Jens 'n' Frens

2012-01-22T21:54:00.002-05:00

Charles Murray on the new American Divide:

When Americans used to brag about "the American way of life"—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

The underlying theme is similar to Mark Steyn's, though, as usual, Murray provides more statistical support and Steyn more timely examples and wit, concluding,

For soft cultures in good times, dispensing with social norms is easy. In hard times, you may have need of them.

2012-01-22T16:18:00.003-05:00

There's more evidence here and here that what the "Occupiers" oppose, ultimately, is civil society. As if more evidence were needed.

UPDATE: Oh, yes, there was the smoke bomb at the White House last week, too.

2012-01-12T16:29:00.004-05:00

On the morning of December 29, I was driving and listening to the radio. A National Public Radio anchor, discussing assorted issues being considered by prospective voters in the New Hampshire primary, described a proposed “right-to-work” law as one that would enable employees to benefit from collective bargaining agreements without having to pay dues to the unions negotiating for them.

No further definition was offered, much less any elaboration of the possible benefits of “right-to-work” laws, which protect workers from compulsory union membership.

This reminds me of my last time listening to NPR on the radio (mentioned in the last three paragraphs there; I'll note that while I haven't listened to them on the radio since then, I have since listened to some NPR podcasts and I follow a link to their website sometimes).

It's been even longer since I listened to Rush Limbaugh (whose birthday is today, by the way), but I seem to remember that he would sum up the liberal case before contending that it was just an excuse to grab power. Some of the media sources I consult regularly are openly biased, but it would surprise me if any of them went so far as to imply that there weren't any fair-minded arguments being made on the other side. Of course, there's a selection issue there, in that if I were used to one of my sources operating that way, I probably wouldn't put a lot of time into them. But my point is that this is not merely the bias of people with a particular world-view letting that world-view color how they report a story - this is, in fact, pretty egregious, even on the scale of opinion journalism.

2012-01-09T11:36:00.002-05:00

I wonder whether there would be a way to combine a VoterID case with a campaign finance case. It would be interesting to hear people directly assert that Voter ID laws making it more nearly as hard to vote as to buy drain cleaner are a greater curtailment of Constitutional rights than preventing people from getting together to produce political advertising, or that the interest of democracy in preventing "the appearance of corruption" is more important than protecting people's faith in their votes from actual vote fraud.

I don't know whether these people could be compelled to offer evidence that any actual cases of corruption are linked to the guilty officials supporters' being able to provide the public with information about their opponents; perhaps there are one or two such instances out there, but of course we're focused on "the appearance of corruption", rather than actual corruption; connection to reality is not required to trump the first amendment. This does make one wonder how this "appearance" is established. Do I actually need evidence that allowing the New York Times to write editorials creates an appearance of corruption, or is asserting it enough?

2012-01-04T12:10:00.002-05:00

Trivial, this, but I can't contain myself.

Apparently, a few guys from Occupy D.C. created a minor disturbance at local hamburger joint "Five Guys". I was taken aback by this:

Considering its local roots—it started in Arlington—and spartan ethos, Five Guys hardly seems like the fast-food restaurant of the one percent.

Yeah, a local establishment based in Arlington, VA, is hardly likely to have a wealthy clientele. Rich people mostly eat at national chains out of the South Bronx.

Okay, I'm done.

2012-01-03T15:48:00.003-05:00

I just saw a headline "Demi joins Lovelace biopic" and got pretty excited about what I assumed would be a movie about Ada Lovelace . Nope. Apparently there was a pornstar who shared her last name.

My husband has a computer named Lovelace, which I also assumed was named after Ada. I hope I haven't been making the same mistake there.

2012-01-03T15:39:00.003-05:00

This article does as good a job as I could making this point:

A young fruit vendor, overcome by desperation, sets himself on fire in a public square in Tunisia. His suicide sparks protests around the globe. Millions take to the streets. Untold thousands die. Entrenched dictatorial regimes crumble seemingly overnight.

To commemorate this worldwide struggle for freedom, TIME magazine honors “The Protester” as Person of the Year, featuring a cover photo of … Sarah Mason, an Occupy L.A. activist who adamantly refuses to pay her credit card bills.

Take that Wall Street.

It gets better:

“Each paycheck that I would get, I would overspend,” she said “I had already spent all this money on clothes, make-up, accessories, and I got the credit card because I needed to [pay] my electric bill. … And then of course, it turned into I just started using it recklessly.”

...Most people facing that kind of pressure while deeply in debt would have cut up their credit cards and worked out a payment plan. But Sarah Mason is no quitter. She’s a fighter, and a born leader. “It’s easy not to pay your debt!” she said. “Nothing can happen … if you have assets, people can seize them, but if you don’t have assets, what are they going to take?”

Obviously not your dignity.

2011-12-31T21:56:00.006-05:00

A round-up of year-end round-ups, in roughly descending order of my endorsement:

The 50 best political quotes of the year
Dave Barry's Year in Review
Jonah Goldberg's version
From the American Spectator, Jed Babbin's version
Christian Schneider's version is somewhat Wisconsin-specific, but not entirely
Ann Althouse's most-read posts of the year
The College Republican National Committee's "dumb Democrat quotes"

Happy New Year!

2011-12-29T01:59:00.013-05:00

Happy birthday to Ronald Coase!

Things that Ronald Coase is older than:

The Federal Reserve
The General Theory of Relativity
modern Quantum Mechanics
penicillin
Birth of a Nation
the Indianapolis 500
the states of New Mexico and Arizona
Milton Friedman
Paul Samuelson
Alan Turing
- Ronald Reagan
- Richard Nixon
- John F Kennedy
- Scoop Jackson
John McCain's mother
- Harold Wilson
- Edward Heath
- Otto von Habsburg, Crown Prince of Austria and Hungary
- Kim Il Sung
- Tennessee Williams
- Woody Guthrie
- Roy Rogers
- Vincent Price
- Gene Kelly
- Ginger Rogers
- Lucille Ball
- Babe Didrikson
- Jackson Pollock
- Perry Como

He was born before

the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
the launch of the Titanic
the death of Gilbert (though not Sullivan)
the first election of Woodrow Wilson
The 16th amendment, as well, of course, as the 17th and the 18th — the beginning of Prohibition
World War I
the end of the Qing Dynasty
The Russian Revolution
Irish independence

He was an adult before

The Great Depression
The New Deal, including Social Security
Keynes's General Theory

He was 33 when the Bretton Woods conference took place.

2011-12-28T15:09:00.003-05:00

Some responses to Stewart Mandel's mailbag:

Hi Stewart. I've been reading a lot about how wrong it is for a team that didn't win its conference to be able to win the national championship and I must say I agree. I mean, the ninth place Big East team (UConn) is the national champion? Really? Oh, they are talking about football and Alabama? Sorry, wrong sport.
-- Chris Anderson, Shreveport, La.

Touche. College football's unique postseason system makes for some unique pet peeves. Teams that didn't win their conference or division constantly emerge as champions in other sports. In fact the reigning NFL (Packers), NBA (Mavs) and baseball (Cardinals) champs did not win their respective divisions. UConn was ranked 14th in the final RPI standings last year. The BCS equivalent this year would be No. 14 Oklahoma -- fourth in the Big 12 -- winning the national championship.

But of course we accept these results without hesitation because they stemmed from a playoff.

Which "we" are is Mandel talking about here?

I don't know about UConn per se, but I'm not sure the #14 team winning the NCAA tournament should necessarily be considered to clearly be the best team. A single-elimination tournament that large means that a good team can get unlucky early, leaving an easy path for a middling (in a comparative sense) team.

It's something of a curiosity to me that professional leagues tend to have longer post-seasons, making it more likely that the best team will win — I take that as a good measure of their being more "fair" — while college playoffs tend to be more heavily tilted toward single-elimination, which is probably more exciting. (Football is the big exception here.) On some level the entertainment business should skew more in the latter direction; the countervailing factor, perhaps, is that professional athletes can be asked to play more games than supposed and actual student-athletes can.

Given that only two teams get that opportunity in college football, I understand why some fans would find it uncomfortable that one of them did not even win its conference. However, it's not like in the NCAA tournament we make sure every conference champ is seeded before rewarding any at-large teams. If the two best teams in the regular season were ACC champion Duke and ACC runner-up North Carolina, they'd be given the top two overall seeds, thus ensuring the best possible chance to play each other in the title game. If the Tar Heels beat the Blue Devils, no one would object to their being declared national champion. That's essentially what's happening here, albeit with five fewer layers between the seeding and the title game.

I would note that a national title system that insisted on having only "conference champions" in it would have good reason to exercise its own discretion as to how those champions are determined. If Arkansas had beat LSU late in the regular season, the SEC West's representative in the conference championship game would have been chosen by a tie-breaker that can only be described as pathological. As it was, the SEC East was represented not by South Carolina, which was undefeated in its division but lost an interdivision games against Arkansas, but by Georgia, which lost to South Carolina but won an interdivision game against Florida. The SEC can determine its champion, but a national championship game shouldn't be expected to manacle itself to that decision.

I was wondering if any of you sports writers realize that BAMA won every statistical category when they played for the first time in Tuscaloosa expect for the one on the scoreboard and yet "all" of you talk about how LSWho beat BAMA. Score wise, yes they did, but on the stat sheet they DIDN'T. For that very reson you are WAY off on your BCS Championship prediction. BAMA will Rolllllll into New Orleans on Jan 9th ranked #2 and ROLLLLLLLLL out National Champions!!!!!
-- Michael, Corinth, Ala.

I couldn't wait for the first game to get here because I so badly wanted to see the teams play. I can't wait for the second one to get here to put an end to 36 days of this.

