LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph? How long shall they utter and speak hard things? and all the workers of iniquity boast themselves? They break in pieces thy people, O LORD, and afflict thine heritage. They slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless. Yet they say, The LORD shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it. Understand, ye brutish among the people: and ye fools, when will ye be wise?
Rich Lowry says we'll never get rid of the crazies until we do something about the Saudi money that funds them. And the first step is. . . admitting we have a problem.
Just the other day, a girl in my office asked the classic question: "If we can send a man to the moon, why can't we cure the common cold?" Derek Lowe tells us why not. Aww, shucks, one of them practical reasons.
Essays by law professors from both sides on the origin, justification, and ramifications of the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2000 elections
The best essays in this book are very good; the worst aren’t unreadable, but they tend to state a goal of proving something, wander from minor point to minor point without much direction, and then without warning declare Quod Erat Demonstrandum! and abruptly terminate themselves. The result is that one gathers a lot of small, telling points, but it’s hard to generate an over-arching philosophy about what did happen, or should have happened, from a single reading of this book.
The best essay in the bunch, as far as I’m concerned, is Cass Sunstein’s introduction, which provides a lucid summary of the relevant events, political and legal, which led up to the decision. Sunstein does not, in this essay, attempt to divine which side is right; rather, he concentrates on the sociology of the commentators. He makes the telling observation that it is possible to predict with almost perfect accuracy someone’s opinion on The Opinion simply by finding out who he voted for; it is a welcome grain of salt with which to take essays from both sides.
The conservatives, predictably, ignore the question of just who was harmed by the “equal protection” violations, want to gloss over the possible effects this decision may have on future elections, court opinions, and the legitimacy of the Court; the liberals, with equal predictability, deny that there is anything odd about changing the election rules after the fact, and dismiss the possibility of a constitutional crisis with an airy “Oh, well, that wouldn’t have happened” but offer nothing to back up their a priori assertion. The strongest points offered by both sides, with the exception of Richard Posner’s essay on the mechanics of a recount (which has been made redundant by the newspaper count) are their criticisms of the fallacies and strained construction of the other side. I’ll have to read the book at least once more before I can use it to eke out a workable theory of what went on.
So should you buy the book? Well, it’s slow going in some spots – legal writing is its own little world. But ultimately I think it’s valuable because it gives you an overview of how lawyers think about the case, rather than one person’s extensive interpretation (Alan Dershowitz, Richard Posner). The essayists have something of a dialogue going on between them, which allows you to ask and answer questions about legal constructions within the same book. And while the writers address specific points rather than the whole megillah, this is ultimately I think valuable, both because it keeps the book from degenerating into the kind of “I’m write, you’re wrong” argument that characterized much of the debate, and because it allows a deeper perspective on key issues that shaped the decision. Ultimately, I think the book could have been better. But I think it’s probably the best book out there for understanding the ongoing debate over the Court’s decision.
Dr. Weevil is asking some very important questions about that whole 72 virgins thing, including this: what's in it for the women? Given the way women seem to be treated in most Islamic societies, I'm guessing that by the time they get to that point, they'd settle for having someone else do the housework.
You know what kind of gets me, though? It's that I bet Muhammed didn't even think about it. I mean, I bet it never occurred to a single one of his followers that women needed any more reward than, say, your average draft animal. I've done some reading in the Koran, but it's not exhaustive, so I'll be happy to be proven wrong -- but all the arguments I've heard so far about the equal treatment of women in Islam come from modern reinterpretations of the hadith, not the Koran itself.
In the 30-or-so years of CAFE standards, American fuel usage hasn't decreased one iota -- and in fact, oil imports as a share of U.S. consumption have risen from 35 to 59 percent in those three decades. All CAFE standards have succeeded in doing is making cars unsafe, and creating a morass of regulation that automakers circumvent (the Chrysler PT Cruiser is classified as a light truck, for Chrissakes!). . .
