Dave Friedman's Soul of Wit

Hiatus Canceled...

...at least temporarily.

Jeremy Siegel, finance professor at Wharton, writes in today's Wall St. Journal:

The outsized influence of the tech sector in 2000 greatly distorted the capitalization-weighted indices. There are 10 sectors in the S&P 500 Index: technology, financials, health care, utilities, industrials, energy, consumer discretionary, consumer staples, and materials and telecom. If we exclude the tech sector, the S&P 500 would be 16% above its level reached in 2000. Seven of the 10 other sectors (excluding tech, telecom and consumer discretionary) are significantly higher than their 2000 levels. Even within the S&P 500, more than two-thirds of stocks are above the price they reached in 2000, but the big cap tech stocks had so much weight then that their collapse forced the whole index lower now.

In more prosaic terms: capitalism is triumphant, wealth is being created, and you would be a fool to bet against the tendency of man to become wealthier over the years. Even if you are a stupid day trader bidding up the prices of worthless companies, overall, man--Americans, that is--has created wealth over the past six years. And there is no reason that such continued dynamism won't continue, left-wing hand-wrining over "income inequality" notwithstanding.

On Stupidity

The Wall St. Journal on HP and Congress:

Are there any bigger lessons here about "corporate governance"? Not really. The fad of dividing the roles of CEO and chairman may sometimes make sense, but at H-P that division of responsibility led to dysfunction. Ms. Dunn seems to have meddled too much in corporate operations by supervising a leak probe run from the H-P counsel's office. That's one danger of dividing the two jobs. But like any collection of human beings, the knowledge and judgment of the individuals on a board matter far more than its structure.

Mr. Hurd and the entire H-P board also seem to have ignored a law of modern public relations, which is to get all the bad news out early, take responsibility, and move on. Instead, the board knew as early as June that the probe involved "pretexting," or misrepresentation, to obtain Mr. Keyworth's phone records, yet it failed to stop it. Mr. Hurd has finally acknowledged he should have paid more attention to the details of the probe, but he was also too slow to accept that Ms. Dunn had to leave as chairman. He's fortunate H-P's stock has performed so well, or some investors would be using this episode to call for his head as well.

As for Congress, we understand the impulse to grab some camera time by beating up on H-P witnesses. But even otherwise shrewd Members of Congress have been known to do stupid things from time to time. The last thing the country needs is a new Bureau for the Prevention of Bad Business Judgment, which is at bottom what the H-P saga is all about.

Though the Journal is undeniably correct here, good luck in getting Congress to take as nuanced an interpretation of the events as this. Politicians, as always, are out for blood, and no group of people is more easily demonized than businesspeople, never mind the fact that the size of our government is a direct function of the size of our private industry; government could not be government without the wealth created by business. Governments that print money in the absence of any economic underpinning experience hyperinflation; witness Germans buying loaves of bread for quadrillions of deutshce marks in the years after World War I.

And yet, HP et al will be demonized by government.

Explain to me how this makes any kind of sense?

Possibilities

There's a possibility I will become wealthier than Bill Gates.

There's also a possibility that I will live to 120.

There's also a possibility that I will one day score a hole in one in golf.

There's a possibility I will be struck by lightning.

It is safe to say, however, that there exists no possibility that Scott Dyleski will become a productive adult. See, he was convicted of bludgeoning to death his neighbor, in an apparent act of premeditated murder. His lawyer's understanding of probability suggests remedial math is neeced:

His lawyer pleaded with the judge to give the teen "the slimmest opportunity" of a chance at parole after he serves 25 years in prison for the brutal murder of Vitale, his 52-year-old neighbor.

"Scott Dyleski made a terrible mistake," public defender Ellen Leonida said. "There is always the possibility that he can mature into a responsible, productive citizen."

In a proper world, of course, this monster would have been sentenced to death, not life in prison, but we live not in a proper world but in the world in which our legislatures and judges have seen fit to warehouse murderers, not execute them.

Alas, it is folly to argue, even if it is one's duty to do, that one's client is redeemable. Such is the mockery of life and murder that our criminal "justice" system engages in daily.

It is also worth noting, of course, that 25 years till parole is, essentially, the same sentence about to be imposed on Jeffrey Skilling of Enron fame; to assert that fraud and murder are essentially the same, which is what sentences of equal length implicitly do, is to mock perspective.

Logic

Take The Mantra:

The only thing I ask of the religious is that they consider the depths to which religion has sunk man.

Nothing in that mantra can logically be construed to mean that no non-religious man has sunk man; the statement makes a claim only about the religious. It says nothing about the non-religious.

Why is it, then, that when I quote The Mantra on other people's blogs, I invariably receive a response "yeah well, Hitler wasn't religious and look what he did." Well, yeah Hitler wasn't religious and look what he did.

The Mantra is stated as it is for a very simple reason: it would be demonstrably fallacious for The Mantra to be "the only people capable of sinking man to great depths are the religious." See Hitler, and what he did, above.

UPDATE: The comments are raging on this point of logic, at the comments linked to above. I think the bluntness of the mantra induces people into a sort of emotional stupor.

Nice in Theory, But...

One of the interesting things about theories is that, while they often sound nice, putting theory to practice seems elusive.

This is especially so when you are dealing with the troubling tendency of poor kids being consigned to life long poverty due to factors beyond their control. A Constrained Vision notes that some research suggests environment, not genes, augurs academic performance for the impoverished. Here's the research quoted:

Among families of lower socioeconomic status, variation in IQ is far more environmental than genetic in origin, whereas the converse holds in families of higher socioeconomic status. That is, an impoverished child's background and experiences can so heavily influence his or her degree of achievement that his genetic makeup is nearly irrelevant in predicting his academic success. Optimistically, such a powerful role for experience suggests that intervention may be particularly successful among disadvantaged children.

