Provisionally Titled

A change is gonna come/ Like Sam Cooke sang in '63

2010-02-09T19:59:00.000-05:00

I don't have any content for this title yet.

Did something else happen tonight?

2010-01-28T00:40:00.002-05:00

Historian Howard Zinn, best known for writing A People's History of the United States died on Tuesday. He was a very influential activist for a number of important and worthy causes, and inspired untold others to work for these causes as well. Here's why most people should not read his book.

Link due to: Eric.

Wipeout

2010-01-22T14:48:00.002-05:00

Remember two days ago when I was praising engaging the arguments of others instead of just making snarky comments? I lied.

Yglesias, “My plan, I suppose, is that the Obama administration should threaten corporations with indefinite detention without trial if he doesn’t like their political contributions. That would presumably get the Supreme Court engaged with this civil liberties problem.”

While it's not the main topic Yglesias is talking about in that linked post, I should say something about Citizens United now, I suppose. It's not a big deal. The role money plays in elections and access to political power is a big deal, but I've been convinced of the hydraulic theory of money, which says that like water, it finds its way through. In which case the argument for Citizens United being a disaster rests on drastically overstating the effectiveness of the previous regulatory regime under BCRA.

Down in parade, people running like a masquerade

2010-01-20T00:52:00.003-05:00

Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley and will become the junior Senator from Massachusetts in the next two to three weeks; here's what that means. Jon Chait said a bunch of true things this morning about what Brown's likely victory meant in terms of Obama's popularity and how Democrats in Congress should react. Most importantly he discussed why this does not mean they should give up on health care reform; the short version is that they've already paid whatever unpopularity costs exist, and that not passing it just means they lose the benefits, not get back the costs. Unfortunately, it's not clear that Democrats see things this way, as I'm going to be explaining in just a few sentences. If you care about health care reform, or the future of the Democratic Party (and, while it's not the same thing, the chances for liberal policies to be passed) over the next couple of years, it's a good time to contact your Congressional representative. One unhelpful thing Chait did is title his piece “PANIC!!!” In this situation telling people not to panic, or making jokes about how they're panicking, or pretty much any other use of the actual word panic seems more likely cause panic than alleviate it.

Anyway, after Brown won, Barney Frank and Jim Webb, two people whom I have positive feelings towards, put out statements which strongly imply that health care is dead. Carolyn Maloney also said earlier in the day that a Brown win meant reform was dead.

Which brings me to my final point. I really don't care about, or put much stock in, speeches. But Barack Obama needs to give a major policy address, and he needs to do it as soon as possible. And in that speech he has to take a risk, by publicly recommitting himself, and the Democratic party which he leads, to passing a health care bill as soon as possible. He has to do this because the main thing House Democrats need to understand is that not passing health care legislation will only decrease their chance of holding their seat this coming November, and Obama giving such a speech will actually tie the Democratic party's fortunes more closely to the passage of the health care bill, and should thereby prevent defections from the voting coalition. Josh Marshall makes the same point, but other than drawing a clever analogy between Bush doubling down with the surge in Iraq after the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006 and a potential Obama move now, I don't think there's much to take away from his post.

On sharing

2010-01-19T14:33:00.005-05:00

I just used Google Reader's share feature for these three posts; I don't believe I've ever used it to suggest that other people read an entry before, but plan to start. Those three are all good reads in their own right, and I liked the way that O'Hare brought up a classic of academic literature (which I wasn't familiar with at all) but then didn't just use it as shorthand for the ideas in it, but actually explained them and their relevance. But even more so, I linked them because they reminded me of what blogs used to be like, back before the left- and right- blogging communities had so solidified and people engaged the arguments of ~~the other side~~ people they disagreed with about U.S. politics instead of, or in addition to, making snarky remarks and attributing stupidity/malice/bad faith or some combination of those to their opponents. Which I do too, in real life, and would do if I blogged, but I'm feeling nostalgic. And the debate I'm linking is intra-blog, rather than inter-blog, and not explicitly about a political issue under debate, which is a nice symbol of how things have changed.

One point of disagreement with O'Hare's second post, where he writes:

“White man’s burden” movies like the Indiana Jones series play this message out: the cookie-cutter plot is that a bunch of brown people are having a terrible time and can’t do anything about it until a white guy comes into town and saves them (I haven’t seen it, but have the impression Avatar follows this template).

It's exceedingly strange to use the Indiana Jones series as your example of white man's burden movies, he accurately describes part of the plot of Temple of Doom, but nothing in Raiders or Last Crusade resembles that, and I don't think Crystal Skull does either, though I haven't seen it. I don't know enough to take a side in the debate on culture as a determinant of growth, but I'll be damned if I let a confused film reference by me.

Back on the sort of unifying topic for this post, I suppose Jim Manzi v. Jon Chait and Paul Krugman (with a large supporting cast on each side) on growth rates and wealth in Europe compared to America was reasonably similar to the days I'm nostalgic for, so maybe I'm just complaining it's own sake.

Posted while I try to ignore Scott Brown's impending election and the attending chaos (doom?) it will bring for health care reform in the United States.

A Brave New Post

2009-12-22T13:24:00.004-05:00

Natalie Angier argues in the NY Times that omnivores should not “cede the entire moral penthouse” to vegetarians and vegans. As someone who wrote a humor article proposing creating a “Better than Vegans” movement while in High School (permissible foods for those in the movement were salt and twinkies), let me say that she is very, very confused. For instance, neither the words ‘consciousness’ nor ‘pain’ appear in her article. Instead, she lists various ways that plants respond to stimuli which indicate that they react to threats and try to stay alive. These are interesting, but have literally nothing to do with whether it's wrong to kill them in order to eat them. Standard arguments for vegeterianism note that animals, like humans, can feel pain and struggle to avoid it, and/or that whichever features of humans make it wrong to kill us are features we share with many, many animals, and that it's therefore wrong to kill them. But this means that the article doesn't deal with the reasons anyone has for holding their view, so it's not clear who she thinks she's arguing with.

RSVP

2009-12-08T17:21:00.003-05:00

True or false: I should start blogging again.

Also potentially of interest: Yankees/D-Backs/Tigers trade evaluated.

A quiz on U.S. Presidents by V.P.

C'est la vie, you never can tell what will motivate me to post

2009-06-12T18:47:00.004-04:00

Henry Farrell writes about the surprising success of public in door smoking bans in changing social norms on where and when smoking is permitted, as opposed to generating the massive disobedience to the law which seemed likely to some. I like discussions of social norms, maybe you do too. The comments, particularly comment three on the malleability of smell and six on what else New York City / the Bloomberg* administration have done to reduce smoking besides the ban, are also good.

* Unrelatedly, though not surprisingly if you've read this site, I'm a single issue anti-Bloomberg voter for term limit extension reasons. It'd be almost impossible for Thompson to lose my vote or Bloomberg to gain it.

The Magnifecent Seven Year Itch

2009-05-15T04:44:00.003-04:00

Every summer, a number of different venues in New York show free outdoor movies. For my own convenience, and yours, I've complied a calendar of all of them.

Seriously, American culture is increasingly food-focused

2009-05-11T00:14:00.003-04:00

Read Henley on omnivores, vegans, the different ways in which they sometimes upset each other, and especially the last paragraph about the value of marginal changes in individual food consumption patterns, which is a point I've made before, at least in person, and I think on this blog as well.

Food culture

2009-05-07T03:27:00.003-04:00

More meat related content, because I was surprised by the coincidence of seeing this article soon after posting on the hot-button medium-rare issue. Personally, my trust in the Burger of the Month Club's judgment started waning with the very first anecdote, talking about how important it was that everyone tried the half pound burger, with bacon and cheddar. A half pound is generally too large to maintain proper ratios between the meat patty, bun, and any cheese, vegetable, condiment, additional meat, or other extra touch. Further, while cheddar isn't generally a strong cheese, and I'm a fan of bleu cheese burgers myself, if you're trying to accurately judge the burger then layering bacon and cheddar on top of it is just going to get in the way of discerning the quality of the burger itself.

Also, I hold it against them that they're part of the backlash against Shake Shack's popularity. Yes, the line is obviously annoying, and the fact that the line is one reason people go there (seeing that it's popular and wanting to be part of the popularity) is even more so. But the burger is actually excellent, and I don't know why they'd pretend otherwise. The real mistake is to think it's name is making a stronger claim than it is and go there just for a shake, which is not worth braving the line for.

I'll gladly pay you tomorrow

2009-05-06T02:48:00.002-04:00

My practice is universally to order steaks, hamburgers, and most any other product on which the option is available medium-rare without giving any thought to the particular circumstances the cow which became my meat was raised in (grass-fed, organic, not) which cut or cuts are being used to assemble the burger, or any facts about the manner in which the meat is being cooked (on burgers, largely grill versus griddle, on steaks, other concerns). This has worked pretty well for me, in the sense that my food tastes good, and I've avoided mockery from friends and wait-staff who think it's a waste to order good steak cooked any more than that. And it looks like I've been ordering correctly, but if I want to be a real epicure (and I do!), I need to put a lot more thought into the whys of my order.

Remember when I totally ducked John Fund?

2009-05-01T18:29:00.004-04:00

Over a week after it was timely, but I just read David Silbey's This Day in History for April 21st, relating what current Senator, then Second Lieutenant, Daniel Inouye, was doing on 4/21/45, and wanted to recommend that everyone else do likewise.

Referents in that sentence could probably be a little clearer, I guess.

And, while I'm frequently deliberately obscure with the connection between a post and its title, or even have no connection in mind, here's the reference for this post title, and why I'm thinking about that post while writing this one.

The guarantee, iv. Or, a tonal mis-mash.

2009-04-28T15:24:00.002-04:00

Krugman:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

True, and very serious. I have nothing serious to add, but in the spirit of not publishing posts in which I just quote other people, I'll note that “it's evil” is not one word and that his post is therefore mis-punctuated. It should either not include the “it's” after the colon, or not use a colon there at all.

All About the Hamiltons

2009-04-22T14:27:00.002-04:00

I originally considered writing a post about Judge David Hamilton when the New York Times wrote an editorial praising his nomination as a welcome return to qualified judicial nominees after years of poor Bush nominations. My plan was to write a post saying that I didn't really like the Hamilton nomination because, while the ABA has rated him Well Qualified (.pdf link) for this circuit court position, I was worried they had done that just because they didn't want to make the Obama administration look bad early on, and that his Not Qualified rating (.pdf link) from when he was nominated to the district court was still worrisome. But it turns out that it was just because of a perceived lack of experience, and his time on the district court really does seem like a reasonable fix for that, so I stopped having worries on that count, and lost my reason for writing this post.

But then I read this Michael Tomasky post about how Hamilton is being smeared for having written things he didn't write, favoring worshiping Allah over worshiping Jesus Christ, in an opinion on Indiana state legislative prayer, which I thought was a pretty interesting story, including this update, and worth passing on.

I read the penal code, part ii; Or: Don't jostle me, man

2009-04-18T00:01:00.002-04:00

Four years later.

Section 165.25

Jostling

A person is guilty of jostling when, in a public place, he intentionally and unnecessarily:
1. Places his hand in the proximity of a person's pocket or handbag; or
2. Jostles or crowds another person at a time when a third person's hand is in the proximity of such person's pocket or handbag.
Jostling is a class A misdemeanor.

Elections Matter

2009-04-17T00:09:00.002-04:00

1. Glad you made the right choice, Mr. President.

2. Paragraph 3 of this inauguration day post is hereby incorporated by reference, specifically with regard to the portion of the memos excerpted by Hilzoy.

A Tax Day Present

2009-04-15T01:43:00.004-04:00

I don't know if this visual tone matrix toy is already the most popular web-thingy in the world and I've just fallen behind the times, but I have a feeling it might not be, and there's definitely nothing better I can do with this post than further the cause of recommending it. The matrix really makes me want to take up an instrument.

On a totally separate topic, but because I just heard it happen, if Yankees announcer Michael Kay never describes as “jeterian” again it'll be much too soon.

UPDATE: I don't think I was emphatic enough about how much I like the tone matrix. It's not just some web-thingy (seriously, that's the best description of the category it's in) that I'm doing a blog post about, it's the best web-thingy ever, I just wish there was a better way to avoid the problem of it getting repetitive than clearing the one you've made and making a new one.

Does Spielberg think Lawrence of Arabia is monstrous?

2009-04-14T16:18:00.003-04:00

I'm not sure, but in a featurette on the DVD of it he says that when he saw it, living in Phoenix as a teenager, he “couldn't really comprehend the enormity of the experience.” Yeah, this is just one of those posts where I complain about people using enormity to mean that something is merely (metaphorically) large in size.

The telegraph wires are humming

2009-04-14T00:32:00.002-04:00

I want to link, without any commentary of my own, to two Yglesias posts from last Friday, which I'd missed until now because Yglesias posts too damn much to keep up with. The first is on the under-considered topic of what we should be doing right now to respond to future problems likely to crop associated with the high oil prices of such long ago times as last summer. It's really good.

The second is on how he learned a lot of real world lessons about dealing with piracy by playing some video game I've never heard of from Civilization creator Sid Meier. It's, what're the words I'm looking for, really good.

On the topic of Yglesias writing too much, Jim Henley's April 1 post was awesome, and I agree with every word he says on the topic of Yglesias in it.

