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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, July 04, 2003 :::
Happy Birthday to Calvin Coolidge. Go celebrate.
::: posted by Steven at 11:20 AM
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Apparently, American kids don't know American history. I'll bet that's a complete surprise to you, isn't it? You've never heard that before, have you? Been living under a rock, have you?
Anyway:
"I always tell my students: If I see you in the grocery store five years from now, I will not measure my success on can you tell me Hamilton's financial plan, but can you tell me if you voted," Meredith Elliott, an American studies teacher in Utah, said during a round-table discussion at the NEA convention. "If you answer yes, then I've succeeded as a teacher."
Well, there's your problem right there, innit? Actually, if they don't have all of the details of the founding down, that's okay, but if they voted, they should have some intelligent reason for whom they voted for, shouldn't they? "Yo, kids -- vote! Class dismissed," shouldn't be the entirety of our kids civic education. They should understand -- as is pointed out elsewhere in the article I've linked -- that one's Congressman has very little to do with the local dog catcher, and they should learn enough more than that to make an educated choice, or to stay out of the political process.
A friend of mine -- my predecessor as chairman of the Cambridge Republican City Committee -- has suggested that voters be required to give a reason for how they voted in order for their vote to count. He's not suggesting that some elections official should be able to accept your reason -- just that you be required to have one. If you can't even offer that, and you vote anyway, your civics teacher has failed.
Happy Independence Day. Don't abuse what you've been given. I know where you live.
::: posted by Steven at 12:14 AM
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Thursday, July 03, 2003 :::
Also from the Kitchen Cabinet comes news of a "Lingerie Bowl" to be held during half-time of the next Super Bowl.
Here's the scoop: A very creative entrepreneur had a news conference Wednesday in West Hollywood to unveil plans for "Lingerie Bowl 2004," which will feature 22 pajama-clad young ladies playing full-contact, seven-on-seven tackle football in an Arena Football-like setting Feb. 1 - the same day as the Super Bowl."
Ouch. I hope they'll at least wear helmets.
::: posted by Steven at 3:22 PM
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Kate thinks that the Christian Science Monitor is mistaken in its implication that Americans today think of democracy as -- Kate's apt words -- "an off-the-shelf product."
I heard a discussion of this on the radio yesterday. I hope she's right, and believe she's right. I think most people knew, when Bush said we might be in Iraq for quite a while, that it wasn't just political boilerplate. But there are a lot of naive people out there, especially in the press.
::: posted by Steven at 3:17 PM
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Could the different job-search web sites please agree on a single XML resume format? It'd be ever so handy if I didn't have to re-enter everything at each site. Sourceforge seems to have something going -- maybe you can all adopt theirs? Thanks.
::: posted by Steven at 2:01 PM
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I'd like to apologize for not having edited down this entry.
I don't talk about Bush here much, and when I do it's mostly positive. When I'm critical of Bush, it's usually from his right, but check out the following:
Human Rights Campaign, a gay-rights group, dug up an article from the Austin American-Statesman of Jan. 22, 1994, titled ''Bush promises to veto attempts to remove sodomy law.'' The newspaper reported:
''Gubernatorial candidate George W. Bush on Friday promised he would veto any attempt by the Texas Legislature to remove from the state penal code a controversial statute outlawing homosexual sodomy. Bush, a Republican, was asked about the sodomy statute shortly after speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Ladies Auxiliary.
''I think it's a symbolic gesture of traditional values,'' he said.
I'm consistent in being more libertarian than he is.
A compromise I could live with -- though I don't know whether it would satisfy Bush, and I'm absolutely certain that it wouldn't satisfy the left -- would be to have laws on the books with no penalties. One would be subject to receiving a citation, which one could frame on one's wall, perhaps, or put out by the curb on the next Thursday in a big plastic bag. This could apply to any victimless behavior for which we wish to express official disapproval.
I'd vote against a zero-penalty anti-sodomy law (N.B.: I said I could live with it, i.e., would tolerate it, not that I'd support it). But I'd probably support zero-penalty anti-drug laws and anti-prostitution laws. We could create a whole chapter of the Massachusetts General Laws, replacing chapter 272 with a new one titled, "laws without teeth" (actually, now that I look at 272, there are some things in there that should be kept; those can be moved to a different chapter, though).