. . . cheaper oil is directly responsible for our country's worldwide leadership in per capita productivity with regard to fuel consumption. You have an alternative you'd like to offer? Hydrogen and electricity are energy carriers, not energy sources; as such, they must first be generated from coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, or some other natural source before they can be converted into usable energy sources. Raw hydrogen must be produced, for instance, from natural gas or generated by the electrolysis of water. This leads us back to electricity (electrolysis, incidentally, is the most energy-intensive process of any fuel making alternative; you'd have to burn carbon fuels to manufacture it, making the advantage of conversion negligible at best). Nuclear power is the obvious solution -- a long-term, pollution-free source -- but I suspect you're not willing to go that route.
Further, hydrogen comes married to other elements generally (as in methane gas or water). Most of today's fuel-cell technology relies on hydrogen extracted from methane, in a process that emits large quantities of greenhouse gases. Domestic sources of methane are too limited to serve any significant demand for automobiles. So we'd be forced to look for foreign sources -- sources found primarily in Russia and Iran, and in many Middle East nations. In other words, good-bye oil dependency, hello methane dependency!
. . . a gas tax -- is an expensive solution and does nothing to create the kind of 'energy independence' greens are always going on about. The EU, for instance, taxes gas up to $4 per gallon, and yet it still imports more than half its oil! . . . Besides, we do tax -- we just use backdoor taxes like the CAFE scheme.
. . . To suggest that Islamofascists flew planes into our buildings because of my SUV, then, is just plain silly. . . 'If there wasn't any oil in the Gulf region the United States would NEVER have gone to defend one Arab tribal group [...] against another . As a consequence we wouldn't now have thousands of troops and planes in Kuwait and S. Arabia. Bin Laden and his gang of Islamofascists wouldn't have decided that infidels were despoiling the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. And so on.' By the same logic, I could argue, 'If their weren't any Wahhabism in the Gulf region, the US would never have had to defend itself against Islamofascism, etc. For that matter, were there no Arabs, there'd be no Wahhabism...'
CAFE is useless at reducing our oil consumption, because the evidence is that households use a sort of straight-level budgeting process for gas consumption -- raise fuel efficiency, and people drive more until they're at the same oil consumption as before. Which is what has happened with cars in the US -- according to my energy guru, our gasoline consumption hasn't dropped at all since CAFE was introduced.
Second of all, you can't reduce Saudi income through ANWR either, except from the slight price pressure exerted by a new source in the market. That's because oil is a world market; whatever the price is on that market, domestic suppliers have to be paid the going market rate to prevent them from selling it elsewhere. That's also why we can't boycott Saudi oil; it wouldn't effect their income one bit.
The only way to hit the Saudis where it hurts is to convert to non-fossil fuels. And you know what that means, boys and girls -- Nuclear. Which is why we need to collectively sit on those NIMBY's in Nevada until they squeal for mercy. (I do sympathize. If they were going to put it in my backyard, I could probably find all sorts of reasonable-sounding arguments as to why they shouldn't. But the stuff's got to go somewhere.)
But I do think that Goldstein is wrong about the tax. It would be more effective than CAFE at reducing fuel consumption, because of the way that people budget purchases. People tend to put money in "baskets" in their head: this much for food, this much for laundry soap, etc. The CAFE tax goes into the price of the car, which is not, in most people's minds, in the same "basket" as gasoline purchases, so it doesn't influence their consumption. Moreover, it's a high fixed cost; there's no marginal cost to added mileage that would cause people to forgo that extra trip to the grocery store; quite the opposite, it makes the extra trip cheaper. In fact, it's about the stupidest way you could possibly imagine to reduce consumption. A tax would be much more effective.
But it would cripple the US economy in the short and medium term. My macro professor argued convincingly that the stagflation of the 70's was brought to you by the sharp contraction in the oil supply, which lowered productivity by a considerable percentage.
Now, there are some environmental activists who understand the full implications of what they’re doing when they essentially lobby to block all forms of energy except impractical ones like wind power (Yes, it is impractical – if we tried to switch to wind power on a widespread basis, we wouldn’t have any room left for the houses and factories the wind is supposed to power.) or currently infeasible ones like solar power (Minnesota. Winter. You’re heating the house how? Oh, with the backup wind farms powered by the blizzard. Try again: you have to take the wind towers down if the wind goes much above 30 m.p.h.). Most, however, are animated by ignorance. Some have a very dim knowledge of how either the economy, or the alternative energy sources they are proposing, work; this leads them first to swallow any unworkable proposal made by Nader or Chomsky without question, then eventually, with enough peer reinforcement, to spin their own fantasy worlds based on the “science” and “economics” found in Greenpeace pamphlets.
