM
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Monday, March 24, 2003 :::
I guess I figured that's what we should be doing all along; the deadline is hit, we drop bombs as appropriate, then we drive to Baghdad, largely ignoring anything that can be ignored.There was a series in Foxtrot in the past couple years in which Paige had made it past a level in a video game that had Jason stumped. The secret, it turned out, was not to fight the monster; just leave it alone, it leaves you alone, you go on. I figured the same was largely true of the Iraqi army: there need be no war until someone resists our peaceful takeover of their country. (Of course, I was advocating militarized inspections before France was, my objection to the French proposal being that I didn't think the militarized would be called in when necessary; if it were put under U.S. command, that would have still been the way to go last week. American troops driving past Iraqi troops that pose no threat to hurry along to eliminate threats to our security is separated from this by a line that's rather fuzzy at best.)
::: posted by dWj at 5:36 PM
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From an "embedded" reporter for the National Post:
The march into Iraq has been so quick, the Marines haven't had time to take prisoners. The Iraqis want to surrender, but in many cases the Americans simply drive straight past them.
::: posted by Steven at 4:11 PM
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Reuters is reporting on Salam Pax.
::: posted by Steven at 4:09 PM
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A report on Uday Hussein in SI:
You should not discount the fact that when we invaded Iraq in 1991 that Uday's presence, and the possibility at that time that he might be the next ruler of Iraq, played a role in our decision to leave Saddam in place. There was a lot of unease, and there was no plan for what would come after Saddam. The possibility that it could have been one of his sons was unacceptable.
::: posted by dWj at 2:30 PM
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I was in Iowa this weekend, and as everyone who's never left New York City knows, we barely have running water there, so I didn't see this until this morning. And I thought I'd say something that may not have yet been said.
The most basic element of fairness, I think, is that the rules are known ahead of time. (The second is that all are treated the same. Note that life obeys neither of these.) My picks would definitely have been different if the scoring had been different, and it seems that we ought to play out by the rules we played in by.
On the other hand, there's nothing to stop Kate — or anyone else who's given all of our picks — from calculating the score in as many ways as he/she/it likes. "Number of lines correctly filled in with someone other than the highest seed of the subbracket", "correct picks times ordinal values of the first letter of the team's name", or anything else that seems amusing. Some will be more interesting to more people than others, and if we want to brag about hitting a target none of us was aiming at, I'm sure there's no shortage of such targets we could find. I, for one, am increasingly in a position to want to look for screwy ways in which to improve my standing. In fact, I expect the few points left to be picked up will be picked up by those more conservative than I was; a lot of my picks were designed to be long-shot, big money winners early on, most likely out by the sweet sixteen, and sure enough I've lost three of my final four (two of them earlier than their seeds predicted).
It's been interesting, though, and I think getting an intuitive grip on the novel scoring system was a big part of that. Next year, perhaps a 1, 2, 4, 8, 10, 12 scoring system should be tried; I don't like the late rounds being weighed overly heavily, in part because they already are if I can't pick a team to come back from the dead; if I pick the wrong winner for a late round, chances are very good I picked the wrong winner for a game or two before that. Also, though, it seems to favor luck — anything can happen on one deal — over skill — an average over many deals — when the scoring becomes dominated by one or three picks that can go wrong in any number of ways.
::: posted by dWj at 2:04 PM
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Congratulations to Brian on winning the Kitchen Cabinet Basketball pool. As I pointed out in one of those blogs too long and incoherent for anyone to read,
This year the dog wags the tail, and the bulk of the points will be picked up in the mid-rounds; this is accentuated by the Kate bonus, because the seeds of teams tend to decline exponentially as the tournament progresses. The contest is mostly over by now.
::: posted by dWj at 1:13 PM
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A story that seems a bit apocryphal to me has it that about a week and a half ago Colin Powell was asked by an Iraqi journalist whether it's true that only 13% of American youths know where Iraq is located. His response, it is reported, was, "It's probably true. Unfortunately for you, those 13% are Marines."
::: posted by dWj at 1:08 PM
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Not a lot different, but an except from a UPI dispatch emailed to me:
A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as You don't want to read the rest of that.
::: posted by dWj at 12:06 PM
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In case you can't tell from my posts, I think the world should be in Iraq removing Hussein from power, primarily because of his connections with terrorist organizations, his fomenting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and his failure to control some regions near the Iranian border — that last calls for either the Pakistan solution, where the government does its best and invites American help, or the Afghanistan solution, which always seemed to be what was most likely to work here. The concerns I do have with current action is that it's being done on a {Greek for forty-five}-lateral basis, with less support than it should have internationally. The Volokh piece that I critiqued the other day mitigates much of my concern stemming from that, and if we were going to win over Germany and France, they would first be serious about supporting other serious efforts to do this in a less military way. I do think it best that the problem be dealt with eventually, and "diplomacy" sounds more and more like "let it fester."
::: posted by dWj at 12:03 PM
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The Profile in Courage award "Ordinarily ... will be made to living Americans", but we might ought to nominate Tony Blair anyway. Fighting your own party can be hard in the United States, but it's much harder in parliamentary Europe.
::: posted by dWj at 12:03 PM
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Sunday, March 23, 2003 :::
Instapundit directs us to Operation Uplink, which takes donations to provide troops with phone-cards. I've heard on the radio that the troops would also like to receive things such as lip balm, sunscreen, and flavorings from folks back home -- unfortunately, I didn't catch the contact info.
I look forward to the day that our military has all the money it needs to provide our troops with the essentials and the teachers' unions are told that they won't get any more taxpayer money until they start educating our kids.
::: posted by Steven at 9:29 PM
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Losing by 47 points isn't good, but in women's basketball, at UConn, it loses some of its sting. Congrats to the BU women for making the tournament.
::: posted by Steven at 8:01 PM
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