Monday grammar blogging

2009-04-13T11:46:00.002-04:00

Prof. Geoff Pullum commemorates the rapidly approaching 50th anniversary of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style by explaining that much of the manuals's advice is bad, Strunk and White didn't understand grammar well enough to write about it (which differs from understanding it well enough to use it, as E.B. White could and did), and the influence of the book has been on the whole harmful. One thing to keep in mind with regard to that last point is to note that Pullum's arguments support both the claims that it has generally been harmful compared to a better grammar manual, and that it would be easy to create a better grammar manual, but not the claim that the book has had a malign influence compared to a complete lack of training in grammar, which might be the most relevant alternative. I previously wrote about The Elements of Style a little bit in this post, and wrote about writing about it in a couple of others from around the same time.

The Cult of the Lizard King

2009-04-09T17:40:00.001-04:00

I'm a fan of: the above video of Knicks forward-center David Lee and an animated reptile. No human being has yet explained to my satisfaction why it exists (David Lee having signed a deal of some sort with The Electric Company is barely even the beginning of an explanation), but what ever the reason for it, it's pretty great.

I'm not a fan of: Obama and his Department of Justice's continued reliance on the state secrets privilege to block law suits investigating Bush administration illegal surveillance, which is essentially a way of both taking political ownership of the surveillance program and promising to make the same illegitimate claim of a privilege to block entire cases on the President's say-so when actions of his administration are the one's being investigated.

Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger

2009-04-07T23:46:00.007-04:00

I'm a fan of: The 55th of the 434 (soon to be 436?) part series Better Know a District, featuring the evil twin of Congressman Dan Maffei from New York's 25th, and Dan Maffei (not his evil twin) miserably failing to shotgun a beer.

I'm not a fan of: talking to Queen Noor (and, even more so, the current Queen of Jordan, Rania) and treating her as an advocate for progressive views; not pressing them at all on the issue of why non-democratic monarchical government, even one with some role for a parliament, is acceptable. I owe this point (the point that I'm bothered by ignoring the monarchy) to Yglesias making it thre e years ago.

Both of these are (obviously) references to tonight's episode of Colbert Report so I'll link to relevant videos (especially for the first part of the post, since without them there's little value to it) when they're posted tomorrow. Update:
Posted as promised.

These are O.R. scrubs.

2009-04-04T00:01:00.002-04:00

I'm a fan of: The Clusterstock post explaining FASB changes to mark-to-market accounting by considering the implications of not marking cows which have been struck by lightening to market.

I'm not a fan of: The op-ed bashing puns as the lowest form of humor or the NYTimes decision to make use of its limited Op-Ed space by publishing one taking any position at all on the value or lack thereof of puns. Also, I saw Harold & Maude for the first time the other night, and there's a visual pun on “right hand man” which cracked me up to no end.

I told you that: I'd be doing a number of posts in this format, I hope they're all right.

More of the same

2009-04-03T01:50:00.002-04:00

I'm a fan of: Google's annual April Fools' Day pranks, especially, but far from limited to, Gmail Paper from 2007 and Gmail Autopilot from this year. And while I'm on the topic of April Fools pranks, it's important to remember the classics.

I'm not a fan of: the most recent Ethicist column. Randy's wrong, there's almost certainly an ethical duty to disclose one's HIV-positive status to one's housemates, because the consequences of them inadvertently finding out that you were HIV-positive and hadn't told them are likely to be severe panic and emotional harm on their part, even though it's actually the case (per Cohen and the epidemiologist he speaks to, and I don't doubt though also didn't do any independent research to confirm) that the risk of infection by shared use of household items is vanishingly low. And the possibility that housemates will find out even though not told can't be dismissed when deciding whether or not to disclose. I'm undecided on the second question, but Cohen is at best batting .500 this week. While great for baseball, that's not so good for answers to self-selected queries.

As is the purple crayon

2009-04-02T01:43:00.003-04:00

I'm a fan of: I laughed my tushy off at this Onion article. On a separate note, if you don't recognize the word “tushy”, do not run a google search for it (Via Feministe via Obsidian Wings).

I'm not a fan of: FoxNews and others smearing Yale Law School Dean (and current Obama nominee) Harold Koh as trying to force Sharia on the United States. As best as I can tell, the report is based on an e-mail from an attendee at a 2007 dinner which reports that Koh said in a speech at the dinner that there are controversies in which the decisions of a U.S. court might be governed by Sharia law. Other dinner attendees and the White House are pushing back against this, but want to point that assuming he said something like what's being reported, it's a perfectly innocent comment, which I'll illustrate by way of a quick and dirty (that is, I'm not going to work through all possible exceptions and complications) example.

Say I go to Brazil on vacation and while there I slip and fall on hotel property. When I return to the United States, I realize I'm more badly injured than I had at first thought, and I sue my Brazillian hotel (which is a multinational corporation or otherwise properly under the jurisidction of a U.S. court, this is one of the complications I said I wouldn't work through). The U.S. court is almost certainly going to apply Brazilian law in determining whether the liability for my slip and fall should properly be assigned to the hotel, whether under a negligence standard or otherwise, and also in determining what kinds and amounts of damages I can get from the hotel if it was responsible.

If those events happened in Iran instead of Brazil, a U.S. court would, under the same circumstances, apply Iranian law. As far as I understand, Iran operates under a Sharia system, so when the court applies Iranian law to my slip and fall case, they'd be applying Sharia. Harold Koh's alleged acknowledgment of this shows that he is a monster.

Thing I hope you're a fan of: posts pairing an item I like with one I dislike, because I have them planned for at least the next few days. I absolutely promise that the items I dislike won't solely consist of the behavior of Republicans, as that would be trite.

Whistling in the dark

2009-04-01T16:56:00.002-04:00

You may have been wondering, why isn't washerdreyer blogging and what will it take to get new posts up on this blog? If you have been thinking that, I worry about you, but that's a separate issue. It turns out the answer to what it'll take, at least for today, is my once again finding my sense of outrage* at the stupid things people in politics write and do. Also, the following paragraph is partially designed to make you wish I'd stop blogging again, which I won't be doing.

I've been trying to come up with a properly ridiculous proper comparison to illustrate just how absurd Calvin Woodward's article, claiming that Obama violated his campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone making under $250,000 because he raised (or agreed with the Congressional decision to raise) the federal excise tax on cigarettes is, but I've totally failed. The best I've got is: Lowering the gift tax exclusion from $10,000 1997 dollars, inflation adjusted and rounded to the nearest thousand (which appears to be $13,000, the current gift tax threshold) to $8,000 inflation adjusted rounded 1997 dollars would be much closer to violating the promise, and yet isn't even close to violating it. That's because the promise was talking about the kind of broad taxes which target families and individuals regardless of their particular purchasing decisions (as Woodward notes, the examples given by Obama were income taxes, payroll taxes, and capital gains taxes), not taxes targeting particular transactions (I was trying to think of an example of a federal registration fee, since Woodward's article makes as much sense as it currently does if written about one of those being raised).

In the broad scheme of things, this is a pretty trivial thing to be outraged about, but I just find it hard to believe that Woodward actually thinks that raising an excise tax is in the category of taxes Obama meant, and if he doesn't believe that he's maliciously misleading his readers from a very powerful venue. Oh, I also think promises are important, breaking them is bad, and false accusations of breaking them are bad, but this applies in a much more minimal form to politicians campaign promises, which is something that someone should be reminded me of if I ever try to get outraged every time a Republican breaks a campaign promise.

*Complicating matters even further, as a general principle I'm against “outrage of the day” blogging, especially when it was all the rage during the primary elections and Presidential campaign and people were doing their best to freak out over every fillip

Unfairly awesome

2009-03-23T15:05:00.003-04:00

This quote is going viral, if I have anything to say about it, which I don't:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

-This quote, from John Rogers, who co-wrote Transformers and co-created the TNT show Leverage, this quote, and his generally excellent blog (best known for the 27% crazification thesis) demonstrates something or other about not judging someone too harshly based on one aspect of their work.

Idiot wind

2009-03-23T01:17:00.002-04:00

Dear Acting Southern District U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin:

I had been under the impression that your office was adequately staffed and not hiring new attorneys. I can see now that I was mistaken about your staffing levels. Please consider this my application.

Dear everyone who doesn't work at the U.S. A's office:

Click on that link, it's hilarious. The office submitted a scammer's e-mail as one example of the harms caused to the victims in the Madoff case.

Like MacArthur to the Philippines, except less crazy

2009-03-19T01:07:00.003-04:00

I shall return, the blog is not defunct.

Seriously

2009-03-12T15:25:00.000-04:00

Linking to this for the main reason one would.

This way madness lies

2009-03-05T18:54:00.006-05:00

Second in a series of recommendations of things which I haven't myself looked at and therefore based entirely on previous work by the people involved, I'd bet the Angel of Death series of webisodes starring Zoe Bell from Deathproof and written by Ed Brubaker who writes, among other things, the excellent comic book series Criminal, is good and worth watching, and I plan on finding out later. If it's not, I'll update. Update: I watched three and a half episodes, and retract the preceding paragraph.

Sorry, I'm just really hard up for things to post about, but wanted some content up anyway. I tried writing a post explaining how to read Bob Somerby in order to extract the valuable stuff without being sucked into his whirlpool of obsessions, but I couldn't explain it properly. He's important to read, at least for me, because he calls out people I usually agree with on errors which I might otherwise miss. See, e.g., his response to one of Josh Marshall's post about Bobby Jindal, here and here (you have to scroll down, the posts are long and cover multiple topics). But on the other hand, he's insane (he's recently become obsessed with Keith Olbermann, who is far from great, but Somerby is at the point where everything Olbermann does is evil).

Blind trust

2009-03-04T02:14:00.004-05:00

I haven't read the Michael Lewis article on the financial crisis in Iceland yet, but following my rule of “read everything Michael Lewis writes,” I recommend it. Which isn't to say everything he writes is good. For instance, I didn't love either part of “The End of the Financial World As We Know It,” and “Michael Lewis tries out living in a huge house” is not worth reading. But some pieces are very good and it's worth reading any given piece on the chance that it's one of the great ones.

Updated (3/4 11:35) to make a link point to the whole of an article, rather than the end.

Friday morning at nine o'clock she is far away

2009-02-27T08:11:00.002-05:00

I know people need topics for blog posts, cable tv shows, and all that other jazz, and that saying the same thing over and over doesn't entertain your “audience” which is purportedly important for having a “good” blog which makes you “money,” but to my mind the card check/ Employee Free Choice Act debate was settled by this post, or more accurately the study linked in it, two and a third years ago, at least until someone shows me actual data (not just anecdata) pointing in the other direction. Pretty much every post about card check should just be a link to it. Any argument against card check has to start by explaining why that study is wrong, otherwise it's just not an argument.

Also, since as a matter of policy I almost never watch any speeches or otherwise take in news via the TV (the Daily Show, while possibly a better source for news than news shows, isn't a news show), I find Bobby Jindal's strange new prominence to be, well, strange. In my mind he's less important now then he was last summer when we thought he was going to be McCain's VP nominee, whatever people want to tell you about his national debut.

RJ + D, the sequel

2009-02-25T12:48:00.003-05:00

Fact: for the past 12 months, the popularity of “donkey” as a google search time has been two hundred and ten times greater than that of “Richard Jenkins.” Google trends is not sensitive enough to low search volumes to show the popularity of “Richard Jenkins + Donkey.”

Richard Jenkins + Donkey

2009-02-24T01:18:00.003-05:00

No, I don't have anything to say on the titular topic, but I am curious how many people are going to google it after Jon Stewart specifically told us not to.

Updated (2/24 3:15 PM) because it turns out the answer to how many people are going to google it was “a lot”:
In other Richard Jenkins plus a donkey news, the best film Richard Jenkins has been in was The Man Who Wasn't There, followed close behind by Hannah and Her Sisters. I don't think donekys appear in either of those films, but I haven't seen them for a while. Jenkins was in three movies in 1994. Two of them starred Nicholas Cage. Three of them sucked. In particular, I'm still mad at teenage me for wasting my time seeing Wolf in theatres.

This article (which I found because it mentions donkeys), pinned to the release of It Could Happen To You, is important evidence in trying to understand the strange and horrifying evolution of Nick Cage's career. But that doesn't involve Jenkins or donkeys, so probably does not belong in this post.

Bravely opposing oath breaking

2009-02-23T11:37:00.005-05:00

It's unjust that the 588,292 people living in Washington, D.C. (2007 estimate) are governed by laws made in a legislature in which they have no voting representation. And it's particularly unjust because when it comes to the District, the Congress on which D.C. has no representation has the power to intervene, and frequently does intervene (as someone who doesn't follow the D.C. home rule debate that closely, the two examples I'm familiar with are school vouchers and gun laws), in what would be matters for purely local law in any other state or municipality. So I favor D.C. having representation. Plus, I'm slightly obsessed with the idea of expanding the House of Representatives, so I should really favor the bill to add two seats to the House and giving D.C. one of them.

Unfortunately, it's constitutionally prohibited. The House of Representatives is made up of “Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States” and the Member chosen shall “be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.” Art. I, Sec. 2, Cl. 1-2. D.C. is not a state, as recognized by Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 17, linked above, and as reinforced by the 23rd Amendment, which gave D.C. its Presidential electors. The Constitutionally proper solution to the D.C. problem is either a constitutional amendment specifically giving them a rep., or, whether by amendment or simple statute, ceding all of D.C. which isn't office buildings back to one of Maryland and Virginia and giving that state another seat in the House, covering a voting district roughly shaped like the land ceded back to that state. That would simultaneously solve the problem of D.C. having no Senators either.