Others nurture fantasies about a bucolic paradise without factories. This is because they appreciate neither the vast amount of technology required to produce their “organic” lifestyles, nor for the squalor experienced by the colorful natives they admire.
Those who claim that they can live simply based on their propensity for going out into the woods for months at a time, do not realize, or have chosen to forget, that their packs, tents, sleeping bags, rock-climbing ropes, parkas, boots, and too many other pieces of equipment to name, are made from petroleum derivatives.
They do not know that coal, no longer easily accessible near the surface as it was in the days of our Bronze Age forbears, is needed to smelt the iron to make the shovel, plow, hoe, bridle bits, scythe, knives, etc with which they plan to return to the land.
They have never experienced food insufficiency as a permanent fear, rather than an occasional inconvenience at the end of the month.
They think that the patriarchy is some sort of bizarre aberration with which every society was mysteriously afflicted, instead of the natural result of an economic and technological condition in which brute strength is more important than brains.
They are unaware that they can’t get penicillin from any old bread mold.
They do not know anyone with a dead baby, so they think they’d be okay with half the children in their community dying before the age of five.
They do not know anyone who has died in childbirth, so they think that they could handle 1/10-1/4 of the women in the community dying in same.
They have very few friends who have died young, so they think that they could accept an average lifespan of 30.
They don’t know how short 30 years is; or they don’t think that they would be affected.
They do not know that those Afghani kids on TV are blond because their body lacks the nutrients to produce their natural hair coloring.
They have never had body lice or intestinal parasites.
They have never seen a wound infected with maggots.
They have never seen leprosy or festering abscesses or sores that do not heal.
They have never seen an arm or a leg swollen with gangrene.
They have never seen a child waste its life away with diarrhea.
They have never seen a cold turn fatal.
They have never seen someone biting on a rag to keep from screaming while the saw bites into their leg.
They have never seen how white a woman’s body is when she’s exsanguinated by a post-partum hemorrhage.
In short, they’ve created a fantasy world in which the rivers and fields are pristine, and edited out the enormous human misery that accompanied this condition historically. Or they’ve made up some plausible sounding scheme and are demanding we implement it without bothering to figure out what the actual effects would be – and get angry when we do find out, and the effects aren’t what they’d imagined. And they want us to base our economic policy on this fairyland.
Well, that was a bit of a digression. But I feel better now. There’s really nothing like bile and spleen for perking up one’s morning, hmm?
The "room by room" that's going on now is combat. It's SOP for clearing a hostile target in an urban environment. It is also the most dangerous and scary combat there is for infantry. (Clearing caves is essentially the same thing.)
When the US Army or Marines do it, they tend to use a lot of hand grenades.
They sure as hell aren't searching file cabinets while there are still armed Palestinians in the compound. If they do that, it will happen much later, after the area is pacified.
But I suspect there may well be many skeletons in the closet to be found there; records of arms shipments, records of contacts with Iran, phone billing records which reveal the phone numbers of Palestinian terrorist commanders. This is going to be an intelligence bonanza.
The jackpot would be intelligence linking Arafat to either Iraq or to al Qaeda, or both.
Could it be that this is what Sharon is really hoping for?
It may not mean anything, but I suddenly saw more Army people milling around the site today, some on guard duty. Could just be routine -- or it could mean that the powers-that-be are anticipating a meltdown in the Middle East. I won't guess which is the truth without more data.
Many people are spending time making fun of Paul Krugman's latest column just because it serves as an extended whine about how all the boys on the right are meeeaaannnnn. They're missing the point. This column represents a radical new way of looking at things that I feel no trepidation in saying could transform the field of Economics as we know it. In just 500 short words, Krugman has swept away some of the most basic tenets of his profession, revealing a daring new methodology that, if it becomes widespread, could liberate us all. I've pulled out four of the most revolutionary insights -- but don't stop there. Read it yourself, and be amazed.
Insight #1: You Can Always Tell in Advance Which Capital Investments Will Pay Off Which is why central planning works so well. Consider this incisive analysis of the Whitewater investigation:
The group's efforts managed to turn Whitewater — a $200,000 money-losing investment — into a byword for scandal, even though an eight-year, $73 million investigation never did find any evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons.
