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 persons is grounds for termination, not just drug-related activity that the tenant knew, or should have known, about.... [...]
The court [of Appeals --ed] ultimately adopted this reading, concluding that the statute prohibits eviction where the tenant for a lack of knowledge or other reason, could not realistically exercise control over the conduct of a household member or guest. Id., at 1126. But this interpretation runs counter to basic rules of grammar.
Are we clear here? Third-party actions that it isn't reasonable for the tenant to have known about are grounds for eviction, because of the grammar of the law, says SCOTUS. Pause and marvel at that fine "strict constructionism." Imagine what one would have said if that was the reasoning of a Soviet court.
Keep in mind two things: the public housing authorities are dealing with an enormous problem of tenants claiming that they "didn't know" about drug use going on in their house, and thereby evading responsibility. Some of them probably didn't. But some of them obviously did, and the Housing Authority couldn't do squat. The opinion also, as far as I can tell, is issuing a ruling on whether people can be evicted for behavior of the secondary tenants that the primary tenants can't control. Hard on the primary tenants -- but sons, boyfriends, daughters, etc. that the tenant "couldn't control" have also been historically a huge source of crime in the projects. If you can't evict the primary, how do you get rid of the sixteen year old of whom that tenant is a legal guardian?
The agency made clear that local public housing authorities' discretion to evict for drug-related activity includes those situations in which [the] tenant did not know, could not foresee, or could not control behavior by other occupants of the unit. So much for individual responsibility. No, the new rule is collective responsibility. Conservatives and libertarians have long rightly held popular the meme that zero-tolerance laws and regulations were an absurd, if not inane, over-reaction of the liberal nanny-state, despite the fact that most liberals agree. Here is another case one would think is an example of zero-tolerance run amuck. But somehow Megan McArdle disagrees; based on what she wrote, I have to wonder if she read either the decision, or the story she linked to.
I don't necessarily agree with the particular application the housing authority is making of zero tolerance laws. Farber goes on to talk about the four cases, which are, of course, extremely disturbing; the Times rendition makes it sound as if the housing authority is evicting people because their grandson smokes the occasional mary jane in the parking lot. I say "of course" because those cases were hand-picked by the activist groups that pressed the case for maximum sob-appeal; most such cases I heard about were more along the lines of "her thug of a grandson is dealing from her apartment, but she says she doesn't know anything about that, and anyway, she's afraid of him."
Bad cases make bad laws. The Supreme Court was not ruling on whether these four people deserved to be evicted; it was ruling on a principal. The question was whether you can, or cannot, evict primary tenants from public housing for the behavior of those who live with them, even if they can't control that behavior. I say yes. It's hard on the tenants, but easier on their neighbors. So did the Supreme Court. Whether or not zero-tolerance drug policies are a good idea, or drugs should be legal, or conservatives are mean, is not the issue.
UPDATE: Here's a summary of the decision, via Edward Boyd
In Department of Housing and Urban Development v. Rucker (00-1770), Respondents were threatened with eviction from their public housing by the Oakland Housing Authority after persons associated with Respondents' households were found to have engaged in drug-related criminal activity on or near the premises. The basis for the evictions was a clause in Respondents' leases that requires tenants to "assure that the tenant, any member of the household, a guest, or another person under the tenant's control, shall not engage in . . . [a]ny drug-related criminal activity on or near the premises." The clause closely tracked the language of 42 U.S.C. § 1437d(l)(6), which provides that each "public housing agency shall utilize leases which . . . provide that any criminal activity that threatens the health, safety, or right to peaceful enjoyment of the premises by other tenants or any drug-related criminal activity on or off such premises, engaged in by a public housing tenant, any member of the tenant's household, or any guest or other person under the tenant's control, shall be cause for termination of tenancy." HUD, in turn, promulgated regulations under this statute that allowed local housing authorities to consider all of the circumstances in deciding whether to evict tenants for this type of infraction; HUD further clarified that such tenants could be evicted even if "[the] tenant did not know, could not foresee, or could not control behavior by other occupants of the unit."
Respondents sued HUD , OHA, and OHA's director in Federal court after the OHA began state-court eviction proceedings. Respondents argued that HUD's application of the statute to "innocent" tenants violated the Administrative Procedures Act (i.e., was an unreasonable interpretation of § 1437d(l)(6)) and, alternatively, that the statute is unconstitutional. The district court agreed (with the first argument) and entered a preliminary injunction in Respondents' favor. A Ninth Circuit panel reversed, but the en banc posse reversed and reinstated the injunction.
