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ר Some Worthy Charities. The end of the year is a good time to be thinking about making donations, both for self-discipline and for tax purposes. Here are a few charities I like. [permalink: 03.12.31a.htm .

ת A Special Prosecutor in the Plame-Wilson Affair. Attorney- General Ashcroft has appointed a special prosecutor for the Plame- Wilson Affair. Why? Many people think it because the leak of Plame's identity to the press has turned out to be a serious crime by someone important. I find that hard to believe, from what we know of the affair, as I've discussed before. Two possibilities that I have not seen mentioned are: 1. The leaker has been discovered, but either the leak was not a crime or is too trivial to warrant prosecution; or 2. The investigation has uncovered misbehavior, but by people in the CIA-- perhaps Plame herself-- who are opposed to the Bush Administration. [permalink: 03.12.31c.htm .

ר Judicial Nominee Blockage As a Game of Chicken. On November 12, Professor Bainbridge compared the situation in the U.S. Senate to a game of Chicken. [more, 03.12.30c.htm .

ש Parmalat, Conrad Black, Bainbridge, and Solving the Problem of Corporate Governance. Italy's eighth largest company, Parmalat, has collapsed after a massive accounting fraud and apparent embezzlement by its managers. This has been compared to Enron, but it is really much worse. [more, 03.12.30a.htm .

ת Harry Stein, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (and Found Inner Peace), Senator Bill Scott, Sulzberger's Anti- Americanism, and Racial Preferences. Mr. Stein's book is very enjoyable. I've excerpted the best parts below, including the confession that Senator Scott's reputation as the dumbest Congressman was a set-up, the desire of the current publisher of the New York Times that American soldiers be killed in Vietnam, Le Monde's endorsement of the theory that Monica Lewinsky was under orders from Israel, and so forth. [more, 03.12.30b.htm .

ש Sodomy Laws in Various Countries. In my December 26 post I wondered in which countries homosexuality is illegal. Mike Morgan points me to Age of Consent which he found via Eugene Volokh's post on a newspaper article on Strom Thurmond. That site also discusses sodomy laws. Someone else pointed me to a map of the world showing sodomy laws. [ 03.12.29b.htm .

ת Planned Parenthood's Abortion and Lobbying Businesses. Via Robert Walker and Carole Canfield, I am pointed to a story about Planned Parenthood's annual report which says that the organization's $766 million budget came about equally from taxpayer funding, donations, and clinic payments and it performed 227,385 abortions in 2002. [permalink: 03.12.29a.htm .

ש Stockdale on Suffering and Life's Meaning; Gray's Elegy; Nietzsche. In a sermon a while back Pastor Whitaker mentioned a story about Admiral Stockdale in Vietnam from the book Good to Great, by Jim Collins. I've boldfaced the key idea: that suffering as a prisoner of war was perhaps the best thing in his life, a source of utility and not disutility. [permalink: 03.12.28b.htm .

ר Some Latin Quotations. I happened upon a good site for Latin quotations. Here are some of them: [permalink: 03.12.28a.htm .

ס A Picture: "Coffee is Life" from Ariel Rubinstein. One part of game theorist Ariel Rubinstein's website is "A Worldwide Guide for Coffee Places where you can not only work but also think!" That's where I found the coffee picture from the Hungarian Cafe. [ 03.12.27d.htm .

ע State Funding of Religion in the United Kingdom and Belgium. In the United Kingdom, the established churches do not receive state funding directly. I know land endowments were traditionally very important--were tithes important too? The state does fund religious schools, but does not discriminate by religion. In Belgium, the government collects a religion tax, but the taxpayer designates his religion, and this can include non-religion. The tax revenues go to the appropriate organizations: 79 percent to the Catholic Church, 13 percent to laic organizations, 3 percent to Muslims and 3 percent to Protestants. [permalink: 03.12.27e.htm .

ע Homosexuality a Crime in Egypt, Amnesty International. The State Department reports that homosexuality is actively prosecuted in Egypt. [permalink: 03.12.26e.htm .

ף CORRECTED, DECEMBER 28. Anton Sherwood and the Ethics Quiz. A friend who's run for office on the Libertarian ticket tried the Ethics Philosophers Quiz. He scored high with Mill (1.00!) Bentham, and the Epicureans. [ 03.12.26d.htm .

פ Michael Shore's Webpage on Game Theory Movies, Atanarjuak. After looking at Professor Ribstein's Business Movie website, I looked for a game theory list and found Professor Michael Shore's game theory and popular culture page, with lists of movies, TV shows, and so forth. If you know of others he omits, please let him know. [permalink: 03.12.26c.htm .

ץ A Good Plaid. I liked this plaid wrapping paper, which Tom and Euna sent to us. Why do I like it? The repeated pattern, the double way to look at it, the mild colors, perhaps. [ 03.12.26b.htm .

צ Immortality: Mark Twain, Bible Verses. Someone asked me to post on the afterlife, writing,

In relation to your post on Assurance of Salvation, perhaps you can set out on your website a justification for believing in an afterlife at all. [permalink: 03.12.26a.htm .

צ The First Christmas Day. On December 14 I discussed the pastoral evidence that the birth of Jesus was not in December-- not that I object to celebrating it on December 25. Bishop Lightfoot has an argument for a different precise day-- the day of the Feast of Tabernacles. [ 03.12.25a.htm .

צ The Economics of Christmas Lights: Postrel. Virginia Postrel has a great article on Christmas lights in Reason magazine (another version was in the Wall Street Journal). The thrust of it is that price is down, quality is up, and the industry illustrates the good trend towards greater production of aesthetic goods and services. [ 03.12.24a.htm .

ק The Church of England: Disbelief Among Clergy. The Telegraph reports of the Church of England that "A recent survey of 2,000 of the Church's 10,000 clerics found that a third doubted or disbelieved in the physical resurrection and that only half were convinced by the truth of the virgin birth." [ 03.12.24b.htm .

ר Christmas Shopping Frustrations. Elizabeth Bortka sent me (or my wife?) this Internet story: [ 03.12.24c.htm .

ש Stigma: Posting the Names of Tax Delinquents. I came across a a proposed Wisconsin law that would result in the names of delinquent taxpayers being posted on the Net. [ 03.12.24d.htm .

ת Religion in Israel and Egypt. The 2003 State Department report on religious freedom is out, I see from Christianity Today's weblog. Here is one place where the State Department does a good job. I read a few of the entries. Here are some excerpts from the part on Israel , the PLO territories, and Egypt. [ 03.12.24e.htm .

ץ Religion in France: Alsace-Lorraine. The 2003 State Department report on religious freedom is out, I see from Christianity Today's weblog. Here is one place where the State Department does a good job. I read a few of the entries. Here are some excerpts from the part on France. [ 03.12.24f.htm .

פ Divorce in the Coptic Church. I learn from the 2003 U.S. State Department report that "The Coptic Orthodox Church permits divorce only in specific circumstances, such as adultery or conversion of one spouse to another religion." Thus, it does not take the Roman Catholic position. [ 03.12.24g.htm .

ק Liberal Religion in Public Schools Struck Down by a Court. Clayton Cramer discusses a new court decision which while not breaking any new legal ground, does come down against liberals-- in this case a public school in Ann Arbor which provided a platform to liberal religious leaders to attack conservative religion and censored a student speech that mildly--very mildly!--- questioned the assertions of the homosexualists. The opinion in "http://www.michbar.org/opinions/district/2003/120503/21290.pdf"> Hansen v. Ann Arbor Public Schools (E.D.Mich. 2003) begins, [ 03.12.23c.htm .

ר Georgetown Law School's Suppression of the Catholic Position on Homosexuality. Eugene Volokh has a good post on Georgetown University's suppress of mild anti- homosexual speech. [ 03.12.23d.htm .

ש New Format. I'm trying a slight change of format. I'll not have headings for each day, though I'll still separate days by horizontal bars. I also recently added my email address to each post, for convenience. The archives would be a good Christmas vacation project. The Hebrew letters, by the way, are just there as topic markers, because they are less distracting and more educational than Roman letters. [ 03.12.23b.htm .

ת Lopez Website: Euler's Theorem for Linking Constants, The Erdos Number, 0.9999...=1, The Axiom of Choice. Alex L�pez-Ortiz has a nice math website at Waterloo. I happened on it in checking for Euler's Theorem for Linking Constants, as I've just named the theorem I talked about on my birthday. [ 03.12.23a.htm . "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > Erasmusen@Yahoo.com. ]

[ 03.12.20a.htm . "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > Erasmusen@Yahoo.com. ]

ר Does Yale Law School Discriminate by Religion in Condemning Discrimination by Religion? Yale Law School's placement office discriminates against organizations that discriminate on the basis of religion-- which, in effect, means it discriminates against religious organizations. [ 03.12.19a.htm . Comments: "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

ש Nuttiness on the Net. On the Net, even if only 100 people in the whole world are interested in something, they can get together and discuss it more easily than 100 people in Bloomington can do it live. Hugh Hewitt perceptively points out in the Weekly Standard that as a result, those 100 people on the Net can forget how tiny a minority they are. [ 03.12.19b.htm . Comments: "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

ת Constructive Trusts and Restitution After Theft. A nifty bit of legal artistry in our Law Lunch yesterday. Professor Heidt brought up a nutty Wisconsin case which went something like this: [ 03.12.19c.htm . Comments: "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

ש Ann Coulter on Responding to a Lawless Supreme Court. Ann Coulter's Human Events article, "Supreme Court Opinions Not Private Enough," is very good. It could use some editing (and I've done some below), but it is quite powerful. I've boldfaced a key idea: that constitutional amendments are useless as a solution to a Supreme Court ignoring what the Constitution says. [ 03.12.18b.htm . Comments: "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

ת Assurance of Salvation. Last night in Bible study, we asked how a person can know if he is saved or not. A relevant verse is Romans 10:9. [ 03.12.18a.htm . Comments: "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

ר Leo Strauss and the Aims of Modern and Ancient States. I found this very nice summary in What was Leo Strauss up to? by Steven Lenzner and William Kristol, The Public Interest, Fall 2003.

Having presented the classic natural-right teaching, Strauss turns to the modern doctrine of natural right. His presentation brings forth several points of contrast between the classics and the moderns. First, the classics view moral and political matters "in the light of man�s perfection" or his end, whereas the moderns take their bearings from man�s origin or from man in "the state of nature." Second, according to the classics, "man is by nature a social being" or political animal, while to the moderns, the individual is prior to society. Third, for the classics, political activity is properly directed at the cultivation of virtue; for the moderns, the aim of political life is to replace the insecurity of man�s natural state by a secure liberty. [ 03.12.17b.htm . Comments: "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

ש Amazon.com's Promotion of Child Molesting. Clayton Cramer explains how he dropped his association with Amazon.Com on account of a particularly nasty book that company unapologetically sells called Understanding Loved Boys and Boylovers . Here are comments by the author and a reader from the Amazon website: [ 03.12.17c.htm . Comments: "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

ת The Mess in Kosovo. Remember the Kosovo War? The Clinton Administration and many conservatives were saying that the Serbs were killing large numbers of Albanians in Kosovo and so it was necessary to do high- altitude, inaccurate bombing of civilian targets in Serbia to inflict enough pain on that country to withdraw from the ancient homeland of the Serbs (now housing mainly Albanian coming in from the west). Also, the War was a useful distraction from what Clinton was doing in Washington at the time (see my Madeline Albright post ). When the war ended, it turned out that the massacres were lies, [ 03.12.17d.htm . Comments: "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

ק Archbishop Abbot's 260 Sermons on the Book of Jonah. George Abbot, later Archbiship of Canterbury, preached a sermon on some part of the Book of Jonah every Thursday from 1594 to 1599. That comes to 260 sermons on a book four chapters long, with 48 verses--- 5+ sermons per verse! (p. 157, Nicolson, God's Secretaries-- a 2003 Christmas List item). These were published as An exposition vpon the prophet Ionah [electronic resource] : Contained in certaine sermons, preached in S. Maries Church in Oxford. By George Abbot Professor of Diuinitie, and Maister of Vniuersitie Colledge. London: Imprinted by Richard Field, dwelling in the Blacke-friers, 1600. Description: [8], 638, [2] p. [ 03.12.16a.htm . Comments: "mailto:erasmusen@yahoo.com" > erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

ר Morten Lauridsen and Choral Music's Importance. My December 14 post discussed Mariolatry in the text of a choir song composed by Morten Lauridsen. A quite separate point is that although we think of classical music composition as being in disastrous decline since 1914, it might be we are just looking at the wrong compositions. True, the symphony and the quartet are in decline, especially since 1950, but other forms of music have done well. [ 03.12.16b.htm ]

ש Two Fun Web Quizzes: Your Ideal Philosopher of Ethics and Your Ideal Presidential Candidate. I found two new fun Selecsmart quizzes from Professor Bainbridge's web- log. One asks you questions to determine your ideal philosopher of ethics and the other to determine your ideal presidential candidate for 2004. The questions are intelligent, and there aren't many of them. Here are my presidential results: [more, 03.12.16c.htm ]

ת Indiana University Tops in Administration Response to Affirmative- Action Bake Sale. Indiana University's temperate response to the affirmative-action bake sale held here contrast well with the response of university administrations everywhere else, apparently. [more, 03.12.16d.htm ]

צ Snow Question for my Exam. I particularly liked one of the questions on my exam today. I'll have to see whether the students responded well to it or not. It is hard to teach, and to learn, how to apply mathematical modelling to questions such as this one, but that is our ultimate aim, and a student who can't do it has not learned what the math is all about. [ 03.12.15e.htm ]

ק More Good Things for Christmas. I finished my one-by-one listing of good things in yesterday's log. The entire 2003 Christmas List is up on the web. At the bottom I list good things that didn't quite make the list: [ 03.12.15d.htm ]

ר France Breaking EU Rules 3 Ways. It is striking how France tries to promote the European Union while not obeying its rules. [ 03.12.15c.htm ]

ש Joe McCarthy and Dogs Chasing Cars. I found a good quotation from "The Cold War Heats Up," Michael J. Ybarra. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Nov 18, 2003. pg. D.7:

...Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy, who attacked alleged communists the way dogs chase cars, and with as much effect.

ת Ethical Lapses at Coca Cola. It is distressing how tolerant major corporations are of dishonest behavior by their executives. We should send a lot of them to jail, but we don't. I just read an article about fraud by Coca Cola that illustrates this, and also illustrates a number of other points in industrial organization. The article is "Into the Fryer: How Coke Officials Beefed Up Results Of Marketing Test; Consultant Gave Kids' Clubs Cash to Buy Value Meals In Burger King Promotion; Wiring $9,000 for Whoppers" Chad Terhune. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Aug 20, 2003. pg. A.1. Mid-level executives at Coca Cola defrauded Burger King, its second biggest fountain drink customer, in a minor but indicative way by buying about 700 meals to bias a test market and induce Burger King to pend $10 million on a joint promotion. [ 03.12.15a.htm ]

ק Choral Singing in Churches. We had a choral service in church today-- no sermon, but a special large choir and orchestra, and lots of reading of Scripture and poems. The music was nicely done, but I have serious doubts about singing in church by choirs and smaller groups without the congregation joining in. It becomes too much like a performance, especially if it is of high quality or by children. [ 03.12.14b.htm ]

ר Mary's Lack of Merit. In church today, the choir sang a song with old words set to music by Morton Lauridsen (Tomas Luis de Victoria and Francis Poulenc also seem to have set this to music). [more, 03.12.14c.htm ]

ש The Shepherds at Bethlehem: Special Passover Sheep? In church today, a poem was read which was based on the idea that the shepherds tending their flock at Christ's birth were taking care of special sheep whose lambs would be used in the Temple sacrifices. Bethlehem is near the Temple, so this has some plausibility. The idea seems to have sprung up as a way to make it plausible that shepherds were tending flocks at night in the middle of the winter, a strange time to be sleeping outside. But it looks like the idea doesn't work. [ 03.12.14d.htm ]

ת Euler and Falsely Proving God's Existence. I just found out from a http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/euler.html Waterloo website that a quotable story I'd heard somewhere is false. See Dirk J. Struik, A Concise History of Mathematics, Third Revised Edition, Dover, 1967, p. 129. I've split its one paragraph into three. [ 03.12.14e.htm ]

צ The Eleventh Day of Christmas: Historical Atlas of Jerusalem. It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the eleventh. [ 03.12.13a.htm ]

ק Second Update on Court Hostility to Religion: Volokh. Here are a few more thoughts on two recent posts on the U.S. Supreme Court and religion.

(1a) Doesn't the government unequal treatment of religion and unreligion apply only to speech? [ 03.12.13b.htm ]

ר Interrogation: The Atlantic Monthly. Via the Curmudgeonly Clerk, a Mr. Bowden has a long and interesting article on interrogation techniques in The Atlantic. Here is one example, from Israel: [ 03.12.13c.htm ]

ש "Let One Hundred Mothers Cry...". Via the Curmudgeonly Clerk, I found Mr. Bowden's long and interesting article on interrogation techniques in The Atlantic, with this good if cynical quotation:

"There's an old Arab saying," Koubi says. "'Let one hundred mothers cry, but not my mother--but better my mother than me.'" [ 03.12.13d.htm ]

ת The Indiana Search Engine. I put a search engine on this weblog a little while back. Indiana University requires use of their search engine rather than the good freeware ones that exist, probably for some security reason. [ 03.12.13e.htm ]

צ Update on Court Hostility to Religion: Volokh/Cramer. Eugene Volokh has replied to my earlier comments on why the Supreme Court's move to neutrality in religion since 1940 shows hostility to Christianity. He makes some good objections, but I can answer them. He says, [ 03.12.12b.htm ]

ק The Supreme Court on McCain Feingold: Jonah Goldberg. Jonah Goldberg has the best commentary I've seen on the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding pretty much everything in McCain Feingold. I'm surprised. I was telling my students last year that the important part of the law was the rules on the limits on contributions, because forbidding organizations from posting advertisements on political issues close to election time was clearly unconstitutional. [ 03.12.12c.htm ]

ר Existence of Nash Equilibrium. I wrote up a new Section 3.7 for the 4th edition of Games and Information today, after a good discussion with some students yesterday. It talks about four reasons why a pure strategy Nash equilibrium might not exist. If any economists are reading this, your comments are welcomed. [ 03.12.12d.htm ]

ש The Rasmusen Weblog Controversy. There was a panel discussion on my weblog a few weeks ago, the IDS tells us: [ 03.12.12e.htm ]

ת Update on Convoluted Court Opinions. The Volokh Conspiracy had posts on other convoluted split-opinion court cases, following up on the McCain-Feingold one. Eugene Volokh says [ 03.12.12f.htm ]

ר Our Disordered Supreme Court: Multiple, Criss-Crossed Opinions. Via Volokh Conspiracy, I learn that the very long Supreme Court opinion just announced for McConnell v. FEC, has, according to the official opinion, the following line-up of Justices: [ 03.12.11d.htm ]

ש Dean and Kerry, Conspiracy Theorists. Jay Nordlinger at National Review says, [ 03.12.11c.htm ]

ת Howard Dean's Bikepath Religion. Jay Nordlinger at National Review also contributed this bizarrity:

[more, 03.12.11b.htm ]

צ The Eighth Day of Christmas: The Electric Toothbrush. It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the eighth.

