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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, June 05, 2004 :::
"A 69-year-old man took office and made us all feel young again."
- Bill Bennett
"The voice of America in good times and in grief"
- John Kerry
"He leaves behind a nation he restored, and a world he helped save."
- President Bush
::: posted by Steven at 7:09 PM
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Years tardy, the pope yesterday received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in large part for his important role in ridding the world of the Soviet menace. This morning comes word that another man who received that medal for much the same reason, and a former President himself, Ronald Reagan, is doing worse; of course, he hasn't been well for a number of years. Our prayers are with him and his family.
::: posted by dWj at 8:51 AM
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Friday, June 04, 2004 :::
Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party's rededication to evil.
::: posted by dWj at 6:22 PM
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More than a year before 9/11, a Pakistani-British man told the FBI an incredible tale: that he had been trained by bin Laden?s followers to hijack airplanes and was now in America to carry out an attack. The FBI questioned him for weeks, but then let him go home, and never followed up. Now, the former al-Qaida insider is talking. Interesting, though -- as Instapundit points out -- not really surprising.
::: posted by Steven at 5:23 PM
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Via the Kitchen Cabinet comes word that the White House Pastry Chef is retiring after 25 years.
From UVa poli-sci prof Larry Sabato comes word that no incumbent president with a four-letter last name has ever won (I'm avoiding using the term "re-elect" so as not to exclude Ford). If you don't have a fifth letter, you don't get a fifth year. As you all know, I'm hoping that will change this year.
::: posted by Steven at 2:13 PM
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Café Hayek has proposed a few Libertarian script ideas based on "The Day After Tomorrow".
::: posted by Steven at 11:24 AM
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Robert Samuelson:Only recently one leading Democratic thinker wrote in the New York Times that Kerry could invigorate his campaign by "putting one crucial word . . . at the heart of every speech: reform."
This may or may not be good advice for Kerry, but it's bad advice for the country. As a word, reform no longer performs the essential function of a word, which is to mean something...
By casting their agendas as reforms, political advocates don't aim to stimulate debate and discussion. They aim to suppress it. They aim to stigmatize adversaries as nasty, wrongheaded, selfish or misinformed. If you're in a debate, you want to be the "reformer" and you want the other guy to be the "obstructionist." Once you've achieved that, you're halfway to victory. You've shifted the contest away from substance -- an argument over principles and practicality -- and toward symbolism, where your symbol is superior. Read the whole thing.
::: posted by Steven at 3:08 AM
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My hero -- and maybe yours -- Bjorn Lomborg got a group of experts together to consider the costs and benefits of attacking different problems in the world and determining which ones should take precedence. It's the sort of idea which, taken too far, quickly becomes Soviet. But if you limit it to its proper domain -- and, preferably, provide the analyses, the data, and their sources for all to critique -- it can be a healthy exercise. Here's what they came up with:The panel assigned the highest priority to new measures to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Spending assigned to this purpose would yield extraordinarily high benefits, averting nearly 30m new infections by 2010. Costs are substantial, estimated at $27 billion. Even so, these costs are small in relation to what stands to be gained. Moreover, the scale and urgency of the problem -- especially in Africa, where AIDS threatens the collapse of entire societies -- are extreme.
Policies to attack hunger and malnutrition followed close behind. Reducing the prevalence of iron-deficiency anemia by means of food supplements, in particular, has an exceptionally high ratio of benefits to costs; of the three proposals considered under this heading, this was ranked highest at $12 billion...
The panel considered three main proposals for global trade reform: first, multilateral and unilateral reduction of tariffs and non-tariff barriers, together with the elimination of agricultural subsidies; second, extension of regional trade agreements; third, adoption of the "Everything But Arms (EBA)" proposal for non-reciprocal lowering of rich-country tariffs on exports from the least developed countries. In the case of trade reform, lives are not directly and immediately at risk. However, the first proposal -- free trade -- was agreed to yield exceptionally large benefits, in relation to comparatively modest adjustment costs, both for the world as a whole and for the developing countries. Accordingly it was ranked third. (Some members of the panel argued that since this proposal need not involve any budgetary outlays, it should be acted upon in any case, regardless of the resources available for additional budget outlays.) The proposal to extend regional FTAs was not ranked, for lack of information on particular agreements.