There is a certain prevalence of really stupid commentary in sports, and yet I find this mail remarkable. It's one thing to say "The team that won had these big breaks," another to say "All the statistics I look at give the wrong result as to which team should have won, so reality is wrong." Alabama missed four field goals, while LSU missed none; LSU punted four times more than Alabama, for an extra 150 yards of field position. Alabama's offense gained 56 more yards against LSU's defense than vice versa, while turnovers were the same, but if you ignore special teams then, yes, you're ignoring one of the reasons LSU is so good this year. After reading this, I'm hoping for another defensive battle of field position, hopefully with another 73 yard Brad Wing punt.

2011-12-23T17:06:00.002-05:00

Frank Fleming:

But to see why taxing the rich boosts the economy, remember the story of the goose that laid the golden eggs.

A farmer had a goose that laid a golden egg once a day, until he tried cutting the goose open to get all the gold at once and ended up with no more golden eggs. Similarly, rich people lay golden eggs of jobs and tax revenue each year — and, as tempting as it is to just cut rich people open and confiscate all their wealth, it’s not really a good idea. That would be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

But suppose, instead of killing the goose because you’re unsatisfied with its golden egg output, you just punched it really hard in the face. That’s perfectly fine; it won’t stop future egg production. But it does let the goose know who is boss. Plus it relieves stress.

And it just makes everyone feel better to see that stuck-up goose who thinks she’s better than everyone get a good whack in her stupid goose face.

In a struggling economy, that’s what people need to see happen to the rich. Call it the “Goose Punch” theory of economics.

2011-12-16T13:36:00.001-05:00

[T]he government's attempt to effectively ban farm kids from working on their own farms goes beyond outrageous.

Under new standards being advocated by the Labor Department, youths under the age of eighteen would be prohibited from working in hay lofts, giving shots, caring for baby animals, and being in the vicinity of animals whose behavior may be "unpredictable." For the estimated 1.3 million youths living or working on farms, this means no longer being able to perform routine chores if the farm is set up as a corporation or a business partnership. Today, the vast majority of family farms are legally structured in this manner.

I know nothing about this particular issue that I didn't read here - in particular, are proprietorships exempted? - but I generally agree with the expressed sentiments that safety has become too highly valued with respect to freedom. Our wealth allows us to afford more safety than 19th century farmers enjoyed; modern families would presumably be safer than them even without safety regulations. Having some additional safety regulations, especially for children, makes sense. But this as described seems to go overboard.

2011-12-11T15:46:00.003-05:00

I just wrote this for someone, and thought I'd post it here, two days before the folks at CERN give a press conference announcing the latest findings in the search for the Higgs boson.

The electroweak model is built on the idea of a broken symmetry: just as the equation x²=1 is symmetric under a change in sign of x but no solution of the equation is similarly invariant, the electroweak model is symmetric but symmetric solutions require very high energies, and the symmetry in any case is not observed in the real world. The symmetry, among other things, precludes electrons and quarks from having mass; the mass terms would violate the symmetry. The Higgs field (among other things) transforms in such a way that if you stick it into the mass term for an electron or a quark, it makes the term as a whole symmetric again; the Higgs transforms in a way that cancels out the transformation in the rest of the term. This is why you read about the Higgs field "giving mass" to these particles, which isn't really wrong by science journalism standards, but doesn't feel quite right to me, either.

I would note that, with the sole exception of our inability to find the Higgs boson, the electroweak model has been fantastically successful for more than thirty years; I have a book from thirty years ago that includes the masses of some electroweak bosons that were discovered the year after the book was published, and the masses are exactly right. Physicists are thus confident that the electroweak model is a very good description of most low-energy particle behavior. It is, however, an even stronger empirical result that electrons are not massless, hence the desire by the physics community to reconcile the two sets of observations.

2011-12-02T11:50:00.003-05:00

The employment numbers this morning looked good, but the participation rate plummeted.

Much has been made of the fact that the unemployment rate excludes "discouraged workers." There are at least two reasons to make this point. One is that, if the unemployment rate is 9%, that doesn't mean 91% of the population is doing great. This is definitely true; I know of a lot of people, especially young people, who are working part-time or in jobs that they reasonably consider below their capabilities, and of course family members of unemployed people are affected, too.

But I think some of the commentary is implying that this economy is worse than previous economies with the same headline unemployment numbers. Very little of this commentary has made much of a point of whether the current participation rate is unusually low. So I spent a little bit of time this morning (which I should have spent finding a dissertation topic) finding a "normal" participation rate instead. I found BLS data back to 1948, but eyeballing patterns in the data suggest that it has been reasonably stable since 1980.

I did some polynomial regressions earlier today of labor force participation rate against unemployment rate and time to try to establish whether the participation rate is unusually low for the level of unemployment we have now -- i.e., is today's real unemployment rate worse than it usually is when the reported number is 8.6%?

Depending on which specification I used, I found that the participation rate is either somewhat lower or roughly the same. If I include data since 1948, I get that today's participation rate should be a lot higher than it is. If I cut it at 1980 to avoid leaning too much on my time variables to capture economic change, it should be a little bit higher than it is. If I cut off at 1970 and remove unemployment rates below 7.2%, such that I'm not fitting my data to time periods with low unemployment rates, I again find that the participation rate should be slightly higher than it is - that our 8.6% unemployment is comparable to earlier 8.8% or 8.9% unemployment rates.

What's more worth noticing is that two or three years ago, when the unemployment rate was in the mid-8s on the way up, the participation rate was unusually high. So on a longer-term historical basis, real unemployment is only a little bit worse than it usually is when the reported number is 8.6, but real unemployment is about a percentage point worse than it was when the reported number was 8.6 in early 2009 (I think March of 2009). That isn't really surprising -- people are more likely to give up after several years of high unemployment than when it's new.

There are other problems with the current economy that this doesn't account for, such as the alarming length of time for which unemployed people stay unemployed. But if you, like me, have seen the comments that participation rate is low and wondered whether that's an unusually big problem now, there you go.

2011-11-20T21:34:00.003-05:00

Professor Bainbridge takes a look at Senator Scott Brown's bill to prohibit insider trading by Congress and its employees and finds it lacking. But I think his objections are covered by Representative Louise Slaughter's version, which Bainbridge noticed last March.

One could argue that the Slaughter bill is overbroad and unfairly ambiguous. It may even be as bad in that regard as existing rules against insider trading, but it doesn't appear to be any worse.

2011-11-12T14:04:00.002-05:00

Lawmakers often contact federal agencies directly in an attempt to influence where money is spent, a practice often dubbed “lettermarking” or “phonemarking.”

The messages from members of Congress are not typically made public, though the press sometimes obtains them through Freedom of Information Act requests. Several lawmakers have been embarrassed when their letters asking for federal funds were disclosed under FOIA, undercutting their stated positions of wanting to cut government spending.

The draft memo from the Obama administration could make disclosure of lettermarking and phonemarking routine — a possibility welcomed by watchdog groups, but feared by lobbyists who make their living off the appropriations process.

Good for the administration. The sole objection mentioned in the article is

Howard Marlowe, president of the American League of Lobbyists, said his group is concerned that if the memo were issued, it would lead to constituents not asking for congressional help.

“What concerns the American League of Lobbyists about this proposal is its potential to deter constituents from asking their federal-elected officials to support their needs. That is the right of every American that is guaranteed by the Constitution,” Marlowe said.

It's certainly their right to do so, and there are probably some cases in which their Congressmen should support them. But I'd like Marlowe to offer an example of a situation in which this support is appropriate and in which privacy is essential.

2011-11-12T00:50:00.001-05:00

“It’s called Zuccotti lung,” said Willie Carey, 28, a demonstrator from Chapel Hill, N.C. “It’s a real thing.”

As the weather turns, the protesters in Zuccotti Park, the nexus of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Lower Manhattan, have been forced to confront a simple truth: packing themselves like sardines inside a public plaza, where cigarettes are shared and a good night’s sleep remains elusive, may not be conducive to good health.

“Pretty much everything here is a good way to get sick,” said Salvatore Cipolla, 23, from Long Island. “It’ll definitely thin the herd.”

To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it's funny because I don't know them. But also because they emit non-sequiturs like this:

“I’m amazed that in a park full of revolutionaries, there are large contingents that can’t throw away their own trash,” said Jordan McCarthy, 22, a member of the protesters’ sanitation team.

Demonstrators do maintain a medical tent, filled mostly with over-the-counter medications and alternative treatments, like herbal remedies. Some have spotted shamans walking the premises... Volunteers at the medical tent also have on-call contacts in acupuncture, chiropractics, massage therapy and psychotherapy, protesters said.

“We’re a triage clinic,” said Pauly Kostora, 27, a former licensed nurse, as he rolled the tent’s single wheelchair into a corner. “We don’t pretend to be a hospital.”

There's a lot of unexplored story behind that word "former".

I'd like to excerpt more, but I can't just take the whole story. For example, the next paragraph notes that the potential for bad press has led some of the protesters to hope that the people around them don't die. Different people respond to different incentives, I guess.

2011-11-11T14:18:00.000-05:00

Now that Piggy has been killed, do the adults finally show up?

2011-11-09T14:38:00.003-05:00

This brief piece [NB: loading that site causes my computer to hang for a few second] notes that

As a consolation for the GOP after a lackluster election performance, it has been pointed out that Democrats clung to an apparent tie in the state Senate despite winning only 39 percent of the statewide vote for state Senate. But this number, which suggests a clever gerrymander, omits the fact that Democrats failed to contest 11 incumbent Republicans whereas Republicans failed to challenge just three Democrats.

What do you get if you throw out all the votes from the uncontested races?

According to the Virginia Board of Elections website, Virginians cast about 1.34 million votes last night. If you exclude all of the uncontested races and write-in votes, there were 912,000 votes cast. Of those votes, Republicans won 441,776, and Democrats won 470,412.

So if you only look at contested races, the Democrats won 17 races out of 26 (65%) on 52% of the two-party vote. I don't think that really contradicts the "clever gerrymander" story.

UPDATE: Of course, it's also consistent with the story that the Republicans fought more unwinnable races.