8. Electric toothbrushes are really a great idea. I have the Crest Spinbrush Pro, $8. [ 03.12.10e.htm ]

ק Andy Stone's Book. My Uni High classmate has a book out as of May 2003, Investment Climate Around the World: Voices of the Firms from the World Business Environment Survey. [ 03.12.10d.htm ]

ר Bernstein on the McDonald's Coffee Spill Case. On Volokh, http://volokh.com/2003_12_07_volokh_archive.html#107093681112071607 David Bernstein has a good post on the McDonald's Coffee Spill Case-- a refutation of the common claim that McDonald's served its coffee at an unduly hot temperature. [more, 03.12.10c.htm ]

ש Alfred Marshall on Mathematics in Economics. Marshall wrote a famous letter on economics and mathematics that doesn't seem to have been on the web yet. I just posted it for my PhD IO class, and mention it here in case others are interested. The famous bit is this: [ 03.12.10b.htm ]

ת A Real Book Contract: Game Theory Anthology Royalties from Films and Book Clubs. I mentioned on December 5 that my game theory book contract has a movie rights clause. I've scanned in one of my other contracts, which seems to have the same clause-- the publisher-editor contract for Readings in Games and Information (May 2001), up in MS-Word and html. It's up so I'll have an example of a real-world complex contract to discuss with my students, but others might find it interesting too. Here is the boilerplate on movies and such: [ 03.12.10a.htm ]

ק The Seventh Day of Christmas-- Cornwell's Sharpe War Novels. It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the seventh. [ 03.12.09a.htm ]

ר Update: Eugenic Abortions and Homosexuality. A previous post reported the case in England of late-term abortion because the baby had a cleft palate. Most often, the reason for therapeutic abortions is probably that the baby is a girl (that is how I interpret the growing imbalance in the sexes in Asia), or, in America, that the baby has Down's Syndrome and would have done poorly in school. My Friend the Battery Man has a brilliant thought on how a different kind of eugenic abortion will cause a crisis in the courts in a few years: [ 03.12.09b.htm ]

ש Update: The Metric System's Deficiencies. On December 2 I talked about how bad the metric system is. My Friend the Battery Man has, as usual, cogent things to say: [ 03.12.09c.htm ]

ת Eugene Volokh on Church and State Rulings As Not Anti-Christian. Eugene Volokh has a post today responding to Clayton Cramer's comment that the Supreme Court is anti-religious and uses the 1st Amendment to restrict religion rather than promoting it. Mr. Cramer's comment is a broad one, but Professor Volokh, while admitting that much of what the courts do actively discourages religion (e.g. by forbidding the government to aid religious groups in the same way as it aids nonreligious groups), does not think judges are being hostile to religion when they forbid governments to encourage religion. Professor Volokh's point is worth discussing, but it is wrong. Here is his full post (the whole thing really needs to be read to get an accurate view): [ 03.12.09d.htm ]

ק The Sixth Day of Christmas-- God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the sixth.

6. Adam Nicholson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, 304 pages, $17.47. Nicholson does an amazing job of making the religious politics of 1605 fascinating. [ 03.12.08a.htm ]

ר Bush Hating--Examples and Theory. Here are some more examples of Bush Hating, and my theory-- that people hate him because he doesn't care what they think of him. Also, a bit of comparison with Clinton Hating. ... [more, 03.12.08b.htm ]

ש Evolution Gaps--New Species. The argument between Biologists, Intelligent Design people, and Creationists is a curious one, sociologically. I won't go into it now. But one feature I would like cleared up is whether there is direct evidence of the appearance of new species. By this I don't mean new types of animals that cannot breed with the old types for behavioral or physiological reasons--- the Chihuahua and the Great Dane, say-- but a new type whose DNA is different enough to be a new species. Creationists say there is no evidence, and a strongly anti-creationist article from Scientific American seems to grant their point, if you read between the lines and see what the article does *not* say. Is there a better account than this one? ... [ 03.12.08c.htm ]

ת Evite Web Party Invitations. Jim O'Neill sent me a web invitation to a Christmas party in his Virginia home recently. The idea is a good one. This free (ad- funded) software seems to be able to show you the list of guests invited and who have already accepted too, a neat feature one doesn't get with regular invitations, though the feature was turned off on the actual invitation I was sent. The site is here at Evite. ... [ 03.12.08d.htm ]

ק The Fifth Day of Christmas-- Ucluelet, Vancouver Island. It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the fifth.

5. Ucluelet on Vancouver Island is a wonderful place-- clams and sea cucumbers, rain forest and seals. We stayed at The Cabins.

ר Publilius Syrus on Carrot Incentives. A quotation website tells us that Publilius Syrus says in his Maxims,

Beneficium accipere, libertatem est vendere.

I'll have to find out more about Syrus, who seems to have other good maxims too, though I'd never heard of him before. Also, I will repeat a plea I often make to quotation listers such as Bartlett's: please give us specific citations. I'd really like to know where to check that you've got the quotation right. It isn't quite that "If you don't have a citation, he didn't say it", but for scholarly work it's nice to have some evidence that the supposed quotation really is a quotation. ... [ 03.12.07b.htm ]

ש Cost-Benefit Analysis for Anti-Spam Software. Indiana University has decided to pay about $300,000 for anti-spam software. I am on the Bloomington Faculty Council Technology Policy Committee. I was skeptical about the cost, wondering whether the same amount of spam might be stopped at lower cost. I was told that actually the software would do other good things besides stop spam, and am satisfied that this is so. Here, though, let me show why the benefit of anti-spam software far exceeds $300,000. ... [ 03.12.07c.htm ]

ת Homosexuality and The Church. The essential thing about churches and homosexuality is that they should deal with it just as they do other sins. This raises the issue of what they do with other sins.

There is a rhetorical switch-game here. Take racial hatred and homosexuality. With homosexuality, people take the theologically correct position that you should hate the sin and love the sinner, and that we are all sinners, and must remember to be compassionate. All quite true. But when it comes to racism, people condemn it unthinkingly and somehow all the caveats about loving the sinner never get mentioned. Why the difference? I think it is because people don't like to offend the world. [ 03.12.07d.htm ]

ר The Fourth Day of Christmas-- The Movie, Luther. It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the fourth. ... [ 03.12.06a.htm ]

ש Official Anti-Semitism in Egypt. Via Taranto and the Wall Street Journal and the Middle East Media Research Institute we learn that the director of the Alexandria Library museum in Egypt considers The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be not only genuine, but a Jewish holy book on the level of the Talmud. He also is skeptical of the Holocaust, believing that Hitler could easily have killed all the Jews in Europe if he'd wanted to, but he didn't, and the West is deceived on this point. Here are the details. ... [ 03.12.06b.htm ]

ת The Wal-Mart Trampling Incident Tells us More About American Court Abuse than About American Shoppers. I forget my source, but I noted down the web address for this interesting report on the woman who was supposedly trampled by selfish Wal-Mart shoppers. It turns out she has filed 16 previous injury claims at places where she has shopped or worked, all of them dubious. And yet she walks free. This is injustice as much as when a court turns down an obviously meritorious claim (does any court ever do that?). Here are the details from WKMG-Local 6 News. [ 03.12.06c.htm ]

ק The Third Day of Christmas-- Ayres and Nalebuff. It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the third. ... [ 03.12.05a.htm ]

ר Cost-Benefit Analysis for Anti-Spam Software. This will have to come tomorrow! I am finding the Berube discussion too stimulating.  

ש Update on Professor Berube's Article: More from Erin O'Connor's Weblog. Professor's Berube's article in The Chronicle of Higher Education inspired some more good thoughts by Erin O'Connor and her correspondents and links. ... [ 03.12.05c.htm ]

ת Update on Professor Berube's Article: Novels for a Literature Course. I commented yesterday on Professor's Berube's article in The Chronicle of Higher Education on how to deal with obnoxious conservative (or perhaps I should say "obnoxious/conservative" or "conservative, i.e. obnoxious"?) students. I emailed him to let him know, as one ought to especially in the case of hard-hitting criticism. He very impressively and politely emailed me back quickly, and at least paid me the compliment of saying, implicitly, that I was not " without qualification the most unscrupulous one I've seen", since he said that about somebody else. After a bit more thought, though, he did say he wanted to comment on one particular part of my entry, which I'll repeat here. ... [more, 03.12.05d.htm ]

ש The Second Day of Christmas--Weblogs. It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the second (which is perhaps unnecessary for this audience!) ... [more, 03.12.04b.htm ]

ת O'Connor on Berube on Conservative Students as Loonies. Erin O'Connor writes interesting commentary on an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Berube, an English professor at Penn State. Here is an excerpt that shows the tone of his article. [ 03.12.04a.htm ]

צ The First Day of Christmas-- AVI-MPG Movies. It has long been my custom to send out lists of good things of the year with my Christmas cards. I thought it might be nice to set this out one by one in my weblog. They are not in any particular order. Here is the first. ... [permalink, 03.12.03a.htm ]

ק Ronald Reagan's Divorce from Jane Wyman--Whose Fault? When my father was down for Thanksgiving, we discussed Ronald Reagan's divorce, and why nobody made much of a deal about it. I wondered if it was because the divorce was not the fault of Reagan but of his first wife. Such seems to be the case, from what I read about Jane Wyman's total of four failed marriages and five divorces (she remarried one man for a few extra years). ... [ permalink, 03.12.03b.htm ]

ר The Abolition of Marriage. Nicole Gelinas makes one of my pet points about marriage in her New York Post op-ed, A TATTERED PRIZE: that we have changed the legal definition of marriage to where it doesn't mean much nowadays. Queer marriage is thus not a big deal-- the institution is not threatened-- it is already destroyed, legally. ... [ permalink, 03.12.03c.htm ]

ש Aborting a Baby with a Cleft Palate. Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of abortion is how the scariest kind of eugenics-- killing the handicapped-- has become routine and, apparently, uncontroversial. In Britain, a cleft palate is enough of a defect to allow your elimination. From The Guardian: ... [ permalink, 03.12.03d.htm ]

ת Britain's Rise in Prestige. Not all the news is bad today. A lot of people have been saying that America's unilateral actions would hurt its prestige worldwide. Britain, bucking the U.N. just like America and the E.U. much seems not to have lost but to have gained a remarkable amount of prestige and influence, at least in the eyes of the Germans. The Telegraph reports on the result of a survey: ... [ permalink, 03.12.03e.htm ]

ת Against the Metric System: Levy, Drum. The metric system is a bad idea. Jacob Levy notes in a post responding to Kevin Drum that it is emblematic of a bigger debate: The French Revolution vs. Classic Liberalism, Robespierre and Napoleon versus Montesquieu and De Tocqueville. ... [ permalink, 03.12.02a.htm ]

ת Russell Kirk's Six Canons of Conservatism. James Pinkerton, in lamenting in National Review modern conservatism's unwillingness to oppose things such as social security and medicare, gives us the six Canons of Conservatism of Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind (1953): ... [ permalink, 03.12.01a.htm ]

ת Jonah and Hezekiah. Today Pastor Whitaker's sermon was on patience until the Second Coming. He read from several places in Isaiah, and I was struck by how similar Hezekiah's prayer in Isaiah 38 is to Jonah's in Jonah 2. Here they are, for comparison. Jonah 2:1-9 says

Then Jonah prayed unto Jehovah his God out of the fish's belly. And he said,

I called by reason of mine affliction unto Jehovah,
And he answered me;
Out of the belly of Sheol cried I,
Thou heardest my voice.
... [more, permalink, 03.11.30a.htm ]

ק Aristotle on Homosexuality as Brutishness Akin to Cannibalism. I still have to sort out what the Greeks and Romans thought of homosexuality. Sometimes it seems accepted as normal and good; other times it is called perverse or is punishable by death. Even a single author can illustrate both (e.g. Plato in The Symposium and The Laws). Here is what Aristotle has to say in Book VII, Section 5, of The Ethics. ... [ permalink, 03.11.29d.htm ]

ר Volokh on Islamic Law in Contracts. Eugene Volokh has some interesting comments on Islamic law in contracts. He notes one problem for judges: if a wedding ceremony has been conducted in an Islamic setting, does it incorporate standard default Islamic rules of marriage? ... [permalink, 03.11.29c.htm ]

ש Steyn on Terrorism: "These five regimes must go". Via Volokh conspiracy, I see a superlative Mark Steyn article, "These five regimes must go". The five regimes are Syria's, North Korea's, Persia's, Sudan's, and Saudi Arabia's. He forget to include Palestine, I think. Libya is properly omitted. Sudan is a bit of a question mark, hateful though I find its domestic policy. Steyn's general point is the good one that civilized people will not be safe unless those regimes are overthrown, and there is no reason-- not even prudential--not to overthrow them. I'd agree. Certainly, if it's worth spending great effort building Iraq (not "rebuilding"--it never was in good shape) then that effort would be better spent overthrowing other regimes. ... [more, permalink, 03.11.29b.htm ]

ת Saudi Strategy to the U.S.A. as Jugurthan Foreign Policy. Via the Volokh conspiracy, I found the superlative Mark Steyn article, "These five regimes must go". One particular paragraph reminded me of the clever strategy of Jugurtha, king of Numidia, in dealing with Rome, a country with overwhelming military superiority but certain moral weaknesses. Here's the paragraph: ... [ permalink, 03.11.29a.htm ]

ר Islamic Law in the United States. The Volokh Conspiracy had a couple of posts today on the application of Islamic law in Canada, based on a WorldnetDaily article. Jacob Levy and Eugene Volokh note that it is nothing special, or unjust, to allow private parties to incorporate by reference any legal code they want into their private contracts. I noticed this because Jeffrey Stake and I came across some examples of this in American courts, where it is nothing new, even in connection with marriage (so long as the marriage included a prenuptial agreement). ... [ permalink, 03.11.28c.htm ]

ש The Texas List of Unbalanced Professors. A student organization at the University of Texas has had the good idea of posting a weblist of professors who politicize their classrooms. We faculty never monitor this kind of misbehavior by instructors, and sometimes we even glorify our laziness by calling it devotion to "academic freedom". But it is much more important to look into what a professor teaches and how he teaches it than to monitor student happiness or unhappiness via end-of- semester surveys as we do. Here are a couple of items from the list. ... [ permalink, 03.11.28b.htm ]

ת The Gollin Case of Weblog Suppression at Illinois. I've discussed the Gollin case before. From the Chronicle of Higher Education, November 21, 2003:

ש What Seems Bad May Be Good: Aquinas. It seems Thomas Aquinas thought this is the best of all possible worlds, not an unreasonable position to take. He has a nice analogy for why I should not think things would be better if I were in charge and changed them to fit my way of thinking: ... [ permalink, 03.11.27b.htm ]

ת Physics and Mathematics: Gollin. These slides (in pdf) of Professor Gollin of Illinois on a lecture on particle physics titled "It's not Like Colliding Watermelons," really make me wish I knew enough of the subject to follow them. That an outsider can be so intrigued is a tribute to the lecture. ... [permalink, 03.11.27a.htm ]

ר Gays, Homosexuals, Homosexualists, and Queers. Homosexuality creates difficult problems of terminology. "Homosexual" is a well-established term that conveys meaning pretty well,but it has the huge disadvantage of being five syllables long. "Gay" is one syllable--which is why it has been so successful-- but it is a propaganda term that still has weird resonances with its old meaning of "happy"; e.g. in "gay cancer" (AIDS), or "gay leaders disturbed by weblog". My father, visiting me for Thanksgiving, suggests wisely that "queer" is the best term. This has one syllable, combines its original meaning with the new meaning of sexual deviant well (and without damaging the old meaning), and is even used proudly by many homosexuals. ... [permalink, 03.11.26c.htm ]

ש The History of the Thanksgiving Holiday. I've prepared a Thanksgiving Webpage with history of the holiday, excerpts from public proclamations of it, and links to those public proclamations. It is interesting to see how deeply religious the presidential proclamations have been, and that even Bill Clinton did not excise God from the holiday. Lincoln's is one of the most eloquent: ... [permalink, 03.11.26b.htm ]

ת Mistakes in a Keegan Book. History News Network has a shocking article on factual mistakes in John Keegan's Fields of Battle:The Wars for North America. Mr. Keegan is one of my favorite authors, and one of his great talents is an eye for the interesting little- known fact. Yet this book contains errors that would be obvious to anyone with a moderate knowledge of history-- it has Jefferson alive in the 1830's, General Johnston (who was killed in the battle) ordering a Confederate withdrawal from Shiloh, the Old Northwest including Tennessee, and the American Revolutionary War lasting from 1776 to 1781, and so forth. Either Keegan has fallen to pieces or he did not write (or read) most of the book. ... [permalink, 03.11.26a.htm ]

ת Churches and Nonprofit Disclosure Regulation. The Washington Post has an interesting article (via Christianity Today's Weblog) on church finances. The following paragraph made me wonder about disclosure regulation. There ought to be a rule requiring churches, and other tax-exempt nonprofits, to report their income and the salaries of the five highest-paid employees, similar to rules for public corporations. Good organizations do this anyway; bad organizations do not. For example: ... [ permalink, 03.11.25a.htm ]

ש Weblog Controversy Items: Amazon Review, Vaughan Weblog on Pedophiles. My brother pointed out to me that someone gave my book, Games and Information, a one-star customer review rating on Amazon because he objects to my views on homosexuality. Be assured, game theory fans-- there is very little sex in the book, and no homosexuality that I can recall, so any ignorance I may have on the subject isn't really reflected in its quality. Here's the review. ... [ permalink, 03.11.24b.htm ]

