What Sam Brownback Thinks About Evolution

Today's New York Times includes an op-ed column by Kansas Senator Sam Brownback explaining in more detail his views on evolution.

Brownback is a lawyer and not the dumbest guy in Congress, but as public intellectual credentials go, not only is he no Daniel Patrick Moynahan, he's not even Newt Gingrich. Whatever good it may do him politically, the column is an intellectual muddle.

First, Brownback sets the stage by asserting "the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason." That's a nice touch, actually. The problem is that "faith" is a very ambiguous term. Faith of what sort and in what, exactly? We might reasonably claim that scientists, themselves, have faith in reason (and in evidence and so forth), but it is certainly not the sort of faith of which Brownback writes. What he means to imply but does not outright say is faith in the truth of certain specific doctrinal beliefs he happens to hold to be true, so it isn't the existence or nonexistence of faith, per se, that is at issue here but faith as belief in the correctness of certain substantive claims. Brownback writes:

The heart of the issue is that we cannot drive a wedge between faith and reason. I believe wholeheartedly that there cannot be any contradiction between the two. The scientific method, based on reason, seeks to discover truths about the nature of the created order and how it operates, whereas faith deals with spiritual truths. The truths of science and faith are complementary: they deal with very different questions, but they do not contradict each other because the spiritual order and the material order were created by the same God.

Let's dissect that. Why can't we "drive a wedge between faith [as Brownback understands it] and reason"? Because he wholeheartedly believes they cannot be contradictory? Why is that? Here he starts out reasonably well, noting that science and (Brownback's) faith address different questions; namely, questions about how nature operates and what he calls "spiritual truths." That's not so bad so far. If he had gone on to claim that their areas of concern were not complementary but incommensurable or merely that they bore no relationship to each other at all, rather like, say, there is no overlap between questions about auto mechanics and questions about music, I'd gladly agree with him. But he doesn't. What he does instead is simply assert his belief in God's agency. I don't happen to disagree with that belief as such, but the belief itself is no evidence or argument that scientific assertions and theological assertions cannot or do not contradict each other. As Brownback states it, it is merely a conclusion, an assertion of faith, actually, without any supporting argument or evidence. Viewed as an purported argument, it is entirely question begging.

Brownback then shifts from the notion that science and faith are complementary to the notion that faith supplements the scientific method "by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose." Certainly, religious beliefs can provide a context for and even, insofar as they are believed, a rationale for one's values, etc. But they are not the only possible such contexts or rationales, nor is it at all clear how any of these things supplements the scientific method any more than my discussing jazz with my mechanic supplements his ability to fix my car. What Brownback might have said is that, just as a knowledge of both mechanics and jazz lead to a fuller life, a life focused only on the sorts of questions science can answer is a less full life than one that includes other concerns. But that isn't what he said and what he did say, insofar as it is intelligible, is false.

Brownback tips his hand when he writes, "If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true." Implicit in this statement is that he does not believe, in particular, that our species evolved from other species (whether accidentally or not). This, of course, belies his purported belief that science and faith do not contradict each other, but we'll let that alone for now.

He goes on with the fairly typical Intelligent Design gambit of dropping the punctuated equilibrium hypothesis as evidence that real scientific questions remain unanswered in evolutionary theory. As others have written extensively, this is both true and irrelevant. What is especially relevant is Brownback's rejection of "arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality." This is the real heart of the matter and Brownback gets it exactly wrong.

I don't know a single scientist who believes as a matter of science that divine causality is impossible. I know some who do entirely reject the notion of divine causality as I know some who believe in it, but in neither case are they making a scientific claim and in neither case are their views at all relevant to evolutionary theory. The critical point here is that as far as the science of evolutionary theory is concerned, (1) its working hypothesis that divine causation is not necessary to explain how nature works has so far proved successful and (2) it is impossible, in any case, to either verify or falsify divine causation as we have come to understand what that assertion entails. I note, in passing, that some would claim the assertion is unintelligible or incoherent and, thus, incapable of being either true or false, but we'll leave that for another time.

Let's return to my mechanic friend who does not want to discuss why Miles Davis was one of the all time jazz greats but wants me to understand, instead, why I should get the oil changed regularly in my car and so explains how internal combustion engines work. He describes the pistons moving up in their cylinders, compressing gas vapors, then how the vapors are ignited, causing a controlled explosion pushing those pistons back down and, at the same time others on the crankshaft up, etc. He describes how the gears and such transfer that power from the rotating drive shaft to turn the wheels and so forth and why, therefore, the engine must be properly lubricated. Let's pretend I follow him but insist at every point in his explanation that this all happens because my personal deity, Mechano, makes it happen.