Incidentally, here's MGL ch 272 sections 34 and 35:
Chapter 272: Section 34. Crime against nature.
Section 34. Whoever commits the abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or with a beast, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than twenty years.
Chapter 272: Section 35. Unnatural and lascivious acts.
Section 35. Whoever commits any unnatural and lascivious act with another person shall be punished by a fine of not less than one hundred nor more than one thousand dollars or by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than five years or in jail or the house of correction for not more than two and one half years.
Are these defined better by the common law or something? They aren't defined at the beginning of the chapter (a lot of the election-law-related terms are defined in the first chapter of the election laws, so I checked). I can't even tell them apart, except for the "beast" part and the word "lascivious". I assume that at least one of them incorporates sodomy (though I understand the state's Supreme Court invalidated it based on the state constitution about twenty years back).
I've heard that "ignorance of the law is no defense", but it seems the law should at least be required to say what it means. "I'm sorry, your honor -- I assumed that a `crime against nature' referred to the second law of thermodynamics, and while it's true that I refer to myself as a `perpetual lovin' machine', any reasonable person would have recognized that as unserious."
Since I don't think I really responded to the decision when it came out, I'll do so now. As I told my brother, I felt as though the Packers had won on a bad call. I have fully admitted that there are some common-law elements which are beyond my pay grade, and some of Randy Barnett's discussion of the ninth and fourteenth amendments over on Volokh were starting to sway me a little, but I understand that Kennedy's opinion cites the European Court of Human Rights. Call me simplistic, but I consider that prima facie evidence of judicial non-seriousness.
Part of me wonders whether this decision applies to prostitution, and, if not, why not. And I wonder whether sodomy was always protected, or whether that's a function of the changing environment, and, in the latter case, why the legislature isn't the best determinant of the environment.
Lastly, I'd like to kudo Thomas for quoting the dissent in Griswold v. Connecticut (the decision which struck down laws against birth control), calling the law "uncommonly silly". A judge should usually refrain from indicating their own policy preferences, but in this case it seems appropriate to explicitly point out that policy preferences were not the basis of his ruling.
::: posted by Steven at 1:50 PM
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Guess what P.J. O'Rourke thinks of Senator Clinton's new book. Better yet, read what he thinks of it.
::: posted by Steven at 10:21 AM
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Experimental physicists have found pentaquarks. I'm really only pointing to this on the chance that my brother has something to add.
::: posted by Steven at 10:06 AM
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As I pointed out a few weeks back, movie-director Spike Lee got an injunction preventing the TNN cable network from using the name "Spike TV". I missed the update a week ago, though -- Spike Jones, Jr., son of the Spike Jones, has submitted a brief supporting TNN. Link from Jeff Wolfe, whom I reached from Virginia Postrel.
::: posted by Steven at 9:39 AM
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Wednesday, July 02, 2003 :::
Michael Kinsley at slate has a solution to the discord over gay marriage:That solution is to end the institution of marriage. Or rather (he hastens to clarify, Dear) the solution is to end the institution of government-sanctioned marriage. Or, framed to appeal to conservatives: End the government monopoly on marriage. Wait, I've got it: Privatize marriage. These slogans all mean the same thing. Let churches and other religious institutions continue to offer marriage ceremonies. Let department stores and casinos get into the act if they want. Let each organization decide for itself what kinds of couples it wants to offer marriage to. Let couples celebrate their union in any way they choose and consider themselves married whenever they want. Let others be free to consider them not married, under rules these others may prefer. And, yes, if three people want to get married, or one person wants to marry herself, and someone else wants to conduct a ceremony and declare them married, let 'em. If you and your government aren't implicated, what do you care? This was my response in college when asked to sign a petition to the Illinois government to recognize gay marriage; marriage in general should be none of the government's business. Yes, yes, marriage is about more than sleeping arrangements. There are children, there are finances, there are spousal job benefits like health insurance and pensions. In all these areas, marriage is used as a substitute for other factors that are harder to measure, such as financial dependence or devotion to offspring. It would be possible to write rules that measure the real factors at stake and leave marriage out of the matter. Regarding children and finances, people can set their own rules, as many already do. None of this would be easy. Marriage functions as what lawyers call a "bright line," which saves the trouble of trying to measure a lot of amorphous factors. You're either married or you're not. Once marriage itself becomes amorphous, who-gets-the-kids and who-gets-health-care become trickier questions. Who gets health care only becomes trickier in the case of government health-care; in the private sector, it's to be worked out by the insurance company and the subscriber, possibly with an employer thrown in the middle to muck things up. A hospital can admit any spouse it recognizes as such. In both these situations, there will be interests lobbying in complications; insurance, particularly health insurance, is a magnet for regulation, and health privacy regulations are increasing. Removing marriage recognition from the tax code would be quite easy if not popular; I don't know how hard it is to designate a single heir for everything I own, but if it's not easy now, it could readily be made at least as easy as getting a marriage license is.