ת Acts Between Consenting Adults: The German Homosexual Cannibal. While we're on unpleasant topics, I just came across a singularly disgusting example of an act between consenting adults that I would like to ban even if both parties consent. Armin Meiwes advertised for "young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 to slaughter" and did just that. His defense is that the young man consented, and joined him in auto- cannibalism before he died. Don't read this if you don't want to be disturbed. I'm not sure I was wise to. But, J.S. Mill liberals, if the young man did consent, do you object to this? If you do, what is the difference between allowing this and allowing simple sodomy, except that you personally find cannibalism offensive, while other people find both sodomy and cannibalism offensive? ... [permalink, 03.11.24a.htm ]

ר Worry and Prayer. Pastor Whitaker's sermon at ECC today made a good point: Worry is good. It is good as raw material, because it can be turned into prayer. Whenever you worry, rememember to pray. And then you will view your worries not as problems but as opportunities, and instead of complaining that you worry all the time, you will feel blessed by all the provocations to prayer. ... [permalink, 03.11.23c.htm ]

ש The Novels of Evelyn Waugh and C.P. Snow. I recently finished C.P. Snow's The Light and the Dark (1947, 344 pp), which is the story of Roy Calvert, one of the fellows in The Masters. It was perhaps worth reading-- but just barely. Calvert's problem is a sort of melancholy or depression, and Snow just can't get the reader to appreciate it. It does not have the ring of truth. In fact, Snow has written only one first-rate book, as far as I can tell: The Masters, which is about the election for the master of a college. Corridors of Power, about a rising young government minister, is pretty good too, but not in the same class as The Masters. In this respect, Snow is like Evelyn Waugh, who has also apparently written one first-rate book (Brideshead Revisited) and one second- rate one (Decline and Fall) , but no others that are clearly worth reading. I was disappointed to find this out. After reading each author's good book, I dipped into a number of his other books, only to be disappointed. ... [ permalink, 03.11.23b.htm ]

ת Condemning Homosexuality: An Indication of the Critic's Hidden Desires? It is often said by pro-homosexuals that people who oppose homosexuality do so because they are latently homosexual themselves. I've never understood the logic of this. Some time ago Brian Leiter posted the following, which he thinks highly enoughly to have expanded and reposted more recently: ... [ permalink, 03.11.23a.htm ]

צ Phenomenology. I've long been puzzled by what this means. I'm slightly closer because Professor Leiter pointed me to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Phenomenology. [ permalink, 03.11.22e.htm ]

ק Staten Island Democrats Honor Al Qaeda Terrorist. Incredibly, the Staten Island Democratic Association has honored Lynne Stewart, a lawyer under indictment for aiding the "blind sheik" terrorist plot. As Taranto of the Wall Street Journal reports, ... [ permalink, 03.11.22d.htm ]

ר Medical Care. Here are some more facts on medical care for the poor in America. According to the Statistical Abstract, Table 516, health public assistance was $225 billion, out of total welfare spending of $436 billion (Note that this excludes Medicare and Social Security; we are not talking about poor old people). ... [ permalink,(go to bottom) 03.11.21a.htm ]

ש Marriage Law. Jacob Levy on Volokh has a posting on whether it is constitutional for a state to ban non-procreative marriage. Of course it is. Here's an email I sent Professor Levy, commenting on how states have actually done this, with wide public support. ... [ permalink, 03.11.22b.htm ]

ת Bush-Hating. I'm collecting weirdly excessive quotes as examples of Bush hatred. Readers are welcome to submit entries. Here are a few: ... [ permalink, 03.11.22a.htm ]

ר HEALTH CARE IN THE USA AND OTHER COUNTRIES. Thought Arguments and Rants, via Professor Leiter gives a table of data on a subject I'd been thinking of writing on sometime. I've excerpted some key numbers below and added a last column:

Country 		Pub%  $/capita  GDP%   Doctors/capita	  Public $/capita

Canada 			70.4% 	$2,433 	 9.1% 	  	2.1				$1,713

France 			76% 	$2,211 	 9.3% 	  	3.3				$1,680

Germany 		74.8% 	$2,615 	10.6% 	 	3.2				$2,000

Japan 			78.1% 	$1,852 	 7.5% 	  	1.9				$1,446

Korea 			43.1% 	  $762 	 5.6% 	 	1.3				  $328

United Kingdom 		80.5% 	$1,704 	 7.2% 	 	2.0				$1,371

United States 		44.2% 	$4,287 	13%   		2.7				$1,894

Pub%	 - Public Expenditure on Health as a Percentage of Total Expenditure on Health
$/capita - Total Expenditure on Health per capita in US$ GDP% 	 - Total Expenditure on
Health as a % of GDP Doctors/capita - Practicing Physicians per 1000 population

The figures  are from   1999, the last year for which complete statistics are available.

ש WEBLOG IMPROVEMENTS: SEARCH ENGINE AND PHOTO. I did figure out how to incorporate a search engine and photo today, thanks to discovering I ought to skip a seminar I'd been thinking of attending. What I learned about the law school colloquium was: ... [ permalink, 03.11.21b.htm ]

ת TWO WELL-CONDUCTED HERESY TRIALS OF THE EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY SOCIETY. From Christianity Today we hear of the Evangelical Theology Society coming close to expelling two members, one of them (Clark Pinnock) very well known, for failing to believe in the principles of the Society. Though I think that "Openness Theism" is dead wrong, I don't believe in inerrancy myself and so would deserve to be expelled if I belonged, but I admire how well they seem to have managed things. ... [ permalink, 03.11.21c.htm ]

ש Items to Add to the Weblog: Search Engine, Photo of Me. I'd like to add a search engine, but tonight I find that the Pico engine does not work because the entry point fails, probably because of some Indiana University security feature, since an entry point in Geocities does work. Maybe a workaround would be to post a duplicate of this file in Geocities and use it as the entry point, but it is too late to do that tonight.

ת Revolutions and Reputation. My experience with Chancellor Brehm made me think of a new reason why revolutions might be so sudden and unanimous. The best- known idea currently is the one that, I think, Timur Kuran uses in his book: that it is so dangerous to be the only person to start a revolution that nobody will do so until it is obvious that the revolution will be successful--at which point it usually will have massive support. Very similar is if you hope to get a reward from the new regime (rather than fearing a punishment from the old). The new reason I've thought of is not fear, but the desire to look powerful. If you know that the revolution is going to succeed, you should back it, so people will increase their estimate of your power. [ permalink, http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/03.11.20a.htm ]

ת Descriptive Jurisprudence. I took a quick look at a paper of Brian Leiter's that he mentions in his web-log. The paper is "Beyond the Hart/Dworkin Debate: The Methodology Problem in Jurisprudence" here, appearing this fall in the American Journal of Jurisprudence as part of a symposium on "Law's Moral Foundations: Has It Any?" with papers by Joseph Raz, Timothy Endicott, Matthew Kramer, and John Finnis. I have a hard time getting motivated to read work in this style, but Professor Leiter's paper is a good one to file away for a summary of it (I suppose I should really look at Posner's Problems of Jurisprudence again too). Two of the questions in jurisprudence are (1) How do judges decide cases? and (2) How should judges decide cases?. I found this difficult to follow without examples, and decided that I'd start over with my own example rather than try to figure out what Dworkin and Hart are saying (even Leiter's article couldn't, with a quick read, convince me that those two big names have anything useful to say).

The Hornpipe Hypothetical: Jones sues Smith in a civil case, claiming that Smith burned down Jones's house on behalf of the terrorist Al Quaeda organization. The judge in the bench trial can see that Smith did burn down the house, and he must decide on a remedy. He has four alternatives: enjoin Smith to leave America; make Smith pay money damages; make Smith dance a hornpipe naked in a shopping mall; or impose no penalty on Smith, but make Jones pay Smith's court costs. ... [more, permalink, 03.11.19a.htm ]

ק The Nigerian Scam. I keep getting spam with the Nigerian Scam. It's actually the most interesting spam that I get, so I've read it a few times. I saved three recent messages as a memento of our times. ... [permalink, 03.11.18d.htm ]

ר Senator Moseley Braun. The group of Democratic contenders for the Presidency is truly pitiful. The only one with any kind of national stature is Representative Gephardt; the only one with a live mind is Governor Dean; we must wonder whether any of them (except General Clark, maybe?) can manage a government of any size, and then we have the amazing Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun. The two of them make Jesse Jackson look like a statesman. They are useful for purposes of humor, though, as a passage from a Moseley-Braun speech reported by The American Spectator shows:

We're gonna show the American people that George Orwell wrote fiction, not prophecy. And we will get our civil liberties back. We will repeal the Patriot Act. We will make certain that you have privacy in your home, you will have privacy with what you read, you will be able to think again.

[ permalink, 03.11.18c.htm ]

ש Rasmusen Weblog Controversy. Albert Mohler wrote a nice article on the controversy recently. ... [ permalink, 03.11.18b.htm ]

ת Bush Hating. I don't have time to give this interesting subject the attention it deserves right now, but I want to note a fact from The Public Interest that is relevant:

In a recent paper delivered at Princeton University, political scientist Gary Jacobson noted that, before the terrorist attacks of September 11, the gap between Democratic and Republican support of President Bush was wider than it has been for any prior president, including Bill Clinton. Before September 11, 88 percent of self-identified Republicans supported Bush; only 31 percent of self-identified Democrats did. This 57-point gap was the largest Jacobson had ever found.

ת Alfred Kinsey. National Review recently had an article on Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey was a professor here at Indiana University, and we still have a sex research institute named after him, to our shame. For it turns out that despite the facade of scientific objectivity that Kinsey displayed, of a staid entomologist who had decided to apply boringly rigorous statistical techniques to an important but taboo subject, Kinsey's research was laughable in its absence of rigor and he himself was a secret adulterer, homosexual, and masochist. The lack of rigor was obvious, and commented on, " even at the time. The opposition to sexual morality has come out only recently. But see how similar, despite their different spins, are articles in the conservative National Review and the liberal Nation on Kinsey. First, the National Review. ... [ permalink, 03.11.17d.htm ]

ק The High Priest. I've been trying to find a source for the claim that the high priest of Israel would enter the Holy of Holies room in the Temple alone on the Day of Atonement to sacrifice for the nation. That is surprisingly hard to pin down reliably, but the New Testament book of Hebrews, chapter 9, is a source. I've added my own boldface, as usual.

... [ permalink, 03.11.16d.htm ]

ר Churchill versus the BBC. Andrew Sullivan quotes Churchill, always a worthwhile thing to do, on the interesting proposition that an entirely partisan politicized public agency is better than a nonpartisan politicized public agency. That makes sense, once you think about it. And it implies that if we are to have politicized judges, we should not have independent ones. Here's the quote: ... [ permalink, 03.11.16c.htm ]

ש The Democrat Intelligence Memo Leak and the Liberal Press. Hugh Hewitt has a good story in the Weekly Standard on a reason, besides liberal bias directly, why the mainstream press has not picked up on the Senate Intelligence Memo Leak Scandal that I've posted on previously. ... [ permalink, 03.11.16b.htm ]

ת Political Makeup of Congress in the 20th Century: Graphics. My high school classmate, Mr. Sherwood, brought to my attention a wonderful site by Poole and Rosenthal on the Democrat-Republican and Economic-Social Conservative-Liberal dimensions, a site that includes mesmerizing animated gifs over time. If you want to see how real scholars do this, as opposed to the fun but amateur Political Compass, go here. You can tell these professor love political statistics the way sports fans love baseball statistics. Professor Poole's course webpage has an even greater treasury of graphs and statistics. I'll have to tell my industrial organization class, G601, since we've recently been doing location models. ... [permalink, 03.11.16a.htm ]

ת Notes for my Christmas List. Each year I send out with our Christmas cards a list of a dozen good things I discovered that year. I encourage others to take up this custom-- information makes a good gift, being disposable, personal, and space-saving. Here are some candidate items. *Mazdaspeed Protege. *Web-logs. *Terra Yukon Gold Yogurt and Green Onion potato chips. Luther, movie. Tablet PC's. Ucluelet, Vancouver Island. God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, Adam Nicholson. Dictators book. Bernard Cornwell, Waterloo, Sharpe's Tiger. Contact cement. Electric toothbrushes. Spirited Away, movie. *AVI-MPG Movies with digital cameras. Don Van Natta, FIRST OFF THE TEE, 2003. Cordless mouses. James Hogg: Confessions of a justified sinner. Greaves: Cancer the Evolutionary Legacy. Spiritual Lives of the Great Composers, Patrick Kavanaugh. David Frum, THE RIGHT MAN: The Surprise Presidency of George Bush. 2003, 303 pages. ... [permalink, 03.11.15a.htm ]

ר When is War Justified? A recent article in The Public Interest says

And in yet another public-opinion survey conducted in March 2003, almost one-fifth said that war is "never morally justified."

ש Canadian Suppression of Civil Liberties: The Hugh Owen Case. What is "hate speech", as a specialized legal term? A Canadian politician defending laws against hate speech as not really infringing on freedom of speech quotes the Canadian supreme court as saying " 'hatred' connotes emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation". Thus, in Canada, someone like Mr. Chait who publicly admits that he detests George Bush apparently would be liable to criminal penalties (or would be if Bush were gay or black or female, at least). ... [ permalink, 03.11.14b.htm ]

ת JUDGE MOORE'S REMOVAL. I've used up my time and indignation on the Hugh Owens case, so I will merely link to the Alabama decision removing Judge Moore from office for upholding his oath of office against the caprice of a federal judge. Here it is. [ permalink, 03.11.14c.htm ]

ת Lillian Rasmusen. Can the Volokh Conspiracy beat this?

ר Oppression in Canada. David Bernstein said on Volokh that Canada was unfree, even quoting someone calling it a "totalitarian theocracy", and Crooked Timber has a response with lots of comments. Neither mentions specific cases, but there's already been one prosecution, conviction, and failed appeal. WORLD magazine reported in March on Hugh Owens in Saskatoon, who was fined $4500 (by a one- woman panel-- no jury right here) for quoting Leviticus in a newspaper ad. The newspaper was fined the same amount. He appealed to a federal court, which confirmed his guilt and said he deserved to be punished. ... [ permalink, 03.11.10c.htm ]

ש Microsoft. Sherwood's Ogre Blog has this wonderful quote:

Remember, the truly evil thing about Microsoft is that because of them, we think of unix as the good stuff. ---Jon Callas

ת Anglican Churches in Various Nations. The Independent had a useful list of national Anglican churches, their sizes, and what they think about homosexuality: ... [ permalink, 03.11.10a.htm ]

ק Abortion and the First 14 Days. Via the Christianity Today weblog, I learn that the head of the Australian Anglican Church, which is relatively conservative, takes an intermediate position on abortion which I am surprised is not more common: that abortion is permissible very early (the first two weeks) but not later. [ permalink, 03.11.09d.htm ]

ר Conservative Catholics and Church Authority: McCloskey. John McCloskey shows what can happen when a smart Wall Streeter turns pastor. Via the Christianity Today weblog, the Boston Globe tells us: ... [ permalink, 03.11.09c.htm ]

ש Luther, Purity and Salvation. My wife and I saw the movie Luther a few days ago. It is a good movie--quite moving, without my quite knowing why, and with superlative acting by Peter Ustinov as Duke Frederick the Wise. It seemed historically and theologically accurate, too, which is remarkable. (I do wonder about the treatment of Carlstadt, and I did find the Peasants' War section completely confusing, but then, it was a confusing war.) The movie stimulated me to think about Purity and that gave me a new angle on the perplexing doctrine of Total Depravity-- the orthodox doctrine of Luther and Calvin (and perhaps Augustine?) that all men, even the apparently virtuous and or saintly, are sinful and do not deserve eternity with God. The proximate cause of my seeing this angle was a passage from Luther's Table Talk that I read after seeing the movie: ... [ permalink, 03.11.09b.htm ]

ת The NMR Nobel Prize. I posted on this some time ago. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long good article that persuades me that the Prize was properly given just to Professors Lauterbur and Mansfield, and not to Dr. Damadian. [ permalink, 03.11.09a.htm ]

ר Update: Treason in the Senate Intelligence Committee? On November 5 I commented on the treacherous Democratic Intelligence Committee memo. Via Taranto, we learn that at least one Democrat, Zell Miller, is outraged too, and uses words stronger than mine: [ permalink, 03.11.08b.htm ]

ש Supporting Evil: UNICEF and Public Radio. UNICEF has been given as patronage to an American liberal, who has ruined it, National Review tells us. For example: ... [ permalink, 03.11.08c.htm ]

ת Rules For Dealing with Bureaucrats. I just thought of a new rule: be sure and give them some piece of writing, even if it isn't the one they requested. For example, if they want you to write down the day you first heard the word "Africa", don't leave that entry blank. Instead, write down something like "Probably around May 3, 1961, but I don't remember." That way, the blank is filled-- and remember, Bureaucracy Abhors a Vacuum. A corollary is that if the rules demand a particular document, give the bureaucracy some document, even if it isn't the same one they asked for. ... [ permalink, 03.11.08a.htm ]

ש Conservative Environmentalism. A recent American Spectator article reminds me that it is a bit odd that conservationism and conservatism are not more closely linked. This would not quite be the liberal's conservationism, of course, since the conservative's objectives would tend more to beauty and less to a view of natural objects as gods, and the conservative would, I hope, be less fearful of poor health and more trustful of science. Yet it could be more extreme: the conservative might be less reluctant to say that he'd prefer saving Sequoias to saving starving children. The article is on the Montana landscape: ... [ permalink, 03.11.07b.htm ]

ת Blackjack Behavior. Professor Lloyd Cohen, of George Mason University, posted some of his observations on gambling psychology on the Econlaw discussion list. I asked if I could post them, and he not only did, but sent me lengthier notes on blackjack. Here are paragraphs making three good points, on the choice of house percentages, on moral flaws that make people lose, and on the practical application of the Gambler's Ruin paradox: ... [ permalink, 03.11.07a.htm ]

ק School Choice. Clint Bolick and others debated inner city school voucher programs at the law school today, and our law-and-econ lunch bunch decided to go there and eat the free pizza. Bolick was very good. Listening to his opponents disparage the motives of school choice advocates, though, I wished the discussion had focussed on the basic question:

Why should a parent not be able to transfer his child and the government spending on education from an expensive school that teaches badly to a cheaper school that teaches well? ... [ permalink, 03.11.06a.htm ]

ר IU's Affirmative Action Bake Sale. I am proud that when students at Indiana University held one of the anti- affirmative-action bake sales that have been popular lately, our Administration did not suppress it, nor did other students try to disrupt it. As the Indiana Daily Student says, the idea of the sale was that: ... [more, permalink, 03.11.06b.htm ]

ש Civil Arrest Warrants and Debt Collection. The Wall Street Journal had a long article titled "Hospitals Try Extreme Measures To Collect Their Overdue Debts" on October 30. It describes an interesting legal practice akin to debtor's prison and to criminal contempt: ... [ permalink, 03.11.06c.htm ]

ת Volokh Conspiracy on Leszek Kolakowski's Prize. Jacob Levy has a very well crafted post at the Volokh Conspiracy demolishing Brian Leiter's criticism of the award to Leszek Kolakowski, a Chicago professor, of the John W. Kluge Prize. I like reading Professor Leiter, because he is willing to take strong stands, despite the fact that his stands are wrong more often than not. He is specific enough that it is possible to refute him, something I can't say for everyone, and, after all, a web-log is not supposed to be as careful as a journal article. I don't know much about Kolakowski except he wrote a moderately good book with the wonderfully direct title, God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism. Jonathan Edwards couldn't have said it better! ... [permalink, 03.11.06d.htm ]

ש Laws on Children Drinking Wine with Parents. Here is an issue that illustrates several interesting conflicts within conservatism: the morality of drinking wine, the role of the family versus the state, the role of the federal versus state government, and whether the ends justify the means. In brief: should people under age 21 be allowed to drink wine with their parents or spouses at restaurants? This is reported in The American Spectator. ... [ permalink, 03.11.05b.htm ]

ת Democrat Partisanship on the Intelligence Committee. Intelligence committees don't work well unless their members put country above party to a greater degree than in, say, a tax committee. Leaks are harmful, and open discussion especially useful. And it is desirable that the majority party and the Administration feel safe in sharing information with the minority party, since we want the minority party involved. Here is the story: ... [ permalink, 03.11.05a.htm ]

ש Games and Information: New Chinese Translation. My book, Games and Information, has a new simplified characters mainland Chinese translation, to join the complex characters one from Free China.