I've heard rumors that there are non-terrible arguments in favor of the constitutionality of such a law, but I don't know what they are what they are and I'm not looking them up right now. The argument the N.Y. Times editorial board gives in favor is terrible: “The better argument, as respected constitutional scholars argue, is that Article I’s ‘District Clause’ gives Congress sweeping authority over the District of Columbia. That authority includes the right to award it Congressional representation.” This is nonsense, a clause granting Congress power over D.C. can't be the source of Congress's power to give D.C. additional power.

Backwaters swirling

2009-02-19T20:12:00.002-05:00

Maybe I'm just being weird, but isn't it strange the there's a special election for the House of Representatives happening in New York state (NY-20, Kristen Gillibrand's former sea) on March 31 and if you got your news entirely from the New York Times you wouldn't know the election is happening (that link is meant to provide evidence for my claim because it shows that the only mention in the Times this year of Jim Tedisco, the Republican running for the seat, was a blog comment. Searching for “Gillibrand” also fails to bring up any mention of the election) in the, the name of, or anything about, either candidate? I understand it's an upstate race and the Times isn't an upstate paper, but it's little more than a month from election day and the candidates for both parties were announced by Feb. 1, surely it merits some coverage.

Here's the nickel summary of what you need to know about Scott Murphy, unless you live in 20th, in which case you should be telling me what I need to know about Murphy: while he'd probably be a better Representative than Tedisco, he won't be that much better, so don't bother caring about this race, and certainly don't donate money for it. While adding one Republican to Congress moves the median vote more to the right than adding a conservative Democrat does, with the current margins in the House that just isn't much of a concern. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't non-endorsing someone based entirely one blog post, so I also looked for pro-Murphy material but didn't find anything which would dissuade me from going with what Bowers says, even on Murphy's own website.

Needless categorization

2009-02-18T14:02:00.003-05:00

Prompted by an off-hand comment I just made that one of these people is among my ten favorite Times writers, I present an unranked list:

Top Ten New York Times Employees
Mark Bittman
Paul Krugman
Manohla Dargis
Jeffrey Gettleman
Sewell Chan
Adam Liptak
David Leonhardt
Dexter Filkins
Eric Lichtblau
Will Shortz

Runners up:
Frank Bruni
John Burns
Charlie Savage
Harvey Araton
Clyde Haberman
Janet Maslin

David Cay Johnston would've made the list, except that he left the Times last year. I wish more of the people I'd picked were women, but other than Manohla I couldn't think of anyone who was a good candidate. Janet Maslin and Gail Collins came closest, and I'm not much of a fan of either of them. I also would have liked to include editors and non-writers other than Will Shortz, maybe a photographer, but it's hard for members of the public to know what editor's contributions are, and I don't pay much attention to the photo credit on Times images, I guess. I'm certainly interested in good people that I may have missed, or reasons that the people I picked aren't as worthy as I thought, so leave'em in comments. Though I should note that exclusion of all the columnists other than Krugman is quite intentional.

President's Day weekend reading

2009-02-14T09:01:00.002-05:00

Almost entirely not about Presidents:

Miles O'Brien explains the likely cause of last night's Buffalo plane crash. This is the kind of specialist knowledge which blogs are great at and television and newspapers are less good at providing, due to structural and audience constraints. By which I mean word/time limits and that it's not clear that enough people want this sort of material that it makes sense to put it on tv or in a newspaper. Then again, it's not clear that enough people want the material that actually is in a newspaper to put it in a newspaper.

Price Fishback argues that neither the Depression nor WWII count as evidence for the effectiveness of stimulus.

In other economic news, DeLong explains how the current crisis discredits Milton Freidman's monetarist response to the possibility of depressions.

Zadie Smith gave a speech. You should read it (or listen to it if you want, though I haven't done that yet). Though I haven't decided yet if it's a really interesting speech about Barack Obama, or a really interesting
speech about how she sees Barack Obama. Via Hendrik Hertzberg, who supports the former interpretation.

Short and Punchy

2009-02-14T08:59:00.000-05:00

Via Old Jews Telling Jokes, of course.

Prude, Lewd collude; views eschewed

2009-02-13T13:23:00.005-05:00

Earlier this week, John Holbo posted about Amartya Sen's paradox of Lewd and Prude (and reminded me of why Crooked Timber was at one time my favorite blog, but that's not the point of this post). To briefly restate it, Lewd likes reading pornographic novels (apparently Lady Chatterley's Lover in the original example) and also likes for other people to read them. He'd especially like Prude to read it, because Prude needs some loosening up. Prude doesn't like like reading pornographic novels, wants no one to read them, and especially doesn't want Lewd to read it because in Lewd's degenerate state god only knows where it would lead. So the two of them come to an agreement and exchange Prude's reading of the novel for Lewd's promise never to read the novel, each getting their most preferred option. This outcome is supposed to optimal for utilitarians (because its maximally preference satisfying) but problematic for liberals because these people are giving up their right to read what they want.

Holbo finds this purported paradox non-paradoxical, as did Brad DeLong when he discussed it years ago. Daniel Davies (commenting as dsquared, as is his wont) claims in both the Holbo and the DeLong threads that it is a paradox (the paradox of the liberal state being unwilling to enforce all contracts), and Leo Katz appears to agree, though the most relevant pages of his book aren't included in the free sample (I'd find out, but the book isn't available for kindle and I'm not tracking down a hard copy of an out of print book. If anyone wants to buy me a copy, I will read it, it looks really good). The Holbo thread, by the way, is hilariously funny, especially once Rich Puchlasky starts actually writing stories about Lewd and Prude.

Anyways, what I wanted to do is discuss the agreement between Lewd and Prude as an actual contract, and consider what would happen in the event of breach. Say that Prude breaches the contract by refusing to read the book. If Lewd sues for this breach, what results? The answer is probably that a court would find it void as against public policy, but that's boring, I want to consider the issue of measure of damages and remedy, because I think it mostly solves the problem (and generally solves a bunch of problems involving contracts which conflict with other liberal values).

Specific performance (a court order telling Prude to read the book)will almost certainly not be awarded as a remedy, because this is a personal services contract and specific performance is not generally awarded for personal services contract. Expectation damages are going to be essentially impossible to measure. In theory, they're the dollar Lewd assigns to his enjoyment of Prude reading the book less the dollar value Lewd assigns to his own reading of the book. But that's going to be subject to serious issues of proof, so another way to go is a cost of cover remedy, where the court awards Lewd whatever it would cost him to pay someone with similar preferences to Prude to read the book, though again the amount that Lewd values his ability to read the book needs to be deducted from this. So I don't think expectation damages are going to work. There are no reliance damages, Lewd didn't any additional costs because of his belief that Prude would read the book. So Lewd is stuck with nominal damages, and we get the question: what's so bad about a court telling Prude to pay Lewd a buck or two for breaching his agreement to give up certain rights, even though that agreement was in conflict with liberal values? If this solution generalizes to other problematic contracts (it kinda does, though not completely), maybe the conflict between utilitarianism and a liberal regime of values is overstated.

I apologize if this post was so boring, over-long, or poorly written that it made your eyes bleed. My next post will be short and punchy, I promise.

judd great

2009-02-13T03:05:00.003-05:00

The text below is mostly my response to an e-mail about Judd Gregg's withdrawal and what it shows about Pres. Obama's management abilities. I thought it might make an informative post, thought it doesn't include anything you don't know if you're a regular reader of either Talking Points Memo or Yglesias.

Poor choice with Gregg in a number of ways. For starters, Gregg voted to abolish the Department of Commerce in 1995 (also, this might still be a good idea, just need to spin off the census bureau, patent and trademark office, and NOAA as either independent agencies or into other departments, Commerce doesn't do anything important besides those). When I first heard about it, I assumed it was because they wanted the Democratic governor of NH to replace him with a Democratic Senator. But then everyone (Barack, Judd, the governor) agreed that wasn't happening. Which is good as a matter of (small-d) democratic theory: if the people of NH voted for a Republican Senator, they should have a Republican Senator. But if Obama and the Dems weren't getting a senator out of it (or even Gregg's vote on anything while he was a Senator), it's not clear what the motivation was, except to make a bipartisan gesture. And then it seemed like Obama hadn't given any thought to the issues regarding the Census which the Black and Hispanic caucuses in the House raised soon after Gregg was announced, and then over-reacted to those.

Also there are rumors the withdrawal isn't about the census or stimulus, but rather pressure from back in N.H.

As some support for the idea that there shouldn't be a cabinet level Secretary of Commerce, I recommend looking through the wikipedia entries for the last five of them. You'll find exactly zero mentions of anything they did while they held the office. That's not to say they didn't do anything, just that they didn't do anything notable enough to get the attention of people who were already going to the trouble of creating a wikipedia page for them.

Loose ends

2009-02-12T17:38:00.003-05:00

For anyone else who has been desperately curious since this morning (I know, it's probably just me) what the legal authority was for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB, and no, I don't know why that's the initialism for it) to stop Six Point Brewery from making any more of their “Hop Obama” beer, I've got the answer: 27 C.F.R. §7.29(6). That regulation provides that the labels on containers of malt beverages, or other branding materials which accompany the malt beverage for sale, cannot make use of the name of a famous person if there is a likelihood of confusion about whether that person has endorsed or is otherwise affiliated with the malt beverage. So that's a load off my back. As a blogger, I believe I'm supposed to express opinions: it's probably good that this regulation exists, I hope it's not enforced capriciously and don't know of any evidence that it is, Hop Obama is not one of my favorite Six Point beers (I like Sweet Action and Brownstone better).

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

2009-02-11T01:43:00.003-05:00

Marc Ambinder talks to an unnamed Obama administration member (or possibly multiple officials, they're unnamed, so it's unclear) about the Obama/Holder DOJ's continued assertion of a broad and dangerous version of the state secret privilege, referenced in the post immediately below (the part about "there oughta be a law"). I'd really like to believe that what the administration is doing in Jeppesen Dataplan is ok, but a large part of the argument made by the administration member Ambinder talks to seems wrong as a matter of law, and so far I can't help but think that what they're doing is just covering up for evil and further harming the people (the plaintiffs) that evil was done to.

Ambinder summarizes what he's going to say in the rest of the post, when in the third paragraph, he says, “Officials decided that it would be imprudent to reverse course so abruptly because they realized they didn't yet have a full picture of the intelligence methods and secrets that underlay the privilege's assertions, because the privilege might correctly protect a state secret, and because the domino effect of retracting it could harm legitimate cases, both civil and criminal, that are already in progress.” Maybe I'm confused, but I'm pretty sure this last part, about the domino effect, is false. How could deciding that the privilege was improperly asserted in one case prejudice the DOJ's ability to decide that it was properly asserted in other cases, or to assert it in the future? One of the main things lawyers do is distinguish the ways in which different cases are relevantly different, it just seems crazy to say that a retraction here has any consequences for other cases. The reason not to retract in Jeppesen Dataplan has to be that privilege is proper in that case, not that it might be proper in other cases.

In which I fail to alternate between long and short posts, or stay on topic, or write a real title

2009-02-10T01:23:00.001-05:00

Chart of the day, nearly unreadable but very informative edition:
One important piece of information which isn't part of the chart (because it doesn't have to do with employment) is: interest rates are at the zero lower bound, and it hasn't helped. And that's the truly scary part.

Video of the day, CNBC sucks edition. Via Josh Marshall.

There oughta be a law restricting the use of this evidentiary privilege, as the fact that Pres. Obama apparently can't resist the urge to grievously abuse it demonstrates. In fact, there ought to be this law. Somewhat relatedly, I should write a post about U.S. v. Progressive one day, it's a really interesting case which hasn't gotten the attention it merits. It's not about the state secrets privilege, but is about the dangers of government appeals to national security in order to control what information is and isn't public.

I wanted to write about this site discussing the issue of the House of Representatives having far too few representatives for all the people it's supposed to represent, but I'm not sure what to say because it's not a very good site, yet it supports a goal I agree with. This should be a lesson to me on political coalition formation: even when you share a goal with someone, it doesn't mean you share all that much else.

These were good posts responding to bad anti-stimulus arguments. Marginal Revolution is, on the other hand, your source for good stimulus-skeptical arguments. I haven't read all of von's six part series arguing against the stimulus, but it also looks to be engaging in real arguments instead of just saying crazy things.

People have been talking about micropayments as a way of saving the newspaper business. There are plenty of reasons this won't work, but Clay Shirky explained the most important ones over eight years ago (which is over a century in internet time).

I strongly recommend this movie. Don't worry about Art Garfunkel acting. It was considered scandalously sexual when released, which is now funny in itself.

Stir it up

2009-02-09T16:55:00.002-05:00

I don't talk about feminism much (the last time I can think of was when I linked in early October to a post defending Sarah Palin from a misogynist attack) , and I should, because feminist issues are important. In particular, it remains somewhat shocking to me when I'm reminded of the different experiences and perceptions men and women have in terms of safety when traveling or walking alone and/or at night, and gender expectations (about sex, division of responsibility within the family, and other things) which presently exist in the U.S. (not just the U.S., of course, but that's where I am and that's the culture I know something about) systematically hurt women more severely and in different ways than they hurt men. Also, the Larry Summers comments about the explanatory role of different gender variances in math and science ability were stupid (read the whole post I'm linking to here, it's better and more interesting than anything I'm going to write. The comments to it are good as well, including the ones which disagree).