The Court today reversed, with the Chief writing for all participating Justices (Breyer sat this one out-presumably as a result of his brother's role as district judge here and not because he signed one of these leases when occupying his swank-o Georgetown pad). Although dragging on a bit by his standards, the Chief quickly explained that § 1437d(l)(6) unambiguously requires lease terms giving local housing authorities the power to evict tenants for household members' drug-related activities, without regard to the tenant's knowledge of the activity. The word "any" clearly modifies "drug-related criminal activity," and, therefore, a knowledge requirement is not consistent with the statute. Moreover, although "under the tenant's control" obviously modifies "other person," it would be nonsensical for it also to modify "member of the tenant's household" and "guest," as the en banc Ninth Circuit found. That interpretation, of course, would deprive the disjunctive "or" of its meaning, and no one wants to see that happen. Furthermore, elsewhere in the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act that gave us § 1437d(l)(6) Congress expressly imposed an "innocent owner" defense where it wished to do so. The plain language therefore makes it unnecessary to resort to legislative history, but, even so, that effort would not support Respondents' position.
The Chief then took a moment to reject the en banc Ninth Circuit's attempt to rely on the canon of constitutional avoidance to read a knowledge requirement into the statute. After reiterating that avoidance is unnecessary because the language is unambiguous, the Chief went on to dismiss that court's suggestion that the lease provision presented problems under the Due Process Clause. Not only had Respondents contracted with the government for these lease provisions, he explained, but also they would receive adequate notice of any deprivation in their state-court eviction proceedings. Revealing that his main beef was with that insolent Ninth Circuit, the Chief relegated the Respondents' constitutional arguments to a lowly footnote, simply adopting Judge O'Scannlain's refutation for the initial panel of the First Amendment and Excessive Fines Clause challenges.
In other words, not only did the court rule on a broad array of issues on secondary tenants; it also allowed for broad discretion on the part of the HUD authorities. The authoritites may have made a bad call on some of the cases, but that doesn't give those tenants a constitutional case.
I have a sort of odd perspective on Israel. On the one hand, my family's from Northern Ireland. The first time I drove into the ancestral town, located in a region of Ireland where McArdles have been kicking around for, oh, 3,000 years or so, according to the history the nice tourist lady sold us, I was struck by the bucolic beauty. Then I was even more struck by the arch that the residents of the town (which is split neatly, half Catholic, half Protestant) had erected. It was newish (not earlier than the mid-eighties, I'd guess), festooned with Protestant heraldry, and held a gorgeous orange sign at the apex of the arch that said "For the love of God, Country, and Protestant Ireland."
Niggers, go home. Except, oops! This is our home. You're the ones who came over, seized our land, outlawed our religion and our language, forbid us to own property worth more than five pounds, shipped wheat out of our country to your hungry mouths at home while a quarter of us died of starvation and almost another half left, half of those travelers dying before they reached whatever shore they were fleeing to.
There is no rage as powerful as that of a people dispossessed in their own land. My family hasn't lived there for a hundred years and I can still work up a towering head of righteous anger on the subject. It isn't in any way shape or form fair. The protestants in Northern Ireland have no right to be there.
And yet.
It's their home. I have no right to be in New York City, by that accounting. Northern Irish Protestants have been there for four hundred years. They don't have a right to act like crazy bigots, as many of them do -- remind me to tell you sometime about the little hotel in Belfast, the name of which escapes me, which had no rooms available for McArdle but magically opened one up for Johnson. The ranting of the Ian Paisley and his ilk about "them" and the way "they" [insert your favorite slur from the fifties in the south -- breed like animals, won't do an honest day's work, aren't fit for polite society, etc] is no different from that of the Segregation Forever! crowd.
But they live there now, and they have a right to stay. It's their country too. The fact that this represents some sort of cosmic historic injustice doesn't give Gerry Adams and his merry band of madmen a right to blow things up any more than it gives the Mohawk nation a moral right to open fire in Times Square. The Irish psychos are a little different in that they usually target police or paramilitary targets rather than civilian ones -- but not too different because they aren't too picky about who happens to be standing near those "military" targets when the bomb goes off -- and the fringe wackos seem to have the idea that London is some kind of gigantic military base. There's one side effect of 9/11 that couldn't make me happier -- the funding for the IRA has dried up, at least in New York. My fellow Irish Americans are no longer walking around with a Michael Collins fantasy in their head -- they know now what the carnage is really like.