... [permalink, 03.11.04a.htm ]

ת Linda Tripp Privacy Violation. Linda Tripp just settled her privacy lawsuit against the Defense Department for many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here is the court document for the settlement. This is of some interest because it is a case of apparent actual government violation of privacy for nefarious political purposes, as opposed to the hypothetical invasions that people fear under the Patriot Act. [ permalink, 03.11.04b.htm ]

צ State Department Incompetence. Michael Ledeen has a very good,if angry, article in National Review, "Who got fired for sending Paul Wolfowitz to sleep in a deathtrap?" That is a question I always ask when the government makes a stupid mistake (I hope in this case that no American actually intended for Wolfowitz to die in an attack). ... [ permalink, 03.10.03a.htm]

ק France as an Enemy. Via Instapundit, Belgravia tells us,

Aziz has told interrogators that French and Russian intermediaries repeatedly assured Hussein during late 2002 and early this year that they would block a U.S.-led war through delays and vetoes at the U.N. Security Council. Later, according to Aziz, Hussein concluded after private talks with French and Russian contacts that the United States would probably wage a long air war first, as it had done in previous conflicts. By hunkering down and putting up a stiff defense, he might buy enough time to win a cease-fire brokered by Paris and Moscow.

ר Environmentalist Deceit. National Review's report on the unreliability of a major article on global warming provides more evidence for why environmentalist claims need to be regarded skeptically, not just even if they are claimed to be factual but especially when they are claimed to be factual. [ permalink, 03.10.03c.htm]

ש Media Bias: San Francisco Chronicle. The Volokh Conspiracy has a good analysis of the San Francisco Chronicle's article lauding Robert Fisk, the notoriously mendacious and anti-American reporter who gave rise to the weblog term "fisking". ... [ permalink, 03.10.03d.htm]

ת Weblog Controversy--Chronicle of Higher Education. My web-log has made it to the front page of the November 7 Chronicle of Higher Education. I'm glad the photos turned out okay. ... [permalink, 03.10.03e.htm]

ת An Eye for an Eye. Pastor Whitaker gave one of his best sermons ever today at ECC on self-defence and dealing with one's enemies. Oddly enough, there was a bit of connection to the paper I've been working on this past few days, "Buyer-Option Contracts Restored: Renegotiation, Inefficient Threats, and the Hold-Up Problem," which Professor Lyon and I recently had accepted at The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. ... [ permalink, 03.10.02a.htm]

ר De mortuis nil nisi bonum. I was just thinking about the Latin maxim, "De mortuis nil nisi bonum," (About the Dead, Say Nothing but Good). I think that maxim very pernicious. If a dead person was vile, we should say so, as a deterrent to other evildoers and as an education to the young. ... [more, permalink, 03.10.01a.htm]

ש: Schumpeter, Ayres, and Nalebuff. We were talking about the Ayres and Nalebuff Why Not column and website at my law- and-econ lunch last Thursday. The old columns are here and the website is there. I realize that some quotes I'd been teaching from Schumpeter's 1912 book, The Theory of Economic Development, were relevant: ... [ permalink, 03.10.01b.htm]

ת The Political Compass Conservatism Index. Steve Bainbridge and Brian Leiter have enjoyed the Political Compass survey and index of political beliefs. I tried it too, but am not as enthusiastic as Professor Leiter. My rating is ... [ permalink, 03.10.01c.htm]

ק Discounting in Bargaining Games. Ariel Rubinstein was kind enough to alert me that when I say that the only interesting sorts of discounting in bargaining games are a constant discount rate per period and a constant bargaining cost per period, I am missing an important case---that of concave utility. So I've revised my entry notes on Rubinstein (1982) for Readings in Games and Information (May 2001). Professor Rubinstein hasn't seen my revision yet, but I hope I've got the idea of what we talked about by phone. ... [permalink, 03.10.30d.htm ]

ר Chancellor Brehm Resigns. Chancellor Brehm, who so publicly deplored this web-log a month ago, has resigned as Chancellor, effective December 31, not for an outside job, but just remaining in some kind of advisory position as described in the press release. Rumor has it that the Trustees decided this last spring, and that the previous chancellor, Professor Gros-Louis, will replace her. The former Law School Dean, Professor Aman, is another contender. We'll see. ... [permalink, 03.10.30a.htm ]

ש: The Courts vs. Democracy. In the October 24, 2003 Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger writes eloquently of how judicial activism has led to increasingly bitter feelings that may end in violence ... [more, permalink, 03.10.30b.htm ]

ת American Moslems: Imam Wahhaj. From the October 24, 2003 Wall Street Journal we learn about one of the most prominent Moslem clerics in America: ... [ permalink, 03.10.30c.htm ]

ת The Patriot Act. The Patriot Act is widely unpopular among intellectuals, and condemned by the very Congressmen and Senators who voted for it, but it's not obvious why. The amazing thing is how feeble the criticisms are. They seem to amount to moaning about the bad things an evil Justice Department *could* do under the Act, with a complete absence of examples of anything it actually *did* do or any discussion of the myriad bad things an evil Justice Department could do and has done (under Clinton) even without the Act. The Weekly Standard has a good article on this (boldface mine). ... [ permalink, 03.10.29a.htm ]

ת: The Value of Liberty. What is wrong with government regulations? Well, first, of course, they are likely to be the result of special interests, and inefficient. But even good regulations have a cost that I don't see mentioned: the cost of having to act carefully so as to avoid breaking the rules. In a society with numerous regulations, people spend a lot of time learning about the regulations. How can I build a model of this? ... [ permalink, 03.10.28a.htm ]

ש: Italian Politician Umberto Bossi. National Review tells us about an Italian politician to watch:

Umberto Bossi, Berlusconi's controversial reform minister, ended his boss's day in Strasbourg colorfully enough. According to the Daily Telegraph, Bossi told reporters that the EU elite were "filthy pigs" whose ambition was to "make paedophilia as easy as possible." And the euro? A "total flop." But then he came to his senses and explained that the EU was actually only "transforming vices into virtues" and "advancing the cause of atheism every day." [permalink, 03.10.27a.htm ]

ת: Logical Symbols. Professor Mark Kaplan talked about bayesianism in a workshop today. Before the workshop, he helped me with a couple of logical symbols. I'd been looking for a symbol for " X is not necessarily equal to, but maybe equal to Y". He suggested I write:

~ x=y ... [ permalink, 03.10.27b.htm ]

ר: Aquinas on Creationism and Biblical Interpretation. Thomas Aquinas talks about how to interpret Scripture in his Summa, 68:1, "Whether the firmament was made on the second day? ... [ permalink, 03.10.26a.htm ]

ש: The Muslim Chaplains Scandal. I just read the best description of this I've seen so far, in a World magazine story. My first thought was how odd it is that the Democrats, while attacking Bush so unfairly and weakly on lots of issues, have neglected a real scandal such as why the military, very likely under political pressure, recruited chaplains who were obviously possible traitors, and then didn't even watch them very carefully. Then I realized that the reason President Bush made this bad decision was no doubt as a favor to American Muslim voters, and that is the same reason why the Democrats won't criticize him for it. Anyway, here are some excerpts: ... [ permalink, 03.10.26b.htm ]

ת: GOLLIN AFFAIR UPDATE: LEGAL ANGLE. Professor Gollin's website about diploma mills was moved under pressure from his university, as I reported yesterday and as Erin O'Connor reports both more elegantly and more forcefully today. Eugene Volokh says ... [ permalink, 03.10.26c.htm ]

ר: GOLLIN ACADEMIC FREEDOM AFFAIR: FACTS. I've just come across a case of a very good university, the University of Illinois, apparently suppressing a professor's academic freedom to avoid offending diploma mills. A tenured physics professor, George Gollin, set up a website on the subject of diploma mills-- low-quality schools that sell unaccredited degrees-- on the computer used by his high energy physics group. (This computer contained other pages, including a a recipe for stir-fried kangaroo, which apparently the University thinks is appropriate for such a computer.) On July 25, CBS News did a story about his website. The university started getting complaints and threats of lawsuits from the diploma mills.

What happened next is a little unclear, but by October, Professor Gollin had moved his materials to the Oregon Office of Degree Authorization. It is linked to there prominently from the George Gollin homepage, so, as usual with university attempts to suppress information, the information didn't really get suppressed, but the university was able to demonstrate its strong desire that it be suppressed. What is unclear is why the website was moved. ... [ permalink, 03.10.25a.htm ]

ש: GOLLIN ACADEMIC FREEDOM AFFAIR: COMMENTARY. (For the facts, go to 03.10.25a.htm ) It sure looks to me as if the University pressured Professor Gollin to remove his webpage. ... [more, permalink, 03.10.25b.htm ]

ת: I SKIPPED A DAY: OPTIONS. I missed making an entry yesterday because I was up for the BLISS conference (Bloomington-Indianapolis-Purdue) in Indianapolis, my fifth conference of the past month. I was the first presenter, at 8:30 a.m., and was commentor on an afternoon paper. I hadn't finished the paper yet, and didn't start making my overheads and handouts till 8:30 pm the night before. The presentation, on "When Does Extra Risk Strictly Increase the Value of Options?", went well, though, and I slept almost 11 hours last night. ... [permalink, 03.10.25c.htm ]

October 22, 2003. ש: Race and Religion in the 1950's. ת: EUnuchs, and the Fallacy that Combining Weak Things Creates Strength.

ש: Race and Religion in the 1950's. Via Clayton Cramer, I learn that there is a a new book out on the 1950's civil rights movement and religion: A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, by David L. Chappell. It is reviewed in The Atlantic Monthly, ... [ permalink, 03.10.22a.htm ]

ת: EUnuchs, and the Fallacy that Combining Weak Things Creates Strength. Jed Babbin in National Review has a nice turn of phrase and a good idea:

The EUnuchs -- those nations of Old Europe who opposed our determination to remove Saddam from power ... [ permalink, 03.10.22b.htm ]

ש: A Website Download Program: Httrack 3.30. I found what seems to be an excellent program for downloading not just a web page, but all the sites linked to that webpage. I used it to download usefully organized copies of Blackstone's Commentaries and the Uniform Commercial Code, two documents I wished I'd had on my laptop during the two recent law-and- economics conferences. ... [ permalink 03.10.21a.htm ]

ת: A Useful Audience: Aristotle, Augustine, and so forth. When I take a position either different from 90% of university professors, or the same as 90% of them, perhaps I should look to a different audience as a check. The liberal intelligentsia may think I'm taking a position that is crazy or one that is obviously correct. But what audience should I really care about? An easy suggestion is to ask "What would Jesus do?", but for many purposes that's not useful; Omniscience is too high a standard for me to be able to answer the question.

God is too high a standard for this purpose. How about an imaginary oversight committee of intelligent people with diverse points of view? Say--- Aristotle, Han Fei, St. Augustine, David Hume, and Winston Churchill? ... [ permalink, more 03.10.21b.htm ]

ת: Rabbi Rentseeking in Israel. David Bernstein has a good description at Volokh of how not to conduct a traditional Jewish funeral, with observations on the decadence of the Jewish clergy. He draws the parallel with Christianity; I wonder if Islam and Buddhism provide further examples? ... [ permalink, 03.10.20a.htm ]

ר: Web-Log Operation. I've been putting things up on this web-log as I discover them or as convenient (often I post several things at once), while making a strong effort to post at least one item every day. I think now I'll try putting some item on religion up every Sunday. Contrary to the Westminster Confession, Christians are not obligated to keep a holy day like the Sabbath. Indeed, that smacks of judaizing-- imposing the ceremonial obligations of Judaism in the way condemned in the New Testament. The first relevant passage I found is Galatians 2:14-16: [ permalink, 03.10.19c.htm ]

ש: Aquinas on Religious Belief and Evidence. An interesting passage from the Summa Theologica, 1:8, "Whether sacred doctrine is a matter of argument?" with my boldfacing. Note in reading this that for Aquinas, the definition of an "article of faith" is something that cannot be proven naturally, so, for example, the existence of God is not an article of faith for him. ... [ permalink, 03.10.19b.htm ]

ת: APPLICABILITY OF OLD TESTAMENT LAW: The Woman Taken in Adultery. A sermon a week or two ago made me understand this story much better, by telling me that the Pharisees hoped to put Jesus in the difficult position of either repudiating Leviticus or rebelling against Roman law. Here is the story from John 8:3-11. [ permalink, 03.10.19a.htm ]

Today I had a good idea. Why, when there is so much wasted space in cars, do we put things on the seats, the back shelf, or the glove compartment? Instead, attach things to the dashboard and roof in places where space is otherwise useless. I've attached my MP3 player's remote control on the dashboard, and a box of tissues on the ceiling. This is practical even with due regard for visibility and for the reaction of such objects to a car crash. I used velcro on the car and the object, which allows for future repositioning.

I should let Ian Ayres and Barry Nalebuff know about this, since they have a wonderful Forbes column called "Why Not". ... [permalink, 03.10.18a.htm ]

ר: PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS IN INDIA. Christianity Today tells us of new evidence for why the British should have stayed in India: the Hindu government wants to make it illegal for Untouchables to convert to Christianity: [ permalink, 03.10.17a.htm ]

ש: UNPATRIOTIC, THEIVING, DEMOCRATS: MADELINE ALBRIGHT. Via Drudge, Yahoo News informs us that the former Secretary of State, unembarassed by her complicity as a board member in secretly paying millions to the president of the New York Stock Exchange, is trying to earn a few extra bucks in France by criticizing America. ... [more, permalink, 03.10.17b.htm ]

ת: National Merit Scholars at Various Universities. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported (subscription only), August 29, 2003, Volume 49, Issue 30, Page A37, on how many National Merit Scholars went to various colleges, and whether the colleges paid for them. I've abridged the table: ... [ permalink, 03.10.17c.htm ]

ר: THE MRI NOBEL PRIZE: WHO DESERVES IT? I don't know who really deserved the Nobel Prize for MRI that was given out in 2003, but I found the WSJ article below interesting. [ permalink, 03.10.16c.htm ]

ש: NUCLEAR POWER'S NAME. The MRI process was renamed to remove the word "nuclear", the the WSJ tells us:

For their discovery of what would be called "nuclear magnetic resonance," or NMR, they won the Nobel Prize, too. NMR was later re-christened "magnetic resonance imaging," or MRI, to avoid the troubling word "nuclear."

ת: PRIVATE POLICE. I must remember to write on this subject. It is closely tied to the question of what conduct ought to be illegal. Let us start, though, with a system in which, like the present system, an elected government decides what conduct is illegal. There are different ways to enforce the law.