2011-11-09T00:33:00.002-05:00

Here's more about Occupy Boston sponging off of the homeless.

I've also been meaning to post this, on the Oakland riots last week:

Maritime operations at the Port of Oakland were shut down late Wednesday, port officials said in a statement, and "the port has been taking steps to help workers in the harbor area get home safely."

"Continued missed shifts represent economic hardship for maritime workers, truckers and their families, as well as lost jobs and lost tax revenue for our region," the port statement said.

Trucks that attempted to exit with cargo were forced to turn around, KCBS said. Drivers without cargo were allowed to pass.

"I just want to go home," one truck driver told the station after being trapped by the crowd. "Why are they on top of my truck?"

Which can be paired with this piece of chutzpah:

Monique Agnew got in front of a truck with a camper shell that was forced its way in. When it charged, she hit it with a
sign she was carrying.

She said she has been there for several hours.

"These people tried to kill us. I can't believe they are being that aggressive over a paycheck, over your own people fighting for you."

2011-11-07T16:33:00.002-05:00

On double standards between the Tea Party movement and the Occupiers:

Taranto has noticed that the New York Times, which was the most egregious media organ in the attempt to tie the Tucson shooting in January to overheated rhetoric by the Tea Party movement, has been cheering on a movement connected to actual violence.
From Richmond, Virginia, this:
On Friday, Oct. 28, Corky Mann, treasurer of the Richmond Tea Party, hand-delivered an invoice to the City of Richmond for the total costs incurred from three separate April 15 events at Richmond's downtown Kanawha Plaza.

The annual Richmond Tea Party Tax Day Rally, a major venue through which we both alert and educate Virginians on fiscal and other policy issues, has been a mainstay event for the organization each year since the 2009 inaugural rally.

The $8,500 invoice represents dollars budgeted for the Richmond Tea Party's three Tax Day rallies. When combined with the many hundreds of volunteer hours utilized for these events alone, the overall investment represents a good portion of the organization's available resources.

For each event at Kanawha Plaza we filed timely applications for governmental review and paid all required permit fees. We arranged for toilets, first-aid care, staging, lights and sound, off-duty police officers for security, event insurance and volunteers trained to support an orderly day of protest. We always left the property as clean as — or cleaner than — we found it.

The Occupy Richmond group met none of these benchmarks while camped out in the same Kanawha Plaza between Oct. 15th and Oct. 31 (the morning they were finally evicted). So in the spirit of our founding principle of equal application of the law, the Richmond Tea Party is requesting a full refund from the City of Richmond for city-imposed costs related to these three rallies.
Absent a good-faith effort to charge the Occupiers, this request should clearly be granted.

2011-11-07T00:26:00.002-05:00

I hope Potemra will forgive me for quoting his entire comment, as it's short:

After church today I stopped in at West Side Judaica — doesn’t everyone? — to see what was new. One of the clerks addressed me. “Young man,” he began, with more kindness than accuracy, “do you need help?” I assured him that I didn’t. To which he rejoined: “You’re one of the lucky ones.”

2011-11-03T00:21:00.002-04:00

I've seen a Los Angeles Times headline characterizing the "Occupy Oakland" protest as a "mostly-peaceful protest." It seems to me that most of the entirely-peaceful protests we've seen in the last few years have been reported simply as "protests" or "rallies", without the adjective "peaceful", which, nonetheless, never struck me as missing. The adjective isn't really needed unless you need to draw an explicit contrast to the riots in Athens or Denver or Oakland — which may actually be the point of the headline, though the first violence that appears in the story that accompanies the headline was from tonight's activity. Maybe it's just me, but I think adding "mostly peaceful" just highlights the fact that there has been a not insignificant amount of violence in Oakland recently.

One might just as well describe the Madison, Wisconsin, franchise as "a nearly-public masturbation-free protest" or the Baltimore version as "a protest involving less rape than you'd think, all things considered."

2011-10-31T19:32:00.002-04:00

Occupy Philadephia protesters marched on the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School forcing the cancellation of a speech by House Majority Whip Eric Cantor. The protestors were subsequently shouted down by students chanting, "Get a job."

I have never been more proud of MBA students.

2011-10-27T10:47:00.002-04:00

Some things that amused me recently include the (fake) headline, "Greece Offers to Repay Bailout with Giant Horse."

Also, from Twitter:

The mercatus center, highlighting something from a column in the WSJ: "Senator suggests Google replace its algorithm with a panel of experts to ensure "fair" search results: http://ow.ly/7a2aV." The column doesn't attribute this assertion to anybody else, so the columnist seems to be taking responsibility for the accuracy of the claim, but he doesn't name the Senator.
ExJon, presumably commenting on Romney's apparent hedge on an Ohio ballot question: "Romney is so risk-averse it actually gets him in trouble. Meanwhile, Perry is Mayhem from the Allstate ads."
Jeff Greenfield: "I'm thinking we need John McEnroe at the next debate; at approprate moments, he can say, "you cannot be serious!" (yes, in the fall as well)"

2011-10-21T22:59:00.003-04:00

Megan McArdle notes that the Senate voted to raise the limit on the value of a mortgage that can be bought by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, thereby (as the title of that article puts it) subsidizing homes for the rich. She asks, "Seriously: is there anything stupider than subsidizing loans for homes that cost more than half a million dollars?"

Which makes me wonder whether she's seen this:

The European Union’s executive is leaning toward proposing a ban on the issuing of sovereign credit ratings for countries in bailout talks, European internal market commissioner Michel Barnier said Thursday.

2011-10-14T00:09:00.001-04:00

Since ‘Occupy Boston’ has forced the cancellation of the Greenway Mobile Food Fest, The Right Sphere is trying to raise $1,000 for the Greater Boston Food Bank, which was supposed to benefit from that event.

Details here.

2011-10-13T19:02:00.002-04:00

As you may have heard, there seems to have been a plot by Iran to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States. Reuters has the hilarious headline, "Alleged Iran plot may have violated U.N. treaty."

2011-10-04T01:27:00.001-04:00

Maryland's new district map is even more ludicrous than Ohio's.

2011-10-03T11:49:00.006-04:00

This weekend, Herman Cain and the Washington Post attacked Rick Perry for, back when he was a Democrat, frequenting a place where there was a rock with a bad word painted on it.

I guess if that's all you've got... [UPDATE: Cain is, at least, declining to dwell on it.]

Meanwhile, Andrew Breitbart is attacking Obama for having marched with racists a year and a half before he was elected President. But the way I skim that article, he didn't find a New Black Panther march and join in - rather, he was marching in what may have been a perfectly respectable parade and some New Black Panthers glommed onto him. Breitbart notes that Obama has other connections to the people in question and says that "[h]ad any of Obama's opponents appeared at an event with the KKK or Aryan Nation, The New York Times would have had to double its ink buy," which is probably true. At least, the Washington Post would have printed the story, at least if one of the members of the KKK were holding a rock with a bad word painted on it. But that doesn't mean this set of pictures is really newsworthy, it just means that the Washington Post will sometimes print stories that aren't.

UPDATE: If having frequented a place with a racial slur painted on a rock over two decades ago is a serious knock against a politician, how about attending a football game involving a team called the "Redskins"? I'll bet the Post could find some politicians who have attended such a game.

2011-10-02T13:08:00.004-04:00

Last December, my fiancee (now wife) gave me a Green Bay Packers shirt. The Packers haven't lost since.

This summer, we also got Buffalo Bills shirts. They are also undefeated so far this year.

On the other hand, last Wednesday night, I not only had but wore a Red Sox shirt. That shirt appears to be less magical.

I'm considering adding the "cargo cults" tag to this blog entry, but I don't think it quite fits.

2011-09-28T18:24:00.002-04:00

Pray for snow, says the Daily News,

And for sleet and torrential rains - anything that might convince the precious insufferables who have taken over Wall Street that they have had enough of exercising their First Amendment rights to the inconvenience of tens of thousands of people who actually have to work for a living.

There's more at the link.

2011-09-27T11:37:00.002-04:00

Just last week, two well-educated and well-known writer acquaintances of mine remarked in passing on the "fact" that those who serve in the U.S. military typically have no other career options. America's soldiers, they said, were poor and black...

These allegations—most frequently leveled at the Army, the military's biggest service and the one with the highest casualty rate—are false.

In 2008, using data provided by the Defense Department, the Heritage Foundation found that only 11% of enlisted military recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth, or quintile, of American neighborhoods (as of the 2000 Census), while 25% came from the wealthiest quintile. Heritage reported that "these trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, in which 40% of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods, a number that has increased substantially over the past four years."

Indeed, the Heritage report showed that "low-income families are underrepresented in the military and high-income families are overrepresented. Individuals from the bottom household income quintile make up 20.0 percent of Americans who are age 18-24 years old but only 10.6 percent of the 2006 recruits and 10.7 percent of the 2007 recruits. Individuals in the top two quintiles make up 40.0 percent of the population, but 49.3 percent of the recruits in both years."

That ROTC statistic would be more interesting if I knew what percentage of those who go to college are from the wealthiest neighborhoods; I'm sure it's more than 20%, but suspect it's less than 40%.

The writer goes on to note that the military is not disproportionately black, though disproportionately few servicemembers are Asian or Hispanic.

2011-09-25T14:45:00.002-04:00

In their first two games, the Vikings outscored opponents in the first half by a total of 34-7. They were outscored in the second half by a combined 41-3.

In their third game, they have a halftime lead of 20-0. We'll see what happens.

UPDATE: They lost in overtime, 26-23.

2011-09-25T00:35:00.003-04:00

Eugene Volokh argues for the acceptability of the use of a conjunction as the first word of a sentence, but I think his coblogger Kenneth Anderson argues more powerfully.