I commented:

Well, that sounds nice in theory, and makes some kind of sense, but how do you inculcate such an environment?

Take kids from impoverished families and warehouse them with educated people who can speak well?

As always, a nice theory, but what is its practical application?

To quote Rod Tidwell, "show me the money."

Bad Writing

There is nothing more important in the world than writing well about Donatella Versace. And yet, Wikipedia throws this garbage at us:

Also, in many other films, including the recent hit, The Devil Wears Prada, the mention of "Donatella" is used sporadically.

How about the more fluid:

Donatella's name is mentioned sporadically in other movies, such as the recent hit The Devil Wears Prada, which gives some indication of her influence on pop culture.

Now, as to why I'm wasting my time reading a Wikipedia entry on Donatella? Well, that's for me to know and you to find out.

Stupid PR Move

Idiot lawyers strike again.

OfficeMax is apparently suing because some families of Americans executed by Castro's regime are themselves suing to recoup funds frozen by American authorities as redresse for their relatives' murder:

The U.S. Foreign Claims Settlement Commission, an arm of the Justice Department, has certified nearly 6,000 U.S. claims for property seized by Cuba. Claimants hope that after the reign of Fidel Castro ends they can recover their homes, factories, beachfront land and sugar plantations believed to be valued at $6.7 billion today. To settle some claims, they also expect to gain access to more than $268 million in Cuban assets -- largely held in U.S. banks -- that were frozen under the Kennedy administration's Cuban embargo.

Most citizens and businesses will likely have to wait years to recoup any losses. In the mid-1990s, a coalition of U.S. companies, including OfficeMax's future parent, put pressure on the Clinton administration to settle its members' numerous claims with Cuba -- with no luck.

But thanks to special antiterrorism laws passed in 1996 and 2002, a few families have been able to leapfrog to the head of the line. The legislation helped permit relatives of Messrs. Anderson and Ray to seek, and ultimately win, wrongful-death judgments in Florida state courts, with a federal judge in January clearing the way to tap into the frozen Cuban funds.

OfficeMax wasn't pleased with the news. In March, the company filed court papers in New York U.S. District Court, Southern District, seeking to block the Ray and Anderson relatives from collecting.

Robert Muse, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who represents Cuban Electric and OfficeMax, says the dead men's families shouldn't be given first dibs on the accounts. "I'm not trying to be provocative," Mr. Muse says. "That money was sequestered for the purpose of paying [restitution] claims."

Now, Muse may not be trying to be "provocative," but he sure is being rather stupid in not considering the venomous hatred most Americans have for Castro, and, therefore, the natural sympathy other Americans have to those whose lives have been affected by Castro. The smart thing to do--again, not necessarily the thing that protects OfficeMax's legal interests--is to leave well enough alone and let these families seek their redress.

The idiocy of lawyers continues apace.

Innumeracy

Here's the situation. You're on a golf course. You tee up, swing the ball, and lo and behold, you get a hole in one.

It is therefore impossible for you to get a second hole in one in that round of golf, right? Because, the odds of getting one hole in one are so small, the odds of getting two holes in one must be infinitely small, that is, impossible.

But no. These are two separate events; the odds of getting the second hole in one are unaffected by getting the first hole in one. The odds of getting two holes in one in the same round of golf likely are very very small (but not impossible). But the odds of getting any one of those holes in one is the same, whether one previously scored a hole in one or not.

So why am I prattling on about math and a good walk spoiled?

Cause Althouse is blogging about some lady who won two jackpots in state lotteries. The title to her blog post is somewhat misleading: " The odds were 1 in 3,669,120,000,000". The odds of winning both lotteries very well may be 1 in 3.669*10^12, but the odds of winning the second lottery are unaffected by having won the first lottery.

UPDATE: Posner:

What would be socially and even economically useful would be to instruct high school students in the rudiments of statistical theory. That would help them learn to think straight about a range of public policy issues, as well as to avoid certain recurrent mistakes in everyday life. People are terrible at handling probabilities. For example, most people, including otherwise quite intelligent and well educated people, don't understand that randomness is not regular alternation--that a typical random pattern is 1000110110001, not 101010101010. And this mistake leads them, for example, to give undue weight to the recent performance of a mutual fund (e.g., 1101). But whether to teach statistical theory in high school is an issue of educational policy rather than a matter of raising the scores on math tests.

It would also be helpful to the United States, mainly from a public policy standpoint, if more of our people were scientifically literate; and it would help them to be so if they knew some math, because modern science is heavily mathematical. In my book Catastrophe: Risk and Return (2004), I examined the issue of scientific literacy briefly, pointing out that only a third of American adults (adults, not 15-year-olds) know what a molecule is, that 39 percent believe that astrology is scientific, that 46 percent deny that human beings evolved from earlier animal species, and that almost 50 percent do not know that it takes a year for the earth to revolve around the sun (many do not know that the earth revolves around the sun). These are amazing statistics, and yet, according to the materials I consulted, the scientific literacy of the U.S. population actually exceeds that of the European Union, Japan, and Canada.

Australian English

Apparently, the Australians call toxicologists toxinologists.

Which makes some kind of sense. More so, at least, than the Brits' kerb affectation.

Texas Has Its Priorities Right

It pays football coaches more than it does teachers, Joanne Jacobs reports.

Clearly, Texans have their priorities in order.

Remind me never to go to Texas, lest they suffer from my withering condescension, the morons. Football, especially high school football, is, to my mind, the biggest pile of steaming dog shit since, well, dog shit.

"dead Americans decomposed on American soil"

Trying to wax grandiloquent, the New York Times apparently takes the position that an American who dies ought not to decompose:

The dead man, a black man, had been sprawled like carrion on dry Union Street, just outside a parking garage, for several hot-crazed days after the late August hurricane. The only dignities granted him were a blue tarp across the face and orange traffic cones near the head, placed by a state trooper to keep the milling soldiers and reporters and law enforcement officials from driving over him like a speed bump.