It's outrageous, isn't it? I think we should pass a law saying that no one's allowed to invest any money in anything unless they have a 100% guarantee that the investment will pay off.
Insight #2: Highly Localized Samples are Representative
. . . for some reason there is a level of anger and hatred on the right that has at best a faint echo in the anti-globalization left, and none at all in mainstream liberalism. Indeed, the liberals I know generally seem unwilling to face up to the nastiness of contemporary politics.
Now, when I was doing boring old marketing surveys, I wasn't allowed to just survey my friends to produce an answer because my stupid professor thought that they shared too many characteristics like being upper middle class professionals in their late twenties who were enrolled at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Clearly, he wasn't in tune with the latest research. I don't know what Krugman's methodology is for drawing sweeping generalizations about the entire population of the US based entirely on conversations with his friends, but boy, I can't wait to get my hands on it! I could kill an entire year's product planning over beers and cheese fries at Jimmy O'Brien's!
Insight #3: Extremely Small Samples are Representative I wish they'd told me about this in statistics!
It's also true that in the nature of things, billionaires are more likely to be right-wing than left-wing fanatics. When billionaires do support more or less liberal causes, they usually try to help the world, not take over the U.S. political system. Not to put too fine a point on it: While George Soros was spending lavishly to promote democracy abroad, Mr. Scaife was spending lavishly to undermine it at home.
According to Forbes, there are 497 billionaires in the world . . . yet Krugman was able to completely describe the behavior of the population with a sample size of just 2, just .4% of the total population -- and no worries about the reliability of samples smaller than 50, either! Using this radical new technique, I will finally be able to complete my dissertation: All People Named Paul Are Good Economists but Bad Liars: A Case Study.
Insight #4: You don't need any boring old numbers to make your case
In my economics classes, my professors were appallingly obsessed with numerical proofs of my statements. Just let me say something obvious, like "most people own a computer", and they'd want me to go waste time digging up the actual number of people who had a computer, and divide it by the number of people, all so I could tell them something I already know. Too bad I never took a class from Krugman.
Slate's Tim Noah, whom I normally agree with, says that Mr. Brock tells us nothing new: "We know . . . that an appallingly well-financed hard right was obsessed with smearing Clinton." But who are "we"? Most people don't know that — and anyway, he shouldn't speak in the past tense; an appallingly well-financed hard right is still in the business of smearing anyone who disagrees with its agenda, and too many journalists still allow themselves to be used.
I have no idea how Krugman knows what "most people" know, or don't know. I don't know whether he has personally spoken with "most people", or has a Brookings study on the matter, or whether he just took a statistically valid sample by asking his mother-in-law and her cleaning lady. But I don't care, because I'm so freed by the prospect that I can get away from all that tedious calculation simply by using precise terms like "most" that I don't even want to know how he performs that voodoo that he do so well. I just want to turn this article into one of my econ professors and demand a couple of retroactive A's.
Thank you, Mr. Krugman. For Economics students everywhere. We are in your debt, sir . . . Deeply, deeply in your debt.
You know, if Eric Altermann wants to tell the world that there's a cabal of devious Jews controlling the media, why doesn't he have the balls to come right out and say it, instead of printing this stupid list?
And here's why: Sharon keeps saying that he means Arafat no harm. Now, if you're going to invade someone's compound without killing him, presumably the reason is that you're trying to scare the hell out of him. If they really meant Arafat no harm, I would expect Sharon to be making a lot of vague grunting noises, occasionally articulating some step that Arafat could take to get them out of the compound. Saying "we're just here to teach him a lesson" is a prelude to "oops, 2nd gunner's mate Liebowitz didn't do proper maintenance on his sights, and darn! we accidentally blew Arafat into more pieces than a jigsaw puzzle. Bad Gunner's Mate Liebowitz! You're confined to quarters, mister, and you'll spend the whole eight hours shining your shoes for the medal ceremony -- no Friends reruns for you!"
No one will believe it, of course. But I'm not sure that Israel cares.