::: posted by dWj at 8:25 PM
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Dinesh D'Souza, on What's so great about America:Indeed newcomers to the United States are struck by the amenities enjoyed by "poor" people in the United States. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s when CBS television broadcast a documentary, People Like Us, which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an ongoing recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with a view to embarrassing the Reagan administration. But by the testimony of former Soviet leaders, it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans have TV sets, microwave ovens, and cars. They arrived at the same perception that I witnessed in an acquaintance of mine from Bombay who has been unsuccessfully trying to move to the United States. I asked him, "Why are you so eager to come to America?" He replied, "I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat."
::: posted by dWj at 4:02 PM
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Accountability, choice pay off... Florida education has improved faster than in almost any other state since the NAEP was last given. The major event in Florida education in that time has been the implementation of two major school reform movements: accountability and choice.... The new NAEP scores also show that throwing more money at education without structural reforms doesn't produce results. Florida made top-tier gains on NAEP despite school spending increases over the same period that ranked 47th in the nation. Meanwhile, big-spending states that haven't made significant reforms showed lackluster gains in NAEP scores. Of the five states that have made the largest increases in per-pupil education spending since 1998, counting only states in which test scores are available, three states have neither school choice nor tough accountability programs. These three states (Rhode Island, Wyoming and New Mexico) ranked in the bottom half of the nation in NAEP score gains. States with the highest absolute level of spending (rather than the biggest spending increases) but no serious education reforms also landed in the bottom half of the nation. Budgeting more money for education (or just about anything) is like letting out more rope; if there's something useful to be done with it, it can allow possibilities that aren't otherwise there, but putting it out there without a purpose is a recipe for waste.
::: posted by dWj at 1:56 PM
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It was mentioned on the radio this morning that noon today is the midpoint of the year. That is not actually quite true for areas that use daylight savings time, where it will be at 1PM. (Noon standard time, though.)
::: posted by dWj at 11:25 AM
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Tuesday, July 01, 2003 :::
The author of "Make Way for Ducklings" died yesterday.