2011-09-18T15:16:00.004-04:00

A couple points of trivia from the NFL today:

The Packers never trailed by more than a touchdown last season. Their streak ended when they gave up the first 13 points of the game to the Panthers, though they did come back to win.
The Bills, who cofounded the AFL in 1960, still have the same owner who founded them. Today was the first home game he didn't attend. He suffered a broken hip last June.

UPDATE: Also on Sunday, the Bills scored three go-ahead touchdowns in the fourth quarter. This was the fourth time this has happened in an NFL game.

2011-09-15T22:41:00.002-04:00

Megan McArdle (well, mostly a correspondent) explains why infrastructure spending takes so long - in particular, why it's already too late to pass a bill to fund any serious school refurbishing next summer.

One thought:

I am assuming that there will be waivers of all the usual federal procurement processes to put this money to work. That is a huge assumption. I cannot imagine that there will be any waivers of the environmental hazard remediation inspections or the minority hiring or disadvantaged business subcontracting requirement. Maxine Waters will scream if no one else.

It's not at all my main point, but I'd like to start by pointing out that every time Maxine Waters screams, an angel gets its wings.

My more important reaction to that point is that - like most things that make Maxine Waters scream - rolling back some of the more onerous regulations that prevent projects from being shovel-ready ought to at least be proposed. In addition to minority set-asides, Davis-Bacon comes to mind. There are also a lot of regulations unrelated to federal contracting that make employing people more expensive. Often, these regulations aren't so much onerous for what they require as for the administrative overhead and legal risk they confer; for example, most businesses would be happy to make reasonable accommodations for disabled people, but the ADA provides a cause for legal action without even allowing the business a warning that they may have made a mistake. A very few businesses have been telling job applicants not to bother sending in applications unless they are already employed. In response, Obama has proposed that the vast majority of businesses who don't issue automatic rejections to the unemployed be ready to prove it in court while those who do issue automatic rejections would be required to waste applicants' time.

Some of these costly and burdensome regulations might be repealable (or, as with the ADA, amendable to be less burdensome without doing much harm to their ostensible purpose). If they aren't, they should be campaign issues next fall. Some members of the administration may want to frame the options as exactly what Obama has proposed or nothing at all, but that obviously isn't true (and note that, later in that article, Obama disputes Axelrod's comment). Obama's proposal seems to have some bad things (see the previous paragraph), some good ideas, botched, and, perhaps, some good things. Nobody should pass exactly his bill and only his bill just because (s)he was mesmerized by his repeating "pass this bill right now" a week before he proposed his bill, nor should anyone reject his bill out of hand and fail to support better ideas, either because she is running for president and trying to define herself as his diametric opposite or because whenever Obama attacks one of his legion of straw-men, (s)he sees in that straw-man a role model. Obama's good ideas should be supported; good ideas that Obama doesn't support should be pushed anyway, and, if vetoed or not passed, campaigned on; and anything that makes Maxine Waters scream should be pushed hard.

2011-09-13T22:12:00.002-04:00

Ohio Democrats were concerned that the Republicans who control their legislature would offer some kind of gerrymander, but it looks like they're going with sensibly-shaped, compact Congressional districts.

I'm kidding, of course. That map is hilarious.

2011-09-12T00:39:00.002-04:00

I've been reminded that 9/11 truthers still exist. I have no time for them.

But I'm glad to find that the Titanic truthers also still exist. This guy is a genuine hero. May his hastily-created website never die.

2011-09-04T23:53:00.001-04:00

Apparently, Sarah Palin decided to run.

Her time was pretty good, too.

2011-09-01T23:58:00.002-04:00

Dean, I didn't send that to you, did I? My wife pointed that out to me yesterday - she has met the judge (not as a defendant), and is fond of him. Our reaction was similar to yours.

I wish the reporter had asked the defense lawyer how much money the victim of an armed robbery and an assault has to have before the armed robbery and assault start to reflect badly on the armed robbers and assaulters. Apparently, she thinks armed robbery (and did I mention assault?) is only serious if the victim is rich, presumably because rich people are more important than poor people. I think that's a sufficiently unusual point of view to justify a little more probing.

2011-09-01T21:44:00.002-04:00

It's interesting to me to read a story like this and imagine how the reporting would be different if the victim had had 7 cents less in his pockets than he did. The last paragraph would probably change the most.

2011-08-31T16:14:00.000-04:00

2011-08-31T00:36:00.003-04:00

This story has been making the rounds in the conservative parts of the blogosphere, but doesn't seem to be getting a lot of attention in the mainstream media (the WSJ notwithstanding, apparently):

Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson's chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company's manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. "The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier," he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.

It isn't the first time that agents of the Fish and Wildlife Service have come knocking at the storied maker of such iconic instruments as the Les Paul electric guitar, the J-160E acoustic-electric John Lennon played, and essential jazz-boxes such as Charlie Christian's ES-150. In 2009 the Feds seized several guitars and pallets of wood from a Gibson factory, and both sides have been wrangling over the goods in a case with the delightful name "United States of America v. Ebony Wood in Various Forms."

That sounds like an asset forfeiture case. If you think it odd that for certain legal purposes a corporation is treated as a "person", wait until the feds file a lawsuit against your car or your house.

It isn't just Gibson that is sweating. Musicians who play vintage guitars and other instruments made of environmentally protected materials are worried the authorities may be coming for them next.

If you are the lucky owner of a 1920s Martin guitar, it may well be made, in part, of Brazilian rosewood. Cross an international border with an instrument made of that now-restricted wood, and you better have correct and complete documentation proving the age of the instrument. Otherwise, you could lose it to a zealous customs agent—not to mention face fines and prosecution.

Brazilian rosewood is illegal to trade because its habitat is threatened by farmers looking to grow crops. As has been pointed out elsewhere - too many are being cut down by Brazilians to farm, so the US is protecting it by ensuring that there is little or no economic incentive not to clear-cut the forests and replace them with crops that can be sold internationally.

There's more on the difficulty of documenting whether your guitar is legal, but there's also this story:

Consider the recent experience of Pascal Vieillard, whose Atlanta-area company, A-440 Pianos, imported several antique Bösendorfers. Mr. Vieillard asked officials at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species how to fill out the correct paperwork—which simply encouraged them to alert U.S. Customs to give his shipment added scrutiny.

There was never any question that the instruments were old enough to have grandfathered ivory keys. But Mr. Vieillard didn't have his paperwork straight when two-dozen federal agents came calling.

He was allowed to plead down to a lesser offense.

Read the whole thing, and note that Michelle Obama is probably as guilty of violating this law as Gibson is.

2011-08-30T14:20:00.002-04:00

Apparently Michele Bachmann makes so few controversial, over-the-top statements that some people think they need to make some up.

Also interesting is that the video that was later doctored was made by a blogger who is looking into a copyright infringement suit.

2011-08-27T11:09:00.001-04:00

90 years ago today, the Packers joined the NFL.

That's got to be the biggest news of the day, right?

2011-08-25T21:00:00.002-04:00

Apparently, the city of Washington, DC, is giving residents five sandbags each in anticipation of the approaching storm (by which I don't mean Congress).

I usually support decentralization of control and getting decision-making authority out of government hands, but I think deploying five sandbags per city resident is generally something better done by the city government than by individual residents. In this case, of course, the government that would be deploying the sandbags is that of the City of Washington, so it's probably a toss-up, but I still find this funny.

2011-08-20T00:42:00.002-04:00

A few of my favorite recent findings:

On his recent bus tour, President Obama was faced with a farmer who was concerned about rumors about new USDA regulations.
Obama’s advice was simple: “Contact USDA.”

“Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about,” Obama told the man. “My suspicion is, a lot of times, they’re going to be able to answer your questions and it will turn out that some of your fears are unfounded.”
A reporter from Politico tried to take his advice and didn't get anywhere.

Note also that the USDA is not generally regarded as the most understaffed of federal agencies. John Hinderaker has a joke on this subject from his childhood in South Dakota.

A few years ago, I was on a Greek island and asked my guide what a particular building was. That building, it turned out, housed a government agency devoted to assisting the residents of the island in navigating the various government agencies. I hope we're not yet to the point of needing such a thing, but I'm pretty sure we are.
Charles Krauthammer scolds the president for decrying partisanship while practicing it. That's quite a simplification, actually - a reading of the full Krauthammer is advised.
There has been much talk of Rick Perry's job creation record lately, and whether it's all it's cracked up to be. Megan McArdle explains why the Texas job numbers are robust but Perry can't claim much credit.

Perry is, of course, not the first politician to claim that good job numbers are his doing. Nor is Obama the first to claim that bad job numbers are less his doing than "bad luck". The Obamas of the world have the better case realistically and the weaker case politically, though I suspect some of Obama's policies have somewhat exacerbated his bad luck. In particular, I think some of his policies have encouraged the growth of the federal bureaucracy - not the Department of Agriculture, as far as I've noticed, but since I'm trying to tie everything here together so I can go to bed, I'll go with it.

2011-08-18T12:22:00.003-04:00

S&P has downgraded the investment portfolio of the City of Los Angeles. The City of Los Angeles has subsequently opted not to renew its contract with S&P.

"The market crash that came with the real estate debacle, it happened because folks like S&P rated AAA corporations that were not worth much of anything, corporations that are no longer there today," [interim city treasurer] Ongele said. "The fact that we have the courage to do this, the fact that we are the first city, I think that's a big bragging right."

Eugene Volokh noted a few weeks ago that, in California, the term "white", applied to people, includes Asians and those of Asian ancestry. This excerpt leaves me wondering what the word "courage" means in Los Angeles; that appears to be another word that has a subtly (or possibly completely) different meaning to Ongele than to me.

2011-08-17T22:30:00.002-04:00

President Obama has a new complaint: “Lincoln -- they used to talk about him almost as bad as they talk about me.”

I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming that was a deliberate, sardonic understatement, but I think this is interesting for historical perspective. Partisan acrimony is high, but, no, we're not at the level of the civil war era or even the era immediately before.