So I can sympathize with the Palestinians rage, if not their means. A lot of people, when talking about the Palestinians, seem to forget that they have gotten an immensely raw deal. For reasons that were totally out of their control, they've been forced off their land and herded into camps. The Israelis (be honest) treat them like second-class citizens and can often be caught saying the kinds of things that Ian Paisley says about my kind.
That it is a better deal than they would be getting in Jordan doesn't make them feel any better about being the assigned toilet-cleaners and ditch diggers of Israel. That Israel deserves a homeland is probably not real compelling for the people who were on the land the Israelis are now calling home. That they are stuck in the camps because other Arab nations are playing politics with their lives is true, but they're still sitting in those camps looking at land that used to belong to them. It may be that the descendants of the person actually responsible for the Northern Irish plight are sitting fat and happy in England, and shooting them would produce a satisfactory revenge. But when the protestants are sitting right there, talking smack about me and my family, it's hard not to get justifiably enraged. So I think that when we talk about the Palestinians, we can't just dismiss their rage. What I would like to do to Osama, every Palestinian who's lost a brother or a neighbor or a husband or a son to the intifiada would like to do to the Israelis.
But we can say to them: there are two just claims to this land, and yours lost. We will never, ever allow you to do to Israel what you are planning in your darkest heart. So think of something else you'd like -- money, land elsewhere, citizenship in another Arab country -- because you will not be permitted to push the Jews back into the sea no matter how long you wait. We will not grow weary of standing against barbarity.
Because the flip side of understanding Palestinian's just rage is understanding that it has many unjust manifestations.
They do not have a right to blow up civilians.
They do not have a right to wipe Israel off the map.
They must not be allowed to make a "peace" deal that is only another stage in the fight to push the Jews back into the sea.
No matter how just their rage, it does not justify blowing up children. And as long as they will not accept that Israel, too, has a right to exist, they cannot be treated with. Israel cannot allow a Palestinian state unless that state is genuinely interested in peace. Which they aren't -- the polls showing 2/3 favoring a sort of "final solution" to the Israeli problem may have suspect methodology, but I have seen nothing in the media or otherwise which would suggest that they are wrong. And Arafat's regime is clearly trying to ensure the next generation is just as filled with hate by printing libelous slanders against Jews in the state-sponsored textbooks. We feel bad for the Palestinians because they got a raw deal -- but that doesn't mean we can uproot Israel to comply with the Palestinians' ideas of fair.
My father thinks that education is the answer, as it has proven to be in Northern Ireland; a busy middle class doesn't have time to run around with guns, posing for their girlfriends. But Arafat's in charge of the education, and the purpose of his school system is not creating a middle class -- it's creating martyrs. Arafat is trying to manipulate things to that he gets everything he wants, Israel nothing. He is a masterful manipulator. But his goals are not acceptable. And I think that he has overplayed his hand.
The suprisingly excellent Newsweek series on Israel this week (I read it on dead tree, so you may have to cast around for the bit -- and don't miss the Kissinger essay) contains one part where a Palestinian kid celebrates the fact that casualties, which were 1 Israeli for every 15 Palestinians in the last war, are now 1:4. Kid, you're winning the battle and losing the war. Let those casualties get much closer and your support in Europe will wane. (Except for France, but they're just being pissy -- and of course, they're scared as hell of what the Algerians might do). Your support in America already has. The "success" of your intifada lies mostly in persuading a couple hundred million Americans that you're all a bunch of ragheads who like to blow up babies.
And when I see things like these terrible suicide bombings, this is what I think: animals. Barbarians. Idiot toddlers who destroy without reason because they can't get their way. If these guys were doing this in the middle of a military base -- but they're not. They're not brave enough to try. They only feel brave enough to walk into the middle of a shopping mall where their victims are innocent and helpless. Cowards. Rotten, filthy, stinking cowards who don't deserve to breathe. And unfortunately, they're not any more, so we can't do to them what they ought.
Does Israel have the right to retaliate? No. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, with good reason. But does Israel have the right to do whatever is necessary to protect itself from a group of people who think that slaughtering children is a legitimate form of warfare? Hell yes. No, that doesn't include, as some have implied, indiscriminate slaughter of the Palestians. But it sure as hell includes relocating the Palestinians if they can't be trusted to build a peaceful state that doesn't send misguided children to blow up the children of others. Or building a wall with the Palestinians on one side, and their jobs and water supply on the other. You won't have to worry about being humiliated at those checkpoints. . .