I've said elsewhere that both sides have jockeyed to disimprove the other sides BATNA (Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement) in the hopes of getting a better deal for themself -- Israel with the settlements, Arafat with the terror campaign he "can't control". Arafat was more successful at it -- too successful. He left Israel with nowhere left to turn. Israel should worry about whether this provokes an all-out war? Check the line, honey -- Israel's taking more casualties every couple of weeks than we took in the entire Gulf War. Come September when we visit Iraq, Sadaam's going to start hurling WMD's Israel's way. What the hell should they be afraid of? Let's be realistic -- if Israel lobbed its nuclear arsenal all over the Middle East, we'd be pissed -- but we wouldn't try to dismantle Israel, which is what the Arabs are doing.
And I'm sorry, this is the fault of the "peacemakers" at the UN. Idiot appeasement backed Israel into a corner where war was the only option; if we'd taken Arafat to the woodshed five years ago, peace might have been possible. Now there isn't, as far as I can see any choice. And I'll take the risk of making a prediction: I think this is going to be big. Not WWII big, maybe, but possibly Korea big, and we will be at or near the center of it. I think that when we see the end of this, a lot more people, mostly young boys, theirs and ours, will be dead, and the maps of the Middle East will look very different.
What with everything that's been going on in the Middle East, I'm reviewing a book out of turn. (The review of The Vote will come later today). It's not a book that I'm reading; it's a book I own, and would be reading if it weren't currently buried in a box deep in the dark recesses of a storage locker in Yonkers. It's Nelson DeMille's By the Rivers of Babylon and it may be the best modern thriller about the Middle East.
The book concerns a planeload of Israelis kidnapped on their way to a peace conference and forced down near Babylon. The plot is superbly paced, and the ways in which lightly armed passengers contrive to do battle with the terrorists who have kidnapped them provide a riveting backbone to the novel, but they are not its meat.
I love this book. I rarely re-read action novels, but this one is so compelling that it's earned a permenent spot on my bookshelf; I've re-read it at least a half-a-dozen times. The characters are both deft and deep, neither sinners nor saints and certainly not the cartoon superheroes who populate so many novels of this genre; but DeMille manages to achieve this without casting away the moral dimensions, no mean feat in a novel about war. The novel explores complex issues of war, peace, and personal responsibility without turning into a sermon with a cast.
The best thing about the novel, though are its evocation of the history of the Middle East and the ways in which ancient history plays out there still. The writing of these pieces is extraordinarily fine, from the history of the Babylonian Captivity, to the return of Jews today. Possibly the most frightening thing about the novel is that it was written about twenty five years ago, yet aside from a couple of slight historical anomalies (the age of holocaust survivors; some technical details about airplanes) you would never know it. This may offer a clue as to the future of peace in the Middle East.
Anyway, HIGHLY recommend it. It gets a coveted five star rating and an order to everyone who hasn't read it to go out and buy it today.
Charles Dodgson blasts Bloomberg for admitting that the poor get incinerators in their neighborhoods, while the rich don't.
"The fact of the matter is that where you tend to site things - unfortunately - it tends to be in areas that are also in proximity to people who are just starting their ways up the economic ladder," he said.
People, that is, who aren't as far up the economic ladder as Kira Kerkorian, who at the age of four, could have had $50,000 a month, or $600,000 a year, in child support (the figure in Lisa's divorce settlement, which she could have had for the asking). Which, like the incincerator, is once again a useful gut check on the glories of American egalitarianism.
Well. . . like most things that sound dreadful, it's more complicated that it appears.
First of all, at least in New York, a lot of the incinerators and power plants and other facilities that enrage the activist groups were there before the poor people. The poor people are there because the power plants drive land values low enough so that they can afford to live there.
Second of all, New York is facing a $4.8 billion budget deficit. Siting an incinerator on Park Avenue, would, as Bloomberg says in the article Dodgson cites, drain the city coffers of money that's used to provide services to those aforementioned poor people.
Patrick Ruffini has an oustanding post on how Republicans should address the abortion issue. Favorite point: if Roe v. Wade had been overturned, we'd have legal abortion in 45 states instead of 50.
I couldn't believe it when I heard a graduate of the Yale School of Law tell me that if I voted for Bush, abortion would become illegal. She was clearly so used to being agreed with that she came close to saying that it would happen overnight -- Bush would get elected, and he'd sign an executive order. Huh?