2011-08-16T19:21:00.001-04:00

This is a week old, but it could be informative if you thought Michael Moore supported rule of law.

2011-08-09T12:42:00.002-04:00

The authorities in London can't stop the rioting, but at least they can stop volunteers from cleaning up after.

2011-08-03T22:09:00.003-04:00

A handful of links:

Michael Barone has some fair criticism of the Republican presidential candidates on the debt limit issue.
As so often happens when new legislation is passed, lobbyists are licking their chops. I like to see lobbyists fighting over cuts for once rather than fighting for new appropriations, but of course the cuts will be determined politically.
Jonathan Adler notes that lobbyists don't always have the same interests as their clients, though his assertion that "[c]orporate executives prefer clear, simple rules that create a stable and predictable business climate" is certainly not always true.
Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor are both noticing that the Senate leadership is more interested in criticizing the proposals that come from the House than in offering their own.
Apparently, Joe Biden once said something apt and clever, which isn't what I usually expect from him. Also, Republican House Leader Eric Cantor found Biden a more reasonable negotiator than Obama.
Red Sox fans underappreciate JD Drew.
You've been playing Monopoly incorrectly.
From twitter, "U.N. Security Council condemns Syrian government's crackdown on protesters." That'll show 'em.

2011-08-02T11:06:00.003-04:00

It's possible that if I read up a bit on the new budget deal I would figure this out myself, but, while it's been spun as having no tax hikes, it seems to me that it dramatically increases the likelihood that taxes in 2013 will go up to 2000 levels. Can someone paying closer attention than I am comment on that?

2011-08-02T09:53:00.003-04:00

This was going to be a comment on my brother's post, but I decided to promote it.

I was musing the other day that, given the weak economy and supposing a severe and sudden fiscal tightening would further weaken it, the tea party faction of the House is just about ideal. While they solved a commitment problem for Boehner for a while, and while I think with this episode they may have moved the debate so that the public will be more open to small government in the future, the most intransigent opponents of any deal ultimately forced Boehner to get Democrats just to get the final deal through his own house, and likely, in the short term, pushed the thing to the left. Weaker short-term austerity sowing the seeds for more log-term prudence is exactly what a lot of the Mankiws — mainstream neo-Keynesian Republican economists — would champion.

There are also an interesting number of unitary agent approximations in play over the past few weeks. Some of the overseas commentary, and much hypothetical overseas commentary as put forth by mostly left-wing proponents of a quicker deal, portray the US government as a single entity that's not sure it wants to pay its debts. More often, coverage has employed the standard reporting trope of Republican vs. Democrat. Occasionally it has been Republican House vs. Democratic President. It's more accurate, for a lot of purposes, though, to view the House as a "coalition government", with the Tea Party separate from the Republicans and the Democrats, and none of the three with a majority. (cf. my brother's comment about defense cuts, which have passed the House with bi-partisan (non-Republican) support before.) Finally, I don't know where Paul Ryan fits — whether he's considered a Tea Partier or a Republican — but he voted for the bill, and (I can't find the link) criticized the Michele Bachmanns a week or two ago for their refusal to compromise at all. He has been in Congress longer than most of the "Tea Party" folks, so perhaps he counts as a Republican anyway, but he seems to be in between them.

At some level, of course, we group agent together because it works well enough and because it's impossible to analyze every deal as one negotiated among 536 people. There are more important distinctions right now, though, particularly in the House, than is usually the case.

2011-08-02T00:36:00.003-04:00

Megan McArdle has written a lot recently that I'd like to echo. In particular, as she mentions here, and as I alluded to a few days ago, a lot of the tea party crowd seems to overestimate the public appetite for small government.

I think the tea party movement has pushed the nation in the direction of small government - I even suspect the net effect of the tea party in 2010 was good for small government politicians, even though the specific races where I'm most convinced the tea party had an effect were races that they cost the Republicans. It's their fault that Delaware elected a Democrat instead of a moderate Republican to the Senate last year, and it's probably their fault that Harry Reid is still in the Senate (though if you consider the phrase "majority leader Chuck Schumer", you might say they pulled a Homer). On the other hand, they probably unseated Russ Feingold and motivated a lot of Republican volunteerism in campaigns nationwide.

But I don't think the way to build on this success - i.e., a Republican House, with many of those Republicans from (as McArdle puts it) the Neo-Coolidge faction - is to try to parlay that into complete control against a Senate with a Democratic majority and a Democratic president. I think holding up the worst excesses of the Democrats while doing things that make it more likely that people will elect your friends in 2012 is a better option than convincing the public that your sort shouldn't be allowed near the levers of power at all. The fact that the President has, as the deadline neared, become increasingly intransigent himself may help the Republicans' electoral chances next year, and the Senate seemed like it might try to broker a compromise, but I think the House's repeated decision to hold votes on budgets that couldn't pass the Senate looks better than the Senate's repeated decision to say, "no to what you said, and, no, we still haven't passed a budget in over two years, but of course we're not going to offer something constructive; someone might attack it." But I think the big story has still been the Republican base insisting that it be treated as having more popular support than it has, thereby enhancing the regulatory uncertainty that so many Republicans complained about last fall.

McArdle also notes a Phil Klein comment that the Republican party is likely to see battles between its defense wing and its limited-government wing. She points out that the Democrats are likely to have factional difficulties, too, but a thought similar to Klein's occurred to me shortly after I read the outline of the deal: the carrot for the Republicans to support further deficit-reduction this fall is supposed to be a 10% cut in defense spending. But if Boehner called an up-or-down vote for a 10% cut in defense spending in the House, are we sure it would lose? I suspect it would, but I don't think the noes would get to 218 (or 216 or whatever it is right now) with Republicans alone.

2011-08-01T20:11:00.002-04:00

If you want a summary of the budget deal passed by the House tonight (the Republicans went about 3-1 in favor with the Democrats evenly split), Keith Hennessey is worth a read.

2011-07-28T13:09:00.002-04:00

I may be repeating myself here - I know I thought of this analogy a long time ago - but I've heard that a lot of evangelical Christians view the Pentecostal movement as basically on the side of the angels, but with "too much heart and not enough head." That's roughly my take on the Tea Party movement.

The Wall Street Journal offered a similar but more detailed assessment the other day, noting that some conservatives oppose the Boehner plan for being too liberal:

But what none of these critics have is an alternative strategy for achieving anything nearly as fiscally or politically beneficial as Mr. Boehner's plan. The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell into GOP Senate nominees. The reality is that the debt limit will be raised one way or another, and the only issue now is with how much fiscal reform and what political fallout.

If the Boehner plan fails in the House, the advantage shifts to Mr. Reid's Senate plan

which I don't actually think would be terrible.

If there were 62 Republicans in the Senate and a resurrected Calvin Coolidge in the White House, conservatives could reasonably complain about the Boehner plan. That's not the situation we're in. Keith Hennessey makes a good case that the Boehner plan is the most conservative bill that could possibly pass right now. He also makes the case there that if this game of chicken results in a crash, Republicans are more likely to be held responsible than Democrats. Anyone who wants more conservative legislation should support the cause of electing Republicans in 2012. Opposing any possible debt ceiling increase is not the way to do that.

2011-07-26T13:49:00.002-04:00

Roger Parloff asks, “can software practice law?”

He discusses class litigation over whether the web service LegalZoom.com is illegally practicing law in Missouri by helping users prepare legal documents by posing questions and then providing a customized document based on the user’s answers. The class plaintiffs don’t claim any injury other than the price they paid for the service, for which they seek triple recovery under Missouri law for all LegalZoom customers since 2004.

This was inevitable.

If you suppose the point of these laws is to protect consumers, I think this sort of software is better than an actual lawyer. A lawyer, even one who specializes, could eventually come in after a poor night of sleep with distractions from his personal life and forget a step of a process that he's performed thousands of times. I doubt this sort of software has much in the way of concurrency issues or randomization, so if it gets the same inputs as it got a thousand times before, it will produce the same outputs the 1001st time. Unless the law changes out from underneath it, if I know that a lot of other people have used it successfully in my jurisdiction, I can have a fair amount of confidence that it will work for me. That might be less true if my case is really unusual and likely to be untested, but if I'm doing something pretty routine, I'd be happier with the software than with the lawyer - especially if I don't get to know about the lawyer's misdeeds.

If you suppose that a more important reason behind these laws is to protect the legal cartel, then of course the software is a threat. And, regardless of the reason behind the law, anything but the most basic software is presumably in conflict with the law. Whether this software (which is pretty basic) is basic enough is something neither I nor the software is qualified to answer.

2011-07-24T14:53:00.002-04:00

Social scientists and journalists alike, take note: the sexual proclivities of a sample of people who visit an adultery-oriented web site should not be assumed to be representative of the broader population.

2011-07-19T00:52:00.001-04:00

Mankiw quotes Larry Summers:

Never forget, never forget, and I think it’s very important for Democrats especially to remember this, that if Hitler had not come along, Franklin Roosevelt would have left office in 1941 with an unemployment rate in excess of 15 percent and an economic recovery strategy that had basically failed.

I knew there was a reason I hated Hitler.

2011-07-18T12:02:00.002-04:00

U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell scuffled with an armed intruder at his southern Iowa farmhouse late Saturday night before his grandson pointed a gun at the intruder, who then fled, Boswell's staff said.

Boswell's district includes the area where I grew up.

Grant Woodard, Boswell's chief of staff, said the intruder came in the front door of the house near Lamoni about 10:45 p.m. Saturday, demanded money while pointing a gun and attacked Boswell's daughter, Cindy Brown.

Boswell, 77, a U.S. Army veteran, came to the entryway and tried to get the gun away, Woodard said. Meanwhile, Boswell's grandson, Mitchell Brown, 22, grabbed a shotgun from another room. He pointed it at the intruder, who fled into the surrounding fields of their family's farm.

2011-07-18T00:39:00.003-04:00

The fact that I have to look up online the rate for a first-class postage stamp is probably an indicator of the negative demand shock the USPS has faced.