The fact that the Palestinians have been handed an awful deal by history is not a free pass to abdicate civilized behavior. And If the Palestinians wish to justify barbarity with scripture, they should remember that the Jews have a few choice verses of their own:
1 By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. 2 We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. 3 For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. 4 How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land? 5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. 6 If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. 7 Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof. 8 O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. 9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
I want to grab that kid and a couple million of his compatriots, shake him soundly, and say "Here's what you can have: a decent life. Here's what you can't: all the land your ancestors had. That's not on the table, so step up to the negotiation and seek a realistic solution. Act like adults instead of spoiled children crying for Daddy to get 'em the pretty moon. Put your rage aside and seek a proposal that everyone can live with, not just you." But I can't. And so far, Bush won't. But I suspect the day is coming soon when he will. And I think Arafat is going to regret like hell the day he walked away from Camp David.
A lot of anger about the labeling issue. Andy Freeman writes that there's too much disagreement about porn to label it:
Some folks think that it's topless. Some folks think that it's bottomless. Some folks think that it's suggestive behavior. Some folks think that it's smoking. Some folks think that it's violence/blood. (Is the opening 10 minutes of Saving Private Ryan porn?) I can go on and on. (Abortion information? Saudi articles about Jewish pastry ingredients?) Note that many of the smoking/violence folks aren't bothered by exposed flesh, and visa versa.
Well, first of all, this merely implies a set of, say, twenty labels instead of one. This is not an insurmountable problem.
Second of all, parents -- raise your hand if you're okay with your kid looking at porn as long as she's wearing a g-string. Or if your children are unaware of what smoking looks like and you want to make sure they don't get any pictures of it.
Movie standards were promulgated as much to prevent things that the "busybodies" don't like from looking cool as to keep kids from looking at adult content. Smoking is a public activity, unlike (in most cases) parading around au natural It's not really that hard to draw most of these distinctions. Sure there will be room around the edge -- there's room around the edge in any standard ever promulgated for the conduct of human relations.
Nor do I think it is fair to refer to them as busybodies. The social libertarian idea that the most permissive standard should become the de facto public one is every bit as oppressive as the Jerry Falwell idea that we should all hew to his idea of morality in the public sphere. The fact that many people want to have adult content on the net should not mean that parents have to watch their children every minute to keep them from being exposed to content they don't approve of. Personally, my parents were liberal on that sort of thing -- I saw my first R rated movie at aged 10, with my Dad (National Lampoon's Vacation, it was, and I can't remember why it was rated R). But they also didn't have to contend with the possibility that I might discover pictures of behavior that might frighten or appal me in casual cruising, which is not as hard to do as my correspondants have implied. I've stumbled across things I hadn't even known existed by following links that looked perfectly innocuous. (Yes, I suppose I'm sheltered. No, I'm not going to elaborate. Shame on you!)
Lane McFadden weighs in with the sensible point that the stuff we're arguing about is less than 1% of the porn on the net. I think a 99.5% effective filter is about as well as one can expect to do in an evironment as large as the net, and I'm pretty sure that most parents would agree it's better than nothing.
I'm not so much advocating labels as kicking the idea around and looking at it. I don't know what the solution is. But I think that anti-label advocates are going to have to come up with better arguments than
1) People who don't want their kids (or their employees) looking at porn are just prudes and they need to get with the program 2) It's too hard -- it can't be done. (The MPAA shows it can. Whether it's worth the social cost is another question)
I know my posts have been pretty thin the last few days. . . I've been busier than the proverbial one legged man in a derriere kicking contest. Starting tomorrow, there'll be a plethora of thrilling posts on everything that's built up for the last few days. . . but right now I'm exhausted and I'm going to bed. 'Night.
Do you know why I keep a dog? It's because of the way his eyes get all big and round when I wave his plush soccer ball around. To get a person to look that excited, you'd have to be waving a Porsche in the air, but the velvety toy does the dog just as well. And not only that -- by the second or third time someone gave you a Porsche, your eyes wouldn't get so wide. It'd be old hat. But for the dog, each and every brandishment of the fuzzy orb produces the same wondrous glee. As long as you keep the plush toys and the bones coming, they live in magic.
People opposed to smut filters complain that they don't work. So a sensible economist asks why we don't require content providers to label their adult content and then let consumers decide.
From the same site (just discovered it, and boy, it's good): will boredom save Microsoft from the Linux threat? I've been arguing here for a while that the problem with Linux is two-fold: first, that I haven't seen an actual realistic revenue model for a largely open-source world; and second, that it is good code but bad marketing, insufficiently responsive to the needs of the ordinary consumers who would have to use it, rather than the desires of the advanced users who code it. This bit points to a real-world example of what you might term an open source market failure.