...

A full week after the hurricane, as the colossal forensic challenge before them came more clearly into focus, various government officials struggled with an awkward but unavoidable question: Who is going to pick up the bodies?

Federal and state officials quarreled with one another over who had responsibility for collection: The Federal Emergency Management Agency? Louisiana? The National Guard? Meanwhile, dead Americans decomposed on American soil.

Now, I can accept that the New York Times wants to slam government bureacurats for gross negligence and caprice. But "dead Americans decompose on American soil" all the time; this is what happens to your body when you are dead and buried. (What, you thought that you'd rise from the dead like an angel? You're kidding, right? You're maggot food when you die.) Surely there is a less inane and inflammatory way to describe corpses rotting in the Louisiana sun?

Lawyer, Spammer, What's the Difference?

In which I take a jaundiced look at lawyers, or, my father used to be a corporate litigator.

When I was ten or so, I was hanging out in his office, and he had a TV, so, naturally bored listening to him tell his minions what to do, I watched TV. All of the sudden an ad came on for a personal injury law firm. Innocently, I asked my Dad how come his firm didn't have ads on TV? Mind you, I asked this question in front of his fellow partners and associates.

Anyway at that young age I learned that there is a hierarchy of lawyers, from which one must not deviate, lest the world stop spinning and we all fly off into space at an angle tangential to the Earth's surface: at the top of this hierarchy are the skilled lawyers who steal money from corporations, white collar defendants, and municipalities, in the form of "litigation." Far below them are the ambulance chasers, those avocats who chase the infirm and the wretched.

I am reminded of this because a lawyer, likely a member of the skilled part of the hierarchy, has unearthed an inept piece of lawyer-marketing by one of the denizens of the lower end of the lawyer-hierarchy:

In any event, Mr. Sheehan did three things wrong. First, his subject line was misleading. The e-mail had nothing to do with a "Wrongful Death Case." Rather, it was a commerical solicitation. Likely, Mr. Sheehan wanted to trick his e-mail's receipients into thinking a potential client, rather than a spammer, was e-mailing him.

Second, since Mr. Sheehan sent the e-mail to the Crime And Federalism inbox, it appears he is harvesting e-mail addresses from law blogs. In other words, he's a professional spammer.

Third, he sent spam to a computer-savvy blogger. Big mistake - times two. I found his e-mail addresses, which I am going to share. And now anyone looking for information on David Sheehan will learn that he's a spammer.

Lawyer-as-used-car-salesman. Where have we heard that before? Seems to me lawyers are always chasing their own tails, claiming they exist on a higher ethical plane than we common folk, and, therefore, they are right to be avaricious pusuers of justice.

But for the fact that what passes for "justice" in lawyer-speak is either slick marketing or else a wanton disregard for the facts (to say nothing of taxpayer or shareholder money).

Let's do away with the idea that lawyers are any more or less honroable than we common folk. Some are competent, many are incompetent, some are upstanding, many operate in a kind of moral squalor. Atticus Finch most lawyers are not. Lawyers suffer from the same deprivations as the rest of man; let us not pretend they are immune from the caprices of man.

"If your self-esteem requires being told you're attractive by anonymous horny net geeks with their dicks in their hands, you really need to reevaluate your life"

So says Dispatches From the Culture Wars about Jacqueline Passey.

Sure, she's self-righteous and arrogant as hell, but I also think she makes a good point: successful, intelligent, attractive people tend to seek in their mates people they see as their equal. Now, that may not be a truth we all want to acknowledge, it being rather superficial, but it is nonetheless the truth.

Neurosurgeons are Not Pharmacologists

Eliot Spitzer is, allegedly, an intelligent man.

He bases his stance on medical marijuana on the claim, by his brother, a neurosurgeon, that "other drugs" work better than marijuana:

A Spitzer spokeswoman says the candidate’s not “ideologically opposed, but scientifically opposed” to medical marijuana use because his brother, a neurosurgeon, has told him other drugs work better. Spitzer is open to analyzing the issue further though, she said.

So, the next time you have a headache, go see an allergist, because hey, it's a doctor as well. No need to see a neurologist. An allergist knows more about biology than you; therefore, that should be sufficient.

Just don't blame me if you die from an aneurysm. Because, really, an allergist is qualified to make an informed comment about your headache.

Huh?

In an article about the alleged dangers that laptops batteries pose in flight (unexpected fires, not terrorism) the Journal explains FedEx's handling of "dangerous cargo":

FedEx says the shipper violated federal guidelines requiring the batteries be packaged in a plastic sheath to protect them from making contact with other objects. Instead they were rolled in cardboard wrapping and placed in a cardboard box with metal tools used to install the batteries. Mr. Sudduth said the tools probably shifted during transit and struck the batteries, causing sparks. The Memphis-based air cargo carrier says it has tightened standards to exceed federal requirements. It now refuses to carry hazardous materials without first confirming they have been packaged according to federal standards.

So, federal guidelines require that batteries be sheathed in plastic, to prevent accidental short circuiting...and so FedEx "exceeds" that requirement by confirming that shipper have met the federal requirement?

And that exceeds the requirement how? Up next: a man who pays his taxes early and therefore "exceeds" the IRS' requirements for tax payments.

Paroxysms of Existential Despair

A libertarian has paroxysms of existential despair:

Do libertarians honestly believe that there will only be a few creationist private schools? The idea that school choice will end the culture wars, which I’ve read many a time, is downright insane. All it will mean is that even more kids grow up in a bubble of irrationality and godtalk, making things even more fucked up when they grow up and vote.

But I want to believe the public schools are unnecessary; I want to like school choice. The idea of giving a dime of public money to anyone who’s going to talk about Jesus, though, makes me physically ill. Meanwhile, L. is always on my case to be nicer to “people [I] don’t understand,”* and we all have to pay for things we don’t like (Quaker taxes do go to defense spending, after all), so I was trying to make myself buy into the more accomodationist position (which I honestly consider complete bullshit).

