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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, May 22, 2004 :::
I use the CTA's trip planner quite a bit. I wish there were more flexibility, though, in telling it I prefer trains to busses and so on.
::: posted by dWj at 12:56 PM
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450 words typically takes
18 minutes to write long-hand
9 minutes to type
3 minutes to speak
2 minutes to read
Or so my sources indicate.
::: posted by dWj at 12:54 PM
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I left my cell phone on an MBTA bus yesterday. The driver apparently retrieved it, and someone started calling numbers in my speed-dial until somebody answered, so I got it back. Then I started deleting some of the numbers of people I haven't seen in two years.
Speaking of the MBTA, I just found a "trip planner" on their web site -- you give it source and destination addresses, and it'll tell you how to get there from here. I had thought they ought to have something like that, but I didn't know that they did.
::: posted by Steven at 12:42 PM
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Hey, Norwegian looks a lot like Swedish. But so does Icelandic, really, so I shouldn't be so surprised."It's more than twenty years" something. "Svenskene Michael B. Tretow og Ted Gärdestad sto bak gruppen Caramba som slapp landeplagen «Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot» i 1980." Well, that first word looks a lot like the Swede/Swedish/Sweden words in Swedish, "og" looks like "och" (and), "gruppen" one guesses is "the group", "som" in Swedish is "which". So I'm going for "Swedes Michael B. Tretow and Ted Gärdestad [constituted?] the group Caramba which [inflicted on the world] «Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot» in 1980." More speculative translation in brackets.
::: posted by dWj at 12:31 PM
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In a Backfence column (registration required) from a couple weeks ago, Lileks wrote about a song called "Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot" -- recommended by a reader -- which he described by writing, "It's very bad. It's 'Hooked on a Feeling' bad."
Naturally, I went looking for it. I found an apparently Finnish web page with a link to an MP3. I can more than understand the "Hooked on a Feeling" reference -- it's an obvious comparison -- though it's a little more polka and a little less Gary Puckett. If it wasn't used in the Eurovision Song Contest, I can't imagine why not -- it seems like the right sort of song, and the lyrics... well, we'll let Lileks cover that:Sample lyrics:
Num
Deba Uba Zat Zat
Num
A-hoorepa Hoorepa A-huh-hoorepa A-num Num
A-num
Hubba hubba Zoot Zoot
Why do I suspect that if I said those words out loud, an ancient Egyptian demon would materialize by my desk, thank me for my soul, and ask what I wanted in return? I think this webpage indicates that the song was done in 1980, but I'm not certain -- apparently, I can't read Norwegian. As they say, you never know until you try. Maybe my brother will take a crack at it.
::: posted by Steven at 2:04 AM
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Friday, May 21, 2004 :::
Paul "Chicken Little" Ehrlich has a new book out, with his wife. Reason's Ron Bailey takes it on:The "prospective collision with the natural world" is supposed to happen when human population, economic growth and technological progress reach some horrible point of intersection on a chart of global doom. In the Ehrlichs' simplistic summary, environmental Impact equals Population x Affluence x Technology, the notorious I=PAT identity. Impact is, of course, always negative. One notes that the three factors aren't merely added together; their allegedly deleterious effects are multiplied. It's a simple model, but I think multiplication makes more sense than addition. But, as Bailey goes on to point out:History shows that the I=PAT identity largely gets it backward. Population is at worst neutral, while affluence and technology, far from harming nature, actually promote its flourishing. It is in the rich, developed countries that the air becomes clearer, the streams clearer, the forests more expansive. While the Ehrlichs put forward a few good ideas--such as replacing income taxes with consumption taxes and eliminating government subsidies--most of their analysis consists of antimarket screeds and hackneyed corporation-bashing.
The Ehrlichs also underplay the good news. Globally, women are having fewer and fewer babies, so the world's population will likely peak at around eight billion in 50 years or so. The agronomist Paul Waggoner has argued that if farmers around the world can raise their productivity to current U.S. levels--even using current technology, nothing newer--they can easily feed 10 billion people, with better diets. And they can do so, according to his projections, using half the land they now farm, thus sparing more land for nature. The chief hope for that result is precisely the market that the Ehrlichs decry, and the economic dynamism that comes with it.
The clincher:Of course, there are environmental problems, although not the global warming the authors fear. (Satellite data now suggest that such warming will be mild over the next century--about a degree Celsius.) But the depletion of fisheries and tropical forests is real enough. Alas, the Ehrlichs and most of their ecological confreres miss the central reason for it: the tragedy of the commons, where nobody owns a resource--forest, fish, water--and thus no one has a reason to protect it. By contrast, enclosing the commons, by assigning owners, internalizes costs and benefits, and allows markets to determine the value of any given resource. With characteristic wrongheadedness, they advocate instead eroding property rights, thus enlarging the commons and tending to make environmental problems worse. Incidentally, Bjorn Lomborg is less dismissive of global warming than Bailey is, and I tend to trust Lomborg's judgment on this over Bailey's, but I'm pretty ignorant myself.