Yeah, so with all that throat-clearing about my feminist credentials, obviously I'm about to say something which goes against them.

Complaints that differential pricing of dry cleaning (and haircuts) for men and women are unjust gender discrimination are not well founded and are likely to be wrong. I'm tempted to say something stronger than “not well founded and likely to be wrong” but as a guy addressing an issue where women are bearing additional costs, there's a better than usual chance that I'm not seeing something relevant and am wrong. Here's how I understand this:
1. Some shirts cost dry cleaners more to clean than other shirts (most of what I'm about to say applies to hair by analogy, I'm only going to discuss the dry cleaning case in detail), because of the materials they're made with, being designed to fit different body types (and fit those body types in different ways), and because, as discussed in the N.Y. Times article, the machine most dry cleaners have for pressing shirts is designed with men's shirts in mind.
2. It's not the case that all men's shirts cost more to clean than all women's shirts.
3. It is the case that whether a shirt is a man's or woman's is a good, but imperfect, proxy* for how much it costs** to clean.
4. Dry-cleaning is a low-margin business, owners of dry-cleaning businesses aren't making much money per unit dry cleaned.
5. In a low-margin situation like this, it could easily cost dry-cleaners enough extra to individually assess items based on the attributes which contribute to cost-of-cleaning, rather than the gender of the person the shirt was made for, that it would eat up all of the potential gains to women who have less costly-to-clean shirts.
6. The are about 80*** dry cleaners on every block in New York, if none of them are actually offering the service of pricing based on difficulty of cleaning in order to better compete with the other 79 dry cleaners on the same block, this might be because such a tactic is not competitively viable.
7. Access to dry-cleaning on equal terms is not a sufficiently important part of people's life-chances that some users whose needs impose lesser costs on the dry-cleaning system should subsidize users whose needs impose greater costs on the dry-cleaning system.

On the other hand, gender based pricing differences are illegal in California, and this law seems to be enforced against dry cleaners. If the dry cleaners there have been able to deal with it easily enough, a lot of my objections fall apart. Does anyone know how dry cleaners structure their pricing in California?

Next post will be a link roundup, probably coming later this evening.

*I'm totally unsympathetic to similar argument in other contexts. For instance, the Virginia Military Institute argued that it shouldn't have to admit women in part because being a woman is a good proxy for not having certain physical capabilities that VMI cared about, even though some women did have those capabilities. VMI didn't have a good argument ; what schools you're able to apply to has more of an impact on your overall life-chances than the costs of dry cleaning or haircuts do, and the increased difficulties in administering a rule which actually tested for the capabilities VMI cared about weren't nearly enough to justify the burden the then current rule imposed.

** There's a possible sub-argument about the relationship between cost and price in a market economy, whether in the presence of perfect competition and extremely low informational costs among consumers, or in reality, but I don't think it ends up being relevant here.

***Hyperbole.

Some fine nitpicking

2009-02-08T12:14:00.004-05:00

Yglesias: [B]ut just note that there’s a big difference between rounding 85 cents up to one dollar and rounding $850 billion up to $1 trillion. Nobody would call a candy bar that costs $1 a “$150 billion candy bar.” And yet $1 is, in absolute terms, closer to $150 billion than $850 billion is to $1 trillion.

Just to clarify

2009-02-08T11:32:00.002-05:00

“Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin responded Friday to a European official’s criticism of what appeared to be several contract killings here by saying rights abuses occurred in Western Europe, too, citing the ill treatment of migrant workers.”

Really? José Manuel Barosso says, basically, “Your government should stop murdering its political opponents,” and Putin says, “Yeah, well no one's perfect, you guys aren't treating migrating workers well enough, let's call it a draw.”

Two great tastes that go great together

2009-02-03T19:25:00.003-05:00

Coffee and brownies. One link makes you larger, and one link makes you ~~small~~ laugh.

This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather

2009-02-02T21:33:00.004-05:00

Normally I'd agree with the advice in the title of this post (the name of the linked blog is not safe for work if you want to avoid four letter curse words starting with 'f'), but if Staten Island Chuck is any indication, groundhogs have some good ideas. Whether or not it's right about groundhogs though, that blog is terrific. This post may be my favorite, though this is up there too, and really they all crack me up.

As I pledged allegiance to the wall

2009-02-02T14:17:00.002-05:00

“In 1989, someone raped a 72-year-old woman in Pensacola, Fla. Joe Sullivan was 13 at the time, and he admitted that he and two older friends had burglarized the woman’s home earlier that day. But he denied that he had returned to commit the rape.” Adam Liptak writes about Joe Sullivan, a thirty-three year old who was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole at the age of thirteen that rape, and the current status of the appellate work on the case by Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Institute.

As a former student of Stevenson's, I wish him the best of luck. Micro-level decisions on punishment and sentencing are something I frequently have trouble coming to conclusions about, but the macro issue is clear, or at least clearer: U.S. sentences are generally both too harsh and poorly designed as cost-effective crime reduction measures. The Cert. Petition to the Supreme Court is available if you're interested in more details about Sullivan's case. There is no discussion of the case which I could find from a source in favor of Sullivan's sentence (like the court which sentenced him, the appellate courts upholding the sentence, or the prosecution) which is unfortunate, because I wanted to know what if anything relevant is being left out by the EJI.

“Erik and Shannon Gustafson heeded that call. The couple were living in Chicago, where Mr. Gustafson was a part-time commodities trader, when they heard about Braddock last winter. They settled on a two-bedroom house whose owner warned them that it had black mold and was probably a tear-down. Her price: $4,750. The Gustafsons paid the money and discovered that the mold problem was overstated.” Only related by the fact it's also from a good New York Times article which I read today.

Paul Krugman's blog is a treasure. These posts, on the cases for and against the Buy American provisions in the stimulus bill, were especially worthwhile. As was DeLong's post on the same topic, though note JRoth's criticism in comments. I'm not sure who has the better of the empirical issue between those last two.

Since I've been praising N.Y. Times articles (and an N.Y. Times affiliated blog) throughout this post, I thought I'd throw a little bit of criticism into the mix: For the love of all that's holy, stop publishing Ben Stein. It seems that as long as he is willing to put words to the page, they're willing to print it.

Finally, as a side note, writing post titles before you have an idea for a post, and then finding a post idea which to works with the title is harder than I'd imagined. I think I failed this time, but the two previous posts worked out nicely.

Twitching like a finger on the trigger of a gun

2009-01-30T17:32:00.002-05:00

Stanislav Petrov saved the world on Sept. 25, 1983. To quote one commenter from the post where I learned about him, “Here's the thing about his act; he may or may not have saved the better part of a billion people, but at that time and on that spot his best guess was that he might have that power or the power to slow the slide down the slippery slope, if not stop it. He did, with consequences I'm sure he had some foreknowledge of. That's heroism.”

It’s just imagination they lack

2009-01-29T12:16:00.003-05:00

Dana Milbank is sometimes capable of being funny, but his column mocking Al Gore's recent testimony before the Senate is among the laziest, least funny columns ever written. The column appears to be based on the belief that Gore testifying about global warming, and Senators taking what he says seriously is so absurd that just printing selections from the transcript and replacing Gore's name with “Goracle,” plus one crack about Gore being fat (Milbank says he was sweating despite the room being cool) is enough to make a worthwhile column. But there's not a single funny thing in the column, nothing Gore says, nor any of the things the Senators say to him, are out of the ordinary comments. I was initially worried that I found this column so bad because I'm being over-sensitive to criticism of a politician I like and agree with, and that perhaps I would find an analogous mocking of a politician I don't like and disagree with funny. But I don't think I need to worry that, because I think I can recognize a good joke based on the premise that Gore is a crazed, egotistical prophet of doom.

Generally, I have little patience for media criticism which takes one bad piece of work and turns it into an indictment of an author's entire career, or a publication's entire reason for being, but between this and the doctored quotes in the “Obama is the presumptuous nominee” column (text, video), I was starting to wonder what possible value there is in reading Milbank's column. But, checking his two most recent columns before this one, there's nothing objectionable about them and they provide some interesting details. So maybe he's all right.

Markets in Everything

2009-01-27T15:22:00.003-05:00

Tyler Cowen, and to a lesser extent Alex Tabarrok, have a long-running series of posts at their blog with the above title or variants thereof, about goods and services surprisingly available for purchase. I once e-mailed a suggestion for an entry, though when it was posted it wasn't officially included in the series. Today I found a couple of suitable items:

“Witness the exploding fire of passion igniting the heart of industry as an opulent oligarch clashes with the bricks & fists of Mighty Unions!”
- Literally underground theater tickets. In order to avoid intentionally un-paid (accidental is fine) audience members, they don't announce on which lines or at what time they're performing publicly or in advance.

“‘Just pray and hope that we get it back,’ said Havosha. ‘You're not messing with people anymore, you're messing with God.’”
- Black market torahs. I found the second article when I was wondering what the thief in the first would do with the ill-gotten gains.

House of Style

2009-01-26T11:20:00.003-05:00

I don't usually write about architecture, because I don't know anything about architecture; except that I knows what I likes. And I'm not going to write anything about architecture today either, but I did just read, and wanted to recommend, a post by Eric Rauchway about the impact of regulations in Manhattan on the aesthetics of buildings here. The post serves as a useful reminder of the way rules we don't really think about impact our lives; and in turn we should remember that if we care to, we can take actions to change those rules.

Eric's post included a bunch of links to photos of buildings on this site as examples of the effect he's discussing. I'd never seen it before, but it features a cornucopia of photos of notable New York architecture, which I could probably browse through for hours. Here, for instance, is the building on there nearest to my present home.

As always, readers are invited to comment on this post, especially if they're also named Eric R., recently completed their masters degree in architecture, and are reading from the great state of Indiana.

It's an oblate spheroid, dammit

2009-01-25T09:00:00.003-05:00

Shamelessly stolen from here, it's the cover for this review. Taibbi on Friedman was previously discussed on this blog in this post.

Give me Liberty or . . . Actually, just give me Liberty

2009-01-24T09:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Sec. Interior Salazar visited the Statue of Liberty, the crown of which has not been re-opened since Sept. 11 2001. The National Parks Service claims this is for safety reasons, that the crown does not meet modern safety and fire codes. Two pieces of evidence cut against this explanation:
1. It was closed immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks, it seems extremely unlikely that they realized these problems existed exactly at that time.
2. When I was in 5th grade, I raced up the stairs along with a large number of other children. No one was hurt. While anecdote isn't the singular of data, I haven't seen any data about injuries which indicate that the stairs are dangerous, so anecdotes will have to do.

So, I agree with Rep. Weiner and Sen. Menendez, re-open the entirety of the statue. Besides all the symbolic benefits, I can't believe doing so would be anything but revenue positive, both for the federal and state governments and for private businesses which cater to tourists in that area.

On a somewhat related issue, what's the deal with the massive subsidy to Staten Island residents called “The Staten Island Ferry”? Are there some additional costs imposed upon them which justify this and make it better idea than providing free transport from the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens to Manhattan? I suppose it would be hard to enforce a system in which the subway was free if and only if your boarded in the last stop in one borough and got off in the first stop in another, but surely that can't be the reason. Is it just that Staten Island is too far away from Manhattan to build a bridge or subway from there?

Four Corfe

2009-01-23T20:41:00.004-05:00

Is it helpful if I link to the currently most e-mailed (it's not clear to me whether or not that link will work and continue to link to the list of most e-mailed stories as of this writing, or will link to whatever the list of most e-mailed stories consists of at the time it's clicked on UPDATE: there is no way, or at least no way I can figure, to permalink a particular list of most e-mailed stories. The link no longer goes where I wanted it to.) NYTimes story because it's really funny, or are you guys probably going to read the most e-mailed story whether or not I link it? Let me know.

Wait, that's not when Sgt. Pepper taught the band anything

2009-01-23T17:10:00.007-05:00

Google reader has a setting whereby if people google knows you know (because you've exchanged e-mail with their gmail account) also use google reader and decide to share an item, that item by default comes up in your reader as a shared item. One guy I went to college with who likes to share items likes a bunch of very conservative blogs. I'd considered telling my reader that I don't want to see his shared items, because they're generally complete trash, but decided instead that it's worthwhile using them as a method to keep up on what (some) conservatives are thinking. That's all background for how I ended up reading, and am about to post about, an entry by Mark Impomeni from the community blog RedState. Here's the post:

Six Years Ago Today…
…Daniel Pearl was kidnapped, later to be brutally beheaded by his captors with the video proudly posted on the Internet for the world to see.

The terrorists who committed this act, were they to be captured today under the Obama Administration’s policies, would be brought to the mainland United States for trial in civilian courts, be granted the rights of habeas corpus and the right to remain silent, could not be subjected to any coercive interrogation practices, and would have the right to see all evidence against them, as well as cross examine their accusers.

Rest in peace, Daniel.

I agree, I hope Daniel Pearl is resting in peace and that his widow and family have found some measure of comfort after his death. But really, I just want to note that this guy thinks the situation he describes (accepting his hypothetical as laid out) is self-evidently wrong. He's just one person, but as best as I can tell large swathes of the conservative movement agree with him and are devoted to the idea that people suspected of crimes, or at least foreign Muslims suspected of crimes, should be either imprisoned for life without trial or shot on sight. Why this guy thinks that giving Pres. Obama, whom he certainly doesn't trust, the power to do this is a good idea is totally beyond me. I do trust Pres. Obama, and would turn against him immediately if he tried to claim or exercise such power.