How exactly is it "libertarian" to oppose free choice?

In Which A Yuppie Wields a Gun to Subdue Canadian White Trash

Priceless.

What's that you say about gun control laws?

National Organization of Whiners

NOW--which apparently stands for the National Organization of Whiners--had a convention in Albany:

Some gals are young at 40. Not NOW. It's not that NOW is less radical than younger organizations -- she isn't. Every resolution was relentlessly hammered out until there was no possible way that LGBT people (LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) could feel excluded; there was an "equal marriage" pretend-wedding reception with punch and cake. A resolution calling for an "independent" investigation of 9/11 -- you know, because all the other 9/11 investigations weren't truly "independent" -- was adopted.

Still, NOW felt just a bit...tired. Whatever you think of the feminist movement -- and I happen to deplore most of it -- the women who got it started were forces of nature, interesting people with strong personalities. They seemed to be riding the wave of history (or "herstory," as they called it). But now that the wave has crested, the current crop of NOW leaders seem less colorful than their foremothers. The issues are not new. I heard no interesting discussions, not one word of disagreement. In place of argument, there was only dogmatic insistence on inclusivity.

The quality of the "breakout sessions" radiated tiredness. The panelists were often ill-prepared, their presentations disjointed. A session on Wal-Mart drew about 40 angry women and one angry man in a purple NOW T-shirt and matching shorts. I gleaned the startling information that the "merchant of shame" -- i.e., Wal-Mart -- "seeks to dominate the retail industry through customer acquisition." That did sound nefarious! Wal-Mart's health-insurance policies and pay scale were condemned, of course. And plans were begun to test its policy on the morning-after pill (a matter of ideological, if not actual, interest to many women at the conference). Later I asked a young woman sporting an "I Prefer Girls" button if Wal-Mart might be a good issue to bring new blood into NOW. She thought not. Young and less affluent women, she explained, rely on Wal-Mart's low prices.

For me, the most memorable session was the one entitled "Feminist Media Reform." Although two NOW employees spoke, along with Kathy Bonk, a well-known feminist media specialist, the star of the session was Bree Williamson, who plays Jessica on the ABC day-time soap opera "One Life to Live." (She has also guest-starred on a Toronto-based show called "Mutant X.") Ms. Williamson, who went all pouty face when somebody noted that TV heroines tend to be blue-eyed blondes, had a message: Write letters to producers telling them what you want to see. Talk about empowerment! If viewers of "One Life" start to see Jessica battling the patriarchy, they'll know why. But one panelist implicitly questioned the effectiveness of such campaigns, lamenting that NOW failed to save Geena Davis's series "Commander in Chief." I don't know what it means that I heard more about an imaginary female president than about Hillary during the course of the weekend.

Being one of the oppressive males which NOW seems to view with bemused contempt, it is rather presumptuous of me to tell women where to spend their time. But I suspect the Independent Women's Forum is a better place than NOW.

Old People Should Not Drive

There are few things more irrational than the notion that prohibiting old people from driving is "discriminatory" or "infringes on their rights."

Old people should not be driving cars:

An elderly man drove a car onto a patio at a Starbucks on Friday night, injuring 10 people, two of them critically, authorities said.

The driver, who was believed to be 80 or 81, was trying to park in a handicapped spot just after 9 p.m. when the car surged forward and hit the customers sitting on the patio, said police Lt. William Fetner.

Old people, for some reason, are construed by sentimentalists as either wiser than the rest of us, or else as living on a higher moral plane; for those reasons, we are not to condemn their actions but rather to pity them.

Who is going to pity the people hurt by incompetent drivers?

I Want to Be the Paint...

I want to be the paint.

(Not safe for work.)

Fish v. Althouse

Althouse has been banging the drum about 9/11 "denialist" Kevin Barrett for some time now, and Stanley Fish, a literature professor and darling of the multi-culti intellectual left, takes her on:

But in fact, academic freedom has nothing to do with content. It is not a subset of the general freedom of Americans to say anything they like (so long as it is not an incitement to violence or is treasonous or libelous). Rather, academic freedom is the freedom of academics to study anything they like; the freedom, that is, to subject any body of material, however unpromising it might seem, to academic interrogation and analysis....

In short, whether something is an appropriate object of academic study is a matter not of its content — a crackpot theory may have had a history of influence that well rewards scholarly scrutiny — but of its availability to serious analysis. This point was missed by the author of a comment posted to the blog of a University of Wisconsin law professor, Ann Althouse: “When is the University of Wisconsin hiring a professor of astrology?” The question is obviously sarcastic; its intention is to equate the 9/11-inside-job theory with believing in the predictive power of astrology, and to imply that since the university wouldn’t think of hiring someone to teach the one, it should have known better than to hire someone to teach the other.

Althouse responds, here:

So my problem is that belief in this conspiracy theory reveals such a defective mind that the teacher cannot be trusted, and that the factual truth of the conspiracy theory isn't properly taught in a course about Islam. That many Muslims believe the theory could be part of the course, but the inquiry should be into why they would be drawn into such beliefs, and a teacher who thinks the beliefs are true would not seem to have much grasp of the topic.

Althouse, it need not be said, is exactly correct here: the content is not the issue but rather the sanity, or capability of a man so obviously deluded is. It is one thing to elucidate why Muslims (or, indeed, any religious person) is suscpetible to belief in illogical myth; it is quite another to assert that one who accepts without question that such a myth is veritable truth is capable of explaining man's propensity to superstition and religion.