::: posted by Steven at 12:27 PM
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Thursday, May 20, 2004 :::
Mark Steyn is keeping things clear:Is the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq perfect? No.
Is it good? Yes.
Was Saddam Hussein's rule perfect? No.
Was it good? No.
This shouldn't be a tough call. But, shortly after the liberation, the bespoke apologists for the Middle East's thug regimes and the more depraved "peace activists" in Europe set themselves a tall order - to prove that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam. At first, they confined this proposition to matters such as drinking water. When some of us pointed out that the potable water supply in Iraq is now double what it was pre-war, or that health care funding is 25 times larger than it was a year ago, Europe's Saddamite cheerleaders gave up this line of attack. It was always rather boring and technocratic, anyway. So now they've got right down to basics - not potable water but "torture." Why, Bush is torturing just as many Iraqis as Saddam did!
The Shia and Kurds know better than to go along with this. No doubt the average American network anchor or New York Times columnist wouldn't want to be led around naked with Victoria's Secret knickers on their heads by some freaky West Virginia slut. Is this a wager? Do I get to pick the Times columnist?
Is the UN perfect? No.
Is the UN good? Well, I'm not sure I'd even say that. But if you object to what's going on in those Abu Ghraib pictures - the sexual humiliation of prisoners and their conscription as a vast army of extras in their guards' porno fantasies - then you might want to think twice about handing over Iraq to the UN.
In Eritrea, the government recently accused the UN mission of, among other offences, pedophilia. In Cambodia, UN troops fueled an explosion of child prostitutes and AIDS. Amnesty International reports that the UN mission in Kosovo has presided over a massive expansion of the sex trade, with girls as young as 11 being lured from Moldova and Bulgaria to service international peacekeepers.
In Bosnia, where the sex-slave trade barely existed before the UN showed up in 1995, there are now hundreds of brothels with underage girls living as captives. The 2002 Save the Children report on the UN's cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa provides grim details of peacekeepers' demanding sexual favors from children as young as four in exchange for biscuits and cake powder. "What is particularly shocking and appalling is that those people who ought to be there protecting the local population have actually become perpetrators," said Steve Crawshaw, the director of Human Rights Watch. Incidentally, OpinionJournal has the latest on the Oil-for-Food scandal.
::: posted by Steven at 1:55 AM
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Wednesday, May 19, 2004 :::
Seventy-one-year-old Manmohan Singh on Wednesday broke the 57-year-old jinx that no one without alphabet 'R' had become the Prime Minister [of India]. Link from Colby Cosh.
::: posted by Steven at 11:54 PM
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William Safire on justifications for war in Iraq, as they stand today.In this rush to misjudgment, we can see an example of the "Four Noes" that have become the defeatists' platform.
The first "no" is no stockpiles of W.M.D., used to justify the war, were found. ... ... Defeatism's second "no" is no connection was made between Saddam and Al Qaeda or any of its terrorist affiliates.... The third "no" is no human-rights high ground can be claimed by us regarding Saddam's torture chambers because we mistreated Iraqi prisoners. I have to admit that I'm not as dismissive as Safire ofThe fourth "no" is no Arab nation is culturally ready for political freedom and our attempt to impose democracy in Iraq is arrogant Wilsonian idealism. While it's certainly the political conservatives who have, in general, lined up behind this war, you have to admit that one of its most striking purposes is fundamentally non-conservative in nature.
::: posted by dWj at 7:08 PM
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Well, good for Randy Johnson.It was noted that the catcher seemed much more excited than Johnson did — I'm picturing Berra running up to Larsen after his perfect game (which, if Berra wasn't the catcher in that game, is kind of odd) — and I have two thoughts on this: 1) Johnson is 40 years old and just pitched nine innings (do you get extra credit for a perfect game on the road?); he's old and tired. 2) If he had been that excitable, he would have beaned that last batter on the 2-2 count. That he finished the perfect game was itself clear evidence that he was keeping his cool.
::: posted by dWj at 7:08 PM
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Lileks:Some people saw the photos of Iraqi bandits stacked in a pyramid and winced: This was bad, but it would pass. Certain senators saw the pyramid and couldn't help but climb up on the bodies and wave for the cameras.
::: posted by Steven at 11:51 AM
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According to the New York Times:The bald eagle, whose majestic profile was in danger of disappearing from the American wild 40 years ago, has returned in such force that only two states lack breeding pairs and the bird is likely to be removed from the list of threatened species by the year's end. Does this mean we can hunt them now?