Let's walk through this: how many rabidly pro-life justices would Bush have to appoint to overturn Roe? More than one; at least two; more probably three or four.
Let's say this happens. What then?
The issue goes to the states. Outside of the Bible belt, abortion is legal.
In significant portions of the Bible belt, abortion is still legal, because of who controls the statehouse.
In short, it's what Mr. Ruffini said; about five states would have illegal abortion. No one would be prohibitively far from a clinic.
When I quizzed her on this, she finally admitted it, but I had to badger her. But she must have known she was lying; you don't graduate from Yale and remain unaware of the grosser points of constitutional law. But it sounded good, you see, and a surprising number of educated professionals were nodding along with her. That's Manhattan.
I should mention that I didn't do this because I'm pro-life. I'm not. I'm morally opposed to abortion. I'm repulsed by many of the arguments I hear for it, which often seem to argue either that we're better off without those excess people, or that those embryos would really be better off not being born. Go ask a hundred people if they'd rather their mothers had aborted them and see how many of them (who aren't mopy adolescents) say yes.
But I don't think it should be illegal, for the same reason that I don't think people should have a legal obligation to donate their organs or give blood, even if they have a moral one. I wish the pro-choice groups would get off the feminist socialist twaddle and propose a decently libertarian argument and leave it at that, rather than trying to hide how truly awful a thing abortion is.
And I think that I'm pretty well in harmony with the vast swathe of Americans. I don't think it should be used as birth control, and I think that a healthy young woman in her twenties should have the baby no matter how badly it puts a cramp in her life plans, and I'm afraid that I think that if you are unwilling to take on this burden then you should not engage in behavior that might lead to it. I think that twelve year olds and incest victims shouldn't, and people who've been raped, or whose lives or health are in danger, should have the option without recriminations. I think the NARAL attitude that it's a morally untroubling way to "erase" a pregnancy is just as bad as that of those pro-life groups that spend all their time harassing already traumatized young women, rather than trying to change society so that it's actually feasible for a professional woman to have a baby and give it up for adoption. And I've both experienced the unbelievable hatred the pro-life movement is capable of, standing outside of abortion clinics with NARAL (during my more radical days); and personally spoken to women who in casual conversation described the rhetorical tricks used by counselors at Planned Parenthood to avoid discussing the moral dimensions of abortion, and angrily said that they were never told having an abortion could make them feel so awful. So I'm not basing my opinion of either the pro-choice groups, or the pro-life groups, on propaganda from the other side. I think it's an unbelievably tricky issue, and that neither side's hands are clean.
Which is why I think that it should be legal, and that neither Planned Parenthood nor Operation Rescue should be able to codify their view of abortion in law: because we don't have all the answers. The two sides are arguing from two valid premises -- the individual's right to bodily integrity, and the individual's right to life. How you rank those two things is not subject to rational argument. So it's best left up to individual consciences. The shaping of those consciences -- that I leave to public debate.
People are saying that we're betraying Israel. I don't think so. I think we're playing a more subtle game than we're given credit for. In order to build support here and abroad, we need to be seen giving the Arabs every chance. And so I think that Bush is giving the Saudis, Arafat, et al. enough rope to hang themselves. But I don't think we will abandon Israel. I think we'll save it.
Group Captain Mandrake reports that a court in British Columbia just ruled that pictures of adults having sex with children is protected speech.
UPDATE: Oops, I got it backwards; the pictures are illegal, but writing about it isn't. I'm still of two minds. On the one hand, I'm (almost) a libertarian. On the other hand, I think that adults having sex with children would be the first offense for which I would support the death penalty, if I supported the death penalty. But I guess I think it should be legal -- and that the author should be screamed at whenever possible by people on the street.
’TWAS on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean, The children walking two and two, in red and blue and green, Grey headed beadles walk’d before, with wands as white as snow, Till unto the high dome of Paul’s they like Thames’ waters flow.
O what a multitude they seem’d, these flowers of London town! Seated in companies, they sit with radiance all their own. The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs, Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song, Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among. Beneath them sit the agèd men, wise guardians of the poor; Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
DEATH, be not proud, though some have callèd thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so: For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death; nor yet canst thou kill me. From Rest and Sleep, which but thy picture be, Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow; And soonest our best men with thee do go— Rest of their bones and souls' delivery! Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell; And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then? One short sleep past, we wake eternally, And Death shall be no more: Death, thou shalt die!