::: posted by Steven at 9:41 PM
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A friend recently remarked that, when he was young, he thought of public transportation as being expensive, because you had to pay $1.50 to ride the train while you could drive for free. I took this as an opportunity to launch into an explanation of the difference between earnings and cash flow of a corporation; basically, earnings accounts for the value of assets and liabilities, while cash flow doesn't. Earnings is clearly the more accurate of the two, except when it's not, e.g. when the people tallying the earnings don't wish it to be, i.e. are lying. Many investors today look at cash flow rather than earnings. (Even if management isn't lying, cash flow can be important if a lot of payments are coming due in the near future; unless you can borrow against your assets, they generally can't be used to make debt payments.)We have, as is often the case, a situation in which added flexibility can be used for good or evil, and design of government counsels toward inflexibility. Thus it's probably good, on the whole, that governments generally use something closer to cash flow accounting — in any case, meaningful requirements of balanced budgets will have to refer to cash flow — but it certainly leads to occasional unfortunate results. My favorite is that of the Sioux City, IA, school district, which found itself strapped for cash for three decades, and responded by not building any new buildings, nor, in some cases, doing certain advisable maintenance. When the value of assets is allowed to decrease, cash flow looks better than earnings; they kept cash flow near zero while creating a growing invisible debt. The moral of the story has been taught over the past few years; we hope it has been learned. The more recent story, though, is the many states, including Illinois, that are now experiencing crises. Illinois had a $5B (cash flow) deficit, and has successfully repaired it; $2B of the cash flow comes from the sale of buildings, many of which will have to be leased back by the state. Another $2B, incidentally, comes from a game that would not work in a straight cash flow system, and would not be out of place in corporate America: bonds will be issued to shore up the state pension funds, for which return assumptions are significantly higher than the interest rates on the bonds issued, so that the accounting value of the liability that the bonds represent is less than the money for which the bonds will be sold. (Cash flow accounting for a pension system couldn't even pretend to make sense, but the way accounting is done allows even more room for games there than in most other places in the budget.) As it has been reported in some outlets, the state of Illinois is borrowing money to play the stock market, and assuming it will come out ahead. How the next year's budget will be balanced should make a good show.
::: posted by dWj at 1:05 PM
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That the NBA is about star individuals while college basketball is still, at least to a greater extent, about teams, is exactly why some of us are so much more interested in college basketball. (That the team component is stronger in the women's game is a big part of the reason I go to some of the requisite trouble to follow that edition of the sport; Princeton's men's team has also been characterized by a team setting up plays, which is why I was a fan even before I spent time there. I would imagine that a majority of the time I have spent listening to basketball on the radio over my lifetime was listening to Princeton games while I was there; what the game doesn't lose over the radio is exactly what that team has.)
::: posted by dWj at 11:54 AM
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My brother cites a prediction that, were the 2004 election held today, Bush would win the electoral vote, 278-260. What I find interesting is that if he won exactly the same states as last time, this is what the tally would be. (He won 271 in 2000, and his states netted +7 in the new census.)
::: posted by dWj at 11:47 AM
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Colby Cosh points out what amounts to a top 23 list of the second millenium by a Richard Thompson, whom I assume I'm supposed to have heard of. Squeeze's "Tempted" makes the list. I don't dislike Squeeze -- I actually kind of like them -- but I have trouble understanding why anyone would feel more strongly than that about their music, either pro or con. "Tempted" is, surely, their biggest hit, but it's still rather forgettable, isn't it?
::: posted by Steven at 1:39 AM
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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, since I don't think I've said it yet, is pretty solid on the story side, but disappointing on the "arc" side -- the "arc" being "Babylon 5"-esque lingo for the over-all seven-book storyline. If you've read the first four books, I certainly won't discourage you from reading OotP, or even suggest that you'll dread it -- just don't expect to learn any great revelations. Even though the book kind of implies that you will.
::: posted by Steven at 1:11 AM
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Monday, June 30, 2003 :::
I had occasion to recall one of my favorite political stories this evening. Hence the following, from page 63 of the paperback edition of Bill Bradley's memoirs, titled "Time Present, Time Past":
As a leader of the Republican--conservative-Democrat coalition during the first six years of the New Deal, [Senator Walter] George [of Georgia] became a thorn in FDR's side, and in 1938 the president opposed his re-election, going so far as to endorse his own candidate, Lawrence Camp, in the Georgia Democratic primary. At the dedication of a Rural Electrification project in Barnesville, Georgia, and with Senator George only a few feet away, FDR said that George did not have "a constant active fighting attitude in favor of the broad objectives of the party and of the government as they are constituted today" and did not "in his heart, deep down in his heart, believe in these objectives." Senator George told the president that day, "Mr. President, I want you to know that I accept the challenge." Roosevelt's candidate lost. When Senator George returned to the Senate, FDR knew he had a problem, so he sent a young aide to apologize. The young man began by saying what a blunder the president's decision to oppose George had been, but that George should probably let bygones be bygones. "You know the president," the young aide is reported to have said, "he's his own worst enemy." There was a long pause. Then George said, "No he isn't."