I assume that the fact that I covered 44 cents of postage with a 23-cent stamp and a 21-cent stamp is an indicator of something more specific to my own situation.

2011-07-17T11:16:00.003-04:00

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies.

Over the past 5 years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is ‘‘trillion’’ with a ‘‘T.’’ That is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers. And over the next 5 years, between now and 2011, the President’s budget will increase the debt by almost another $3.5 trillion.

Oh, yeah; this speech [pdf] is five years old. It concludes

Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.

þ Athens and Jerusalem, where it's explained that Senator Obama probably never literally spoke those words on the floor, simply having them added to the record after the fact.

2011-07-12T16:52:00.002-04:00

So when you hear folks saying, well, the President shouldn’t want massive, job-killing tax increases when the economy is this weak -- nobody is looking to raise taxes right now. We're talking about potentially 2013 and the out-years.

Anyone who says the President wants massive, job-killing tax increases before November of 2012 is lying.

2011-07-12T11:48:00.002-04:00

So here's the math: if 23 Republicans vote against a bill to deal with the short-term debt crisis and one (Boehner) abstains, the bill passes; for each additional Republican vote against, or for an additional abstention and each pair of abstentions thereafter, he needs a Democrat. The way I'm watching the talks going, I expect he and the President are going to be relying on some Democrats, but Boehner is certainly going to want as many Republican votes as he can get.

2011-07-12T00:31:00.001-04:00

Assad Loyalists Storm U.S. Embassy In Damascus

That surprised me. I had assumed we didn't have an embassy in Syria.

2011-07-09T18:56:00.002-04:00

Senior Obama adviser David Plouffe is getting widely pilloried on the right today for claiming that people won’t vote in 2012 “based on the unemployment rate.”

That's been making the rounds. He went on to say

“People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate, they’re going to vote based on: ‘How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?’”

He's right, of course, though for 9.2% of those people - not including those who are not in the official "labor force" - that "own situation" can be described as "unemployed".

I don't understand why his statement was controversial, nor why he thinks this is a fantastic distinction to be making. Maybe he thinks the BLS numbers overstate how bad things are. I see more commentary from people who think they understate how bad things are, as the unemployed have generally been unemployed longer than usual. I'm not sure how labor force participation compares to its usual rate when the headline unemployment number is 9.2%.

2011-07-02T01:06:00.003-04:00

The solution to the New York Times crossword puzzle from election day, 1996.

One of the clues was "the lead story in tomorrow's paper"; the puzzle was made to work with either "Clinton Elected" or "Bob Dole Elected".

2011-06-24T17:35:00.002-04:00

Politico reports:

The House delivered a surprising split decision on Libya Friday: Voting against authorizing the use of American forces there and then, an hour later, refusing to limit funding for the mission.

In essence, the House decided that it will neither endorse nor totally reject American intervention in Libya.

From this brief description, this sounds even worse than the administration's decision not to argue for the defensible and even widespread position that the War Powers Act is unconstitutional and even to claim to be in compliance with it while clearly not complying with it. The administration's position is ludicrous, but at least internally consistent.

For the record, I'm not sure whether or not the War Powers Act is constitutional, but I think it should be complied with.

I welcome explanations in the comments that:

The two specific bills the House turned down could both reasonably be opposed. The argument, alluded to in that article, that the spending limitation could be opposed on the grounds that it didn't go far enough does not fit within the parameters of the word "reasonably" unless paired with evidence that a stronger bill could have passed and that this bill would have hurt its chances. Any Congressman making such an argument should also explain where in the drafting process (s)he is (or, if (s)he is not drafting such a bill, whose alternative (s)he is supporting).
The War Powers Act unconstitutionally constrains the President's power as commander-in-chief, and the Constitutional provision that gives Congress the power to declare war means [fill in the blank].
The War Powers Act is constitutional, and the President's inherent power as commander-in-chief to respond to hostilities in a timely manner amount to [fill in the blank].

2011-06-24T17:21:00.000-04:00

Nate Silver points out that Bruce Bartlett notes that

the debt limit is statutory law, which is trumped by the Constitution which has a little known provision that relates to this issue. Section 4 of the 14th Amendment says, “The validity of the public debt of the United States…shall not be questioned.” This could easily justify the sort of extraordinary presidential action to avoid default that I am suggesting.

I find it puzzling that the debt limit isn't part of the budget or an appropriations bill or something. I would think that authorizing spending (which really means mandating spending) without the revenues to pay for it would explicitly or implicitly come with the authorization to borrow, with some discretion presumably available to the executive branch. And I don't see why "the Treasury shall borrow no more than $14 bajillion" should carry more legal weight than "the treasury shall spend X bajillion on Medicare and Y bajillion on defense and Q bajillion on tobacco subsidies and J bajillion on convincing people who already overestimate the risks of smoking not to smoke" (I think most tobacco subsidies have been eliminated, but it used to be a good example).

2011-06-24T17:05:00.000-04:00

The president visited the 10th Mountain Division today and congratulated them on their service. Then he told the soldiers that he had given the Medal of Honor to Jared Monti who came back from Iraq alive.
Jared Monti was actually killed in Iraq in 2006.

I can understand why some of the milbloggers are upset about this. Maybe I should be, too, but any upsetness I feel is overwhelmed by my sense of bewilderment.

How did this happen? Did someone in the speechwriters' room happen to remember a 10th division Medal of Honor but not remember which one it was, and nobody fact-checked it? Or is there a better explanation?

Ace of Spades also has a take.

2011-06-24T00:10:00.002-04:00

(CNN) -- A tsunami warning has been issued for a number of coastal communities in Alaska following a magnitude 7.4 earthquake that struck Thursday near the Aleutian Islands, officials said.
The warning was issued for a 250 kilometer (155 mile) radius from the epicenter, said Paul Huang, of the Alaska Tsunami Warning Center.
"We have told folks in the effected area to get to higher ground," Huang said.

In summary: if you screw up your choice of words every once in a while, it's hardly something to congratulate yourself about, but CNN can't even get "affected" vs. "effected" right, so don't beat yourself up too much.

2011-06-21T10:34:00.003-04:00

If you're not aware of enough insane regulations, take a look at reverse mortgages:

One problem is that lenders are not allowed to set aside payments for property taxes and other such recurring costs, leading to trouble if the borrower cannot pay them. Contributing to the issue is a prohibition on underwriting loans based on borrowers' credit rather than the equity they have in their home.

I could just imagine — well, let's pretend — that one of these might in some circumstance turn out to be a bad idea, but a blanket prohibition? Wells Fargo, asked by the government to foreclose on elderly customers, is exiting the business:

"The last straw in our decision was the recent HUD decision to require servicers to initiate foreclosure on the Senior Reverse Mortgage customers [who] could not pay their taxes and insurance," the email [from "a Wells executive" to "business contacts"] said. "When a product or program creates more reputation risk than value … well … you get the picture."

Article 5(2) of Directive 2004/113 allows the differences between males and females to be used in determining risk factors on insurance contracts.

However the Belgian Constitutional Court asked the ECJ whether that was incompatible with a higher ranking EU law which prohibits discrimination on grounds of gender.

2011-06-15T18:15:00.000-04:00

Taranto notes that

A Romney-Bachmann ticket, or a Romney-Pawlenty one for that matter, would combine candidates from the only state Richard Nixon lost in 1972 and the only state Reagan lost in 1984. What's more, of the seven GOP candidates on stage Monday, all but Rick Santorum come from the home state of at least one Democratic presidential nominee since 1960. The four states in question--Georgia, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Texas--have produced a majority of Democratic nominees (8 of 13) during that time.

2011-06-11T22:58:00.005-04:00

Peggy Noonan leads with:

Of course he should resign—or, better, and as a statement, the House should remove him. I speak as a conservative who wishes to conserve. If I were speaking as a Republican I'd say, "By all means keep him, let him taint all your efforts."

Expulsion seems a bit much. Charlie Rangel did worse, at least by the Republic, the House, and his constituents, and he was merely censured.

I'm less quick to insist on resignation for non-criminal wrongdoing than, I gather, most people are. I thought Chris Lee was too quick to resign, and (not having really followed anything related to any investigation in Delaware) I think Weiner is around the point where he probably would resign if he had class or his wife wanted him to pretend to have class, but where a decision to stay on would not demonstrate a lack of class that would be exceptional in a Congressman, or even in a human being. I don't think it's because I'm less inclined than most people to think that this sort of scandal says something relevant about Weiner's character, as a lot of people who oppose his resignation have said out loud that this is irrelevant, and I do think the scandal is sufficiently significant that people who voted to his last time ought to reconsider next time around. I think I'm more inclined to think that he's been elected to a two-year term and should serve it unless there is some extraordinary circumstance. This particular circumstance is, while not exactly ordinary, insufficiently extraordinary.

After Ed Koch lost his bid for reelection as mayor of New York City, he is supposed to have said something like, "the people have spoken, and now they must be punished." This is closer to the line of thought that leads me to think Weiner should be allowed to keep his seat. Suppose he did resign and a special election were held. Would the people who voted against Weiner last time be satisfied with the results? I doubt many of them would be. The next Congressman from his district would be chosen mostly by those who chose the incumbent. Are those who chose the incumbent embarrassed? Perhaps they are (though I think I saw a poll saying most of his constituents don't think he should resign). They certainly ought to be. If they are, they can live with it for another year and a half. If I thought the personality traits and policy positions that Mr. Weiner displayed for them to vote on were completely unaligned with his recent behavior that I could believe that those voters were very unlikely to make the same mistake again, I might want to give them a do-over. But this isn't a humble, avuncular family man who abruptly shot a hobo on live television. They elected a cocky, combative, alpha-male type who clearly thinks very highly of himself despite his complete lack of practical skills. He has, more or less, played to type, if a bit more sensationally than one might reasonably have expected. His erstwhile supporters, given another go, would no doubt elect John Edwards in a landslide. I'd just as soon have them hide their faces in shame for a while and - though this is probably too optimistic - learn a lesson.