What we are witnessing in Fish's writing is a epistemological relativism all too common among leftist professors. As I explained in an email to my father, who has commented on Althouse's blog in befuddlement:

What you're seeing in Fish's writing is the kind of relativism and subjectivity all too prevalent in the social "sciences," in which competing interpretations are subject to open debate, not empirical inquiry. In fact, much of literature, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and "women's studies" professors have the same epistemological framework as do intelligent design advocates: they care little about empirical evidence and more about rhetorical sleight of hand.

Thus, in the argot of epistemological relativism, water is not formed from hydrogen and oxygen but is made of "whatever metaphorical or poetic description I can use to conceive of 'water' ".

That this is all rather stupid and beside the point is, of course, obvious.

As always, I blame the French. Specifically, Derrida and Foucault.

See also the Sokal Affair, for a good introduction to one scientist's usurpation of the relativists' rhetorical sleight of hand.

Huh?

A sentence that makes no sense:

Abstraction made of esthetical reservations when the wearer is not exactly model material, some find it stimulating and reason 'If you've got it, flaunt it', while others find it offensive - in some conservative circles any woman ever spotted in a G-string is 'branded' a slut for life, any male wearer an exhibitionist, and in certain jurisdictions it may even be illegal; as a rule it's a question of knowing where and when it is appropiate or socially less acceptable: usually OK in beach and swimming areas, not in places of worship etc.

In Which the New York Times Glorifies a Murderer

In which the New York Times glorifies a murderer.

California Topography

For the stupid: California is a mountainous state.

Greenland represents one of the largely unrecognized paradoxes of global warming. In former Vice President Al Gore's recent film "An Inconvenient Truth," the melting of Greenland's ice cap, along with a similar cap in the Antarctic, is portrayed as one of the greatest threats of global warming. If the layers of ice and snow holding billions of tons of water were to melt, scientists warn that global sea levels would rise by 40 feet, submerging lower Manhattan, the Netherlands and much of California.

Phoenix in NYC

But for the humidity, the weather here in NYC is like Phoenix. Heat index over 105 degrees:

New Favorite Word

Contumacious.

As in, "I'm one contumacious guy."

Understatement of the Year

Posner:

The achievement lag of Hispanic males may be a transitional phenomenon; they may still be adjusting to an American male culture that is quite different from the "macho" culture of Latin America, which is not conducive to vocational achievement under modern American conditions.

Another Theorem

Tyler Cowen encapsulates France.

Theorem: A country's economic success is inversely proportional to the amount of philosophy degrees awarded to its shopkeepers. What else could account for France's abysmal economic record of the past 600 years?

In Which I Seethe With Contempt for Humanity

Stupid woman calls 911 because she thinks a cop is "cute."

Who's the Idiot?

Displaying a lack of logic so complete as to make Kim Jung Il appear to be a master rhetorician, some commenter on Althouse's blog concludes that, due to my derogation of American cars, not only do I "hate" America, but, as well, I am a "fucking idiot."

Tornadoes in New York

Tornadoes in New York.

Oh, and we get earthquakes, too. Just in case you were wondering.

I Need a Lawyer...

Though I don't see the resemblance, my grandmother insists that I look like Pete Sampras and my aunt claims I look like Clive Owen (that neither of them look like the other is best left unsaid).

Nonetheless, due to my apparent similarity to these (presumably) wealthy men, I will sue them.

Via Overlawyered.

The 4th

Happy Independence Day.

It is, of course, via the events which Independence Day symbolizes, that we have to deal with assholes like Jews for Jesus.

Alas, is this a great country or what?

Buffett

The Wall St. Journal editorial board on Buffett:

In explaining his charitable motivations this week, Mr. Buffett also went out of his way to say that he is "not an enthusiast for dynastic wealth." This is fair enough, and is also one of Mr. Buffett's arguments for so vocally defending federal death tax rates of 50% or more. But we can't help but point out that Mr. Buffett's gift will itself be shielded from Uncle Sam because it is going to a foundation. So in practice he is in favor of death taxes only for those whose estates are too small to hide in foundation tax shelters.

We'd also note that the foundations he is donating to may well become "dynasties" in their own right. In addition to his Gates Foundation gift, Mr. Buffett also said he will give major donations well north of $1 billion each to separate foundations run by his three children and another in the name of his late wife. These gifts, too, will be shielded from taxation and will allow his heirs to wield power and influence long after the 75-year-old has gone to his just reward. With their tax-sheltered assets, modern foundations have no expiration date and have become hugely important players in policy debates, the culture and even politics.

Which is all the more reason to watch how well the two men now deploy their gifts. We can't think of two people less in need of our two cents than Messrs. Buffett and Gates. But since giving free advice is our business, we'd suggest that they put at least a smidgen of their money back into strengthening the foundations of the free-market system that has allowed them to become so fabulously rich. There's something to be said for reinvesting in the moral capital of a free society and trying to sustain and export free-enterprise policies.

Capitalism has done very well not just by Mr. Buffett but also by the world's poor, as several hundred million Chinese and Indians might attest. African nations in particular need property rights and a rule of law as badly as they need vaccines. On that score we were encouraged by a report this week that the Gateses thanked Mr. Buffett for his gift by presenting him with a book from their personal library: Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations."

Buffett is a paradox. On the one hand, he is a moral giant, for he has created billions in wealth. On the other hand, he is a moral coward who should be condemned in the harshest possible terms, for his irresponsible and naive belief that government ought to confiscate a large portion of the spoils of the wealthy upon death. His irresponsible attitude toward the estate tax will forever mar his reputation.

He should repudiate his estate tax views in no uncertain way.

Friends

Apparently, there has been concern of late that Americans do not have as many friends as they once had in some mythical, halcyon past.

Original article here, Dr. Helen's take here, and Stuart Buck's take here

Various reasons and excuses are given: family demands, job demands, commuting demands.

The solution to all this seems rather simple: if having friends is something that is important to you, then (1) don't have many kids, (2) live in a dense urban core, in which your commute time is negligible and entertainment options abundant, and (3) structure your life so that you have time for friends.