Looking at the comments to the post, it seems like the idea is that enemy combatants in a war wouldn't be treated in the way described (true, especially if they're uniformed, but also if they're not uniformed but captured in a situation such that they're clearly enemy combatants), the people who murdered Daniel Pearl think that they're enemy combatants in a war with the United States (true), and therefore we should treat whomever we suspect of being those people as if they're enemy combatants in a war with the United States, and further treat them as if they're enemy combatants who committed war crimes (bat-sh*t insane¹).

Update: I just read Yglesias fucking² nail the issue I'm talking about in the paragraph above, and thought I'd post it.

Simply put, terrorists are not warriors. The German soldiers my grandfather fought during World War II killed people, but they weren't murderers; they were soldiers. When captured, they became prisoners of war, not criminals. Some on the Nazi side were, of course, criminals -- war criminals -- and were charged as such. But the typical German soldier was a soldier, entitled to return to his home and family unmolested if he survived the war. Men who blow up nightclubs and train stations and demolish office buildings, by contrast, are murderers. We neither should nor will treat them as soldiers. But insofar as that's the case, we're not at "war" with them any more than we're actually "at war" with the guy who used to sell me pot.

Exactly right. Also, I wonder if as Yglesias's place in the media hierarchy improves he'll stop publicly acknowledging past illegal behavior. That last clause is in fact toned down relative to things he's discussed in the past, but still kind of gutsy.

1. This blog has no consistent policy on the use of expletives.

2. See?

Depleted Bullets

2009-01-22T16:44:00.003-05:00

Whoever had the idea to play “Caroline, No” on the radio today immediately following a discussion of Caroline Kennedy's withdrawal of her name from consideration for appointment as senator: thanks, you made me laugh.

I really liked the symbolism about how the new Whitehouse.gov was so much more open to being indexed by search engines than the old one, and was therefore disappointed to find out that there's no there there.

In writing this post I was interested to discover that “there is no there there” is a Gertrude Stein quote and originally referred to her experience of returning to her childhood home of Oakland after decades away from it.

Of course I can't resist commenting on the inauguration oath flub. I didn't notice the mis-placement of “faithfully” while listening, I did notice when Roberts replaced “President of” with “President to.” I liked this post about the slip-up a lot, and another had some interesting material about how one popular style manual for legal writing may have been at fault for Roberts's error.

And finally, a well thought out recent commentary on the “enormity” usage mentioned in the “I can't resist” link above. I continue to hold to the line that given its possible meaning of monstrousness, the word enormity shouldn't be used in any context where it's even remotely possible that it means monstrousness unless the speaker or writer using it intends it to mean monstrousness.

UPDATE: I'm linking to this important story indicating that as of now the Obama Administration is continuing the Bush Administration policy of launching missile attacks against suspected adversaries in Pakistan for the trivial reason of its author's choice to awkwardly write the unsplit infinitive, “to pursue more aggressively” rather than the more natural “to more aggressively pursue.”

I think I'll just repeat what I said election night

2009-01-20T11:00:00.001-05:00

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

It's especially appropriate to say that given whose birthday was on Thursday (or “today” from the perspective of me-while-writing-this) and whose holiday was celebrated yesterday. Also, I wrote that election night post over a week in advance of the election and was happy to see the Pres.-Elect (at that point just by minutes, and now only Pres.-Elect for a few more minutes) alluding to the same idea.

And that's the graceful version of this post, I can't really decide between that and a post saying “Good riddance, you torturing, rat fuck” with perhaps a “From hell's heart, I stab at thee; for hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee” thrown on to class it up . So I'll go with both.

Gripes

2009-01-19T21:01:00.003-05:00

I cannot believe the ridiculous plan to give away three free Charlie Huston (who I'd never heard of before the promotion) books (in various e-book formats, not hard copies) in the hopes that it would cause people to buy other Charlie Huston books for money worked so damn well on me. But they're such quick reads, and it's like they say about Lay's: betcha can't just [read] just one! They've have won that bet.

Knocking on wood

2009-01-19T16:00:00.001-05:00

While I'm writing posts in advance of the events they discuss, I'll go out on a very thin and shaky limb and congratulate the Knicks on a five game winning streak, their longest since the 2003-04 season, when they also had a five game streak. Congratulations not valid if the Knicks lost to any of the Wizards on Friday, the 76ers on Saturday (which they probably did, though they've been pretty solid in back-to-back games), or the Bulls just now.

Illegally Searching for Libertarians in the Middle East

2009-01-17T08:59:00.004-05:00

The last line of “Non-reading list” said I'd talk about some good pieces I read on Wednesday as well. Actually, it said I'd do that in my next post after that one, but as you may know if you've read this blog for a little while, claims about what I'll post next are always false. Now I'll talk about them, instead of just talking about talking about them.

Jeffery Goldberg's op-ed on Gaza, with some interesting reporting on Hamas and analysis. A couple of writers whose views I trust and usually agree with don't like Goldberg (that may be putting it too mildly), and regularly have good reason to disagree with him. So I wondered if I was missing some flaws in his piece. But on Thursday, Yglesias briefly responded, and while the post says he's not impressed by the op-ed, he also doesn't bring up any significant flaws (similarly, Glenn Greenwald would presumably bring up problems if he had them, instead of just mentioning the article. It's not like Greenwald is afraid of writing lengthy pieces). So I'm sticking with my initial assessment, it's good.

DeLong had a post about the intellectual history behind the fact that despite being an economist he doesn't come to libertarian policy views (and not just DeLong, most economists). He's really smart; you should read what he says. There's certainly room to quibble with his line about what a self-interested butcher would do, but since the rest of his argument doesn't depend on that at all there's really no point in doing so.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court gave their opinion in the 4th Amendment case of Herring v. United States. I first heard about the case when the court granted certiorari in February last, and wondered at the time why the principle with which the court decided U.S. v. Leon over twenty years ago wouldn't control. There are some factual differences (and an even more on-point case that I didn't know about), primarily that in Herring there was an error made by the police while Leon involved an error made by a judge in granting a warrant, but they didn't seem to me to be outcome-determinative differences. I'm ambivalent about whether or not Leon is rightly decided, but given that it has been on the books for over twenty years, yesterday's decision didn't bother me. For good posts about Herring, check out Orin Kerr writing about it back in May and Tom Goldstein (who is really worried about it, and makes me think I might be wrong) on Wednesday. Kerr wrote about it on Wednesday too, it's just that his May post is better.

I didn't read it on Wednesday (which was supposedly the unifying theme for this post) because it wasn't posted yet, but I also want to recommend a truly excellent Yglesias post discussing the mistaken cost/benefit analysis behind U.S. strategy in the Middle East over the last quarter century.

This post may not be in the best of taste

2009-01-16T07:00:00.004-05:00

Watch that trailer from 0:38 to 0:58. If you've seen the movie you probably know why I'm posting it, otherwise, have fun. I would not have done it if everyone hadn't survived. And I'm really curious about the salvage situation, to the best of my understanding the plane is largely undamaged.

Also, I'm on a flight scheduled to take off the same minute I've scheduled this post for. Here's hoping karma does not exist; otherwise making a joke about bird strikes may not have been the best idea for today. On the other hand, the odds are in my favor. I may or may not have other pre-written posts scheduled to go up during this trip (I'll be gone until Wednesday), you'll have to wait and find out.

Like Timex, putting them to the torture test

2009-01-16T01:09:00.002-05:00

Lots of bloggers have, correctly, complained about the consensus among essentially all national level politicians and everyone else who has much of a voice in national media that prosecutions or other consequences for the present's administrations crimes, be they torture or surveillance-related, are totally inappropriate and shouldn't be discussed in polite company. But I don't think I realized quite how far this had gone until I took a look at the five people who the Times picked to pose questions for Attorney-General nominee Eric Holder. On first glance, it seems like an almost balanced panel, with Jeff Rosen and Noah Feldman as the liberal, or at least Democratically-affiliated, members, and Eugene Volokh, Jack Goldsmith,¹ and Charles Stimson representing those on the right. But not one of the five is a liberal torture critic.

Feldman has one anti-torture piece I can find, but his embrace of the “harsh techniques” and the implication of his question that believing your acting under color of law should be enough to avoid prosecution, combined with some of his past work, don't leave me feeling charitable towards him. Rosen, while sometimes a jerk, hasn't written anything pro-torture that I know of, may have an anti-torture piece somewhere (but I looked briefly and didn't find one) and wrote an extensive article about Goldsmith's good work at the OLC, where Goldsmith's good work largely consisted of questioning previous legal justifications of torture. But four of the five of them ask a question which either implies opposition to torture prosecution (Feldman and Rosen), or, more frighteningly, suggests that they're worried the Obama administration won't torture enough (Goldsmith, Volokh). The only who doesn't imply either of those is Stimson. Stimson is best known for losing his job over this incident (scroll down five posts, start reading, and then scroll back up through the rest), and the fact that he's even being invited onto the op-ed page is disgusting. Oh yeah, Volokh (he's very smart and I still read him in some contexts, but seriously, that was beyond the pale. And his retraction doesn't retract the worst parts). Not one question for Holder asks what he'll do to make sure torture ceases, let alone asks what he'll do to punish people who broke the law by torturing.

1. As mentioned below, I'm familiar with the good work Goldsmith did at the OLC following the disastrous period in which Bybee was in charge. He's still a conservative Republican.

A DTV Transition Rant! DO NOT PUSH BACK THE TRANSITION DATE!

2009-01-15T17:03:00.004-05:00

This post (UPDATE: and title, I'm not really a fan of all caps) comes from friend-of-the-blog Chris. I totally agree with his overall thrust, though I'd be more diplomatic and not describe the problem as people not “get[ting] off their couches.” For that matter, I'm not sure getting this wrong counts as a huge mistake on the scale of mistakes, but Chris has a better idea of the costs involved here than I do. I've supplied links, and a really tiny bit of editing, and made the name of Chris's employer un-searchable (that's why there are slashes in it) but the rest is Chris's:

I am not happy about it, but I am going to have to agree with Kevin Martin on this one. The Obama camp would be making a huge mistake if they move the DTV transition date back. Rockefeller, Boucher and other supporters of the move on the Hill are correct when they point out that funding is gone and not everyone has received their converter boxes. It is true that the government has botched this transition form the beginning. The transition has already been in the works for ten years and they still were not able to get it right; six more months will not solve any problems.

I will not get into the fundamental issues as to why the DTV campaign has been so inept, but I will say that it could take as long as ten more years of wasted resources before the campaign reaches the level of competency that the Obama camp expects. I do not think it is ok that millions of people will be left without television come Feb 17th, but in a way once it happens, those that have been lazy and have not paid attention to all the ad campaigns will get off their couches and walk into the local Best Buy or Radio Shack, and those that cannot actually afford a converter box will notify local officials and then we will have an exact count of who needs immediate tech attention.

There is another HUGE reason why the transition date should not be pushed back and that reason has to do with the broadcasters. I'm currently working for a broadcasting company so it may seem that my views are skewed, but All/britt/on is a fairly large company that is currently making a lot of money. The costs imposed by an additional X months of simulcasting an analog and a digital signal will not make or break my company. The broadcasters that will be hurt the most are the small guys, the ones broadcasting in Albany, Georgia, or Duluth. The cost of extended simulcasting on these small local broadcasters will impose an extreme financial burden on these small stations struggling to stay afloat.

The Obama camp seems to fundamentally support the idea of localism and diversity within the media market place. That is why I think it is surprising that they are proposing a plan that will inevitably harm hundreds of small local broadcasters and threaten the future of localism and diversity indefinitely.

For those of you that care, I strongly urge you to write your local Congressman and Senator and ask them to stay the course. We need to be wise about where we allocate our money and resources in this economy and extending the DTV Transition is not a wise move.

Non-reading list

2009-01-14T16:32:00.002-05:00

Writing an article about a bunch of GQ editors playing LeBron James in a 5-on-1 basketball game is a pretty promising premise. If you read it, prepare to be disappointed.

Via Josh, Roger Simon's Politico piece comparing the role of race in Burris being seated to the role of gender in Caroline Kennedy not yet being appointed makes no sense at all. I'm not sure it's right on its factual claims about what's happened, and if it were its analysis still wouldn't be supported. The Senate making a decision about whether or not to seat an appointee and Gov. Patterson making a decision about who to appoint just aren't relevantly comparable.

Everyone likes a story about Somali pirates, right? This one even includes some new purportedly justifying facts, outside of the usual ones about illegal foreign use of Somali fisheries. Strange not to mention U.S. support for the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia and the connection between that and the piracy. Oh, and the purportedly justifying facts decidedly don't. The lack of state power to prevent illegal dumping of toxins in Somali waters and the lack of state power to prevent piracy in Somali waters are symptoms of the same problem (lack of state power), but the dumping of toxins doesn't justify the piracy. And how could the in-group egalitarianism of 17th century pirates possibly be relevant? It's unfortunate too, because I kind of like Johann Hari.

Rounding out things I'm complaining about today, the comparison in the first three paragraphs of this Daily Howler post is actually offensive, and the column it's criticizing isn't bad at all. That is, the last four paragraphs of the Dowd column really aren't factual claims which she needs to support.

I actually read a bunch of good things today too, I'll get to them with my next post.