1. In most countries, I think, there are two sets of enforcement agents, the army (and navy, etc.) and the police, both made up of government employees, but administered separately. [ permalink, 03.10.16c.htm ]

ת: DNA TESTING AND INSURANCE. The local paper had a story on the unanimous support of the Senate and a supposedly conservative President in favor of forbidding insurance companies to use DNA testing to set higher rates for people who are more likely to become ill: [ permalink, 03.10.15a.htm ]

ת: ENGLISH DEPARTMENTS. Erin O'Connor says that university English departments have chosen to move away from literature and writing so much that it is questionable why they continue to exist: [more, permalink, 03.10.14a.htm ]

ר: WILSON, THE PATRIOT ACT, AND THE GUANTANAMO SPIES. David Frum contrasts the media's interest in Plame and Wilson with its disinterest in Moslems spying for terrorists: [ permalink, 03.10.13a.htm ]

ש: THE CONFUSION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. From Instapundit I see that Mark Steyn puts something well that others have noticed too: that the Democratic Party is playing defense, with no new ideas and an emphasis on implausible attacks. [ permalink, 03.10.13b.htm ]

ת: BEST-SELLER LISTS AND HILLARY'S BOOK. James Taranto of the WSJ has another reminder that the New York Times bestseller list is just a list of local bestsellers, not state or national ones. [ permalink, 03.10.13c.htm ]

THE UNITED NATIONS BANS SPANKING IN CANADA. Well, that's not quite accurate, but it's close enough to be disturbing. As the National Post tells us,

The UN has told the Canadian government to ban all forms of corporal punishment of youngsters -- including even a light slap. [ permalink, 03.10.12a.htm ]

SAMMY DAVIS JUNIOR AND REIMBURSING FOR LOW QUALITY. Honesty and reputation alike should lead to the following story about singer Sammy Davis Junior, described in the New York Observer, happening more often: [ permalink, 03.10.12b.htm ]

POCAHANTAS AND HOW MEN AND WOMEN THINK. At the Midwest Law and Economics Association Meeting yesterday, Professor Robin Malloy of Syracuse showed, as part of his talk, an excerpt from the Disney cartoon movie Pocahontas which I think is a nice example of miscommunication between the sexes. [ permalink, 03.10.11a.htm ]

TORTIOUS INTERFERENCE AND ALIENATION OF AFFECTIONS. My own talk on tortious interference with contract went well at the Midwest Law and Economics Association meeting in Indy, even though the paper is still at a rather early stage. I'm generally skeptical of the tort, except in the one application where it is specifically disallowed in Section 766 of the Restatement Second of Torts: marriage. [ permalink, 03.10.11b.htm ]

ALABAMA POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. David Bernstein reports that the Alabama Scholars Association, which I think must be the analog of our Indiana Association of Scholars, has aroused the ire of the University of Alabama because it sponsored his visit of October 9. Here, from the Volokh Conspiracy, are excerpts from a letter he quotes: [ permalink, 03.10.10b.htm ]

BLACK QUARTERBACKS. James Taranto of the WSJ discusses a study titled "Race, Football and Television: Examining the Black Quarterback Effect" by three Duke economists, Peter Arcidiacono, Jacob Vigdor and Eric Aldrich:

The three economists analyzed ratings for ABC-TV's "Monday Night Football" between 1997 and 2001 and found that "Monday Night Football games featuring black quarterbacks have Nielsen ratings 11% higher than otherwise identical games with two white starting quarterbacks. " [ permalink, 03.10.10a.htm ]

PRESTIGE VERSUS CASH. Another good observation of Joseph Conrad, from chapter 6 of The Secret Agent , is about a variety of Limousine Liberal. The old lady in the novel is a former beauty, an aristocrat, a social leader, and the patroness of the utopian anarchist Michaelis:

She had come to believe almost his theory of the future, since it was not repugnant to her prejudices. She disliked the new element of plutocracy [more, permalink, 03.10.09b.htm ]

THE CIA VERSUS THE PRESIDENT. Representative Peter King has a good New York Post op-ed, "THE CIA LEAK: ROGUE AGENCY?". The theme:

My concern is about something far more ominous. It is what I see to be a systematic pattern of conduct being carried out by elements within the Central Intelligence Agency constituting a virtual covert operation against the Bush White House - a covert operation designed to protect the spy agency's turf and deflect charges of incompetence.

CONSENSUS AND DISSENT. Many organizations operate by consensus. Somebody makes a suggestion, others discuss changing it; if consent is not going to be unanimous, the suggestion or changes are withdrawn without a formal vote. I have observed that this ordinarily works in a large body to discourage dissent, create confusion, and slow everything down. The Bloomington Faculty Council meeting yesterday was an example. [ permalink, 03.10.08a.htm ]

COMMIES IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT. I remembered a line from a college song, "Cannot trust the State Department/Every one's a commie slave," when I read James Taranto's recent item which refers to a State Department website titled "Famous Speeches". [ permalink, 03.10.07a.htm ]

Update, October 9: This episode is a good illustration of how the political appointees who run an agency do have the authority to get things changed--but only if they know what's going on. If they don't, the career people can do whatever they want. The reason it's a good illustration? The website is now drastically different, two days later, as Mr. Taranto reports:

On Monday we noted some curious omissions from the State Department Web page listing "famous speeches" by American leaders. Since then, the folks at Foggy Bottom have made some additions to the list, including speeches by Presidents Eisenhower, Reagan and both Bushes. A speech by Hillary Clinton that appeared there before no longer does.

THE PLAME AFFAIR, THE STATUTES, AND WHISTLEBLOWING. I continue to find it mystifying why Democrats are getting so excited about the Plame affair. Here are a few new ideas, (A) on the necessary intent for a leak to be criminal, (B) on using anti-leak statutes to punish whistleblowers, and (C) on Mr. Wilson's role in revealing intelligence information. ... [ permalink, 03.10.06c.htm ]

CHANGE IN ADDRESS AND FORMAT. I've just changed the address and format of this weblog. It will now be at 0.rasmusen.htm, with just a brief file, rather than a brief and a full one. The brief file will link to permalinks that have the full versions of entries and will also serve as archives. One of these days I will organize the permalinks by subject and also add a search engine. [permalink, 03.10.06b.htm ]

THE GERMAN PRESS AND IRAQ. Michael Fumento comments in National Review today on anti-American German reporting on Iraq in the Financial Times Deutschland. It's interesting how popular quotations and "human interest" have become in reporting, given that they are so easily manufactured to support the biases of the reporters and are such a good way for a reporter to lie and then disclaim responsibility. [ permalink, 03.10.06a.htm ]

&Chi. RIESEBERG ON SUNFLOWER SPECIATION. The local paper reported today that Indiana University Professor Loren Rieseberg just won a Macarthur Award for his work on how new species of sunflowers develop. According to some people, he is the number one scholar of plant evolution. So this would be a source to look to for examples of the minutia of particular new species' developing. ... [ permalink, 03.10.05a.htm ]

&Psi. WHAT IS "SCIENCE"? The SEAL conference had quite a bit of discussion of this topic, related to the particular question of "Is Intelligent Design theory science?" I think the question is a bad one. ... [ permalink, 03.10.05b.htm ]

&Omega. USING RELIGION IN SCIENCE. What is the relationship between religion and science? The emphasis has ordinarily been on using our knowledge of Nature to teach us about God. I think it would be more fruitful to use our knowledge of God to teach us about Nature. Let me explain. ... [ permalink, 03.10.05c.htm ]

&Chi. TEACHING EVOLUTION. The SEAL conference yesterday had an interesting but a bit odd session on "Intelligent Design". This was presented as a conspiracy by five or so evangelical Christian scholars from various disciplines to try to persuade the world that evolution theory is bunk and God created the world directly. What made it odd was that it took about three sessions before I could get much idea of what the Intelligent Design idea is. All the presenters were deeply hostile to the idea, which is fine, but I wish they'd stated the position they were attacking before the attacks. The attacks themselves were all on the motives, credentials, and publishing outlets of the "ID" people, it being taken for granted that they are wrong in their ideas. ... [ permalink, 03.10.04b.htm ]

&Psi. OLD TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS. I learned something contrary to the conventional wisdom on the accuracy of the Masoretic Old Testament text from Jim Davila at Paleojudaica: ... [ permalink, 03.10.04c.htm ]

&Omega. REGULAR WEBLOGGING. I try to put something up every day, but yesterday the SEAL Conference (of which more later) and the three-hour length of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio interrupted. During a boring tenor's aria in the opera, though, I had an idea for how to reorganize this site. I guess if I'd had my laptop along, I could have posted here too-- but my keyboard isn't quiet enough anyway.

&Chi. THINKING AND TRUTH. I was talking with someone today, and realized that there was a fundamental difference between us in the way we thought. An example shows this best. I said that one of three things must be true: 1. Pastors should be ordained by bishops; 2. Pastors should not be ordained by bishops; 3. It does not matter whether pastors are ordained by bishops. I think she didn't want to make a choice, and thought that all three could be true simultaneously. Or, rather, I focussed on whether statements were true or false, but she did not think that was important, or perhaps even meaningful. To her, what was important was whether a statement hurt somebody's feelings or not, and whether it was true or false was irrelevant. ... [ permalink, 03.10.02a.htm ]

&Psi. SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND COMMUNISM. Someone on a message board said that although in the past few decades the Russian abortion rate has been extremely high, the Soviets banned abortion until 1955. Another message board post said that homosexuality was illegal was legalized by the Bolsheviks, but then was illegal from 1933 to 1993. So I suppose American Communists of 1950 would have said that abortion and homosexuality were bad things, something I guessed at in an earlier post. ... [ permalink, 03.10.02b.htm ]

&Omega. PLAME-WILSON AFFAIR. More and more this is looking trivial, though one never knows. The Washington Times again shows its superiority to the Washington Post by informing us that the CIA is required by law to refer possible criminal disclosures of identities to the Justice Department, and refers about 50 per year. The story also says, ... [ permalink, 03.10.02c.htm ]

&Omega. CONSERVATISM IN ACADEMIA: FAIR TREATMENT. There's been some discussion in weblogs recently ( summarized by Professor Drezner) on conservatives in academia. The two questions are their numbers and whether they get fair treatment. ... [ permalink, 03.10.01a.htm ]

&Phi. VOLOKH ON WEBLOG TOPIC CHOICE. Eugene Volokh has an excellent post on how to choose topics for one's weblog: ... [ permalink, 03.09.30a.htm ]

&Chi. PLAME LINKS. This has been burning up the Blogworld this past couple of days. Brad DeLong makes the good suggestion that the CIA wouldn't move against the White House unless it has info that a crime has been committed (but is the best defense against charges of misconduct a good offense?). Mark Kleiman presents the extreme pro-Wilson view. May, at National Review, tells us about Wilson, and Hobbsonline gives us more on Wilson's anti-Bush views. ... [ permalink, 03.09.30b.htm ]

&Psi. WEBLOG COMMENT FEATURE. I've been thinking of constructing a comments section-- maybe inviting comments by email and then putting them in a separate text file linked to this one--- because comments can be very valuable. ... [ permalink, 03.09.30c.htm ]

&Omega. UPDATE, September 30. THE PLAME-WILSON AFFAIR. In some previous post, I gave my take on this. In brief: The CIA commissioned anti-war former Clinton official Wilson to go to Niger and see if Iraq was trying to buy uranium there. He came back and said they were not, and later wrote a scathing op-ed in the New York Times accusing President Bush of ignoring his report. Robert Novak then reported that Wilson's wife, "Valerie Plame", worked for the CIA and had suggested Wilson go to Niger. Wilson, Sentator Schumer, and various weblogs then complained that Novak's source had violated federal law by releasing the name of a CIA covert operative, and should be sent to prison. ... [ permalink, 03.09.30d.htm ]

&Chi. EDWARD SAID IS DEAD. Edward Said, the mendacious scholar of Islam, just died. ... [ permalink, 03.09.29a.htm ]

&Chi. A FEMINIST MEMORIAL. While walking on the campus of the University of Toronto last week I came across a plaque with the following inscription: ... [ permalink, 03.09.28a.htm ]

&Omega. WEB LOG CONTROVERSY. Just to keep track: there have been articles in ... [ permalink, 03.09.28b.htm ]

&Chi. TERRORISM. In Chicago I was reading Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent again, and I see why I put it on my Christmas list a while back. Here is what Karl Yundt the terrorist says: ... [ permalink, 03.09.27a.htm ]

&Omega. RELAXATION IN CHICAGO. Yesterday I failed to post an entry because I was on a short vacation in Chicago, something I highly recommend to anybody who needs to revive their energies. ... [ permalink, 03.09.27b.htm ]

&Chi. THE DEATH PENALTY. The law-and-economics lunch bunch had the unusual treat today of a visit from Professor Hoffman, who knows all the details of death penalty law. He has raised to his class, and to us, the question of how one writes a law to make the certainty that the court would be correct to impose the death penalty greater than the certainty for other kinds of criminal cases. Currently, states have the same "reasonable doubt" standard for death penalty cases that they have for other criminal cases, and the same kinds of rules for what evidence can be admitted. Death penalty cases get a lot more scrutiny, but via extra spending on defense and prosecution lawyers, extra attention from judges, and easier appeal. What else might be done? ... [ permalink, 03.09.25a.htm ]

&Omega. WEB LOG TOPICS. I oughtn't to dwell too much on any one issue, including--especially--- homosexuality, so I'll give that topic a rest until at least November 1. Also, either the heat will have died down, or I'll at least have renewed energy-- and I do promise that I'll return to it. By that time, I'll have finished with the the three October conferences that are going to be held in Indiana-- the Midwest Law and Economics Association, the Midwest Theory Meetings, and the Society for Evolutionary Economics and Law. And by that time I'll have read the numerous articles to which helpful readers have pointed me on the topic, and met with a few people who will share with me their personal experiences with homosexuality. In the meantime, I'll continue to try to provoke thought on a variety of other topics. ... [permalink, 03.09.25b.htm ]

&Omega. AIRLINE SECURITY: KNIVES. Via Tyler Cowen at Volokh Conspiracy, blogger Gary Leff tells us that ... [ permalink, 03.09.24a.htm ]

&Omega. FACULTY COUNCIL IRAQ RESOLUTION. Chancellor Brehm was helpful when the Bloomington Faculty Council passed a resolution on the War in Iraq last spring. Let me recount that, a good practice when annoyed by someone. I suggested a "support the troops" resolution to BFC President Eno, who gave me the good advice that he didn't think it would have much chance of getting through with a strong enough vote to make it worthwhile. I asked him for an example of someone who he thought would probably be opposed, and he suggested Professor Marsh. She took my idea seriously, and rewrote my draft completely, but in a way that satisfied both of us: ... [ permalink, 03.09.23a.htm ]

&Omega. THE HISTORY OF PALESTINE. I have mentioned the 2002 Historical Atlas of Jerusalem by Meir Ben- Dov before. Here's a chronology of control (rounded to the nearest century or so):

1000-600 BC: Israel and Judah---Jewish states with Jerusalem as their capital.
600- 150 BC: Babylonia, Persia, and Alexander the Great and his successors. Just a province of a state with a capital elsewhere. ... [ permalink, 03.09.22a.htm ]

&Omega. UNIVERSITY WEAPONS POLICY. I was looking at the Indiana University weapons policy the other day. ... [ permalink, 03.09.21a.htm ]

&Chi. MENCKEN AS DISTURBER OF THE PEACE. I've been meaning to read William Manchester's H.L. Mencken: Disturber of the Peace (1950) for some time, so I brought it along to read on the plane. I'll have to think about how far I agree with the quotes from Mencken at the start of the book, but they're worth remembering: [more, permalink, 03.09.20c.htm ]

&Omega. THANKFUL THE PROTESTERS ARE MOVING ALONG. From Toronto, writing between sessions of the American Law and Economics Association conference, I see that Mr. Bauder, the IU Coordinator, made a point of telling our student newspaper that the point of yesterday's rally at the business school induction ceremony wasn't to go after Eric Rasmusen. Good! I'm thankful, and so will not mention the affair any further here. [ permalink, 03.09.20b.htm ]

&Psi. UPDATE: EAVESDROPPING LAWS AND LINDA TRIPP. An earlier post discussed the laws some states have against secretly recording one's own conversations, and, in particular, the case of Linda Tripp, prosecuted for the trouble she caused Clinton, and Mr. Hyde of Massachusetts, prosecuted for taping police misconduct. ... [ permalink, 03.09.18a.htm ]

&Chi. MURDERERS AS PROFESSORS. The September 12 Chronicle of Higher Education tells the story of Paul Krueger, a professor of "work-force development" at Penn State, who in 1965 at age 17 brutally murdered three men for the fun of it.[ permalink, 03.09.18a.htm ]

&Omega. GONE FOR A FEW DAYS. I'm off to the American Law and Economics Association for the weekend. It's meeting in Toronto, with a Canadian President. It will be healthy for me to get away from the hubbub for a few days and hear some research presented. I don't know if I'll be posting to the web-log till Monday or not.

&Phi. EVIDENCE ON HOMOSEXUALITY AND CHILD MOLESTING. I'm tired of people saying, for rhetorical effect, that Professor Rasmusen has no evidence to support his claim that homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to molest children. You'll find detailed discussion in earlier posts on why I made the claim. For now, though, it might make some people happy to see something that Professor Steven Willing at our well- regarded medical school cc'd me on from a couple of emails to Chancellor Brehm this morning:

"Of 170 pedophiles, 60 [40%] were homosexual, 45 [26%] were bisexual, 34% heterosexual." [With a population prevalence of 2.8%, this indicates that homosexuals are 14 times more likely to be pedophiles]. [ permalink, 03.09.17a.htm ]

&Psi. THE CHANCELLOR AND MY WEB-LOG: NEWS. Well, things are heating up again. I'm a member of the Bloomington Faculty Council, the IU-Bloomington faculty senate, and we met at 3:30 today for the first time this semester. I wondered whether any of the faculty would mention my web-log. None did-- except the Chancellor, Sharon Brehm. [more, permalink, 03.09.17b.htm ]

&Chi. THE CHANCELLOR AND MY WEB-LOG: ANALYSIS. How *do* I respond? I enjoyed working last spring with Chancellor Brehm on the Faculty Council's Iraq resolution, and expect to work well with her again. But... [ permalink, 03.09.17c.htm ]

&Omega. CERTAINTY EQUIVALENTS. I don't want people to think I'm obsessed with my web- log adventures, and I'm a bit proud of being able to come up with detailed class notes while under pressure, so if you want to see what my regular work involves, [more, permalink, 03.09.17d.htm ]

HERE IS WHERE I SHIFTED TO A NEW STYLE OF ARCHIVING September 15, 2003. &Omega. AUCTIONING OFF ISRAEL.