Steven Green says the world is too much with him, but can't remember from whence cometh the quote. Well, the recovering lit major's always up for a good game of "name that quote", so here it is, from Wordsworth, not one of my favorite poets, but it's among his best work:
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
Outstanding editorial from the WSJ asks where the hell are all the economists who were lauding Argentina's de-pegging the peso, now that it looks like this may have singlehandedly destoryed both the peso, and the Argentinian economy?
When Argentina dumped its law linking the peso to the dollar late last year, international conventional wisdom hailed the move. Funny, but those same global wise men aren't taking credit for their handiwork now that all hell is breaking loose in Buenos Aires.
They suddenly have the same profile as the Argentine peso, which is to say almost no profile at all. Back before it was "floated" in December, the peso traded with the greenback one to one. Now it's worth about 33 cents, assuming anyone is still willing to hold pesos at all. Despite bank holidays and partially frozen bank accounts, Argentines are standing in lines stretching for half a mile to buy dollars rather than hold their own currency.
The police have been arresting currency traders on the street, banana republic style. . . Forty-three percent of the population now lives below the poverty line, Equis says, and with inflation set to rise so will the number of poor. El Clarin reported on Tuesday that the "middle class basket of goods and services" has risen 27% post-devaluation. Yesterday's La Nacion told of Buenos Aires bakeries threatening to close if the price of flour doesn't fall. As for the trade "competitiveness" that devaluation was supposed to bring, Uruguay says it plans to raise tariffs on 300 Argentine products.
All of this is a tragedy, but it was hardly an accident. The devaluation was the product of years of intellectual attack on the peso's dollar anchor; we know because we were on the other side of that debate. We're still waiting for the architects of the Argentine "float" to explain how all of their splendid schemes went awry.
One such would be Ricardo Hausmann, the former chief economist at the InterAmerican Development Bank. Writing in the Financial Times last October, Mr. Hausmann opined that "the government has to find creative ways to reduce the debt burden and gradually gain competitiveness." His "workable" solution to this was to convert the country's dollar debt to pesos and to float the exchange rate. . . There was another way out, as some of us argued at the time. That path was to remove all doubt about the peso's future value by dollarizing the economy. Yes, the country would still have to reschedule its suffocating debt. But it would have avoided the catastrophic loss of Argentine faith in the value of its own currency, which is the bedrock of any decision to invest or start a business. Even now the country might be able to stop the peso hemorrhage if it decided to dollarize, as Ecuador did to emerge from its death spiral in 2000."
Gary Farber takes me to task for my post on public housing and drug use, saying that I read the decision incorrectly. I didn't, but I apolologize if my post implied that the issue is whether criminal tenants can be evicted. The issue, of course, is whether criminal residents who aren't primary tenants can be evicted.
Public Housing authorites have had and do have, the authority to evict criminals, people who have broken the law. That wasn't at issue. In the slightest. In the least. So I have no idea what Megan McArdle is on about.
What was at issue was whether public housing authorities can evict people who have broken no law, and have no awareness of any law being broken, merely because someone in their household used drugs at one time, at some entirely different place, utterly without the knowledge of the primary renter.
Which is a whole different kettle of squid from what Megan McArdle says she is concerned with, and which is why this went up to the Supreme Court, whereas the utterly settled issue of whether criminals can be evicted certainly need not and did not.
I may be misreading the opinion. But from what I have gleaned, the opinion is indeed on whether the behavior of secondary defendants is grounds for eviction. And it was directed at people who say, "Well, I didn't know little Fred was using drugs" or "Well, I can't control him". I worked in the public housing sector in the mid-nineties, and while I certainly could have missed a decision that allowed the eviction of primary tenants for the behavior of those who live with them, this was indeed a huge problem back then, and not one that the Court had addressed.
The Supreme Court overturned the Court of Appeals, and held that tenants may be evicted regardless of whether the tenant knew, or should have known, of the drug-related activity. Specifically emphasized in the decision is that ... any drug-related activity engaged in by the specified person