New measures for the control and treatment of malaria were jointly ranked fourth. At $13 billion in costs, the ratio of benefits to costs was somewhat lower than for the proposals on HIV/AIDS and hunger and malnutrition, but still extremely high by the ordinary standards of project appraisal. This is especially so for the provision of chemically-treated bednets. Again, the scale and urgency of the problem are very great. I have less time than I'd like to evaluate the transparency of the project, but I'm likely to consider anything backed by Lomborg to at least be a step in the right direction, at least paradigmaticly.
::: posted by Steven at 1:09 AM
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Thursday, June 03, 2004 :::
I'm a beta user of Google's new GMail. The spam filter isn't extremely powerful -- I would guess it catches about 80%, while the POP spam filter on my laptop gets about 97% -- but it's much better at avoiding the more important reverse error. It has marked about 2000 messages as spam so far, and I have yet to correct it.
::: posted by Steven at 6:09 PM
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Wednesday, June 02, 2004 :::
Democrat Stephanie Herseth appears to have eked out a win in South Dakota's special election, making her quite possibly the hottest member of Congress. At the corner, Adler says she's pretty moderate -- I haven't bothered to check what her web site says about her positions.
::: posted by Steven at 12:27 PM
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Tuesday, June 01, 2004 :::
For basically the eastern half of the United States, the sun will rise next Tuesday (June 8) with the planet of Venus in its way; Venus will appear as a small dot on the sun until about 6:25 central time (7:25 eastern). Venus's transit of the sun will be repeated June 6, 2012, when it will be ongoing at sunset for the United States.
::: posted by dWj at 7:20 PM
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I'd like to make two comments on this "Supersize Me" business. First, on this woman (Soso Wiley) making a documentary in which she lost 10 pounds eating nothing but McDonald's, eating less and exercising: this weekend I heard a doctor on the radio comment that he wanted to publish a diet book called "Shut Your Mouth and Take A Walk", but that nobody would publish it because the rest of the book would be blank, as there's nothing else to say. There's a theory out there that the reason any restrictive diets work is just because the adherents get tired of eating the same food over and over, and end up eating less; if this is true, an honest attempt at a McDonald's diet could end up closer to Wiley's experience than to Spurlock's.Second, on Disney declining to distribute Moore's new "documentary": I think Disney's going to lose a lot of money. Perhaps in the short-term. I believe putting principles and integrity ahead of short-term financial gain is financially beneficial in the long term, so that, much as Spurlock may suggest that Disney is being selfless here, I think it will redound to their benefit for years to come.
::: posted by dWj at 7:04 PM
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The latest poll from Canada:The Liberals are in a virtual tie with the Conservative party amid growing rancour within Liberal ranks and calls for Prime Minister Paul Martin to make drastic changes to his election campaign team.
A new public opinion survey by SES Research for CPAC -- Canada's parliamentary TV channel -- of 600 people on Friday and Saturday show Liberal support has plunged seven points to 34 per cent since the May 23 election call.
The Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, are at 31 per cent, but with a plus and minus error of 4.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, pollster Nikita Nanos said the two parties are in a "statistical tie." I'm going to disown the last half of that last paragraph -- it implies a journalist's understanding of statistics, which is to say, a very poor one. But these results look surprisingly good for the white-hats. One shouldn't get too excited, especially considering the other two relevant parties are the outright socialist NDP and the Liberal-but-less-sane Bloc Quebecois. But it's better than I expected.
::: posted by Steven at 2:59 AM
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If you dig the Free State Project, but you're more of a paleocon bent, check out Christian Exodus.
They're considering Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina. I would have thought Utah would be on the list. Or Idaho. Or at least some western state smaller than the ones under consideration. It's hard enough to imagine such a group holding sway in New Hampshire (which has two representatives in the House). It's even harder to imagine using migration to sway a state with seven, four, or six.
Of course, many members of the Exodus would point out, Mexican immigrants almost have control over a state with 53, and most of them aren't even citizens.
::: posted by Steven at 1:43 AM
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There's a new documentary called "Super Size Me", where a guy eats more than 5000 calories a day at McDonald's, every day for a month. This turns out not to be very good for his health.
I hope he wasn't too surprised.