I blame David Remick

2009-01-13T17:10:00.009-05:00

I have correctly orthodox thoughts about The New Yorker; its articles are of consistently high quality. But I cannot believe this sentence slipped through their quality control: “He spends a lot of time listening to speeches—the way most people download Coltrane or Mozart, he’s got Churchill and Martin Luther King on his iPod.” And it's true, Mozart almost beat Flo-Rida feat. T-Pain for most downloaded track last year, and Coltrane ring tones are nearly as popular as the one where Katy Perry talks about kissing girls.

Update: For criticism of the New Yorker that isn't insanely nit-picky, I recommend this (long) piece about their use of template letters-to-the-editor. What this translates to, at least in this case, is that they convince people writing in with criticisms to rewrite their criticisms in significantly weaker forms in exchange for having them published. It's also interesting because by the end neither party is particularly sympathetic.

Aural Thrush*

2009-01-13T15:04:00.003-05:00

On the radio today, Glenn Thrush of the Politico, while discussing Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State confirmation hearings, said that Obama had done Hillary a big favor by taking on all of her positions once he entered the general election campaign (this is a paraphrase). Thrush specifically noted that Obama had dropped his position in favor of meetings with leaders of rouge states in general, and Iran in particular, without preconditions; a position which had separated him from Clinton during the primary campaign (it's a 17:00 minute segment that I can't listen to right now, I'll update the post later with when exactly he said it).

The only problems with this claim are that it is totally false and pretends that the ideas Obama was supporting when he won the election were more conventional than they in fact were. That in turn allows people in Washington who are uncomfortable with challenges to conventional wisdom (I know that's a vague description, sorry) to pretend that the challenges don't exist and aren't widely supported by the American people. Of course, Pres. Obama can undo that damage in this particular case by actually engaging in high-level diplomacy without preconditions, but it's part and parcel of the were way in which large swathes of the people dominating the media conversation responded to the election results by declaring the U.S. to be a center-right nation.

*This is the best pun of all time.

The Guarantee, iii or, Does Jay-Z know what “most” means?

2009-01-12T15:16:00.004-05:00

A close analysis of the lyrics to “Roc Boys,” and possibly the most SWPL thing ever written.

In the first line of “Roc Boys” Jay-Z raps, “First of all, I wanna thank my connect, the most important person with all due respect.” In this lyric, Jay, speaking in the character of a drug dealer, thanks his supplier and, quite reasonably, says the supplier is the most important person. Without him, this character would have no drugs to sell, or, in a slightly less awful alternative, have to either pay more for his drugs or receive drugs of slightly less quality. Either way, his supplier is clearly very important to him, and it's reasonable for Jay to say he's the most important person, though it's nice of him to say “will all due respect” in order to mitigate hurt feelings among anyone else who though they were the most important person.

But, then at the end of the same verse, comes this line, “Yea, thanks to all the hustlers, and most important to you, the customer.” This appears to be saying that the most important person, rather than being on the supply side of the drug trade, is on the demand side.¹ Where the truth lies here is a close question, as any individual customer is fairly easily replaceable while customers as a class are strictly necessary for the business's viability. But that's not why I'm writing, I'm writing because Jay-Z says that both the connect and the customer are the most important. And I started to wonder, can two things both be the most important?

And, after a little bit of thought on importance, I realized the answer is yes (ties in importance are possible) and that “most” just rules out there being any thing more important than the connect, not other things having equal importance. I should never have doubted Jay-Z's logic.

1. It's also possible to read this line as saying the most important person to thank is the customer, whether or not the customer is actually more important than the supplier, but I don't think that interpretation coheres with the track as a whole.

Sometimes I miss Dick Armey

2009-01-12T01:32:00.003-05:00

This weekend, Mo Rocca made however much time I have spent listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me worthwhile with the following line during a discussion of the pornography industry's request for a bailout. During the following discussion Mo suggested that along with the bailout members of Congress star in pornography in order to save the industry money, and then said:

“Dianne ‘She's So’ Feinstein featuring the Minority Whip.”

Just brilliant. I'd provide more context for why he says this, except there isn't any.

Hamburger, you're good!

2009-01-06T17:10:00.001-05:00

One last Burris post, because both Laurence Tribe and Erwin Chemerinsky have now weighed in. Tribe argues that the Senate has the power not to seat Burris, Chemerinsky disagrees. As I understand the Tribe argument, and if I understand it I buy it (though I should admit I haven't read Powell), Powell stands for the proposition that the House and Senate can't consider any qualifications of the candidate outside of the age, citizenship, and residency qualifications specified in the Constitution. In particularly, in making the seating decision, they can't consider whether or not the candidate is personally corrupt, as this takes the ability to choose their own Senator or Representative away from the relevant locality.

But they can consider whether the process by which the candidate was elected (or, analogously, appointed) was corrupt. Tribe gives multiple pre-Powell examples of the Senate making such determinations about process as part of their seating decisions, and believes that Powell doesn't stand for the proposition that there was anything problematic in those.

Relatedly, the first segment of last night's Colbert Report, which was the first after a long vacation, was awesome. It included Alan Colmes joining the show as Stephen's co-host, Stephen confusing Plaxico Burress with Roland Burris, and a great clip-based joke about the taint on Burris's candidacy. I'm keeping score for which of The Daily Show or Colbert Report was better on each night that I watch both this year; so far Colbert is way ahead (n=1).

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Colbert and Colmes - Roland Burris Appointment

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

Hurdy Gurdy Man

2009-01-06T17:04:00.004-05:00

Rather than give all of my thoughts about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I'm going to provide a review of one line of dialogue based upon the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative.

An old woman who is not otherwise an important character says to Benjamin early in the film, “We're meant to lose the people we love. How else would we know how important they are to us?” Benjamin might repeat this line later, I forget. I can however, assure you that the movie is not presenting this as a misguided sentiment. Which is weird, since it's actually a horrific example of treating other people as mere means, rather than ends in themselves. Let me explain why it's so bad.

Say someone you love dies, and another person, trying to comfort you, says, “Don't feel so bad, you're still alive.” That would raise some interesting psychological issues such as guilt for actually feeling that sentiment, but it's extraordinarily unlikely that the person saying that will make you feel better, and they're pretty much being monstrously callous.

But the line from the movie is much worse. It goes further than not mentioning the ways in which being dead is bad for this person who you love, it says that you should ignore those and just think about how their death is good for your own emotional development, ignoring whatever ends they had for their life and just thinking about how their death serves as a means for yours. Seriously, it's disgusting.

The movie had good points too.

P.S.: I kind of like this Peter Suderman review, except that he focuses exclusively on the negatives of the film, and since I did that in this post as well, I'm giving a distorted picture of how I really felt about it.

Sequels

2009-01-05T17:18:00.006-05:00

Joel Garreau, currently of the Washington Post and author of the early-80's book The Nine Nations of North America, which I'd never heard of before today but sounds pretty good, responds to Igor Panarin's U.S. breakup prediction discussed below. Via Justin Fox.

Akhil Reed Amar, author of the indispensable America's Constitution: A Biography, and Josh Chafetz, argue that despite Powell v. McCormack the Senate does have the power to refuse to seat Burris, though they may be required to do their own investigation of the circumstances surrounding his appointment before such refusal. This would mean the issue of their power to expel him, discussed in the post below, does not arise. Brian Kalt and Sandy Levinson disagree, but they also both concede that if the appointment was actually corrupt, that is, that Burris in fact did pay for play, the Senate would have the power to prevent this. Levinson's attempt to then limit this principle is totally unavailing.

My next post will be some thoughts on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and will be up yesterday. “Yesterday,” because Benjamin Button ages backwards. Get it? Probably not, because it's not funny at all. When it's posted, you'll discover that I mostly agree with Stephanie Zacharek except that she doesn't bring up my main criticism.

What's he going to give the Senate not to expel him, his appreciation?

2009-01-05T13:31:00.003-05:00

Adam, a friend of the blog, e-mailed the following to me last Wednesday and suggested that I post it if I like it. I do like it (though I'm not certain I agree with the claim that the Senate has to seat Burris), but I wasn't updating the blog last week. Rather, I had written four posts last Monday and then scheduled some of them to be posted later in the week. Which means this won't be as timely as it was when I got it, but that's life. The rest of this post consists of the e-mail to me, very lightly edited, and with links supplied for referenced materials. No edits to the substance of the argument were made:

It is fairly clear that the Senate is going to have to seat Roland W. Burris as a Senator. This issue was already visited with a fair degree of finality in the case of Powell v. McCormack, 395 U.S. 486 (1969). In Powell, the Court ruled that the legislature's Art. I, Sec. 5, Cl.1 powers to judge the qualifications of its members extends no further than to determine that the Senator is a naturalized citizen of a state and is over the age of 30. The Senate is constitutionally prohibited from setting membership requirements above and beyond those basic criteria.

However, the question then arises of whether the Senate seat Burris, and then immediately move to expel him to avoid the appearance of impropriety in the appointment of an Illinois Senator. The expulsion would be based on clause two of Art. I, Sec. 5 which reads, “Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.”

The answer to this question is manifestly unclear and involves a careful reading of the aforereferenced section with an eye towards comma placement. One interpretation views the sentence as a list of powers the legislature has to regulate and control its members. If one takes the sentence at face value, it enumerates three powers for the legislature in control of its members. Essentially, the Senate can (1) determine the rules of its proceedings, (2) punish its members for disorderly behavior and (3) expel a member with agreement of a supermajority. This view would extend Congressional discretion to expel a member for any reason as long as 2/3 of house members agreed.

There are public policy arguments for the above interpretation. For example, lets say that prominent KKK member David Duke was in fact elected to be a Senator in 1990. His fellow lawmakers could likely see good reason that incendiary racist rants be kept off the floor of the Senator and could move to expel him if his rhetoric became too dangerous and disruptive despite the fact he did nothing technically illegal. On the other hand, of course, it would be allowing the Senate to expel members at will thus essentially abrogating the will of the people.

The other interpretation of the statute is the “serial comma” interpretation. Take just this portion of Article I, Sec. 5, Cl. 2 “disorderly behavior, and, with the. . . .” The “, and,” is troubling. The comma before “and” could allow the sentence to be read such that the expulsion portion of the sentence modifies the punishment for disorderly behavior portion. This would mean that for disorderly behavior, the Senator could expel a member. This would allow the Senate to expel only for cause. This interpretation obviously has the advantage of limiting Senate's discretion to expel duly elected members.

Wikipedia's article on serial commas has a good illustration of the exact problem. Take this phrase: “Betty, a maid and a rabbit.” Is this a list of three items, or is Betty both a maid and a rabbit? The introduction of the comma before the “and” in Article 1, Sec. 5 makes it look like a list rather than the expulsion being a modification of the punishment clause.

I invite anyone with more insight on this to comment.

New Year's Day Murder-blogging

2009-01-01T12:00:00.002-05:00

As the commenters aptly note, this 1930 New York Times article about one of Belle's relatives reads more like a good pulp novel than it does a modern day Times article. Besides stylistic differences, there's a wealth of detail included here which I can't imagine seeing today. I'm interested in the causes behind that change, and would speculate they include the increasing professionalism of journalists and police officers so that the two don't cooperate nearly as tightly, which has both good and bad consequences (though good on net, probably). The causes also likely include different privacy norms, which might well themselves have to do with changes in legal liability.

Happy New Years

2008-12-31T23:55:00.000-05:00

This video serves as a friendly reminder that watching a ball drop on TV is really boring. In a couple of minutes, you won't need that reminder.

We're All Not Americans Now in the near future

2008-12-30T16:02:00.001-05:00

A Russian non-expert is getting a lot of Russian media attention for this map, and the predictions he has made surrounding it.

I counter-predict that Mongolia, which spent a total of $23.1 million on its military during the last year for which wikipedia has records, will take over the Irkustk Oblast, that Japan will invade and occupy Sakhalin in order to send a message to the world that it is once again a military power to be reckoned with, and that a secret descendant of King Gustav III of Sweden will lead a newly reunited Scandinavia in an assault on Arkhangelsk, hoping for a repeat of the Second Battle of Svenskund. I believe this is, to a close approximation, equally likely to occur as Igor Panarin's prediction depicted above.

Great Success

2008-12-29T12:02:00.008-05:00

Or, alternatively, Brushes With Fame!

I was just (one of) the winners on the Brian Lehrer Show “Annual News Quiz,” for which I will apparently receive a charming tote bag. I'll try to post the audio for the show, which should be available at that first link in the next day or so, soon after it's added to their website, but in case I haven't gotten around to it and you're really eager to know how funny my voice sounds on the radio (pretty funny, I'd bet) you can listen for a caller “Matt from Manhattan” in the fourth segment, Local News.

The format of the show featured Brian and his guest host for the segment would ask a question of one of the people who were in a queue on hold on the phone. If that caller got it right, they'd be asked another question, and if and when a caller answered three questions in a row correctly, they won. If the caller got it wrong, the same question would be asked to a different caller on hold, and if three callers in a row got a question wrong, that question would be dropped.

The format ended up helping me a lot, because three people in a row missed a question just before I was chosen, and I would have missed that question too. That question was, “What was the name of the escort service which former governor Eliot Spitzer was exposed as using?” If I had been asked this, I would have said: The Premiere Club, the correct answer was: Emperor's Club V.I.P. (the answers are written in white, highlight them with your mouse to read them).