And on the well-traveled subject of faculty bias, he makes a suggestion that I've approached asymptotically: the next time your college calls you for money, ask how many Republicans are on the faculty. If enough of us demand to know, colleges will respond to the fundraising market by getting some conservatives on board.
Market-based solutions for social problems -- who would have thought that stuff this good could come out of Smith College?
What's perhaps even more amazing is that their budget - which they presumably plan to be the groundwork for a claim that they're the fiscally responsible ones - predicts a higher deficit than the one about to be passed by the GOP-controlled House. It's true, yes, that it's smaller than the one in the President's budget, but the two "GOP" versions fully fund the President's military spending request; Conrad's diverts some of it to social spending. Why they think that will go over with the electorate is quite a mystery, I must say.
Conrad's right, of course. Securing the future of Social Security is a vital test of the current Congress' mettle. And, so long as Tom Daschle is Senate Plurality Leader, they will fail it miserably. Their only hope of long-term survival as a party is to keep as many Americans as possible on the public teat. So they will demagogue Social Security right up to the day (now likely to arrive before I am eligible to retire) that the United States government defaults on its promises.
Perhaps the saddest non-legacy of the Clinton Administration is that he could have secured himself a permanent legacy, a place in the pantheon of greats so strong that no number of scandals could ever have dislodged him, if only he had had the courage to reform Social Security in the manner proposed by President Bush. Just as, in the words of the ancient Vulcan proverb, "only Nixon could go to China", so Bubba could have privatized Social Security. He was largely successful pulling his party - kicking and screaming - up to a level of sustainable credibility on such things as the economy and crime; he could have done the same for entitlements.
So here's my opinion on racial profiling: legalize drugs and concealed carry.
Think about it. All those traffic stops, the stop-and-frisks that humiliate and anger a large sector of society -- what are the cops looking for? When they make some kid drop his pants in the middle of the street, they're not checking to see whether he's carrying a stolen tv in there -- they're looking for weapons or drugs. Legalize concealed carry and drugs and you eliminate any payoff, in terms of making cops' quotas, to the searches. We also get rid of a lot of the payoff to the crime that leads to the environment in which the searches are necessary or permissible.
Now here's a question: If we legalize drugs, do we allow money to flow into the inner city, by creating a more stable environment, or pull money out of the inner city, by removing idiot bankers dropping $500 on a whiff of cocaine?
Now, followers of this page will know that I am in favor of legalizing drugs. All of 'em. Don't care how much they weigh, what class they are, or to what extent they resemble or do not resemble crack cocaine. Take the laws off the books.
However, given that the laws are still on the books, drug use is accompanied by a great deal of other crime and anti-social behavior. And unlike other people, the other residents of the housing projects can't move away from trouble; they're stuck with whatever the government chooses to let live there. I'm always entranced by the thought of forcing the ACLU lawyers who argue these cases to live next door to the tenants they're willing to inflict on our minimum wage workers.
Predictably, poverty advocates are screaming that this is discrimination. Wake up, Moonshine; the sixties are over. The problems of the poor today are no longer lack of the basic necessities for survival; the problems of the poor can be divided into three categories: lack of status goods (Wal-Mart sneakers instead of Nikes); their own behavioral problems, for which they lack the safety net that middle class status affords; and the behavior problems of other poor people with whom the government forces them to live. We have a choice between guaranteeing, for those at the bottom, either a respectable if not glamorous standard of life for those who choose to live respectably; or squalor for everyone. There is no way of both guaranteeing everyone a place to live, and making the places that we offer to the less fortunate meet a minimum standard of decency; the two aims are mutually exclusive, because the essential problem with many of these places is the tenants. Not all of the tenants; just a significant minority that make it unliveable for anyone else. (I realize we have a third option, which is to bulldoze the places, but that's another discussion) While personally I'd like to see drugs decriminalized, I still heartily endorse the principle that we can kick criminals out of public housing, even if they're not the primary tenant.
Meanwhile, SmarterTimes lets us know that the New York Sun is almost here! I don't know if it will be good enough to threaten the Grey Lady, but I'm willing to give it a try for $2.50 a week, their special subscription rate. I heartily encourage anyone in New York to take a subscription; even if your politics jibe with those of the Times, it can't be a bad thing to have more intelligent voices in the arena. Help us shake things up a little!
A chance conversation today reminded me of a long family tradition of doing the wrong thing in the middle of a crisis; specifically, when assaulted.