Else, quit the complaining and enjoy the life you have chosen to live. If your priority is having four or six or ten kids, then so be it. I consider that a waste of resources (in cash and time terms) but if you don't then you made the right choice. But you can't at once expect to have a whole slew of kids and have an abundance of friends. Likewise, if you commute an hour or two to work every day, you ain't gonna have a lot of time for friends.

Time is finite, and if having friends is an important part of your life then you need to structure your life in such a way that you allow sufficient time for said friends.

Else, as the saying goes, quit the bitching.

In Which I Repudiate Environmentalist Dogma

Jason Fry, a Wall St. Journal columnist, writes in his "Real Time" column about the environmental impact of e-commerce:

A not very intensive week of e-commerce had generated perhaps 50 square feet worth of cardboard. Wrestling twine around the stack, I wondered: Were significantly more boxes going back and forth across the country, or was it just that more boxes were getting to customers like me? Once you start digging for answers, those boxes raise a bigger question: Is the surge in e-commerce a boon to the environment, or does it just make the consumer feel more virtuous?

This is all rather silly and irrelevant, as I explained in an email:

I'll admit my biases up front: I'm no environmentalist, skeptical as I am about all manner of environmental dogma from Gore to the kid on the street begging for signatures.

That having been said, the reasoning you display here seems faulty:

One big variable is how goods get from a company's warehouse to the consumer. Part of e-commerce's appeal is speed -- but that speed has an energy cost, and it can be considerable. Consider a hypothetical product that arrives in the U.S. by boat and is trucked to a warehouse and then to a retail store, where you buy it and take it home by car. Now, imagine the same product, only it's ordered online -- and since you expect it to arrive in three or four days, it goes from the warehouse to your house via a shipping company's jet and truck. You didn't drive to the store, and that jet and truck should be bringing lots of other orders for people who also didn't drive. But it takes a lot of energy to move freight by jet -- more than 14,000 BTUs per ton-mile, to lapse into energy-efficiency talk, compared with more than 2,000 BTUs per ton-mile for a truck. And what if the jet or truck isn't full? The transportation costs haven't magically gone away -- they've just been hidden from consumers at the end of the chain.

While it's true that e-commerce entails, for the most part, energy costs that are either unseen by the consumer or else folded into basic utilities such as electricity and internet access, it is nonetheless not the case that it is more energy-efficient for one to drive to the store or stores rather than buy goods online and have them shipped.

Consider:

(1) UPS and FedEx do not deliver only to your address, but to all addresses within a given radius of your home. Those are deliveries that would otherwise be spread over hundreds or thousands of households. Your argument implies that it is more energy-efficient for those hundreds or thousands of households to get in their cars, drive to the mall, and drive back, than it is for one UPS or FedEx truck to deliver all these packages.

(2) As to the issue of planes or trucks ferrying goods to not be full: well, UPS' and FedEx's stock price are likely good proxies for the extent to which these companies' logistics systems avoid empty trucks or jets because those are costs that those companies would have to eat. Last time I checked, both companies' stocks were doing quite well. I don't think the energy or capital costs associated with empty planes or trucks are as big a concern as you seem to imply.

Finally, your reference to recycling the cardboard boxes in which your goods are shipped is itself environmentally unfriendly. Recycling paper consumes more energy than does logging trees, shredding the wood to pulp and creating paper thereby. It also does not recoup the capital invested to establish and maintain such programs, and, therefore, in addition to being environmentally irresponsible, is also fiscally irresponsible (a greater sin, in my view). It is feel-good environmentalism (and ignorance) that induces politicians, activists, and clueless suburbanites to embrace recycling programs, costs be damned. It would be far more environmentally friendly to take cardboard and make compost out of it.

A good book to read on the subject of cost-benefit analyses of environmentalist propaganda (and, indeed, the whole environmentalist movement itself) is Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist, which, natch, you can buy via Amazon. Just don't recycle the cardboard box it comes in, because then you would be hurting the environment.

Bad Writing, or, Why Academics Shouldn't Write

This is an awkward construction, found during reading for the CFA test:

An important consideration for domestic or international financial statements is to read the footnotes to ensure that you understand how the GAAP was applied and the accounting philosophy of the firm.

A better construction would be:

An important consideration for domestic or international financial statements is to read the footnotes to ensure that you understand the firm's accounting philosophy, as well as how GAAP was applied.

But what do I know? I only have a bachelor's degree. Clearly, the Piled Higher and Deeper folk are smarter than I and therefore are better writers. Right?

I Do Petty

The Journal needs a better editor.

In a story about how Zarqarwi met his end, they write:

The military released the autopsy results in an effort to respond to lingering questions about the al Qaeda in Iraq leader died.

"about the al Qaeda in Iraq leader died" is perhaps one of the most mangled sentences I have ever seen, even if its meaning is immediately clear.

Bad Marketing

I've been identified as a member of the LGBT community, presumably because I have been supportive of gays and gay marriage on this blog.

Someone ought to tell my (female) date tonight that I've been tagged as gay.

In any event, the email:

Please check out a new website recently launched by UNITE HERE and activist Cleve Jones, Founder, the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt: www.sleepwiththerightpeople.org. As part of UNITE HERE’s Hotel Workers Raising Campaign, this website continues the long and positive relationship between UNITE HERE and the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual and Transgender community. Once you get to the website, be sure to read what Congressman Barney Frank has to say about the campaign.

In addition to valuable information surrounding the LGBT community and the Hotel Workers Rising campaign, there are free downloads, a video, relevant news stories, and a link to a Forum where you can meet, greet, and connect. There’s even an online game called “Hardship Hotel” that will get you hooked if you’re not careful!

One would think that a marketing campaign predicated on the sexuality of the people for whom the campaign is being undertaken would have as one of its primary objectives identifying gays correctly.