His simplistic conclusion seems to be that McDonald's is bad. Well. On occasion, I eat too much dried fruit in a sitting. I can tell you, if you come near the bathroom door, that that isn't good for you either. What's the answer -- ban all dried fruit?
How about milk? Ever tried drinking a gallon of that in one sitting? I haven't, but I've heard it's not pretty. How about a twelve-pack of beer? Are we so bereft of ideas that we must revive the antiquated notion of prohibition?
Anyway, James Glassman has a piece at TCS, most of which is a Maria Bartiromo interview with this guy. I was especially struck by two sections -- the last paragraph, in which he indicates that he fell for Michael Moore's propaganda regarding his fight with Disney, and this comment about a rival filmmaker:You also have to question, you know, Ms. Wiley's motives. You know, she works for a Washington, DC, based lobby group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute that lobbies on behalf of the food industry, the petroleum industry, the cigarette companies. So, you know, I came into this to--to save a population. She came into this to save a corporation. There's completely different motives behind our--behind the agenda. Referring to CEI as a "lobby group" is tendentious in itself, but I'm more impressed by his failed attempt to contrast his motives with hers.
Radley Balko has written a short piece on the matter for Time. As he says,If you aren't responsible for what you put into your mouth, chew and swallow, what's left that you are you responsible for?
::: posted by Steven at 1:40 AM
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Monday, May 31, 2004 :::
P.J. O'Rourke suggests:America had everyone's sympathy
after the World Trade towers were attacked. We can get that sympathy back if we limit our foreign policy objectives to whining. O'Rourke lists too many potential side effects for me to quote them all, but here's a start:One thing to whine about will be the fate of Israel. Without American safeguards that nation is certain to be militarily attacked. To
judge by previous Israeli wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, the result will be serious headaches for Israelis as the Knesset furiously debates the status of Jewish settlements outside Damascus and on the west bank of the Euphrates. Go read the whole thing -- it's not long.
::: posted by Steven at 5:15 PM
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If you're interested in the state of freedom of speech and campaign finance in Canada (in your heart, you know you do), check out Colby Cosh's National Post column from last week. The blog entry immediately following (i.e., above) it adds some more detail for us Americans, and extensively quotes Thomas Sowell.
::: posted by Steven at 2:05 PM
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Actually, also see this bleat from last week, where Lileks compares American malfeasance and misadministration to the UN and some of its other security council members.
::: posted by Steven at 2:03 PM
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Check out Lileks on this Memorial Day. It's brief, and I don't think it's going to be archived.
Also, Kate O'Beirne has a recent NRO piece profiling a few of America's recent heroes.
::: posted by Steven at 1:33 PM
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Sunday, May 30, 2004 :::
Goldberg on objectivity in journalism.Fox News offers a lesson here. I know the network's detractors think it's a right-wing propaganda factory. And, I certainly agree that much of Fox's programming is conservative (though liberals' sudden concern with ideologically loaded coverage is ironic). But at least one of the things that has made Fox News successful isn't that it's right-wing, it is that it's populist.This is an important distinction. From the beginning, Fox anchors weren't ashamed to wear American flags on their lapels. They aren't afraid to refer to American troops as "our brave fighting men and women" or some such. They aren't terrified that they will lose their objectivity merit badges if they sound like they hope America wins. If Fox goes overboard sometimes, it's only compared to a new standard Ernie Pyle wouldn't recognize. For what it's worth.
::: posted by dWj at 6:43 PM
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Steve Hayward writes in the cornerThe Day After Tomorrow is to serious climate science what Hogan?s Heroes was to serious depiction of prison camp life in World War II. I'm told that someone I know greatly enjoyed "Troy", fully concious of its ... textual infidelities. And I've long maintained that, while the movie Jurassic Park was not the book Jurassic Park, they were both worth my time, each inclined more toward what its medium can do well — the book toward intellectual and character depth, and the movie toward vistas and big, loud, scary things.I don't know whether the movie will be any good — it doesn't look like my thing — but I wouldn't say a lack of realism makes it automatically a bad movie. (It does make anyone who touts it realism automatically wrong, of course, and it may make it dangerous to anyone who implicitly assumes its realism.)
::: posted by dWj at 6:43 PM
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