My mechanic, a more philosophically astute fellow than most politicians, points out to me that, while Mechano may indeed be the unseen force behind the workings of engines and motors, he does not need to believe in Mechano's existence to understand or to repair automobile engines. Maybe he does believe in Mechano, but none of the repair manuals and none of his training and experience have mentioned Mechano. In that sense, neither my nor his beliefs one way or the other about Mechano either complement or supplement his work. Whether they complement or supplement his or my life outside the area of auto repairs is another matter. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. In any case, this is the rough equivalent to evolutionary theory vis a vis Sen. Brownback's faith and this is why, again only roughly speaking, efforts to include non-evolutionary accounts of the origin of man in biology class curricula are met with the same sort of reaction I would get if I tried to pressure General Motors to include a chapter on Mechano in their service manuals.

There are any number of other problems with Brownback's column, but I'll just make one final point. He writes, "While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order."

Whether the final sentence of that claim is true or not, it is worth noting that one can be certain in one's convictions but nonetheless entirely wrong.

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P.S. -- John Derbyshire likens Brownback on evolutionary biology to Paris Hilton on partial differential equations. The Derb goes on, as I did not, to do a nice job of tearing apart the implicit "science" of Brownback's weaseling over "micro" versus "macro" evolution.

It's a shame about Plame, but all the same...

"What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not! They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: drunkards, queers, hen-pecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?" -- Alex Leamus, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

I stand (sit, actually) at least somewhat corrected. My previous sense was that the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA status disclosure, the subsequent investigation of White House officials and prosecution of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, while great political theater, was of dubious legal or policy significance. I suppose I should reconsider in light of recent developments. I don't recall ever specifically stating that the question whether Plame was indeed a covert operative or what sort of work she was engaged in was part of my reasoning, which at least gets me off the hook of being embarrassed by Glenn Greenwald now; but I'm sure that some questions in that regard were at least in the back of my mind. (A dangerous, dusty and disorganized place, by the way.) So what now, given apparent confirmation of both her covert status and her work concerning "weapons proliferation issues related to Iraq"?

I wrote "apparent" and will make a tiny point at the risk of sounding like a Creationist demanding every last gap in our evolutionary history be plugged, and that is that the Unclassified Summary submitted by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is unsigned, undated and unauthenticated. Surely, Fitzgerald has made or will make appropriate representations to the judge regarding its bona fides, but I find it at least worth noting that the usual skepticism of the blogosphere regarding such things seems to have gone missing here entirely.

But let's assume now that Plame was indeed a covert operative, moreover, one whose ongoing work for the CIA was both of some importance (we still don't know how much) and badly compromised by the leak and, as a result, U.S. intelligence operations suffered. I agree with Greenwald and others that the extent to which the "bureaucrat desk jockey not covert operative" talking point spread throughout conservative talking head circles now appears pretty thoroughly discredited and (should be) embarrassing to those who pushed it or bought into it on, shall we say, faith-based grounds. It further makes Libby's situation far less sympathetic and intensifies the case for further investigation of Cheney and others.

Very well. I ask this now as what the lawyers call a plea in mitigation of my own obdurate failure still to get it. Aside from the technical legal violations involved in revealing Ms Plame's status, the general import of which is certainly a reasonable concern (we can't just go about outing our spies willy-nilly), is this story still anything more than simply further evidence that, like Le Carre's spies, politicians are "just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards"?

Because, frankly, I already knew that.

Constant Viewer: The Lives of Others

Constant Viewer rarely watches foreign language films, at least not in first release, and realizes this is a great failing. CV has never been comfortable reading subtitles and rarely finds such films aesthetically or emotionally satisfying as a result. For that reason and despite its almost universal praise, CV does not recommend seeing The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) on the big screen. The good news, however, is that it will probably soon be released on DVD. Of course, if you speak German or if subtitles don't bother you in the slightest, you can probably still catch it at the cineplex, too. Seeing it on a smaller screen later won't significantly diminish its merits, though, so CV would still lean towards waiting for the DVD release.

Constant Viewer does not believe this film deserves the lavish praise it has received. It is a very good film, a movie definitely worth seeing, but CV can't help but harbor suspicions that any foreign language film so thoroughly understandable to the average American film goer (and, hence, reviewer) makes that viewer feel all clever and international and thus disposed to a favorable review. The fact is that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's writing and directing is painfully linear and obvious almost to the point of being insulting. The dialog beats the viewer over the head with whatever plot or political point is being made, and while there are several nice and unexpected twists along the way, there is nothing really special or tricky or "artistic" about the acting or directing or story line. Any viewer failing to get the plot or the message here would have been bewildered by the storyline of a Pokemon movie.