Apparently, not.

In Which I Rant

Numbers can increase at a decreasing rate.

Example: 5, 10, 15, 20, 22, 23, 23.5, 24, 24.1, 24.2

And yet the concept of a sequence of numbers increasing in value at a decreasing rate confuses some people.

For no apparent reason.

Because the math is quite simple.

Braindead

Posted without comment:

Two college students were found dead inside a large, deflated helium balloon after apparently pulling it down and crawling inside it, officials said.

The deaths of Jason Ackerman and Sara Rydman, both 21, appear to be accidental, Hillsborough County Sheriff's Maj. Bob Schrader said.

Their bodies were found Saturday partially inside a deflated helium balloon at the entrance of a condominium complex a few miles north of Tampa.

The 8-foot-diameter balloon was used to advertise the complex.

"It was more a fun thing they thought they were doing," said Linda Rydman, whose daughter was found dead. "You know how you blow up the balloon and suck the helium."

The county medical examiner said Sunday that the cause of death won't be released for six weeks, until toxicology results come back.

Inhaling helium can quickly lead to brain damage and death from lack of oxygen, according to the Compressed Gas Association, which develops safety standards in the gas industry.

Ackerman was an advertising major at the University of South Florida and Rydman was a student at Hillsborough Community College.

Being Your Father's Father-in-Law

Bill Wyman, of Rolling Stones fame, married the daughter of the woman to whom his son was engaged:

At age 47, Bill Wyman, began a relationship with 13-year old Mandy Smith, with her mother's blessing. Six years later, they were married, but the marriage only lasted a year. Not long after, Bill's 30-year-old son Stephen married Mandy's mother, age 46. That made Stephen a stepfather to his former stepmother. If Bill and Mandy had remained married, Stephen would have been his father's father-in-law and his own grandpa.

Must Be a Tree Hugging New Yorker

Volokh Conspirator Dale Carpenter quotes a student's evaluation of him:

"Coming in to this class, I thought all people with his 'lifestyle' were morally depraved. Now I recognize that Republicans aren't all bad."

Only a left-winger suffering from Pauline Kael-style myopia** could conceive of Republicans as leading a lifestyle* distinct from non-Republicans.

*Lifestyle could also be an allusion to Dale Carpenter's homosexuality and the view common on the left that all Republicans want gays to burn in hell.

**To be fair to Kael (who, after all, can't defend herself as she is desceased), some claim that the Nixon quote attributed to her is misquoted. I have no idea one way or the other but it is nonetheless a good way of illustrating the myopia with which people with preconceived views of the world demonstrate their own folly. The world is too complex a place to pigeonhole people.

Things I Wonder

Wikipedia describes Henry Paulson as a "devout" Christian Scientist.

Companies are in the business of managing their risks; was Paulson required to submit to medical care as a condition of being CEO & Chairman of Goldman Sachs?

Christian Scientists, of course, are famous for eschewing medical care in favor of prayer and meditation. A large public company cannot afford to have as its highest ranking executive a person who submits solely to the caprices of prayer-as-palliative.

What Would Jesus Do?...

...asks Sarah Silverman.

Her answer? "Give the Jew girl toys," Silverman, of course, being Jewish.

And rather annoying.

This is funny?

Uh, no.

But I wouldn't kick her out of bed.

New Yorkers Support the Military

Just in case anyone was wondering if New York City has its priorities in order:

Max Johnson, 28, a damage controlman second class on the U.S.S. Anzio, a 9,600-ton cruiser, met his wife and her sisters in Manhattan to see the tourist sites. His sailor's uniform prompted officials to put the Johnson family at the head of the line for the Empire State Building.

Midshipman Scott Clark of the Kearsarge, originally from Los Angeles, was especially lucky. On Friday, he and three friends were given Yankees tickets. A man in a suit stepped out of one of the tall buildings near Times Square and gave them the tickets, three rows behind third base, he said. At the game, "I was within talking distance of A-Rod," Midshipman Clark said.

First Class Petty Officer Jason Loftin, a radar technician on the Kearsarge, got a free sightseeing flight over Manhattan. The prize was donated by a local businessman and Petty Officer Loftin was the first to volunteer to take it. The flight left from Staten Island. "I'm glad to get away from everyone else in uniform," he said.

George Bush is Human

Says Gregory Mankiw.

His son crawled under W's desk in the Oval office; W was amused.

The image calls to mind, unfortunately, Monica Blewclinsky under Slick Willie's desk.

Civilization?

When will civilized man learn that one's "mental state" is not exculpatory evidence?

Sure, I know "the law" recognizes that some people are not "fit to stand trial" but this is really just a way of providing an excuse not to go through the ordeal of trying and convicting someone whom society deems sympathetic.

But sympathy for man's plight has no bearing on man's guilt.

To wit:

A man accused of shooting two police officers and biting a third during a wild rumpus in a Brooklyn rooming house is not fit to stand trial, his lawyer said in court yesterday.

"He really believes that he was shooting at wolves," said the lawyer, Larry Rothstein, in an interview outside the courtroom in Brooklyn.

The man, Jonathan Julian, 29, was charged with attempted aggravated murder, which carries a maximum penalty of 40 years to life in prison. Justice John P. Walsh of State Supreme Court entered a plea of not guilty for him.

This man should be tried, and if found guilty, sentenced to a jail for a period of time commensurate with the severity of the crime. If the police officers had been murdered, he should be executed if convicted.

These are really simple concepts; one's sanity has little to do with the issue of whether a crime has been committed. Legal moralizers would do well to end their prevarication and simply realize that there is a reason jails exist: to house criminals.

Man, Beast, Chicago, Foie Gras

Foie gras is one of those disgusting things, like wine and stinky cheeses, that the French consume in mass quantities.

So Chicago has decided to ban it (the foie gras that is).