&Omega. AUCTIONING OFF ISRAEL. In an earlier post, I discussed the idea of auctioning off Palestinian immigrants-- paying any of them something on the order of $10,000 if he would be willing to emigrate to the West, and then auctioning off who would take them among the US, France, Canada, and so forth. When Julie Mortimer was visiting from Harvard last week, I brought this up, and it led to another application of the same idea: How about auctioning off all of Israel? [more]

&Omega. UPDATE: BELIEF AND EVIDENCE. Two verses are relevant to my September 13 post. First,

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)

Second, from the sermon I heard today, on the father of the child who needed healing but could not be healed by the Disciples,

And Jesus asked his father, "How long has he had this?"
And he said, "From childhood. And it has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us."
And Jesus said to him, "If you can! All things are possible to him who believes."
Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, "I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:21-24)

&Chi. BELIEF AND EVIDENCE. Last night I gave a half-hour lecture to the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship on belief and evidence, taking off from the William James essay I've recommended here before. I've posted my lecture notes in ascii and handout in powerpoint. They don't include the dig at Harvard that I, a Yale and Indiana man, added at the last minute (Harvard's seal says "Veritas"; those of Yale and Indiana University say "Lux et Veritas", Light *and* Truth). [more]

&Psi. SCIENCE AND OPINION. I'm slowly working my way through my emails. (Intermittent outages of my home internet connection are no help.) I've gotten several of the following sort:

1. Person X says he is deeply offended by my saying that homosexuals are more likely to be child molesters. [more]

&Omega. SOME SOURCES OF EVIDENCE. I thank E.R. (not myself!), E.N., M.M., and J.O, for the following links on child molestation and homosexuality, which take various positions on the issue. (If you don't mind having your full name mentioned, just let me know and I'll update this.) I haven't really looked at them yet, but I will one of these days, and will try to summarize them then. For now, though, readers might like to look at them directly. I also list the old Iain Murray post that responded to my initial exchange with Professor Volokh. "a1.htm#september13a"> [more]

&Psi. SMITH, MARSHALL, AND SCHUMPETER. We had a very good class yesterday, turning from mathematical methods to intellectual history and mixing the two nicely. If you like economics, and have Powerpoint, you might like my overheads quoting these three economists. There's lots of research to be done based on single sentences in these writers. I found one quote in Marshall interesting in light of the current Enron conviction, the exception that proves the rule: "a1.htm#september12a" > [more]

&Omega. ONE-LINERS, INSULTS, AND REAL DISCUSSION. Kirk Nathanson, a freshman here, emailed to say that he thought my September 10 post in which I quoted an unnamed professor attacking me and then called him a "Captain Ahab" style of Quaker was not a good reply to the attack. Kirk's question deserves an answer, and since it has general implications, and is at the crux of the controversy over my web-log, I thought I'd write it here. [more]

&Omega. JEWS FOR JESUS. One point I hope to make with this web-log is that theology is as interesting and intellectually challenging a subject as politics or economics. I don't know the religious affiliations of any but one of the Volokh Conspiracy folks, [more]

&Omega. MILITANT QUAKERS. Well, on September 9 I said that I hadn't gotten any faculty saying I should take down my website, as opposed to staff, but I actually got my first paper letter today, and it was a doozy. It was from someone in the humanities whose webpage says: "a1.htm#september10a" > [more]

&Phi. LESSONS OF THE WEB-LOG CONTROVERSY. Here is what happened. (I'll have to add links later, since I'm running short of time.)

For some months, I have kept a web-log, with few readers, as a sort of commonplace book. The Volokh Conspiracy raised the interesting question of why people object to homosexuals as schoolteachers, but not Hindus, since idolatry is a greater sin than sodomy. I replied with some arguments distinguishing Hindus from homosexuals, and The Volokh Conspiracy linked to my reply and answered it. My guess is that someone at IU read the Volokh Conspiracy, followed to my web-log, and complained to friends at IU, who circulated the news of my web-log by email. "a1.htm#september9a"> [more]

&Chi. WEB-LOG SOFTWARE. Someone complained that I didn't have a comment section on this web-log. Sorry, but I'm not using specialized software so I don't know how to do it. My permalinks are inconveniently set up, too for that reason. I like to use a minimal number of software programs. What I do is use the simple shareware text editor Textpad to write HTML code, which I then post on a website. That's why this doesn't look like other web-logs.

&Psi. BUSY WEEK. Readers may have wondered what the "site" referred to in the September 6 udpate was. I had a typo in the HTML, so the link didn't work, but I've fixed it now. This is the second week of classes, with teaching and administrative matters keeping me busy (not to mention the research papers I didn't quite finish over the summer, and the referee reports still to be done...), so my web-log may be a bit untidy for a while, especially in terms of cross-linking within the site. I'm trying to keep it going strong, though, lest intolerant people think they've discouraged me, and because my main purpose with this website has been to use it as a commonplace book to jot down thoughts and sources before I forget them. My email responses may be slow, too. A tip: if something obvious seems to be missing: check the SOURCE Html and see if it is hidden there because of a typo.

&Omega. HELL and REMORSE. It's not that I'm having a bad time (in fact, my class is going very well indeed), but I happened to be listening to Don Giovanni in the car and thought about how many chances Don Giovanni is given to repent before the statue carries him down to Hell at the end of the opera. What other literary and religious stories do we have on sinners facing punishment and their willingness or unwillingness to repent? This will have to be a later day's web-log in detail, but the list would include:

1. Mozart: Don Giovanni [more]

3. ANTI-RECORDING LAWS. Before I forget it, let me follow up on an earlier post, which I'll link to later when I have time, on the laws some states have forbidding a person to tape record a conversation he is having. This is the law that they were going to prosecute Linda Tripp on (whatever happened to that?) after she made an enemy of President Clinton. Reader R. Geoffrey Newbury pointed me to an appalling case he had heard about from some other blog he's now forgotten, the Massachusetts COMMONWEALTH vs. MICHAEL J. HYDE (2001). It seems some traffic police were obnoxious to a motorist they stopped, who made a tape of the conversation and used it to make a formal complaint at the police station about their obscenities, etc. The policemen were exonerated by the internal process, but:

In the meantime, the Abington police sought a criminal complaint in the Brockton Division of the District Court Department against the defendant for four counts of wiretapping in violation of G. L. c. 272, � 99. [more]

2. ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS THIS WEB-LOG. I'd hoped to write up some lessons I've learned from this controversy tonight, but it's gotten too late. Teaching this afternoon wiped out my energy, and followed some fancy footwork trying to get diagrams to work right in Scientific Workplace on my office computer, which has been deranged by Indiana University's policy of re-imaging operating systems after the MSBlaster worm hit. And then my Internet provider at home wouldn't let me on till 11 pm. So if you want to see an extended production from me, see the new Sections 3.5 and 3.6 of my game theory book, which I taught from today.

1. UPDATE: HOMOSEXUALITY AND PUBLIC OPINION. See below, September 6, for a correction, and some more data.

2. VEGGIE TALES BANKRUPTCY. The company that makes the Veggie Tales videos has filed for Chapter 11, Christianity Today says. It's the not uncommon story of a young company with great products overextending and getting into trouble. The company will keep operating and producing new videos-- bankruptcy doesn't necessarily shut down the operations of a firm-- but it will be taken over by a different company, and the owners will not be as rich as they were a couple of years ago. What is nice about the story is that the CEO accepts responsibility, and without feeling sorry for himself:

Vischer, whose role models included Walt Disney, and who often spoke of building a company as influential as the Disney Company, also blamed his decisions as Big Idea's CEO for the company's difficulties.

"We got ourselves upside down financially when everything was working wonderfully," Vischer told Christian Retailing. "When things were doing so well, I thought that was God wanting us to expand, so we grew like crazy. Now I think it was more me having all these great ideas in my head and being so excited that I wanted to do them all at once."

1. ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS THIS WEB-LOG. I'd meant to write up lessons of the controversy over this website this weekend, but got too busy revising Chapter 3 of Games and Information for my class tomorrow, and I really ought to answer the polite emails of the past few days. Tomorrow night I'll do the write-up. In the meantime, here's one thought: Rather than emailing me with counterarguments to my position, various people seem to have tried to get IU to shut me down. The result? My web-log still exists and has over ten times the number of readers it used to have. The lesson: intimidation can backfire.

2. ATTEMPTS TO SUPPRESS THIS WEB-LOG. I briefly moved this web-log to Geocities because some people at Indiana University disapprove of the views expressed in it. Officially, at least, that has now been worked out. I'll comment at length in a day or two, after I finish some work on the game theory book I'm teaching from. For now, the Indiana Daily Student and Bloomington Herald-Times and, not as fully, the Indianapolis Star stories have some straight reporting on the controversy. Commentary is available at the Volokh Conspiracy and Crooked Timber.

I would like to comment on one distortion I heard on talk radio yesterday from the various people condemning me: that there is no evidence of the ill effects of homosexuality. What I said in my web-log was that I did not have such evidence at hand, and rather than hurry out and research it, I'd wait till I happened to see it float by. Thus, I said, "I have no evidence that homosexuals are child molesters more often than normal people" in the same way as I would also say, "I have no evidence that men are child molesters more often than women" (as I did say in the web-log) or "I have no evidence that smoking causes cancer" or "I have no evidence that the earth is more than 5000 years old." Just because I don't have it at hand doesn't mean the evidence isn't there. And even if exhaustive search doesn't find any evidence that claim X is true, it might at the same time be true that the exhaustive search did not find any evidence that claim X was *not* true. See my August 25 post on philosopher William James's observations on this. As Aristotle says in Book I of the Ethics:

... it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

1. HOMOSEXUALITY AND PUBLIC OPINION. Pollingreport.com reports on three Gallup polls, all in 2003:

CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. July 25-27, 2003. N=1,006 adults nationwide. MoE � 3.

"Do you think homosexual relations between consenting adults should or should not be
legal?"

	Poll date  	 Should   	Should Not 	No Opinion % 			% 		   %

	7/25-27/03 		48 			46 				6 7/18-20/03 		50 			44
6 5/5-7/03 		60 			35 				5

UPDATE-September 8-9. I misread my own graph above-- by 48 to 46 percent, Americans thinks homosexuality should be legal. That doesn't alter my point, of course, which is that a substantial number of people think it should be illegal. I could have phrased things as "Only a minority of Americans think homosexuality should be legal--which is also true, since it's only 48%-- but the message of the polling data is that opinion is mixed and fluctuating.

That's the nice thing about web-logs-- and footnotes, for that matter. You shouldn't take things on my authority-- if anybody does, which is unlikely-- you should see what data and arguments I have.

Here's what the Gallup news service has to say (better than the graph I had up yesterday in this spot):

Gallup first asked about the legality of homosexuality in 1977, with a basic question worded as follows: "Do you think homosexual relations between consenting adults should or should not be legal?" At that point, Americans were evenly divided on the issue: 43% said yes, 43% said no and 14% weren�t sure.

Gallup has asked the question numerous times since then, and at the last asking in the May 2001 poll, a majority -- for the first time -- agreed with the "legal" perspective. Fifty-four percent of those interviewed said that homosexual relations should be legal, 42% not legal, with 4% unsure. The percentage saying that homosexual relations should be legal dropped to as low as 32% in 1986, perhaps due to either the conservative environment ushered in by the Reagan administration, or the beginning of widespread publicity surrounding AIDS and its prevalence in the homosexual community.

1. THE MARSHALL PLAN AND IRAQ. National Review has a nice Clifford May article on the politics of rebuilding Iraq. He first points out that Germany and France wouldn't want to contribute troops or other personnel to the task.

So what could the Europeans do to be useful? Well, they could contribute a whole lot of money to a sort of Marshall Plan for Iraq. [more]

1. STATUS OF CONVICTIONS WHEN AN APPELLANT DIES. The Boston Globe reports:

Upsetting victims of clergy sexual abuse, prosecutors who won a guilty verdict against John J. Geoghan for molesting a 10-year-old boy said yesterday his conviction will be erased because the former priest died while appealing the case.

...

"The Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that if a defendant dies while his appeal is pending, the indictments are to be remanded to the trial court with an order that they be dismissed," she said.

2. JUDGES AND THE DEATH PENALTY. James Taranto's WSJ Best of the Web makes a nice point:

"A federal appeals court overturned more than 100 death sentences in Arizona, Idaho and Montana Tuesday, ruling that condemned inmates in the three states were wrongly sent to death row by judges instead of juries, " the Associated Press reports. But if judges are incompetent to render death sentences, what makes them think they're competent to overturn them?

1. BUSTAMENTE AND MECHA. I guess I should repeat part of my post from August 30. I see plenty of people criticizing Lt.Gov. Bustamante for not renouncing his membership in Mecha. But it's much worse than that: he publicly voices *support* for the group, as Fox News tells us: [more]

3. HOMOSEXUAL TEACHERS. Eugene Volokh has a new post on the homosexuals-and-Hindus as schoolteachers issue. This is focussed just on the argument that homosexuals are risky as teachers because they are more likely to molest their students (as opposed to the moral examplar argument, or the parental preference argument). Professor Volokh says,

This allegation that male homosexuals are unusually likely to engage in sex crimes against children is a pretty serious charge, and it seems to me that such serious charges ought to be supported by some serious evidence... "a1.htm#september2a" target= "_blank"> [more]

2. BORING BOOKS OF THE BIBLE. Which is the most boring book of the Bible? After some thought, I've decided on Jeremiah, largely on account of its length. How about the most interesting? The Gospels, with Matthew on top in a compromise between length and interest. Then Jonah-- a lot of interest packed into a small space. Then Ecclesiastes, Genesis, and Acts, perhaps. Note that by "interesting" I don't mean "important".

1. OFFENSIVE CHRISTIANITY. Somehow I just remembered something Chris Atwood told me, to the following effect, about how not to offend. If you have to mention the spiritual, at least don't mention God. If you have to mention God, at least don't mention Jesus. If you have to mention Jesus, at least don't mention the Crucifixion. And if you have to mention the Crucifixion, at least don't mention blood. Needless to say, the Christian ought to sometimes offend.

1. LAND OWNERSHIP IN PALESTINE. One thing I've always wondered about is who owned the land in Palestine before 1948 and who owns it now. I'd be much more concerned over expropriation of private property than over transfer of tax rights from the Ottomans to Britain and then to Israel or Jordan. Palestine has not been a state for many hundreds of years (since the Crusaders?), but Palestinians have long owned land there. Also, I can't see what's wrong with Jewish settlements if they just consist of Jews buying land and living there. But the articles I read don't ever touch on questions of who owns what.

I've found a few sources which help, but I don't know how dependable they are. Here's what I've found. It seems that in Israel proper, the government owns almost all the land, and leases it out. [more]

1. ALLENDE AND CHILE. The web-log Valediction had a good post on Allende and Chile a while back that summarizes his downfall nicely, quoting from left-wing historians. Some excerpts on the question of legitimacy (much of the post is on how Allende wrecked the economy, which is a bit different issue):

In the presidential elections of 1970, Allende got 36.2% of the vote, Alessandri (National Party) 34.9% and Tomic (Christian Democratic Party) 27.8%. [more]

3. HOMOSEXUALITY AND CHRISTIANITY. The idea that Christianity teaches the homosexuality should be illegal simply because God commanded thus in the Bible needs to be clarified, I see from the postings of Eugene Volokh and Lawrence Solum. They assume that sodomy laws are religiously based, but I don't think that's the case.

First, it is conventional to divide Old Testament law into three parts: 1. Ceremonial law (e.g. sacrifices, unclean foods), "a1.htm#august30a" target= "_blank"> [more]

1. CONSERVATIVE FACTIONS AND BUSH. Gideon's Blog has a good comment on which kinds of conservatives should be happy with President Bush, and which kinds unhappy. He divides them into Catos (whose focus is on limited government), paleos, Christian Right, business, and neo-cons.

The Cato-oids are the only part of the Republican coalition decidedly on the outs in this administration. (Well, the paleos are on the outs, too, but I'm not sure the paleos are really part of the Republican coalition, not since Buchanan's revolt.) "a1.htm#august30a" target= "_blank"> [more]

1. UPDATE, AUGUST 29. I regret having gotten caught up in this, given the time it takes, but Mark Kleiman wrote me a good, conscientious email catching me in a mistake and bringing up points I hadn't addressed, so I'll correct and elaborate. Many of the ideas below (though certainly not the conclusions from them, which are usually opposite) are his.

Further details on evidence as to whether Mrs. Wilson is a covert operative for the CIA. Mr. Corn's July 16 article reports that she is "a woman known to friends as an energy analyst for a private firm". The July 22 Newsday article says [more]

2. OCCUPATIONAL LICENSING. The State of Indiana has a website on occupations that need licenses. The health ones are: "a1.htm#august29a" target="_blank"> [more]

1. More news is available on the Valerie Plame affair, in which Novak revealed that the wife of former ambassador Wilson (who is outraged that the Bush administration didn't believe him when he said that his visit to Niger proved that Iraq didn't try to buy uranium there) works for the CIA. The affair looks more and more like silly Democratic partisanship, though (Wilson is a Democrat.) There seems to be no evidence that Wilson'a wife is a covert operative, as opposed to the far greater number of people who do occasional work or are regular employees of the CIA. No wonder nobody much has picked up on the news. [more]

2. I just thought to check http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/events/past/winter03/wilson/ the career of Charles Wilson, the former State Dept. employee who went to Niger, couldn't find anything new, and publicly attacked the Bush Administration for not believing that he'd proved there were no Iraq-Niger contacts about uranium. [more]

1. Tyler Cowen notes in the Volokh Conspiracy that

George Liebmann has a provocative idea for making the Middle East a more peaceful place: Offer Palestinians the chance to emigrate to the United States and other Western countries.

Professor Volokh posts the good question of why Christians object to homosexuals as schoolteachers when they do not object to Hindus, even though idolatry is the greater sin. This isn't too hard to answer, though. Some points: [more]

Why has the United States had laws against homosexuality, but not against idolatry, a greater sin? ---Because the laws against homosexuality are not motivated by religion. Christians, Jews, atheists, and don't-cares have all generally thought that sodomy was wrong.

It was interesting to me to find out what Thomas Aquinas has to say about laws against non-Christians. He goes into this in the Faith section of Summa Theologica. In brief: nobody should be coerced to become Christian; Jewish ceremonies should be tolerated; children should not be baptized if their non-Christian parents object; pagan ceremonies may or may not be tolerated, depending on prudential considerations; heretics should be executed. His rationales are sensible on toleration, a bit mixed up on heretics. The principles sound rather like those of Islam, which in most eras (though not present-day Saudi Arabia) has tolerated Jews and Christians, if not pagans, but which forbids conversion of Moslems to Christianity on pain of death.

Section 2-2-10-8 of the Summa is on compulsion to religion: [more]

Professor Volokh mentions that some people responded to his post by citing the Noachide Laws. These are commandments which in Judaism apply to non-Jews as well as to Jews. I found a list on the web, which says that these "mitzvot" some from the Talmud--Sanhedrin 58b.

1. Do not murder.

2. Do not steal.

3. Do not worship false gods.

4. Do not be sexually immoral.

5. Do not eat the limb of an animal before it is killed.

6. Do not curse God.

7. Set up courts and bring offenders to justice. [more]

WHY DO WE BELIEVE? William James has a good essay, The Will to Believe, which I mentioned in my August 18 post on Al Qaeda.

... Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all not even A. Believe truth! Shun error -- these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. [more]

THE ESSENCE OF EPISCOPAL CHURCH ORGANIZATION is the power of bishops over people and property, and there is a close link to episcopal wealth too, which is one reason the Puritans objected to it. The modern American Episcopalians are a good example, not dissimilar to the 18th-century Anglicans whose secular comfort and religious sloppiness lead to the Methodist exodus. Diane Knippers has a good article, "The Anglican Mainstream: It's not where Americans might think," (Weekly Standard, 8/25/2003, 8,47). [more]

THE ALABAMA CONSTITUTION is strange. It is too long, like most state constitutions, but what is unusual is that since 1901 it has accumulated 742 amendments. That's right--742. They include "Amendment 739: Promotion of Economic and Industrial Development in Tallapoosa County" and "Amendment 740: Polling Places in Tuscaloosa County". The state has a problem. Folding all the amendments into the main body has been considered as a solution, but there must be something fundamentally wrong.

I came across this because Judge Moore has been suspended (with pay) pending resolution of ethics charges against him related to his defiance of a federal judge's order to take down the 10 Commandments from his courtroom (see the August 22 posting below). How can a supreme court justice be removed from deciding cases without impeachment? Well, the Alabama Constitution has a way, in Article 6, sections 17 to 19, as amended a few hundred amendments ago. There is a nine-member "Judicial Inquiry Commission" which can bring complaints to a nine-member "Court of the Judiciary". While a complaint is pending, the judge cannot sit on cases. So five members of the Commission take a judge out of action temporarily at their whim, with no appeal. They could keep bringing new complaints, and keep him out permanently. [more]

THE RULE OF LAW can vanish without anybody noticing. In America, when law professors say, "rule of law", they ordinarily mean "rule of judges". What this means is that they refuse to acknowledge that what judges say the law is and what the law really is can be different, and that judicial behavior can violate the rule of law.

A case in point is the Judge Moore controversy over the 10 Commandments in Alabama. Judge Moore, of the Alabama Supreme Court, put up the 10 Commandments in his courthouse. Some lawyers objected, and got a federal judge to issue a court order telling Judge Moore to take down the 10 Commandments. He refused. Is he violating the Rule of Law?

Judge Moore seems to have made rather lame excuses for his behavior, which is odd because there are simple and good reasons for it. The 11th Circuit opinion ruling against him says, with amazing candor,

The First Amendment does not say that no government official may take any action respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. It says that "Congress shall make no law" doing that. Chief Justice Moore is not Congress. [more]

Is strikes me that LIBERTARIANS HAVE THE BEST WEB-LOGS. This is a refinement of what happens in the journals of opinion, where right-wingers have the best commentators, but where there are witty and bright conservatives as well as libertarians. (Though, there, too, conservatism is in retreat-- cf. National Review's increasing acceptance of modern mores, and the reluctance of commentators to forthrightly defend conservative social positions without retreating to feeble excuses like "It's just my religion.") But I haven't seen many conservative web-logs, and while the ones I have seen are not necessarily less intelligent or interesting than the libertarian ones, they are not maintained as regularly and are not as cheerfully opinionated. I suppose it is the nature of the people most attracted to the Web. Probably there are some good evangelical web-logs I don't know about, though--- evangelicals certainly have taken to the Web for posting religion texts and tracts.

Ian Ayres has a neat idea about RECORDING PHONE CONVERSATIONS which he published in a "Why Prosecute Linda Tripp?" New York Times P. A17, col. 1 (August 10, 1999).

The prosecution of people like Linda Tripp for secretly taping phone calls is said to be necessary to protect privacy. But what aspect of privacy is being protected? Linda Tripp could go on Hard Copy tomorrow and tell the world what Monica Lewinsky told her on the phone, but that would not be a crime. [more]

David Bernstein writes on THE GREAT DEPRESSION in the Volokh Conspiracy:

"The book I am really looking forward to is the one that explains how FDR presided over 10 [sic] years of economic depression, and is celebrated for 'saving us' from same." [more]

The FOOD CHANNEL is the best thing about having cable TV. Mr. Roker (who I realize now has both the joviality and looks of a black Frank Buckley--- and I might say, the wit and brains, except that I know about scriptwriters-- has one of the best shows. Last night he featured Saxton Freymann, a vegetable artist you can read about in Smithsonian magazine and co-author of How Are You Peeling? Foods with Moods and Play With Your Food. That guy has talent! Art is not in decadence; it just isn't featured in museums of modern art.

An example of how a third-world country is ahead of the United States in efficient allocation of resources, from World magazine.

Thailand's Communications Minister Suriya Jungrungraungkit is calling the fee for his automobile license plate an investment. Last week he bid $95,200 at the country's first- ever auction of "lucky" license plates, winning the number 9999. (Plate number 5555 drew the second-highest winning bid--$47,619.) The Thai official said the plate will either pay dividends in good luck or in a profitable resale: "This is better than investing in the stock market."

WHY DID AL QAEDA BLOW UP THE WORLD TRADE CENTER? Jack Hirshleifer pointed me to a good article on that question which also says important things about belief and behavior generally: Lee Harris's "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology" in Hoover's Policy Review. The central point is that Al Qaeda was not engaged in purposeful terror, but in dramatic theatre, and they cared not about the effect on us, but about the effect on themselves. Mr. Harris starts by pointing out a flawed assumption in our thinking:

The assumption is this: An act of violence on the magnitude of 9-11 can have been intended only to further some kind of political objective. [more]

RACIAL INTEGRATION has not had much in the way of policy-driven financial incentives, though the free market provides very strong incentives. Here's an example I like, though, from World magazine:

Black, white, and green
Shreveport, La., pastor Fred Caldwell wants to integrate his predominantly black Greenwood Acres Full Gospel Baptist Church. So much so that he's offering white persons $5 an hour to attend Sunday services and $10 an hour for Thursday night services. "God wants a rainbow in His church," said the pastor. On Aug. 3, between 30 and 50 whites showed up for Sunday services. Only five asked for the money.

THE EPISCOPALIAN HOMOSEXUAL BISHOP has raised quite a fuss. I like that, but I'm a bit surprised that it is news that the Episcopalians would do such a thing. The denomination has been a liberal front for years. I think the fuss arises because, as I discuss in my July 19 post in connection with divorce, homosexuality violates natural law, not just divine law, and so arouses even people who don't know divine law or don't care about it. (Also, the international Anglican Church has mobilized only in the past few years.) But Mr. Robinson has a disqualification even greater than that of his homosexuality which is hardly ever mentioned: he believes the Bible should be ignored and is willing to say so. Via the Christianity today web-log, the August 5 Washington Post tells us [more]

Some details on CANADIAN LEGAL PROCEDURE are posted by David Bernstein on the Volokh conspiracy. What struck me is that the "loser pays" rule applies not just to the outcome of the main case, but to all motions that are made. This means that litigants do not try to smother the other side with trivial paperwork. Also, there is a rule that if one side offers a $50,000 settlement and the other side wins, but only wins $30,000, then the *loser* gets his costs paid, at a special high rate, for any costs from the date of the settlement offer. Good ideas!

PILGRIMS BEING BLOCKED from holy sites was the cause of the Crusades, and we rightly think that whoever ends up owning the Holy Land ought to allow pilgrims in. But the Israelis are not. They are blocking *Jews and Christians* from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, because the Moslems object. See CNSNews.com on August 7. Maybe we should launch a crusade against Israel.

Isn't it interesting that Israel doesn't simply raze the Dome of the Rock and restore the Temple Mount as a Jewish site? There are religious reasons for not doing that--it would embarass rabbinical Judaism considerably to have to deal with the possibility of a new Temple, animal sacrifices, and so forth, just as it would embarass many Christian churches to have to deal with the Return of Christ-- but that kind of thing happens in India every now and then, it seems.

The SHERMAN AUSTIN anarchist website case is interesting as an example of (a) a plea bargain, (b) a judge refusing to go along with a plea bargain, (c) a light sentence for terrorist activity, and (d) the crime of promoting terrorism but not actually acting it out. Sherman Austin posted instructions on how to make bombs on his website and the website said to use them at the IMF and World Bank soon. Judge Charles Wilson thought that the 1 month of prison and 5 months of "community confinement" in the plea bargain were not enough. Instapundit on August 5 quotes: [more]

I saw a wonderful quip on GERRYMANDERING at the American Prowler website:

Gerry-Rigged Democracy
Political Hay
We have gone from voters choosing their representatives to
representatives choosing their voters.
John H. Fund, 8/13/2003 12:02:00 AM

JOHN DONOHUE'S NEW PAPER, "The Final Bullet in the Body of the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis," is worth reading, but disappointing. It starts with this purpose:

Hailed as heroes by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its supporters, while derided as scoundrels by their staunchest critics, Lott and Mustard precipitated a scholarly and political odyssey that can teach us much about the techniques and limitations of sophisticated empirical research and the divergent norms of the scholarly and political realms.

THE TALMUD is hard to find on the web, but I finally found it at the very useful site www.sacred-texts.com. Why is it so hard to find when Judaism is such a bookish religion, and one that esteems commentary so highly, compared to Christianity, which urges people to study the Bible but puts almost no emphasis on studying commentary? There is a huge number of Christian texts on the web. Is it that Christians mind translation less? But the Talmud is not even in the holy language of Hebrew; it is in Aramaic. Perhaps it is simply that there are so many more English-speaking serious Christians than English-speaking serious Jews, or that Christians care more about spreading their religion.

At any rate, my first dip into the Talmud, into the Tract Aboth which is supposed to be one of the more accessible parts, is disappointing. The opening seems to be typical of its style and quality: [more]

BANS ON LIE DETECTOR TESTS are a great example of not just foolish but wasteful and dangerous government regulation. But to see how useful lie detector tests are, one must not ask scientists or lawyers; one must think about the data like an economist or a businessman. (I don't mean to insult scientists and lawyers--but just because all the smart scientists and lawyers agree on something is not a reliable guide to whether it is good policy.) Law professor Instapundit's August 5 posting and the recent National Academy of Sciences report attacking lie detectors are prime examples of this. Using just these two sources and the anti-lie-detector August 3, 2003 Boston Globe story that Instapundit cites (now gone from the free site), we see that lie detectors actually are useful and effective, even without going to pro-lie-detector sources.

Big ideas that are useful here are:

1. If lots of competitive businesses use a practice for a long time, it probably works. [more]

WHAT IS HELL? It may be relative. However happy you may be now, maybe it is Hell if being with God is good enough. That's the idea of Dante's First Circle (for the virtuous pagans), I think. I saw this expressed well in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, I-iii:

FAUSTUS. And what are you that live with Lucifer?

MEPHISTOPHELES. Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,
[more]

A MAJOR FIGURE IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT HAS PLED GUILTY TO A MAJOR FIGURE IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT HAS PLED GUILTY TO AL-QUAEDA. Instapundit pointed me to Geek.com:

An ex-Intel employee who was recently arrested now admits to attempting to aid the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Apparently, Maher "Mike" Hawash, who was instrumental in designing the Multi Media Extension (MMX) technology, admits that he traveled to China in 2001 in an attempt to cross over into Afghanistan, but failed to get to Pakistan. Mr. Hawash was charged with "conspiring to levy war against the United States," "conspiracy to provide material support and resources to Al-Qaida," and "conspiracy to contribute services to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban." Mr. Hawash pleaded guilty to the third charge. Mr. Hawash may now get up to 10 years in prison and a US$250,000 fine. [more]

I've been thinking more about RELIGIOUS TESTS for public office. See the Update to my August 5 entry.

Is there a RIGHT TO DISCRIMINATE on grounds of race? This came up on the Volokh Conspiracy recently. I just emailed the following to David Bernstein:

Dear David,

I was reading your posts, and wondering about the following possible right to discriminate. Suppose the state of Indiana passes a law banning racial discrimination in marriage, with a criminal fine of $1000. [more]

It used to be that the US SENATE WAS APPOINTED by state legislatures, while the House was directly elected by the people. Now, as James Taranto points out, we have reversed this. [more]

Do we have a RACE PROBLEM IN BLOOMINGTON, or is it everybody who is unsafe, not just blacks? Here's my letter to the local newspaper on something that looked awfully like the build-up to a lynching in downtown Bloomington: [more]

That is not, however, a religious test, and it is quite constitutional. [more]

DOES THE CATHOLIC CHURCH think the U.S. Constitution is OK now? Historically, it taught that a good Catholic could not believe that a government was ideal if it tolerated non- Catholic religions or if it ever disobeyed the desires of the Pope. To believe otherwise even had a special name: it was the heresy of "Americanism", so-called because American Catholics found it awkward to take the same anti-democratic position as the Popes. Some excerpts from official papal pronouncements:

The Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX (1864) condemned a large number of propositions, some political, including

55. The Church ought to be separated from the .State, and the State from the Church.-- Allocution "Acerbissimum," Sept. 27, 1852. [more]

I'VE BEEN USING MOZILLA instead of Internet Explorer for a few weeks now, and prefer it for various little reasons. The Mozilla people ask for suggestions, and here are mine, which also apply to other browsers: [more]

SILVIO BERLUSCONI, the prime minister of Italy, has gotten The Economist magazine very excited--hysterical, even. In its July 31 issue, the editors condemn the new Italian law which exempts prime ministers from prosecution while they are in office. Since he can't be prosecuted now in the courts, they say, they will bring public opinion to bear against him. But looking at just what The Economist itself presents us, it looks to me like The Economist has gone bonkers. [more]

But it seems (3) and (4) are rarely used. ABC News reports something shocking from Illinois (I tip my hat to Anton Sherwood's Ogre web-log on this): [more]

HOW DID THE EARLY CHURCH MANAGE to come out with a reasonably strong consensus on orthodox belief? The Gnostics and Judaizers lost out, after all, and notwithstanding the Arian controversy and suchlike subtle issues, the Christianity of the Apostle's Creed seems to have been universal by 300. In Professor Gary Anderson's review of Elaine Pagels' silly new book on gnosticism (in the Weekly Standard), he raises this good question, as well as politely knocking her out of the ring: [more]

THE MENTAL DERANGEMENT OF CONSERVATIVES was the subject of a notorious recent article by four professors at top universities. Reading the article is a good start to seeing how worthless it is. James Lindgren, in a letter posted on the Dissecting Leftism web-log points to something that kills the study's credibility for me immediately:

The Jost article claims that conservatives are angry and fearful and it builds on a literature that claims that conservatives are unhappy. I find this strange, given the decades of superb data showing the opposite. In the NORC General Social Survey (a standard social science database, second only to the U.S. Census in use by U.S. sociologists), [more]

THE DINGELL NON-RESIDENT TROUBLEMAKER LETTER really needs to be read in full. The Weekly Standard quotes it ("Boss Dingell, Iraq, Penthouse, and more," 08/04/2003, Volume 008, Issue 45, closed site):

Mr. Connerly:

The people of Michigan have a simple message to you: go home and stay there. We do not need you stirring up trouble where none exists.

Michiganders do not take kindly to your ignorant meddling in our affairs. We have no need for itinerant publicity seekers, non-resident troublemakers or self-aggrandizing out-of-state agitators. [more]

NORWAY HAS JUDGES just as unjust as American ones, I hear via James Taranto's WSJ Best of the Web. As a Norwegian newspaper tells it:

An Oslo man has had his drunken driving case thrown out of court because overeager police didn't wait until he sobered up to question him. The court rejected the inebriated confession and let the 36-year-old go, newspaper VG reports.

...

Police questioned the Oslo man six hours after the test was taken, when he would still have had a blood alcohol level of about 1.7-1.8 per thousand, which is above the point where people begin to slur their speech.

MY SECRET SERVICE AND JUDICIAL SALARY postings have updates today.

MARK STEYN's obituary for Idi Amin, He will not be Missed" is not be to be missed. The best part:

The defining image of him is a 1975 photograph of his arrival at a reception for ministers from the Organisation for African Unity: as the band plays Colonel Bogey, His Excellency is borne aloft in a sedan chair balanced with some difficulty on the shoulders of four spindly Englishmen from Kampala's business community, while another humbled honky walks behind holding the parasol. It's the precise negative of 1, 000 colonial daguerreotypes from Victorian illustrated weeklies. When it came to the white man's burden, the British could talk the talk. But that night the 300 lb Amin made them walk the walk.

VALERIE PLAME is the maiden name of the wife of Joseph Wilson, the retired diplomat who attacked the Bush Administration for mentioning Niger uranium. Some web-logs are in a lather because Robert Novak wrote:

          Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter- proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him. ''I will not answer any question about my wife,'' Wilson told me. [more]

CHURCH SERVICES can be reviewed, like any activity. The Christianity Today web-log points to two of them, from the London Times and Ship of Fools. The reviews are astonishingly superficial, and give a good picture of how most people feel about church and why atheist pastors thrive. If the music is ok and the seats are comfortable, you don't need to believe in God. [more]

MORE HILARITY FROM MARK STEYN, in "Bush playing his cards right in Iraq":

          Well, yes, Saddam's gone the Osama route, releasing audio cassettes every couple of weeks. Why is that? These days, a compact camcorder's as easy to smuggle in as a Walkman, and video would have far more impact. Could it be that Saddam isn't in such great shape for the cameras? Not quite ready for his close-up? Wherever he is, he's dependent on a dwindling band of aides and, after the way his sons were sold out, he's gonna be a bit twitchy if Ahmed's trip to the 7- Eleven seems to be taking a little too long.

PASCAL'S COMBINATION OF MATHEMATICS, PSYCHOLOGY, AND THEOLOGY should be coming into vogue now that we have things like Indiana University's "School of Infomatics". I came across a very stimulating passage in the Pensees on habit versus deliberation. The theological application is incidental; this idea is just as important in economics:

252. For we must not misunderstand ourselves; we are as much automatic as intellectual; [more]

JUDICIAL CORRUPTION strikes again, this time in the Illinois Supreme Court. As the Sun-Times tells us (I tip my hat to David Bernstein guesting at Volokh's web-log)

Setting up a potential constitutional crisis in Illinois, the seven members of the state Supreme Court Thursday ordered state Comptroller Dan Hynes to boost their pay from $158, 103 a year to $162,530 a year and to boost the pay of all judges in Illinois by about $4,000 a year.