So, maybe I'm backtracking a little bit on the paean to hypocrisy I issued the other day - not in that I'm suggesting that a non-hypocrite crapweasel is any better than a crapweasel with professed standards, just in that I think that the former should be understood to represent his constituents while the latter may have constituents who deserve better. I guess this could warrant more thought, but if I really want a PhD, I'll be spending most of that thought elsewhere.

UPDATE: See also Mark Steyn on some actor's referring to being a member of Congress as "high-functioning", with my earlier aside on a lack of practical skills in mind. Some Congressmen (especially, I would imagine, in swing districts, such as not-New York City) work very hard, but it's not necessarily a job where one would have to, and it's certainly not the top job that should pop into your head when you hear "works hard". Beyond that, consider: how many people do you know who work hard under intense pressure? And how many of them, to your knowledge, have responded to this pressure by transmitting electronic images of their genitalia to perfect strangers?

Were your answers "more than zero" and "zero", respectively? I swear I'm not psychic.

2011-06-11T22:28:00.003-04:00

So the Palin gubernatorial email dump is pretty much a bust, then, eh?

UPDATE: Ah, here's a link, albeit English, to go with it. I'm intrigued by the "unlikely to be a candidate for the White House in 2012" aside - I still assume she's as likely as not to run, and I don't think there are five who are more likely to be nominated.

2011-06-09T23:34:00.003-04:00

Apparently, it is the Obama administration's position that the UK should negotiate with Argentina over the status of the Falklands. Also, that the Spanish name for the islands should be used in English. Had you known that? I had not known that. I feel like I should add a comment, but I'm kind of stunned.

2011-06-09T12:30:00.003-04:00

Also via Instapundit, John Carney asks why conservatives are supporting for-profit colleges. Professor Reynolds suggests that conservatives see the attack on for-profit colleges as "primarily an effort to defend a traditional Democratic constituency," which is probably part of it. I mostly object to singling out for-profit colleges as for-profit colleges. I don't object to tightening the requirements for a school to get federal student loans, or requiring the schools to essentially co-sign some portion of the loans their students take. This would price some poor people out of college, but a lot of them probably don't belong in college, anyway. Because for-profit schools tend to have poorer credit risks as students, they would probably be hit disproportionately by those rule changes, which is also fine. What I object to is restricting loans for for-profit schools while non-profits and state schools get a free pass.

Similarly, I don't know how this ended up, but there was talk of raising taxes on energy companies a couple months ago, and I saw two main proposals. One would have eliminated some controversial general deductions that energy companies make heavy use of. The other would have left those deductions in place but singled out the five largest domestic oil producers and eliminated some deductions just for them. The former idea struck me as attractive while the latter struck me as inane.

Incidentally, can you single out five of something? Is there a word that is to five as "single" is to one?

2011-06-09T12:24:00.002-04:00

Glenn Reynolds likes to make fun of the use of the word "unexpected" when disappointing new economic numbers come in, but I'm not sure it's justified here. Given the noise in the jobless claims data, a change from 426k last period to 427k this period when the consensus forecast was a change from 422k to 419k doesn't really constitute a forecasting error. Claims were flat, just as they were expected to be.

2011-06-07T12:02:00.004-04:00

Being careful not to damn all on the left with the idiocy of a few, I'd like to add a point to a piece by Zombie [possibly not his real name] countering the argument that at least Weiner isn't a hypocrite because, while he did violate his marriage vows, he never involved himself in a moral crusade decrying married men sending nudie pics to young women, even if the young women were all of legal age to the best of the married men's knowledge. Or something like that.

Zombie makes the obvious point that "at least he didn't claim to have moral standards" isn't a great defense:

Consider these two statements from two different potential husbands:
“I know I promised to stop drinking forever, honey, but I fell off the wagon again; please forgive me, and I’ll really really try to stay sober from now on, but no guarantees.”
vs.
“I’m a tertiary alcoholic, a stone-cold drunk; always have been, always will be. You’re not likely to ever see me sober. Take it or leave it.”
If you had to choose, which would you marry?
Obviously, neither is very appealing, but the liberal stance is that the second potential husband is preferable, because at least he’s honest. The conservative stance is: The first potential husband is preferable, because at least he’s trying.

Beyond that, though, consider his influence on the kids (or, for a politician, on the culture). Would you prefer a husband who teaches his sons that spending life drunk sending nudie pictures to young women who are probably of legal age is a great way to live, or one who teaches that such a life, for all its superficial and short-term appeal, is ultimately destructive and that such urges are best suppressed?

I don't quite want to give Weiner kudos for his week of lies and slander (especially the slander), but maybe I really do. He's been a bad man and a worse husband, but at least he tried to keep it a secret, responded to the charge with outrage and denial, and, when he was out of options, gave a press conference that clearly communicated shame. We all exhibit moral failings, though I think most of us stop short of sending crotch shots to women we've never met (or maybe girls or maybe even overweight middle-aged men posing as hot young women - on the Internet, it's hard to know). But for Weiner's failings, at least they came with some hypocrisy in the last week and a lot of ridicule from others. It should at least be clear that we as a society - and even Weiner, himself - disapprove of such behavior.

UPDATE: My wife points out - though she didn't quite frame it this way - that I ought to distinguish between lying to save one's sorry ass and lying to avoid normalizing one's deviant behavior. In short, Weiner wasn't lying to avoid making his behavior acceptable to his constituents, he was lying because he knew that it wasn't. So, yes, most of that kudo really belongs to society.

On the other hand, I've seen a few people say that the lying itself is the reason he should resign. Should all Representatives who lie to their constituents resign? The whole House is up for reelection in a year and a half; I see no reason to put the whole House up for reelection sooner. He didn't lie under oath, as Clinton did, and he pointedly avoided calling in the cops and lying to them. Some noncriminal lies are worse than others, of course, but this one strikes me as less important to the public than the one that just got Kathy Hochul elected (i.e., Jane Corwin wants to eliminate Medicare).

2011-06-07T00:47:00.003-04:00

A federal judge sentenced the former head of a biotech company to six months of home confinement this spring and fined him $20,000. His offense? Issuing a single press release about a drug.

I don't find that appalling in itself, if the press release involved serious fraud, but the fraud in this case consisted of communicating results from a study that could have been an artifact of data mining. Even if the deception was blatant, that comes awfully close to criminalizing differences of opinion.

Speaking of questionable prosecutions, Fred Thompson has some comments on the John Edwards case. Salient facts are in dispute in that case, but ignore that. The likelihood that serious jail time could hinge on the distinction between giving money to a friend to protect his public reputation and giving money to a friend to protect his political viability has to be considered a flaw in the law, doesn't it? The political should often be separated from the personal, but especially for a politician, there's a limit to the extent to which that can actually be done.

Speaking of scumbag politicians (Edwards, not Thompson), my Twitter feed suggests that I missed the greatest press conference in the history of western civilization this afternoon, in no small part because of its opening act. I haven't watched any of the Breitbart video, nor of Weiner's speech taking responsibility so long as that doesn't mean he actually suffers any further consequences.

I do think there's a plausible reason that Chris Lee's improprieties warranted resignation while Weiner's worse ones didn't: they are married to different women. I don't think either has(d) a duty to his constituents to resign, though both developed legitimate campaigning points for any future opponent. But if Lee's wife wanted him to come home, I think it reasonable of her to expect that of him. If Weiner's wife doesn't, that's her call.

UPDATE: Also, Chris Lee may himself have some self-respect, while Weiner probably does not.

2011-06-06T21:46:00.002-04:00

Often, a newer technology (or even a non-technological system) will be better than its predecessors, but the switching costs will be high enough that it isn't worth moving away from the older one. If you work at a large, old company, you may well work on a software system from the 1980s or before, and it probably frustrates you sometimes, but it may not be worth the company's while to get a new system up and running and tested, all of the existing data ported over, and you trained on it. This is even truer if there are network effects -- hydrogen-powered cars might be better than gasoline-powered cars, but until enough people adopt them that it's worth putting up hydrogen filling stations, it's not in any individual person's interest to switch over.

All of that notwithstanding, if you had told me 15 years ago that we'd be testing IPv6 in 2011, I would have been surprised that the costs of using IPv4 hadn't surpassed the costs of switching at least ten years earlier.

2011-06-04T11:27:00.003-04:00

You may have seen this number game before. Form a sequence of positive integers in the following manner:

Start the sequence with an arbitrary integer
If the last number in the sequence is odd, get the next number by multiplying by three and adding one
If the last number in the sequence is even, get the next number by halving

It has been conjectured that, regardless of the starting value, the sequence eventually gets to 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1... Now, a German mathematician claims to have a proof, though it doesn't seem to be public yet.

2011-06-02T10:44:00.002-04:00

There's this story going around that empirical economists have found that marginal tax rates don't have incentive effects, which is odd both in light of common sense and in light of the Romers' research on Keynesian multipliers. Without looking at the details of the new study, I assumed they were either looking at different taxes or, more likely, using a weak test (here's a basic statistical inference lesson: you never really find "no effect" because you can never infer from a sample that a particular population value is exactly zero, or exactly anything else. You may have too little evidence to find an effect - i.e., you may not be able to rule out zero - and if your statistical test has enough power, you can find that the effect, if any, is very small).

But Megan McArdle notes that the source of this new chatter does not really find that rates don't matter, it finds that the US tax code has enough loopholes that statutory tax rate changes don't have large effects on actual tax rates. This interpretation suggests somewhat different public policy implications.

2011-05-24T00:06:00.000-04:00

I've been meaning to comment on Governor Andrew Cuomo, but these two paragraphs by Megan McArdle touch on all the points I wanted to hit, and she has more.