::: posted by Steven at 11:19 AM
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Tuesday, May 18, 2004 :::
Science News this week mentions the story I posted about persistent holes in a shaken suspension of corn starch, but it gives it the title "Holey Water" and quotes a professor I had for a mechanics class my first year of college as saying it's "the wildest thing I ever saw".
::: posted by dWj at 7:41 PM
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Monday, May 17, 2004 :::
At the Corner, Peter Robinson mentions that he wants to bring his kids to New England to, among other things, experience thunderstorms.
Are those even rarer in California than they are here? The idea seems odd, since thunderstorms are one of the aspects of Midwestern life I really miss. It seems we get a couple or three a year, and even those are pretty weak, both in rain output and thunder/lightning output. I have been around for the odd dying hurricane, and those have the intensity of rain you get from a good Midwestern cloudburst -- sometimes, even more intensity -- but in my experience, even they lack in thunder and lightning.
::: posted by Steven at 11:09 PM
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Dean, knowing no more law than you do and having followed neither link you just offered, I think an "original intent" based jurisprudence would suggest that the writers of the 14th had race foremost in their minds, while the notion that women ought to be legally equal to men would have seemed at least foreign -- i.e., too far off to be constitutionalized -- and possibly absurd.
::: posted by Steven at 11:04 PM
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The Brown decision and an article against it. I would very much like legal responses to this; was Brown good law? If so, is it constitutionally permissible to segregate schools by sex? If yes to both, where does the argument in A fail in B? (Presumably the rational basis in the latter case is more defensible.)
::: posted by dWj at 8:03 PM
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For several days, I've had a browser window open to a blog entry about the latest fiasco in the Balkans, apparently meaning to comment on it. Consider this post a concession that I'm not going to.
::: posted by Steven at 6:20 PM
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Sunday, May 16, 2004 :::
Cosmo Macero has written a column about the Globe's publishing of pornographic lies.
Incidentally, the Globe has also announced that nobody will be fired over the incident. I didn't find the editorial calling for Rumsfeld to resign over the abuse of prisoners in a single prison in Iraq, but I did find an editorial referring to such an editorial.
::: posted by Steven at 11:56 PM
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I have been awarded an MS in Investment Management. You may now call me Master.
With honors, as it turns out. And with an attractive CD wallet, which they handed out after the ceremony. I hadn't expected either. Though I hadn't really thought about either, anyway. I get to keep the cap and gown, so I'm pushing off laundry by an extra day.
The speeches were less boring but more numerous than I had feared. Several of them had points, though I don't think any of them had points that you haven't heard if you've ever been to a graduation ceremony.
In other news, my cell phone no longer receives incoming calls. I've been unable to receive voice mail on that line for several weeks. I should probably get a new phone. I know what you're thinking -- "isn't it a good thing that people can't call you?" -- but most of the calls I get on my cell phone are actually worth answering.
I saw "Rear Window" the other night. A few weeks ago, I saw "Road to Perdition", which is probably the darkest Hope and Crosby movie to date.
Why, yes, I am out of things to say.
::: posted by Steven at 10:58 PM
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I live three blocks from the current epicenter of the gay marriage movement.
As you may know, cities and towns in Massachusetts will start handing out marriage certificates to same-sex couples tomorrow. Cambridge has announced that it will open city hall at midnight. So when I passed by at 10:00, the sidewalk in front of city hall was filled with people celebrating.
I currently consider myself very tentatively supportive of gay marriage -- I'd kind of like to see some states approve it and some states not, to see what happens -- but I strongly suspect the court decision enabling all of this was based not on what the law is, but on what the justices feel the law ought to be. And any pro-gay sentiment I might have is, on this occasion, overwhelmed by my anti-cheating sentiment.
But the gay-marriage opponents, as far as I saw, were represented solely by the "God hates fags" crowd. Indeed, that phrase itself was on several signs (as was "Thank God for 9/11," which I don't want to understand). The real lesson is probably that sane opponents have no motivation to come out, so the few people opposing gay marriage there are the insane ones. Indeed, they are outnumbered by celebrating throngs, by an even greater margin than I'd expect if one polled the local citizenry -- the ratio of supporters to opponents is probably ten or twenty to one. And I know enough opponents of gay marriage to know that they aren't represented by the people across the street from city hall. But I have to say that those people across from city hall are not helping their cause.
Especially since there's so much contrast with the throngs across the street. I consider this a dark day for the rule of law, but it's hard not to be happy for the people I witnessed in front of city hall. I hope they take the institution more seriously than a lot of heterosexuals have lately.Labels: same-sex marriage
::: posted by Steven at 10:19 PM
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