I was first asked how the [name of escort service which was the answer to the previous question] referred to Governor Spitzer on their books. The answer, famously, is: Client Number 9. Second, I was asked what crimes Spitzer was charged with. I answered:Spitzer was never indicted. Finally, I was asked to name two of the charges/topics that a House of Representatives ethics committee is investigating with regards to Rep. Rangel. The two I brought up were: Use of tax shelters in the Caribbean and improper use of rent control or other rent laws for some apartments. The other two are, apparently: soliciting funds for the Charles Rangel Center at City College on House of Representatives letterhead (I'd never heard about this one) and voting in favor of a tax loophole which he had previously opposed after a meeting with an executive of a company that benefited from the loophole and who pledged a million dollar donation to the Rangel Center.

So just think, if you spend absurd amounts of time reading the news, one day you too could make an ass of yourself in public and win a tote bag.

Update: The Brian Lehrer show site is updated faster than I'd imagined, but I haven't figured out how to directly embed the audio. I'm on for around three minutes, starting at about 4:28 in the fourth segment. The question about the name of Spitzer's escort service starts at 3:01. Also, while I know I talk fast, I was surprised to learn that even I wouldn't understand that I'm saying “I'll take advantage of those” in response to Lehrer's mention of bragging rights at a News Year Eve party if I hadn't already known what I said.

Career Opportunities

2008-12-23T05:30:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been thinking about, and reading about, Caroline Kennedy. And I've come to the conclusion that people, both those supporting and those opposing her potential appointment as the junior Senator for New York state, are confusing what should be two independent questions, and it's leading them astray.

Here's one question: is Caroline Kennedy doing anything wrong, or otherwise worthy of criticism, by trying to persuade David Patterson that he should appoint her to the Senate?
Here's another question: if David Patterson were to appoint Caroline Kennedy to the Senate tomorrow, how should voters feel about it?

And here are two answers: No, she's not. Less favorable towards him than they presently do.

Now I'll play the “resolve an apparent inconsistency” game. Caroline Kennedy has a really excellent idea of how she'd vote on various bills and which bills she'd want to write or sponsor or otherwise make her priorities, plus anything she'd what to do in terms of the Senate's oversight role. She has a slightly less good, but still pretty good, idea of how she'll interact with other members of the Senate and other key players in and outside of government (I mean this purely in the sense that she can introspect and know how she reacts to other people, though she she probably also has experiential knowledge of how she gets along with particular colleagues from her affiliation with her uncle, current Sen. Kennedy, and the Obama campaign). And, just making an assumption for the sake of argument, she might have a somewhat good idea about how other people who could potentially be appointed by Patterson would do at all these things, and reasonably think she'd do the best job of them. In which case, it's fine for her to try to get the job.

On the second question, I think I've coyly hinted at why my answer was what it was with all my talk above about things Caroline Kennedy knows. The problem is that while she has epistemological access to all that information, voters n general certainly don't, and Gov. Patterson doesn't really either. One good way for people to get a lot of that information about a candidate for office is to watch how they fulfill the duties of another office, but that's not always available, in which case you can learn a lot of it by watching them campaign. So the reason I'm at present bothered by the idea of appointing Kennedy as opposed to someone who has campaigned for and won an office isn't because there's anything so great, ennobling, or wisdom-providing about campaigning for and holding an office. It's because unless she at least campaigns for the office, I can't figure out if she'll be any good at holding office. Answering written questions from the NY Times and two other papers is a good start to this, but it's just a start. She needs to, at minimum give interviews and engage in live question and answer sessions.

One might reasonably respond to all that by asking why she should campaign to the voters, when the choice is Patterson's and Patterson's alone. And in answer to that, the only answer is that Patterson should require her to do so, and he should require her (and anyone else he's seriously considering) to do so because otherwise the Governor is going to piss off more voters than he has to and increase the chances that he'll be blamed for any missteps by whomever it is he appoints.

Right Light, Green Light!

2008-12-23T03:35:00.004-05:00

This article on the evolution of Tom Cruise, primarily focused on Risky Business, is good and you should read it. I actually think Mission: Impossible 3 should pose a significant obstacle to the part of his argument about Cruise's decline, because the movie is awesome, but it wasn't considered a box office success. Come to think of it, it's not clear to me that the quality of the movies Cruise has made has anything to do with the argument in the linked article, but I still like it. Finally, the purported problem with Valkyrie has been an issue at least since Vanilla Sky, if not earlier.

Update: The title of this post was intended to be “Red Light, Green Light” in honor of a nonsensical piece of dialog from Mission: Impossible. But I didn't notice the mistake until now, and it's been up too long for me to change it without feeling like I'm covering something up. But I have no idea what the current title could mean, in case anyone else is wondering about it.

New toy II

2008-12-17T20:42:00.003-05:00

Click here to compare how many of the IMDB Top 250 Films (as of some date or another, it's not the same as e.g. today's list) you've seen with my results. I wholeheartedly anti-endorse this list, it's far from a good guide to the top 250 films of all time; both in terms of its inclusions and exclusions and, even more so, in it's rank-ordering of the included movies. Nevertheless, interesting to look at.

When I wasn't sure if I'd seen all of something I didn't check it off. In particular, four which I've seen parts of but don't think I've seen the entirety of were: Frankenstein (1935), Planet of the Apes (1968), Gandhi (1982), and Platoon (1986).

Last point: if someone told you that one of the titles listed isn't really a movie, and was just thrown on there as a gag (not that that's the case), which would you pick? My answer to that question, and my percentage seen, which you can otherwise only find out by submitting your own results, are in comments.

I did a somewhat similar post about a very different Top 1000 films list a couple of months ago, in case you think you're experiencing deja vu.

Annals of good predictions

2008-12-17T15:48:00.003-05:00

“Lawyers for John Walker Lindh (the 'American Taliban'), who has now spent seven years in prison, are asking President Bush to commute his sentence. Not expecting a lot of agreements. . . . But I think it's the right thing to do.”

I disagree.

In particular, let me note that unless the reason Josh thinks President Bush should commute his sentence has something to do with the relationship between President Bush and John Walker Lindh, rather than purely having to do with the merits of Lindh's claim, it follows that President-Elect Obama should commute Lindh's sentence. This is wrong as well, Lindh, to the best of my knowledge, really did commit serious crimes and then pled guilty to some of them. The elements of his case that potentially merits mercy relate to allegations of mistreatment while in pre-trial custody, I don't think that makes up for his actions.

Progress II

2008-12-17T02:02:00.005-05:00

What Louis CK says in this video is right in a lot of ways. I, of course, want to talk about the ways in which he's wrong. But I don't have those thoughts quite worked out yet, so in the meantime you can watch the video and if you're interested in more about it, read the post and comments (all of which agree with the videos sentiment) here, I'll update this post when I'm good and ready. You should not, of course, read the comments at YouTube under any circumstances.

Update: I'm still not sure what I want to say. It's true that technology has made many, many aspects of our lives more convenient and allowed us to do things that previous generations couldn't have. In particular, he's right that communications and transportation technologies have massively improved, and he's not even mentioning the fundamental (though longer term) changes that have occurred as smaller and smaller percentages of human labor have had to be devoted to food production and acquisition, and the more recent change in which large amounts of knowledge have become instantly accessible via the internet.

The first thing to note about this is that it has made impractical valuable forms of social interaction which made many people happy but also depended on their being largely rooted in one physical location without the easy ability to exit. These social organizations also had costs (there's a reason exit is desired), but that's no reason to dismiss their value. The social arrangements I have in mind right now in particular are those described by the Pres. Elect Obama about Kenya before it was a British colony in Dreams From My Father, but those are just fresh in my mind, similar arrangements existed everywhere at different times.

Another thing to mention is that human expectations are very adaptable, we get used to things both good and bad. So once instant communication becomes possible, expectations change so that others will expect you to communicate with them instantly, whether you want to, and pointing out that people used to use rotary phones isn't going to be very persuasive to them, and for good reasons.

Finally, flying being awesome isn't a reason for airlines to make offers to people and the fail to fulfill them.

Progress

2008-12-17T01:54:00.002-05:00

I'll have a bunch of posts with real content over the next couple days, but as a temporary measure, this is really neat. Say you've digitally recorded your local NBA team's (sorry Seattleites) most recent game, but don't want to watch it if your team gets blown out. One way to avoid this would be to check the score, but that'll ruin the game for you whether or not it was a blowout. That link provides the solution to finding out if it's a blowout without risking finding out the result of a non-blowout game; I'm impressed with the ingenuity (link via TrueHoop).

What's a windstar, anyway?

2008-12-09T17:45:00.004-05:00

As I said about my link to the three act play below, not the whole story, but worth mentioning (image from here). In fact, I've mostly bought into the argument that this is an extraordinarily bad time to have all the increased unemployment which would come from a GM bankruptcy. On the other hand, once the choice is made to support GM just to get through one extraordinarily bad period, I worry that there will be a ratchet effect and we won't ever be able to go back the other way. I can't remember who I saw make this point, but one thing to keep in mind is that what's good in terms of keeping the economy from falling further off a cliff in the short term (keeping unemployment under control) isn't the same as what's good in terms of increasing the viability of GM and the rest of the Big 3 in the long term (restructuring and getting smaller, including large lay-offs). This means that if you support a bail out package because you hope it'll control the damage to the rest of the economy, you have to consider whether the bailout package under discussion, or one which could potentially pass, is anything like the one you support in principle.

Critical

2008-12-09T16:37:00.002-05:00

Via an Eater post on a different topic, I learn that only five New York City restaurants have received ★★★★ from the NY Times. The link doesn't make clear what period of time that's true for, but presumably there are restaurants which at some point in the past received a four star review and are nevertheless not included in the list, either because they stopped existing or because they were reviewed too long ago. Though I suppose I don't know when the Times began using a star rating system, if it's a fairly recent (no more than ten years old) innovation that might truly be all of them. Also interesting (at least to me), all five of those restaurants are localized in one fairly small part of Manhattan, as you can see. If it weren't for Daniel being on the east side, it'd be a much smaller part of Manhattan, but still pretty small.

On a far less appetizing note, the word of the day, because I hadn't heard it before except in its totally unrelated type-setting meaning, is “pica.”

Non-Washington Bullets

2008-12-04T16:12:00.000-05:00

The above image (and a larger version which you can zoom in on and thereby read) tells a story about the collapse of Iceland's economy, with a few other Iceland facts thrown in as well. From my passing familiarity with the topic, it seems pretty accurate to me, though it's odd to leave out the possibility of market manipulation, unless subsequent reporting has debunked those suspicions. However, I'm not linking to it because of the information, but rather because it's an amazing example of how not to use graphics. If you read it, you'll find that the information contained therein (except for a joke in #10) suggests absolutely nothing about a cycle. It's just an ordered list in which two follows one, three two, and so on. Presenting it as a cycle (e.g. the nitrogen cycle) is fundamentally misleading and people will either consciously or subconsciously come away with a badly mistaken impression of the facts it relates.

A brief, witty take on the Big 3's plight. Not the whole story, but a useful corrective to an over-abundance of UAW bashing.

Glenn Greenwald worries whether Obama and Democrats in Congress are serious about passing laws commanding the CIA not to torture people. I'm cautiously optimistic, though Greenwald is correct to note retreat by Feinstein and Wyden from their previous statements. Relatedly, I'd like to read this book.

It seems to me that either the Israeli or British press publishes a story about Israeli strikes on Iran being imminent every three months or so. Which isn't to say such stories are meaningless, see Blake Hounshell's take on the most recent story. I actually wrote the previous two sentences before reading the most recent story myself, which it turns out isn't particularly alarmist and is more about the fact that Israel is making plans for how it would execute an attack without U.S. cooperation, something it should certainly have plans for and then never do. In the same sense, I hope the U.S. military keeps War Plan Red up to date.

Finally, the 1993 William Langewiesche Atlantic Monthly article “The Turn” on the development of the ability to fly an airplane without a visible horizon (in clouds, in darkness, and when coming out of a cloud already in a banked turn), and the obstacles in the way of doing so, is absolutely fascinating and everyone should read it. Comparatively, everything above is crap. This should probably not be the last bullet, since you probably will have stopped reading before it. In case you haven't, and are turned off by the fact that the article isn't properly formatted for readability (if you haven't clicked, it's a far too narrow column of text for an article that long), here's the same article reformatted as a google document.

If it's free, it must be good

2008-12-03T20:39:00.002-05:00

I like Roger Ebert's essay on the declining demand for film critics and the various depredations of celebrity culture. But there's something very wrong with an essay which is in large part trying to address the fact that fewer newspapers choose to employ film critics and doesn't even mention competition from high quality free reviews available on internet, and for that the review aggregators metacritic and rotten tomatoes (or the largely forogtten mrqe). It used to be the case that someone looking for film criticism could read it if it was in their local paper, and otherwise couldn't. The facts have now changed completely, and moved in a very different direction.

Investment advice

2008-12-03T14:00:00.005-05:00

What I'm sure is a verbatim transcript of Donnie Walsh's meeting with Stephon Marbury yesterday, complete with illustrations. As a completely shallow fan, I'm really enjoying the Knicks' “Defense? What's that?” style of play, especially when they're matched up against another team which has never heard of the concept. Or, more accurately, it's a style which seems to fit their current roster's abilities well and is, at least for now, a nice change of pace.

Finally, if I had easy access to a sportsbook right now, I would absolutely put money on the Knicks to come within 15 points of the Cavaliers tonight. I don't see how there's a 50% chance of the spread being that wide, even with the Cavaliers at home. And take the over, because the Knicks don't play defense.