Gov. Blagojevich had vetoed those cost-of-living increases, and Thursday he vetoed a bill to restore last year's cost-of-living adjustments for judges. [more]

THE NEW YORK CITY CITY COUNCILLOR SHOOTING has some interesting features not widely noted. The basic story is that incumbent city councillor Davis was shot to death in City Hall by semi-serious primary challenger Askew. The two points of interest are the implications for gun control of the concealed guns both were carrying and the homosexuality of Mr. Askew. [more]

SHOULD A CHRISTIAN OWN A BMW? I bring this up because yesterday I drove to Louisville and bought a 2003 Mazda Protege Mazdaspeed to replace my 1990 Protege. My old Protege was a fine car, but it is wearing out. The Mazdaspeed is about $4000 more expensive than a normal Protege, for which you get a turbocharger, big tires, better brakes, fancy stereo, sporty tuning, and an unattractive sporty appearance, as you can read in reviews by Edmonds, [more]

GOOD COOKING AND GOOD POLITICAL THOUGHT have their similarities. Digby Anderson, who ought to write more than he does, says in his short piece, "Tradition, Self-Restraint and Social Control," [more]

THREATS AGAINST THE PRESIDENT are illegal, even though threats against ordinary citizens are not. That is undemocratic and wrong, even when the law is applied only to serious threats. [more]

THE TAWDRINESS OF EUROPEAN POLITICIANS is surveyed in a piece by Mr. Stuttaford in today's National Review that talks about

• German foreign minister Joschka Fischer's terrorist links
• Former French prime minister Lionel Jospin's covert Communism
• Former French president and current EU constitution writer Giscard D'Estaing's acceptance of diamonds from the cannibal emperor he supported [more]

NATURAL VERSUS DIVINE LAW was my subject a few days ago. I didn't have citations, but here are some from the Revised Standard Version.

Romans 1: 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth.
19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. [more]

A NUMBER OF HISTORIANS filed a brief in the Lawrence sodomy case before the Supreme Court. It turns out to be false in several statements of fact, as shown by the comments following it at the History News Network site. We should expect that of leftwing historians by now. Clayton Cramer remarks on one of their claims, for example: [more]

IS BUSH REALLY A CONSERVATIVE? Given the general mendacity of the historians' brief discussed above, maybe the following is wrong too:

President Bush recently signed legislation -- named after one of the gay heroes of September 11, 2001 -- allowing death benefits to be paid to the domestic partners of firefighters and police officers who die in the line of duty. Mychal Judge Police & Fire Chaplains Public Safety Officers� Benefit Act of 2002, Pub. L. No. 107- 196, 116 Stat. 719 (June 24, 2002).

THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH and conservatives are appalled by the idea of homosexual marriages, and rightly so. It is a weird idea, akin to house-man marriages--- that is, the terms in the phrase just don't fit together. What it means, of course, is the elevation of a certain kind of homosexual relationship to the same level of government approval as marriage. But what interests at me at the moment is why it is this issue which is exciting attention, rather than, say no-fault divorce, which has had such a deleterious effect on the family and society that "gay marriage" has little left to kill. Just look at all the turmoil listed in Ted Olsen's Christianity today web-log of July 14.

I think the reason can be found in the difference between natural law and divine law. [more]

MARK STEYN has scored another hit with his column on European integration, "There was a European, a European and a European . . ." A sample paragraph:

Under the convention's proposals, a new European Trait Commissioner will be given the authority to break down trait barriers within the EU and correct regional imbalances. "Mr Berlusconi, for example, would benefit from being more Finnish and dour, or if necessary Swedish and suicidal."

Instapundit points out a CBS story on FBI incompetence. Translator Sibel Edmonds complained about purposeful slackness and a Turkish spy, and was fired. [more]

JOE LIBERMAN was actually once thought to have more integrity than most politicians--- hard to believe, isn't it? But he's moved into more than just abandoning his religion for his campaign, as the American Prowler notes:

For example, both of the Lieberman children who are on the campaign are earning six- figure salaries. While it's fairly common for candidates of all ilk to bring family on board, the Lieberman payouts were surprisingly excessive for a man who prides himself on watching the bottom line.

Where did the forgeries come from? The March 8, 2003 Toronto Globe and Mail says [more]

IRAQ DID NOT, IT SEEMS, PURCHASE URANIUM from Niger. Democrats therefore say that President Bush is a liar. But they are lying themselves, as a Clifford May tells us in National Review, because that is not what Bush said. What he said in his State of the Union address was:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. [more]

GOING TO CHURCH is neglected by many people who call themselves Christians. That is a mistake. If you really wish to serve God (a big if, admittedly), then you should realize that churchgoing provides at least a minimal amount of each of several things you should be doing weekly. [more]

ROTTEN ORGANIZATIONS do not indicate their rottenness so much by operational problems as by the way they deal with the problems, and, in particular, how they punish those to blame. A case in point is Brooklyn College. The Johnson tenure case [more]

Friday, July 11, 2003

JUDICIAL SUBVERSION of the Constitution is old news, I guess, but Eugene Volokh points out a particularly egregious case by the Nevada Supreme Court. [more]

WHICH DO WE REMEMBER BETTER, good events or bad events? Thomas Gilovich notes in How We Know What Isn't So that although one might think that the problem with gamblers is that they remember their wins but not their losses, in fact the opposite seems to be true. He found in experiments that they remembered their losses-- but only because they wanted to find excuses for them.

By carefully scrutinizing and explaining away their losses, while accepting their winnings at face value, gamblers do indeed rewrite their personal histories of success and failure. Losses are counted not as losses, but as `near wins' (p. 55).

DEFINING "HUMAN" is not easy and it matters. Whose death can be murder? Who counts in the utilitarian or Pareto calculus? Who has a soul that can be lost or saved? I just came across a 1997 posting by Dean Sherwood that introduces a new angle: the human as property-owner and contract- maker. [more]

SODOMY LAWS are an example of morality laws. Libertarians oppose such laws,which also include laws against such things as private racial discrimination, drug use, cannibalism, cruelty to animals, adultery, and prostitution. The American intelligentsia is confused on this, leaning libertarian when it comes to anything to do with sexual behavior but remaining against drugs and discrimination against blacks. What is interesting is the weakness of the conservative press on morality. I had thought an important element of conservative thought was that virtue is one of the ends of government, or at least an important means to the end of happiness. Plato and Aristotle, and, indeed, almost everyone would have thought so at one time. But even the awareness of virtue as a possible end has vanished for many people. A case in point: Deroy Murdock's National Review column of July 7 in which he criticizes conservatives who favor sodomy laws. [more]

PRAYER IN SCHOOLS is supposed to have really bothered certain atheists. But did it really? If people are really bothered, they start pulling their kids out of the public schools and home-schooling them or starting private schools. Catholics did this on a large scale, during the period of school prayer-- because there weren't *enough* prayers, and not of the right kind. Nowadays, evangelicals do this on a large scale too, partly for the same reason and partly because they rightly believe that the public schools teach immorality as much as morality. Clearly, religious people care a lot about education. [more]

POOR EUROPE. One of the best articles I've seen on its problems is "Old and in the Way," by Karl Zinnsmeister, American Enterprise, December 2002. Some of his observations: [more]

INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE and adoption are still surprisingly controversial. Human Events mentions an interesting fact in an article pointing out that William Pryor, the Bush judicial nominee accused by Democratic senators of being a racist, is supported by Alabama Democratic legislator Alvin Holmes as one of the bravest non-racists in the state: [more]

WHAT DO WOODROW WILSON AND GEORGE W. BUSH have in common? They both aggravated the French with their attitudes in the same way. Philippe Roger's 2002 book, The American Enemy (L 'Ennemi Americain) reports [more]

APOPHATICALLY is a word not in any on-line dictionaries I checked, but useful nonetheless. It means discovering by the via negativa of saying what something is not, rather than what it is.

In the apophatic (or negative) way ... one approaches God by stripping away all concepts, definitions, and adjectives which would seem to "confine" the infinity of divinity in order to stand in utterly open prayer before the Holy Trinity. ( "Connections to the World of Orthodoxy" )

• Good movies, now and past
• The best science, economics, and scholarship generally in the world
• [more]

1. Remember that you are the boss. You do not have to give reasons, or take your children's opinions into account in making decisions.

2. Children are used to ignoring adult conversation. Thus, if you want to tell a child something, say his name first, and start the conversation slowly. [more]

THE SUPREME COURT'S ARROGANCE in the Lawrence sodomy case is the subject of a good National Review piece by Jonathan Cohn. [more]

REPUBLICAN SPINELESSNESS has again shown itself implicitly, in the lack of response to the Grutter affirmative action decision. Couldn't Congress pass a law banning racial discrimination that explicitly noted that affirmative action is also racial discrimination? It would be filibustered in the Senate, but the publicity along the way would help the Republicans and hurt the Democrats. But the Republicans have no guts.

JUDICIAL TEMPERAMENT is important. But I see that it can be entirely misperceived. Via Romesh Ponnuru at National Review, I discovered that July 2 Andrew Sullivan writes of judicial temperament, [more]

FOOTNOTES are one of the more difficult parts of writing to get right. Here is some advice on them from an unlikely spot [more]

ADMINISTRIVIA IS A POTENT TOOL for destroying policies one dislikes. The Left has used cumbersome procedures as a pillow to suffocate the death penalty despite its strong public support. It should be even easier to use administrivia to wreck policies that are publicly unpopular, and have been imposed by runaway courts. [more]

WHY FIRMS PAY DIVIDENDS has long been a puzzle in finance theory, since then shareholders must pay taxes on the dividends, whereas if company retained the earnings and the shareholders just sold shares, they could get the same amount and pay less in taxes. [more]

DELETING FILES BY ACCIDENT is frustrating. That's what happened to my intended post of yesterday, on the Lawrence decision and on administrivia and affirmative action. Maybe I can reconstruct for another day.

PLESSY V. FERGUSON is the celebrated Supreme Court decision that declared that segregation was lawful so long as it was "separate but equal". This was interpreted to mean that, for example, segregated schools were lawful so long as the school qualities were equal. They weren't, of course, so Southern school systems were in violation even of existing law in, say, the 1920's, but for many years nobody challenged them in court. [more]

THE GRUTTER AFFIRMATIVE ACTION decision by the Supreme Court is full of interest as an example of confusion and hypocrisy. One point is the claim that "Diversity" is not just a code word for "African-American". [more]

EDWARD SAID'S VIEW OF ORIENTALISM, like anything he wrote, should be suspect, since his dishonesty is well known (is "honesty" perhaps a Western concept-- but we must include ancient Israel in that West?). [more]

SCRIPTURAL COMMENTARY used to include a lot of allegory, but not in the past few centuries. I was surprised to see Erasmus, one of the moderns, supporting it in section 2 of The Handbook of the Militant Christian: [more]

CHECKING FOR BROKEN LINKS is a good process to automate. Xenu's Link Sleuth , by Tilman Hausherr, is good freeware for that. His writing style is superb, too, in the specialized genre of information about software---he actually makes it interesting to read, with his concise bullet lists, tangential discussion of Scientology, comparisions with similar software, and so forth.

Have I fixed the broken links in my own webpages lately? No... after I finish those pesky referee reports and get my presentation ready for the conference next week, maybe, ...

BUDDHISM is really an entire array of religions. World magazine has a good series of Olsasky articles on early Buddhism, bodhisattvas the Japanese Tendai, Zen, and Nichiren sects, and the Pureland sect. [more]

HISTORY FRAUD seems to be rampant in that academic profession. Erin O'Connor's June 19 blog is about a new book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History by Keith Windschuttle. [more]

INNOCENT PEOPLE WILL DIE if we make killing them pay well enough. On June 18 Instapundit reports from reader Dick Aubrey:

I once observed, while in Central America with such a bunch, that if dead civilians were necessary to discredit US policy, dead civilians would be provided. Part--I speak as one with some formal training in hearts-and-minds--of the lefty war manuals deal with how to deke the government into killing their own people. The lefties always knew that if they killed civilians, all would be forgiven, if it were even noticed.

I have made a similar observation to my own church (PCUSA), modifying it to, "If dead babies are useful to Saddaam, dead babies will be provided." The point is that the folks who made such a big deal about the sanctions are directly responsible for making dead babies so valuable to Saddaam. Blood is on their hands. The blood of innocents.

THE FLYNN EFFECT is the huge increase in average performance on intelligence tests from 1920 to 1995. A score of 100 is by definition average, but only at a point in time. Scoring 100 in 1995 meant that someone did much much better on the test than someone in 1920. [more]

THE NEW EUROPEAN CONSTITUTION is further evidence of European decadence. [more]

THE DEATH PENALTY is extremely popular in the United States, where liberal politicians have learned that overt opposition to it is fatal to their chances of elected office, yet it is extremely unpopular with American and European intellectuals. [more]

EDITING POETRY is a task made difficult by the modern notion that writing poetry is trivially easy, as easy for a pre-schooler as for Pushkin. "a1.htm#june14a" target="_blank"> [more]

MORE NUGGETS FROM DANIEL PIPES'S BOOK, Militant Islam Reaches America:

1. "Some Muslims may preach nonviolence. But politicians and diplomats must account for the stubborn fact that Muslim radicals have attacked Americans in such diverse locales as Lebanon, Yemen, Kenya, the Philippines, New York City, and Washington, D.C." (p. 95) [more]

IS AN IDEOLOGICAL TEST DESIRABLE for candidates for public office? During the 1700's, Great Britain did not let Roman Catholics enter Parliament, even if they were willing to swear allegiance to the Crown. (It should be remembered that it was unclear whether a Roman Catholic could so swear, in good conscience, since the Crown was not Roman Catholic.) [more]

DANIEL PIPES'S BOOK, Militant Islam Reaches America, will probably make it to my Christmas Recommendation List this year. Although it is a thinly disguised compilation of his journalism, there is a common theme: Islamism is a new political ideology that is dangerous in all its forms but downplayed by governments and press. [more]

AMERICANS HAVE BEEN GETTING FATTER for a long time. A recent working paper, "Why Have Americans Become More Obese," by Cutler, Glaeser, and Shapiro has a nice analysis. During about 1900- 1950, American calories consumed actually fell, but people were working in more and more sedentary occupations, and so weight rose. Since then, the main problem has been not reduced physical movement, but-- and here is the author's contribution--- increased snacking. From roughly the 70's to the 90's, people didn't eat many more calories at mealtime (even though there was a shift from home to restaurant dining), but they ate a lot more snacks.

I'LL BE BLOGGING LESS for a while. But you might find the Indiana affirmative action materials linked at this website of mine interesting. One thing I see is that although NRO, Instapundit, the local paper, the AP, and the Chronicle of Higher Education have picked up on the story, the campus newspaper has not. My guess is incompetence rather than coverup.

HAS ANYONE NOTICED something strange about the South and Presidential races? Memories linger of a Republican "Southern Strategy" of appealing to white Southern voters despite the losses that entail among black Northern voters. But in fact, until 2000, Southern whites were unimportant to the Republicans, while Northern blacks were highly significant. [more]

A FALLACY OF REGRESSION TO THE MEAN is nicely illustrated, I think by something in the Chronicle of Higher Education's May 16 daily briefing (yes, I'm behind): [more]

IN FOREIGN RELATIONS, who are the winners and who are the losers from Gulf War II? We Americans have been focussing on America, Iraq, and France, and I've seen a little attention given to Britain and Poland. Instapundit picked up on a perceptive article by Michael Mertes that explains how Germany is actually the biggest loser next to Saddam Hussein 's Iraq. [more]

OUR LAW SCHOOL DEAN is upset with us because the state chapter of the National Association of Scholars issued a press release quoting from her email to law students commenting on the theft of Scott Dillon 's data from their mailboxes. [more]

OUR LOCAL AFFIRMATIVE ACTION STORY has made National Review: [more]

BUSH'S DIPLOMACY seems to have achieved what that of previous Presidents could not: it has persuaded Syria to shut down the offices it allowed terrorist groups to publicly flaunt. [more]

BACK FROM TOWING A U-HAUL with furniture and books from my parents' farm in Illinois, I found a great quote about Clinton, Nixon, Kennedy, and presidential morality in Jay Nordlinger's column on National Review:

It's September 1998, and Clinton is conducting a cabinet meeting. Donna Shalala, the health and human services secretary, has the temerity to say, Surely, Mr. President, a president has some obligation to provide moral leadership. Clinton wheels on her, furious, and says, By that logic, you'd have preferred Richard Nixon in 1960 to John Kennedy.

THE FILIBUSTER is an example of the kind of lovable tradition that is so much a part of the English and American political systems, like the New Hampshire primary being first and the Democratic and Republican parties alternating whose convention comes first. This kind of tradition depends on fair play and reciprocity, though. [more]

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION obviously got Jayson Blair his job at the New York Times despite his dishonesty and incompetence. But that is to be expected, even by supporters of affirmative action. The whole idea is that the employer chooses workers who are more likely to be dishonest or incompetent, because he is trading off that extra probability against the benefit of having a person of the race he prefers. [more]

TONIGHT I LOOKED OVER MY PORTFOLIO and changed a few things. I'm getting out of bonds, except for inflation-indexed ones, simplifying my holdings where I can, investing in Japanese stocks, and buying into a 529 college savings plan for my children.

PATRIOTISM IS SOMETHING knowbody seems to want to be admit lacking. I think patriotism is a virtue, but to be consistent, I think many other people should not. Take those people who thought Gulf War II was an unjust war. If asked, "Did you want Iraq to win?", how should they answer? If they answer, "Yes," they are being unpatriotic. If they answer, "No," then they are ascribing to the maxim, "My country, right or wrong." That is fine, but I'd like to see them acknowledge that they agree with the concept.

WHICH WARS ARE JUST can be a difficult question, but what one hears commonly this spring is that a just war is a defensive war, where "defensive" means that you wait until you're attacked. I didn't see anyone point it out, but this implies that Hitler was fighting a just war against Britain. [more]

SODOMY LAWS are a good test for distinguishing between conservatives, process libertarians, result libertarians, and liberals. [more]

WHY ARE REPUBLICANS INCAPABLE of playing hardball? The Democrats in the Senate deliberately set out to break tradition by using the filibuster to block not just an unusually conservative nominee to a federal appeals court---though even that would be a radical break from tradition--- but the typical Republican nominee. The Republican response? To complain--- and mildly. [more]

DID IRAQ REALLY have weapons of mass destruction? Why is taking so long to find them then? Was this really just Bush's pretext for war?

Well, consider a related question. Did Saddam Hussein really exist? "a1.htm#may5a" target="_blank"> [more]

BILL BENNETT"S GAMBLING is an interesting story. He is a rich man who thinks many things are sinful, but, typical of Catholics, not gambling, and he does gamble large sums several times a year. [more]

DIVERSITY sounds like a good thing in education. But so does uniformity. I hear lots of complaints from professors that it is hard to teach a class because the students differ so much in ability. [more]