I've been pleasantly surprised by Andrew Cuomo as governor of New York; he's shown himself willing to stand up to his party's special interests, and even taken on the fearsome Local 1199 of the SEIU in an effort to reduce Medicaid spending.

But Andrew Cuomo got his political start in the affordable-housing-industrial complex (he founded a non-profit dedicated to providing transitional housing to homeless families, where I spent an eye-opening 11 months working as a secretary in the mid-1990s). Given that, I suppose it was too much to hope that he'd take New York City's rent control regulations in a more rational direction. Indeed,he wants to strengthen the rent regulations that have led to the deterioration of the city's rental housing stock, driven up rents for market-rate apartments, and helped ensure virtually the only new housing construction consists of luxury apartments.

If I were polled today, I'd still give Cuomo an "approve," and I wouldn't have expected that half a year ago.

2011-05-19T19:50:00.003-04:00

Comedy Central funnyman Stephen Colbert, like most of his friends and allies on the left, thinks that last year's Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC is, literally, ridiculous. To make his case that the ruling invites "unlimited corporate money" to dominate politics, Mr. Colbert decided to set up a political action committee (PAC) of his own. So far, though, the joke's been on him.

He's been learning how complicated campaign finance law is and how hard it is to avoid running afoul of it.

2011-05-17T11:15:00.002-04:00

France's broadcasting watchdog called Tuesday on the country's television channels to be extremely cautious in showing footage of International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs, a practice that contravenes French law.

In the days since New York City police said Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been arrested and charged with sexually assaulting a cleaning woman in his room at the Sofitel Hotel near Times Square, images of the International Monetary Fund chief have flooded airwaves and the pages of newspapers and magazines in France.

The footage has transfixed the nation, not least because French law prohibits cameras inside French courtrooms, as well as any footage of people in handcuffs unless they have been convicted by a court.

As far as restrictions on the press go, I don't think that one is terrible, though I wonder whether any advocates for defendants have been charged under the law for trying to document police abuses. I certainly don't think the US should adopt the law, even if it were constitutional to do so, but I do think the perp walk should be considered unethical.

By the way, am I wrong in my understanding that all we have on the guy is the statement of his accuser and some comments by people who know him that, yes, this sounds like something he would do? That might be enough, assuming the accuser hasn't made a habit of unsubstantiated accusations, but this recent piece indicating that false accusations of rape are more common than is generally assumed seems relevant.

The article notes that, in sexual assault cases with DNA evidence, the DNA evidence excludes the primary suspect 25% of the time; I would think these would be more likely to be cases of mistaken identity than outright lies, because the presence of DNA should discourage dishonesty, because the presence of DNA indicates that at least something happened, and because DNA evidence doesn't have much to say on whether there was coercion (so the 25% wouldn't include any cases in which there was consensual sex which the woman later regretted).

Most of the other numbers in the article are estimates by people who should have some idea what they're talking about. Hard data is, presumably, difficult to obtain.

From what little I know of this case, it doesn't seem like the accuser has any motive for or history of making things up (at least, I haven't read otherwise), and it does appear that DSK has a history of being accused of actions similar to what he's accused of now. So the accusation is enough for me to assume that he's guilty, and it might even be enough to convince a jury past "reasonable doubt". But if it does go to a jury, I hope they get a little bit more evidence to work with.

2011-05-16T00:10:00.003-04:00

I feel the need to apologize to anyone whom I might have encouraged to listen to the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest. I look forward to Eurovision every year for the cheezy Europop itself, for the more admirable aspects of nationalism on display, and, on rare occasion, for actual musical quality that makes it past the national filters. I don't usually agree with the winner, but I usually feel some warmness to it. Usually, but not always.

Profanities can not express the contempt with which I regard this year's winner. I would expect the average teenage band in the average American garage to do somewhat worse, but if I tuned into VH-1 - I'll assume it still exists, since I don't know otherwise - and came across this song, I would assume that they were simply rotating through their top 40 songs and that some innocuous, forgettable band had fluked its way to number 38 for a week and that the band members' children would have to hear about it incessantly from 2017 to 2046. If I truly believed that this were the best that Europe had to offer, I would not buy Swiss bonds at Greek interest rates.

I do want to highlight the Italian runner-up which I had previously missed. It is an intriguing non-abominable jazz tune. It has other characteristics that distinguish it from the winner, but those are some that stand out.

For other rejected alternatives, I recommend Europop from Estonia, a decent Euroballad from Austria, and a tamer-than-usual but still solid Eurorock entry from Turkey (which didn't make the final).

2011-05-15T19:15:00.003-04:00

One of the assumptions made by many people in the ongoing debate about how far to socialize medicine is that health insurance coverage leads to better outcomes. From the Wall Street Journal: Medicaid is Worse Than No Coverage At All.

2011-05-13T17:38:00.002-04:00

The Eurovision song contest final is tomorrow. I'm most interested to see how the French entry does. The English bookies have it as the favorite, but it's unusually operatic. Most countries shied away from rock until a rock entry won a few years ago; if France wins, future Eurovision entries could well be more diverse.

2011-05-08T23:29:00.000-04:00

This is a few days late, and is hardly important, but I wonder how many of these people could explain to me who Kim Kardashian is and why she's famous.

Mind you, I'd just as soon they didn't.

2011-05-08T20:43:00.002-04:00

Bin Laden was killed in a pre-dawn raid Monday in Pakistan by a team of U.S. Navy SEALs. His corpse was carried away by the assault force and later buried in the Arabian Sea.

The U.S. official said that DNA comparisons with samples taken from known relatives prove with near-perfect certainty that the man killed at the Pakistani compound was the al-Qaeda leader. The chance of a false positive from the DNA testing is “approximately one in 11.8 quadrillion,” the intelligence official said.

Gary King wonders about the probability that bin Laden had an identical twin that we didn't know about. I'm wondering what the probability is that the test was performed incorrectly. I would guess it's even lower in this case than in most, but higher than, say, one in a quadrillion.

2011-05-06T13:44:00.001-04:00

The British voted yesterday on whether to use instant runoff voting for future parliaments. So far, half the results are in, with voters 2-1 against. The web site is here.

2011-05-02T22:29:00.004-04:00

It's too early to call it, but it looks like the Conservative Party of Canada will have a majority. It's not too early to say they'll have the most seats and the NDP will be the official opposition. This will be the first time in Canadian history that the Liberal party will not be one of the top two. CBC results are here.

UPDATE: It's late enough to call a majority.

The Liberal Party leader says he's going to stay on as the leader of his party. It's cute that he thinks that.

2011-05-02T00:26:00.003-04:00

Osama Bin Laden's Compound Already Mapped on Google

That via Professor Bainbridge, who notes that the circumstances suggest that the Pakistani government is not fully on our side. I, for one, haven't been this shocked since I learned there was gambling at Rick's.

2011-05-01T23:39:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned earlier, Canada has an election tomorrow (today, by the time you read this). The main story of the campaign, as of last week, has been the surge of the New Democrats - I referred to them as Canada's third national party, but they will probably be the second in the next parliament. Apparently, Canadians have taken a shine to their leader, John Layton (more often called Jack, but "John" will seem more appropriate by the end of the next paragraph).

Last week, though, they hit what will probably be a little bit of a snag in the news that, fifteen years ago, Layton was caught naked in a raid of a massage parlor that had - to put it delicately - diversified its business in a way that was neither legal nor particularly original. Layton was not charged with anything; one could suppose that this was because he was on the Toronto city council, but from what I know, lack of evidence is a completely supportable explanation.

The NDP had a kind of weird press conference on the matter in which Layton stood alongside his wife and fellow MP, Olivia Chow, as she made a statement on the matter and neither took any questions.

My guess is that most of those Canadians considering voting for the NDP will not let this sway them. Like the news, earlier tonight, that Osama bin Laden has been killed, this is probably more important as a justifiable source of entertainment than for its real effect on the world. My reason for relating it is partly for its own entertainment value, but mostly just so you will understand this "tweet" in response to the press conference.

2011-04-29T20:15:00.005-04:00

Megan McArdle looks at why we don't have better birth control pills. Some of the reasons are technical, some are economic, and some are regulatory (and, of course, all are interrelated).

She notes that

[w]hen I was younger, I thought of the pill as something nearly perfect--almost no side effects, almost 100% effective. I think a lot of young women view it the same way.

Arthur C. Clarke once noted that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." I think the biggest difference - especially in medicine - is that magic is simpler. Magic (at least what I've read about) generally does exactly what is expected, which is generally something easily explained. At worst, the spell simply fails. If it has unexpected side effects, they are usually unexpected consequences of the expected consequences (e.g., the monkey's paw).

Medical technology is wonderful, but it isn't magic. If an FDA-approved pill exists that is supposed to alleviate or cure a problem you have, it likely will, but it won't leave you otherwise unchanged as a magic pill would, and most of the unintended consequences will generally be unwelcome (though not necessarily all of them).

As a (mostly) conservative, I assume that if the obvious effects of a major piece of legislation are, on net, roughly neutral, the actual effects will be, in the aggregate, negative. Not all change should be rejected, but unless a proposal has enough to recommend it to offset the risks that major change automatically entails, it's better to leave the old laws in place along with the schemes that people will have devised out to deal with their deficiencies. I operate under a similar rubric as a drug consumer.

2011-04-29T13:04:00.003-04:00

For what it’s worth, not everyone is convinced Trump was born in the USA either: 43% say he definitely was born here, and 20% say he probably was; 7% say he definitely or probably was born in another country. Nearly three in 10 say they don’t know enough to say.

In case you needed evidence that some respondents just like messing with pollsters.

2011-04-28T15:10:00.003-04:00

The NYT editorial board today asserts, with no attempt to provide any evidence, that

It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.

Three years ago, their news section reported

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

The links are from an Althouse blog entry and from that blog entry's comment section, respectively.

It's not clear to me why making a baseless accusation of racism should be considered any less deplorable than actual racism.