I don't think I ever finished that book, incidentally -- it wasn't that I didn't enjoy it, it was one of those things where one gets distracted by something else (in this case, it was probably schoolwork -- this was while I was still an undergrad) and one never gets back to it.
::: posted by Steven at 10:57 PM
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Will Baude also has a response to the Maureen Dowd column, Volokh's response to which I pointed out this morning. Link from Diotima.
::: posted by Steven at 5:29 PM
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I saw a car today with two bumper stickers. One said, "Abolish Racism." The other said, "If your mind isn't open, are you sure you still have one?"
I see the owner of this car becoming an avowed racist later in life.
::: posted by Steven at 5:06 PM
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According to political analyst Larry Sabato:
If the 2004 election were held today, President Bush would win re-election with a slim margin in the Electoral College -- 278 votes to the Democrat candidate's 260.
He also says:
Gazing into his "Crystal Ball," the political analyst and commentator projects, "Bush seems to have 231 solid electoral votes, and the Democrat appears to have 210 solid electoral votes.
I don't buy this. There's no way 441 electoral votes are "solid" a year and a half before the election, before we even know who the Democratic nominee will be.
The article goes on to say:
Sabato, "probably the most quoted college professor in the land," according to the Wall Street Journal, predicates his Crystal Ball on what he sees as the perennial polarization of the "Red" and the "Blue." Social issues such as abortion, guns and gay rights have separated the states into Blue "Tolerant America" and Red "Traditional America."
Which reminds me that Ramesh Ponnuru has a piece on NRO today about media bias.
UPDATE: Visiting Sabato's web site, the characterisation of blue America as "tolerant" appears to be his rather than USA Today's. Read Ponnuru anyway.
::: posted by Steven at 2:57 PM
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Eugene Volokh fills in for Reynolds at MSNBC, and writes about Clarence Thomas and affirmative action. In particular, he takes on Moreen Dowd for saying, "It's impossible not to be disgusted at someone who could benefit so much from affirmative action and then pull up the ladder after himself." His main argument is that in a lot of other cases -- e.g., male judges in the 70s ruling against sexual discrimination from which they've benefited -- you don't get that reaction.
I'll bet that most of Thomas' critics (the ones that make the criticism with which I started this post) don't think there’s anything remotely wrong with people trying to overturn these unfair advantages, even when they themselves had benefited from them. In fact, many would think such actions are especially worthy, because the judge or legislator would be voting out of principle, and against policies that might unfairly benefit people with whom he'd feel close...
I've always thought that F.W. de Klerk seemed to get too little credit for the end of apartheid, relative to Nelson Mandela. Mandela had suffered more, obviously, and the simple fact that de Klerk had reached the position he had probably indicates that he had been part of the problem (though I don't know all of the details of his career), but as of the early '90s, he was fighting his own unfair advantages, and ending his hold on power. The first is a hard task for anyone, and the second anathema to a successful politician.
::: posted by Steven at 1:42 PM
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Colby Cosh writes about tea. The (pdf-formatted) report on which he's commenting instructs one to put milk in one's cup before the tea (assuming you're the milk-tea sort), rather than after, so that less of the milk will contact the tea while the temperature exceeds 75 celsius. The milk-second crowd argues that one will be more likely to put in the wrong amount of milk, assuming that you'll completely fill the rest of the cup with tea. I suppose you could put some milk in first, then fill the cup, then add more milk as necessary. Or one can drink one's tea black and skip the whole fuss.
Anyway, the following point is also made.
Brew for typically 3 to 4 minutes (depending on the tea). It is a myth that brewing for longer times causes more caffeine to infuse into the tea. Caffeine is a relatively quick infuser and caffeine infusion is largely complete within the first minute. More time is, however, needed for the polyphenolic compounds (tannins) to come out which give the tea is colour and some of its flavour. Infusing for longer times than this, however, introduces high molecular weight tannins which leave a bad aftertaste.
I'd heard this in college -- that the caffeine tends to be leeched out early and the color/flavor come later. We would brew a late-night cup of tea with four teabags for fifteen seconds. Kept us up, it did.
::: posted by Steven at 1:12 PM
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