Update: The Cavaliers 61-35 halftime lead suggests that I'd lose both bets and that it's a good thing I don't have easy access to a sportsbook. But I will note that teams with huge halftime leads usually will rest their best players and otherwise let up somewhat in the second half, allowing the team behind to reduce the margin by which they're behind. Don't know if that will happen here, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Udpate the 2nd: And this, children, is an object lesson in why you shouldn't (or at least I shouldn't) gamble on sports. Thank God bodog puts so many obstacles in the way of my setting up an account. Also, I still think the odds of what actually happened happening are less than 50%, but that's inherently unverifiable. Final point: if you wanted to know what actually happened in last night's game with any detail, neither the NY Times, the NY Post, nor the NY Daily News would give you a particularly good idea, but Marc Berman at the Post does the best job.

Also, they were tired of being thrown in jail

2008-11-26T15:11:00.003-05:00

In England, a long time ago, there were people called Pilgrims who were very strict about making everyone observe the Sabbath and cooked food without any flavor and that sort of thing, and they decided to go to America, where they could enjoy Freedom to Nag.

Calvin Trillin, writing as part of his campaign to have the main dish for Thanksgiving changed from turkey to spaghetti carbonara. Read the whole thing. Yglesias is also on an anti-Turkey kick today, but personally I'm in favor. You just have to spend a lot of time making sure it doesn't dry out while cooking it.

Also, to whomever I lent my copy of Alice, Let's Eat, I'd like it back. I regretted not having it when I was at a party/fundraiser Trillin attended, I could've got it signed.

Wear layers

2008-11-25T17:04:00.004-05:00

On Saturday, I walked this route (if you click on the link using Microsoft Explorer, there is a very good chance that the page won't finish loading and you won't be able to see the map. Stop using Explorer). It was very fun and very, very cold. I'd hoped to steal that map and embed it in this page, but either I can't figure out which parts of source from that page I need to copy, or blogger's platform just doesn't allow it, or both. If anyone reads this and wants to advise me (either on the html issue or what mental problems lead one to go on walks like that), I'll appreciate it.

That was some week, huh?

2008-11-24T17:42:00.013-05:00

11/18

Finally, some details on the logistics of attending inauguration, including, as I've been telling everyone I speak to about it, that you don't need tickets to attend (just to attend in the most choice seats).

Joe Lieberman voted to de-fund troops in the battlefield, accused (now, but not then) President-Elect Barack Obama of the same, was rewarded for it.

Everyone, please take off your Obama/Biden buttons and other paraphernalia. Walking around wearing the President's name, outside of a campaign, suggests a fundamental confusion about the proper relationship between the American electorate and the American President.

How was Bob Dylan's reaction to Obama's victory not picked up as a news story? The reaction was very restrained, but, as that first link also mentions, Dylan is purposefully enigmatic and almost never reacts publicly to anything these days, so the very fact of reaction is important. I was in a really wonderful mood on Nov. 5, nevertheless I had two very different Dylan songs in mind that night, both for the out-going administration. Perhaps Dylan is closer to tranquility than I.

George Packer really does a number on Bill Kristol. Fully deserved, but cruel. Then again, I still have some animus towards Packer (see the sixth comment, it's a true story).

This post recommending a course of action for dealing with pirates off Somalia sounds like something Jack Aubrey would approve of, which recommends it to me. However, I do worry that it includes no perspective as to how the U.S. Navy and others are currently dealing with this issue, treating it as a blank slate for Pres. Obama to be acting on. Also, for a site about international law, it's strange for the post to mostly be about military tactics and strategy, with international law (for example) as a side issue to be discussed later.

11/19

If one wanted to be snarky, they could dismiss this David Leonhardt column as just pointing out that infrastructure spending needs to be done wisely. But in fact, it contains some good, specific advice and the comparative aspect, noting that other countries do manage to handle infrastructure spending with more wisdom is important, though it leaves unanswered the difficult question of how we get from where we are to where they are.

This site from Minnesota Public Radio is mostly interesting for seeing the various ways in which voters messed up their ballots in the Coleman v. Franken contest and the absurd claims the campaigns are willing to make in order to interpret a ballot to their liking (e.g., the voter was underlining the name, not crossing it out). Also, Lizard People!

These two Yglesias posts on how so far the noises coming out of the Obama transition team all point towards really positive steps for the liberal agenda are good and worth reading. I remain somewhat worried about executive power, domestic surveillance, and war on terror detention/legal policy issues, but I'm hopeful for positive developments there too.

11/20

The New York Times wisely notes that the electoral college is an absurd anachronism which needs eliminating, and even mentions the National Popular Vote movement. Here's my usual reminder to find out the status of the bill in your state legislature and then contact them about moving on it. Contact info for New York state assembly members and senators available at that link.

I'm thrilled that we're going to stop keeping at least five innocent Algerians imprisoned after seven years. Are we going to return them to Bosnia, where they were captured? To Algeria? Release them in the United States? Pay compensation? For all I know, there's already a framework for dealing with these questions, but I'm not aware of any.

Waxman over Dingell. It's kind of a big deal.

“It's no one's fault, per se. It's written into our constitutional structure.” Josh Marshall, in reference to the lag time between electoral victory and inauguration. Sandy Levinson, who both generally hates people treating constitutional deficiencies as just facts of life, rather than problems to be solved, and specifically hates the provisions causing that lag (e.g.), will not be pleased.

11/23

Yglesias correctly notes most of the foreign policy differences which came up between Senator Clinton and Senator and now President-Elect Obama during the primary season, and wonders what her appointment as Secretary of State, when it happens, will mean for the direction of U.S. policy in these areas.

11/24

I haven't been following the Guantanamo detainee litigation as closely as I used to, so I can't provide an analysis of the legal arguments in play in this case right now. But I'm pretty sure that in response to two of the three judges on the panel indicating in oral argument that they're amenable to the government's arguments against the release of the Uighur detainees (not the Algerian detainees mentioned above), Pres.-Elect Obama should announce his intention to release those particular detainees (who, to the best of my knowledge, there is no reason to believe pose a risk to the United States) as soon as he is inaugurated. Such an order is both required by justice, and, more practically, would quite possibly (depending on timing of the order) make the appeal moot and thereby remove the possibility of a bad precedent on the powers of federal judges to order release.

“Pop quiz, hot shot”

2008-11-24T12:25:00.006-05:00

“So, I have a confession and a suggestion. The confession: I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: ‘You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.’

Is Thomas Friedman confessing:

A) That he is very rich, but young people aren't;
B) That he is stupid, and assumes that the young people he sees eating out eat out regularly;
C) That he is confused and thinks net reduced consumption is a good way to respond to a recession;
OR
D) All of the above
?¹

The above wasn't about politics, and therefore this post doesn't violate last Monday's “no politics” announcement:
A) True;
B) False
?

My favorite quote from Speed is:
A) The title of this post
B) The part where Alan Ruck relays “Fuck me!” as “Oh, darn”
C) “And to Jack for shooting Harry. Something we've all wanted to do for a very long time.”

1. The column also fails to ever again reference the “suggestion” mentioned in the first sentence. I think he means his proposal to have Paulson resign and Geithner take over as Treasury Secretary immediately, but it could also be referring either to the suggestion he wants to make to diners or the fact that if he had his druthers, he'd move inauguration day up to the present (though he says he thinks this is impossible).

Calling a movement "metaphysical art" is kind of obnoxious

2008-11-21T14:36:00.004-05:00

Reading through Dreams From My Father, I noticed a mention of “De Chirico shadows.” Which reminded me of my favorite painting, so I'm off to the Museum of Modern Art to stare at it in person. Lucky you though, you can see it here.

I may have posted this before, I can't remember and a quick search of my archives doesn't find it.

Overkill

2008-11-20T17:26:00.003-05:00

Last night I spoke with a friend and reader who enjoyed my recent Ethicist post, and not having anything else I wanted to get off my chest today, I'm writing another one. It follows the same format as the last one, wherein I quote the advice-seeker's question and then provide my answer (which differs from Cohen's, that's why I'm choosing to answer this particular question as opposed to others), without quoting his answer.

I am a prosecutor. As part of any case, we demand that the defendant pay restitution to the victim. Recently a disgruntled employee stole instant-lottery games from her employer, a local grocery store, and a few of those tickets were winners. She must repay the grocer the face value of the stolen tickets. But who should get her winnings? The defendant? The state lottery system? The person who bought the first tickets after the theft (who buys only winning lottery tickets)? — ANDREW BONAVIA, ITHACA, N.Y.

Me: Mr. Bonavia asks a difficult question; there is going to be a windfall gain for someone. There's also a fact question of whether the disgruntled employee knew the tickets were winners before stealing them (I do know that it used to be, a little less than a decade ago, possible for employees to determine whether some tickets were winners by scanning their bar codes, I don't know if this has changed). If the employee did know they were winners, obviously she can't keep the winnings, that would create a perverse incentive to steal tickets and then pay the face value of them, though other penalties for theft may offset the incentive, depending on the size of the winnings and the size of the penalty. But then it turns out that perverse incentive exists whether or not the employee knew, so it can't be right idea to allocate the winnings to her.

But it's also an unfair gain to the State of New York if they don't have to pay the winnings to someone. The state creates a certain number of winning tickets and the lottery business model assumes they will be paid out, it's an unfair gain to the state if they don't have to pay just because the tickets were stolen from the store.

There's no similar unfairness in allocating the gain to the grocery store owner, but there's also no justification for it, she's already been returned to where she was in the status quo before the theft.

So there's a problem with the money going to anyone, because it's a windfall gain. The way to deal with this is basically to create a state fund which provides relief to people who suffer windfall losses, and have the money delivered to them, but creating such a fund probably isn't an option for this advice-seeking prosecutor. As a second best option, demand that the thief give the money to the New York State crime victim's compensation fund. Crime victims have, in many cases, suffered a windfall loss.

Also, I'm not sure whether this really is an ethical dilemma for the Prosecutor, because even if he made a very poor choice as to how to deal with the winnings, it would be strange to criticize that choice as unethical. Unless he took the money himself, but that's not the topic being discussed.

Kids say the darndest things

2008-11-19T17:57:00.002-05:00

“After lunch, if that’s what you call a large meal of meat that you finish just before 9 A.M., I had a chat about Snow’s origins with its management team. We talked near the pits, so Miss Tootsie could pull off sausage links now and then. ‘I felt like with her name and barbecue and my personality with people we could make it work,’ Bexley told me. He’s a short, outgoing man whose résumé includes—in addition to rodeo clown—prison guard, auctioneer, real-estate agent, and shopkeeper. He already had the location—a place where he’d run a farm and ranch store in 1992. The name came from a nickname he’d had since before he was born. According to the family story, his brother, then four years old, was asked whether he was hoping for the new baby to be a boy or a girl, and he replied, not unreasonably, that he would prefer a snowman. Kerry (Snowman) Bexley and Miss Tootsie opened Snow’s in March of 2003—Bexley had built the pits—and it did well from the start. ‘For the most part, we cooked two to three hundred pounds of meat,’ Bexley told me. ‘We sold out by noon.’”

Calvin Trillin, “By Meat Alone” The New Yorker, 11/24/08 (emphasis supplied)

On another New Yorker related matter, (and if you count the McPhee post below there have been a number of those lately), whatever else is true of Malcolm Gladwell, whoever runs his publicity is very good. His new book came out this week, and suddenly he is everywhere.

Though to be honest, that was just a, quick, gut reaction. I was just saying the first thing I thought, and not really deliberating. I'm not sure whether the evidence really supports my hypothesis.

Every time I try to get out

2008-11-18T14:39:00.003-05:00

For a time, one of the main things this blog did was gently, and sometimes not that gently, point out that Randy Cohen is not good at giving people advice. And there's no time like the present to get back in the habit:

Natural-gas companies in our area can drill in one spot and extract gas more than a mile away by using “horizontal” drilling. These companies offered to lease homeowners’ mineral rights — about $4,000 for my partner and me. For environmental reasons, we strongly oppose this drilling, but most of our neighbors are enthusiastic about the profits, so drilling will likely be done under our house whether or not we agree to the lease. What should we do? JESSICA MAY, FORT WORTH

Me: First, make serious efforts to confirm that you're correct about whether or not selling your mineral rights in particular will change the total amount of natural gas extracted from your area. Talk to your neighbors to ensure that you're correct about their intentions, local or national environmental groups about their understanding of the situation and your options, and possibly a geologist.

If the sale would make a difference, even marginally, don't do it, for categorical imperative (first formulation) reasons.

If it turns out you're correct that your sale doesn't matter, ask for more money. Encourage your neighbors to ask for more money. If you get more money, publicize that fact. Give a substantial portion of any money you receive to a reputable charity which either purchases land to preserve it from drilling, takes action to reduce greenhouse gas levels, or lobbies to make it more difficult for natural gas companies to purchase mineral rights.

Cohen's answer, which I encourage you to look at for yourself, is wrong in a variety of ways. His claim that “[b]ut the most potent argument for your declining to sign what you regard as a devil’s bargain is this: It violates your own principles” is especially misguided. It's not the case that all principled reasons for opposing drilling entail, or even suggest, the wrongfulness of taking money from a company which drills.

In the past I've worried that I'm being unfair to The Ethicist by using a lot more words in answering than he does, since he's constrained by his column word count. So let me note that he used 241 words, and I used 154 (and a supplementary link which improves, but isn't required for, my argument).