Joseph Epstein writes in the Wall St Journal:

Foie gras (literally "fat liver"), a pate made from the livers of artificially fattened geese or ducks, is not a staple of chez Epstein. Nor do I ever order it when in expensive restaurants living happily beyond my means. Over a lengthy and immoderate life I have eaten a modest amount of foie gras, and have found some of it better than others. But were I to be sent to the gallows or the electric chair, I should not select it when composing the menu for my last meal.

The problem with Chicago's banning of foie gras, then, is not a personal one for me, but ultimately a problem of civil liberties: those of fairly high rolling gourmets versus those of geese and ducks. I've not myself seen these animals force fed to make their livers foie grasable, except in an old Italian movie called "Mondo Cane," a 1963 documentary showing strange rites around the world. The sight in that movie of live geese having grain stuffed down their throats through funnels until their livers swell well beyond normal size has remained with me. But then so has the sight of watching a Jewish ritual slaughter, when I was a boy staying with my parents at a resort in the Laurentian mountains, mutter a brief prayer before slitting the throats of chickens -- and thereby rendering them kosher -- before flicking them, squawking their death squawk, over his shoulder into the grass behind him.

Any individualist worth his salt (and I like to think I'm worth more than this common mineral) would agree with the statement that I am man and geese are beasts, and never the twain shall meet, by which I mean, of course, that while I, and most other men, lay moral claim to their life, geese and all other manner of non-human beast do not. (Yes dog and cat lovers: this means your pets, too.)

Activist Lawyers

In case anyone was wondering why I don't donate money to my alma mater.

Politics

If you're naive enough to think that money doesn't buy elections, check this out.

"The War on Contraceptives"

The New York Times magazine (to which there is no link online until Sunday) has a cover article titled "The War on Contraceptives," which cover shows a condom wrapper with a fake disclaimer on it:

If used properly, this latex condom (or for that matter, any other form of birth control, especially the morning-after pill) will anger a great many people--people who believe that having sex without the intent to procreate is a very, very bad thing. Any contraceptive highly effective against pregnancy--that is, unwanted pregnancy, otherwise why use it?--is precisely the problem, even though there might be fewer abortions if those having sex with no intention to procrate used a contraceptive

Hard to argue with that and yet conservatives will find fault with it.

"I'm a straight, white, Southern male - and *gasp* I hang out with my gay neighbor all the time."

Brain-Terminal reports on emails received from allegedly "tolerant" progressives, and those from small-town America.

Guess who said the quote referenced in the title to this post? Hint: it wasn't from some liberal in San Francisco heaping scorn upon Middle America.

Perhaps there's hope for America yet?

An Orwellian Libertarian

Tyler Cowen, a self-described libertarian, has the temerity to tell me which culture to consume?

I think he's exaggerating for rhetorical effect, but this is like Nixon going to China.

Condoleezza Throws a Watermelon?

What's racist about this story? Is there some connection between blacks and watermelons that I'm unaware of?

Americans and Cars, Part II

It occurs to me that, in my haste, I did not really make the point I wanted to make in this post.

As emailed to a reader, this is the point I'm trying to make:

The point I was trying to make, and which I don't think I made very well, is that all we hear of people and their cars is how much traffic there is and how high the price of gas is.

These are all manifestations of the uniquely American assumption that each person has a god-given right to acreage. Now, in a country that has billions of acres and only three hundred million people, this is not an unreasonable assumption to make, however, concomitant with the idea that every American should have their own house on their own (large) plot of land is the fact that cars will be an integral part of society.

Cars create traffic, which creates inefficiencies, exacerbates costs (both in time and cash terms), and forces people to endure ever-longer commutes.

I don't really care if people want to live in the suburbs, but you get, as they say, what you pay for: lots of traffic, impossible commutes, etc.

For this, blame America's insistence that its people deserve not to be in dense urban cores, and, of course, Eisenhower, he of the interstate highway system. Indeed, he an Detroit have the blood of three thousand US solidiers on their hands; the only reason we have any military presence in the Middle East is because we are so reliant on oil to power our millions of cars.

If you think I'm exaggerating here, I suggest you take a trip to Los Angeles and try to engage the locals in a conversation about anything other than the traffic on the 405. Then come back to me and tell me that Americans and their cars are not a prime example of irrationality.

Publishing

Apparently, book publishers' sales are declining and so they are publishing more memoirs, which, the logic goes, should juice sales:

Several trends are driving the popularity of the memoir today. One is the public's continuing fascination with reality TV. The programming genre's obsessive interest in the lives of ordinary people and B-List celebrities has migrated to the printed word. Another trend is the ascent of narrative nonfiction with such books as the "The Perfect Storm" and "Shadow Divers," an account of the discovery of a shipwrecked German submarine from WWII.

Brad Parsons, senior editor for books at Amazon.com, argues that there's a "safety valve" factor that a memoir provides in an uncertain world. "We like to read about the crazy lives of others and how they got through them," he says.

There's an additional reason why publishers like memoirs: Most, except those written by flash-in-the-pan celebrities, have a long shelf life. "Memoirs continue to sell year after year," unlike typical nonfiction books, says Bob Wietrak, chief merchant at Barnes & Noble, the nation's largest bookseller. Indeed, he says that recently 75% of the chain's biography sales have come from memoirs.

One thing publishers should do well if they want to boost overall sales is to ditch hardover versions of books, or, at least, publish hard and softcover versions of books immediately. I never buy hard cover versions of books when they come out; hard cover books are too bulky and heavy for me to be anything but useless. Publishers therefore lose out on sales until such time that they see fit to publish books in portable (softcover) format.

Publishers need to get over the sentimental idea that most of their customers buy books because they have the time to curl up on a couch with a big, hardover tome. Publishers should understand their customers' lives, and design products, and business models, around that, and not around the idea that what the world needs are more memoirists.