About 18 years ago my grandfather, then 70, was working in his gas station when a man came in and demanded the cash. This man was 35, over 6 feet tall, and weighed considerably more than my grandfather, who weighed in at 6 feet and 150 pounds. Rather than doing the sensible thing and handing over the take, my grandfather leapt over the counter and lunged at him. When the cops arrived, the would-be robber was begging them to pull this crazy old man off him. The local papers wrote him up as a sort of geriatric wonder, which angered my grandfather deeply. My mother was angry too -- because he'd risked his life for the contents of the cash register drawer. She tried to get him to promise that next time, he'd comply quietly.
A few years later, my mother's purse was snatched by someone who was also, coincidentally, younger and larger than she was. Rather than doing the sensible thing, she chased him four blocks, threw him against a wall, retrieved her purse, and held him there for a little while before she realized that, this being New York, no one was going to go for the cops whilst she detained him. She let him go. I furiously lectured her on the relative values of her wallet and her continued good health.
A couple of years after that, I was sauntering down Osage Street in the lovely Philadelphia dusk when two teenagers appeared out of a corner. One of them grabbed my wrist; the other said "Give me your money, [Expletive deleted]". A flash of metal indicated that this one had some sort of a weapon, although I didn't see it too clearly, so for all I know they were holding me up with a roll of Reynolds Wrap.
I should mention that at the time I was dating a fellow who was a black belt in Karate and who had endeavored to teach me same. Unfortunately up to that point, all I had mastered was the scary yell and the fighting stance. Yet such was my rage at the thought of these little twerps trying to get their grubby hands on MY MONEY that rather than doing the sensible thing and giving them the eighty dollars and change that I was carrying, I emitted my best scary yell, yanked my wrist out of the hand of Perp #1, and assumed fighting stance.
The second I had done this I recognized that it was completely insane. What was I going to do if they called my bluff -- say, "ha, ha, glad to see you fellows can take a joke," and hand over my money? I frantically sought ways to get myself out of the now deeper predicament I was in.
I needn't have bothered. The one with the reynolds wrap said, "Oh, [expletive deleted], man, she knows karate!" and the two of them took off down the street. Amusingly, the other one kept looking behind him to see if I was chasing them. I suspect that I may have been their first foray into the dark underworld of crime; hopefully, I was their last. Thank you, Jean Claude Van Damme.
The point is, you can't know what you would do in a real crisis until you're in it. We like to believe that we will do the exact right thing; that we would be the ones hiding Jews in Nazi Germany; fighting against apartheid in South Africa; that in battle we would be heroic, and that in extremes of personal need we would hew to our deepest principles. But if you can't even plan a simple thing like what you're going to do when you get mugged, how sure can you be that you'd take heroic risks when the stakes are higher?
I don't know about you, but I watched the Oscars for about ten minutes. After suffering through Tom Cruise's speech, which sounded like the live version of the painfully earnest essays people write to get into film school, I thought "I'd pretty much rather be doing anything else" and went off to finish my taxes. Luckily, Cintra Wilson has suffered for all of us by sitting though the entire thing and producing a summary that is vastly more entertaining than the original.
I don't have anything in particular to say about this, except that over the past week or so I have been recalling the sort of righteous anger that suffused every fibre of my moral being six months ago, as the tributes roll out to the dead. This is a particularly moving one, because all it is is a description of the ordinary lives the people on Flight 93 were living, right up to the time they had to become heroes.
From over at Jumping to Conclusions, there's a possibility that two of the hijackers were treated for Anthrax last June. It's a retroactive diagnosis, of course, but could put paid to the widespread rumor that the Feds know who the anthrax guy is, and he works for us.
Here's what I don't understand about the Democrats refusal to pass amnesty, while Bush pushes it: is this really not going to push some of their latino base into the arms of the Republicans?
Slow news morning, so I'm going to post something I've been meaning to do for a while: the answers, if anyone cares, to the emails that I got regarding my article on the Microsoft Anti-trust case. Of course, they tend to stress the same broad themes, so I'll just condense here, though you can see a good sample of criticisms, and applause, for the article here in the Salon letters section.
The amazing thing to me is how many people who emailed seemed to be trying to continue an argument with me that they'd started with someone else. The purpose of the article was not to argue that Microsoft played fair; it was to argue that the lawsuit Netscape is bringing is full of holes. But rather than responding to that, something I said touched off a hotbutton in their heads, and they commenced a familiar argument as if I were taking the other side.
You can too buy an Apple/Sun station for under $1000! This has two answers. The first is that $1000 was essentially an arbitrary number: the point was that the cheapest PC's are about 25% cheaper than the cheapest Apple, more than 50% cheaper than the cheapest Sun. I could have said $900, and then you wouldn't have anything to email about.
The second answer is that I priced systems with the following criteria: CPU, printer, monitor, extended warranty (on the assumption that we are talking about the most computer illiterate consumers). The iMac comes in over $1000; the Sun comes in around $1600 (that $949 price didn't include a monitor). Yes, but. . . many of you argued that one or the other component was unecessary. Fine. Strip off everything and the Dell is $549, the Apple $799, the Sun $1200 (I refuse to concede that a monitor is optional).
Yes, but. . . there's actually more "value" in an Apple/Sun when you count software, performance, or whatever. That's a value judgement. Firewire maybe fantastic, but it's not something that everyone wants, as evidenced by the fact that not everyone has it. YOU may value your iMac at well over what it cost, but assuming that your hierarchy of values represents some absolute, objective standard is what made Communism such a rousing success. (Comrade Oblenko likes black pants better than brown -- therefore, we will only produce black pants and save many rubles on dye!)
Bundling Was Unfair Competition The best argument I've heard on this score is that IE loads faster because it loads at startup; this makes Netscape compare unfairly.
Here's the thing, though -- I have a hard time believing that consumers make their software choices based on the extra 10 seconds they have to wait for Netscape to load.
If they do, however, then this is a genuine advantage of the browser to the conumer, one that Netscape couldn't replicate. Remember, the Appellate court ruled that the purpose of the Anti-trust legislation was to protect the consumer, not Netscape. You're going to protect the consumer by forcing them to give up a feature they like?
There is a compelling argument to be made about some of the API's, except that Netscape didn't make it. We can't try the case in the papers.
Microsoft designs its code so other programs run badly Sigh. Also not in the complaint. Nonetheless:
Find me a Microsoft programmer who admits this, please -- and not one that your brother-in-law met at a party; one who's actually put it in writing. I've met several (current and former) who deny it adamantly, but then they would, wouldn't they? But short of a confession, or your looking at the Windows source code, you don't actually have any evidence that the reason that Microsoft programs run better is that Microsoft sabotages its competitors, rather than that the code is better. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But you don't know and neither do I. And I know enough programmers to know that they'll blame anything when their code doesn't work, from sunspots to their officemate sending "evil thoughts" at them.
Users are lazy and stupid That's a tech's perspective. I'm sure those dolts down in accounting feel the same way about what you do with your checkbook. The evidence just isn't there that they are imprisoned by whatever software is on the desktop; as I point out in the article, they proved perfectly capable of downloading Netscape when the dreadful I.E. 3.0 was on teh desktop. They stopped when it was no longer necessary to do so.
Internet Explorer isn't actually a "single platform" It may well be that IE violates the "write once, run anywhere" ideal; I'm not a web developer. But the point I was trying to make is that if there are network effects in the browser market, they come from the web developers; the software isn't hard enough to use to create real switching costs, and of course users don't create files to share with other users, the source of the network effects for programs like Microsoft Office.
If the point is that network effects aren't as strong as were previously thought, I agree with you. So does Microsoft; that's why they compete like hell in every market they're in.
Unix is better The argument that I was discussing was not about the Unix kernel, which is undoubtedly better (as many people pointed out) than Apple's old core; it was about Unix as implemented in Solaris, etc. Which is expensive and requires extensive training for users because it's harder to use. I frankly don't understand why people want to argue with me about this; it is empirically more expensive, and if you want empirical evidence of its ease of use, plop one computer illiterate user in front of a Unix box, the other in front of a Windows machine, and see which one's working faster. Linux is great -- and requires a lot of time to custom build a stable system, since the problems that were inherent in Windows are also inherent in Linux -- a whole lot of third party drivers that can interfere with eachother. That's why (I imagine) I know so many people who perfected their Linux system two years ago after much fiddling -- and haven't touched it since. Unix doesn't have to be all things to all people to be a great system; I don't understand why its fans can't accept that.
Netscape was free too Check your facts. Netscape was free -- initially, while they built market share to that 70%+. At the point where Microsoft started to eat their market share, they were charging $40 a pop.
Microsoft's not Free -- You pay for it as part of your Windows license So far, no one's been able to prove this. Arguments rely on one of two things:
1) It's not free for other platforms Check your facts. At least for Unix and Mac, it's free as far as I can tell. Go to Microsoft & download it if you don't believe me.
2) Pricing has changed Extremely hard to prove. Most proofs seem to relate to Microsoft's practice of raising the price of it's old operating systems to that of its newest release, which has more to do with other strategies than its browser prices. It's hard to generate a "true" price for Windows, because the makers of the other main competitive OS's either don't charge (Linux), or are integrated software/hardware makers, which changes the economics of their business.
In a larger sense this is true, of course; some of the profits from Windows go to pay for browser development -- but that doesn't mean that the company would necessarily charge less for WIndows; those profits might otherwise go into Bill Gates' pocket. Unless, of course, Netscape had succeeded in its strategy to seize the strategic monopoly position of Microsoft, in which case you'd be paying those profits to Netscape.
I'm an evil, pro-Microsoft shill Did you read the article, or just the headline? Saying that Microsoft should win the lawsuit is not the same thing as saying that Microsoft is a good guy. I just don't think you should indict someone for something they didn't do, just because you can't make a case for something you know they did.
Best technology doesn't necessarily win in the marketplace What's "best"? Every single person who made this argument achieved it -- if they offered examples at all, rather than just stating it, a priori, by leaving out attributes that they didn't care about, like price, or compatibility, or customer support, or something. Perhaps there are compelling examples, other than the widely debunked QWERTY or VHS ones, of a better technology losing, but I haven't seen it.
The Total Cost of Ownership of Unix is lower As a consultant, I ran TCO's for Unix and Windows (and the person running the TCO for Unix was our Unix guru, not me). It isn't. Again, such comparisons are usually achieved by leaving out little things like training and availability of software. When it was lower, we used Unix.
Netscape server isn't as integrated with Netscape as IE is with Windows That's true. That's because there's another viable product on the market. It's not seriously in question that Netscape initially planned to have a server platform that would work better than rival systems for the same reason Netscape advocates claim IE works better than Netscape. That's why investors were throwing so much money at them -- they thought the browser franchise would be a license to mint cash.
Microsoft's giving away its browser was predatory pricing No argument here. Which I said in my article. Problem is, it's not in the complaint.
AOL isn't better Than what? Than MSN it is. Consumers said so.
Personally, I wouldn't use AOL if they paid me. But a lot of people seem to disagree.
Microsoft themselves admitted Netscape is better Not quite. What they said was that they didn't see how they could gain market share without leaning on their distribution network. That doesn't mean their product was necessarily worse (though that is indeed how Netscape cast it in their complaint); it could just as easily be taken to mean that Netscape's monopoly power was so locked in that the only way anyone could compete would be by leveraging the network. Which doesn't mean that the Microsoft executive was correct. Remember how many e-mails AOL had to sift through to get that one, out of context, quote.
The decision to use a browser is not the same as the decision to use a web browser True, but hard to see how this is relevant. Emails on this topic seemed to point to the fact that browsers have lower switching costs (once you've got an email address, it's harder to switch to another service). However, this should have helped Netscape, not harmed them, if the desktop icon were truly decisive.
I don't understand how Microsoft tried to take over open standards to force people to their browser Au contraire. But I didn't have time to elaborate on it; the article was long as it stood. And the core point is, that it wasn't in the darn complaint, so Netscape can't get money based on it. Not that Netscape could anyway, since they don't own the standards you're emailing me about.
The fact that IE may have been better is not proof that it should have won I'll quote directly from a Salon letter:
Even the "free browser" argument gets garbled in McArdle's presentation. The point is that Microsoft can afford to support a free product indefinitely, while a company like Netscape cannot. This is a brilliant bullying tactic on Microsoft's part, since a free product is a boon to the consumer, and their motives appear less predatory.
Netscape isn't as good, but that's not the point of the antitrust suit. Netscape's 70 percent market dominance was not "monopolistic" as McArdle contends in her opening. Saying that IE is better, so nothing unseemly happened, is like saying that Nicole Kidman turns out to be a pretty good actress, so her marriage to Tom Cruise must have nothing to do with her success. Nepotism and Monopoly work the same way; they ensure success, even when the success is deserved. And that apparently is too subtle an idea for Ms. McArdle.
Predatory pricing -- don't need to go over it again.
70% market share is usually considered in the monopolistic range, at least when considering mergers and such.
The last is an interesting point, but the problem is that the writer has it backwards. Microsoft doesn't have prove it would have won the market share anyway; Netscape has to prove it wouldn't have. Which it can't.
Using IE as the help file made it more likely to win Don't buy it. Browsers just aren't that hard to use, and the version used for the help file is stripped down and altered so that the relevant parts (the navigation buttons) are features of both Netscape and IE.
Microsoft didn't succeed just because its superior I didn't say it did. I said it didn't succeed just because of its distribution practices, which is what Netscape is trying to argue.