Of course, another way to look at all of that is that it is art to conceal art and that Donnersmarck and the cast have done an entirely credible job with an entirely competent and workable script -- the story of the increasingly intertwined lives of an East German playwright and his actress lover with that of a Stasi (secret police) officer assigned to spy on them. But it is the absurdity of the final days of the East German state that make the movie worth seeing, whereas no one ever said, for example, that what makes Citizen Kane great is how much one learns about William Randolph Hearst.

For the perennially ax grinding sorts among us, there are no doubt analogies to be made between the bathetic spy vs. spy nightmare of the DDR and post 9/11 PATRIOT Act America. But don't kid yourself. Unless you have ever been to East Germany before the system collapsed or to any of the other Soviet satellite states during the Cold War, you haven't a clue what it was really like. CV was in East Berlin once before the end of the regime and then again a few months after the Wall came down. The first trip was the most eerie of my life. It physically felt like the exact opposite of the scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and steps into a world of color. Crossing Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin, all the color in the world washed out into a dull, lifeless gray almost instantly. It showed at once in the poorly lighted streets and unmaintained buildings and in the faces and body language of the poorly dressed and unkempt people on the streets. East Berlin was the closest thing to the walking dead in a limbo of perpetual dusk I have ever witnessed.

And it was the most prosperous and flourishing showcase of the entire Soviet socialist world.

And for Christmas, Everyone Gets a Pony!

Barack Obama is now making a plan for universal health care a campaign promise in his bid for the presidency.

Details, such as they are, are reported by the AP (with my emphasis added) as follows:

Under Obama's proposal, everyone would be able to obtain health insurance, and the Illinois senator would create a National Health Insurance Exchange to monitor insurance companies in offering the coverage. In essence, Obama's plan retains the private insurance system but injects additional money into the system to pay for the expanded coverage.

Those who can't afford coverage would get a subsidy on a sliding scale depending on their income, and virtually all businesses would have to share in the cost of coverage for their workers. The plan that would be offered would be similar to the one covering members of Congress.

His package would prohibit insurance companies from refusing coverage because of pre-existing conditions.

"My plan begins by covering every American. If you already have health insurance, the only thing that will change for you under this plan is that the amount of money you will spend on premiums will be less," Obama said. "If you are one of 45 million Americans who don't have health insurance, you will after this plan becomes law."

In addition to broadening coverage, Obama called for a series of steps to overhaul the current health care system. He would spend more money boosting technology in the health industry such as electronic record-keeping, put in place better management for chronic diseases and create a reinsurance pool for catastrophic illnesses to take the burden of their costs off of other premium payers.

His plan also envisions savings from ending the expensive care for the uninsured when they get sick. That care now is often provided at emergency rooms. The plan also would put a heavy focus on preventing disease through lifestyle changes.

In all, Obama said, the typical consumer would save $2,500 a year.

Obama conceded that the overall cost of the program would be high, while not providing a specific number.

"To help pay for this, we will ask all but the smallest businesses who don't make a meaningful contribution to the health coverage of their workers to do so to support this plan," said Obama. "And we also will repeal the temporary Bush tax cut for the wealthiest taxpayers."

Sounds great, doesn't it? Hey, if you already have insurance, your rates as a consumer (never mind your rates as a taxpayer) will go down, and if you don't have it the government will pay for it. Where's the (yet uncalculated) extra money going to come from? Why, from rich and greedy businesses (don't worry, their prices and profits will magically remain the same) and the "wealthiest" taxpayers (everyone but the poor) and from everybody's lifestyle changes!

My only question is this: Who is the Hillary Clinton operative planted inside Obama's headquarters working to ensure his defeat?

Housekeeping Notes -- May 2007

The blog is two months old today. I continue to get random visits from around the globe, amusingly enough often following the foreign visitor’s search for information on Foley catheters which I once mentioned in a piece about House MD. There must be some cosmic symbolism to that. Thanks to links from such sites as Reason’s Hit & Run, memeorandum and Unqualified Offerings (to name but a few) the site has moved from invisible to merely obscure.

There have been many big stories I have, for various reasons, not written about, and I continue to intersperse the political and current events topics with human interest stories, odd news, movie reviews and assorted nonsense, occasionally of a somewhat personal nature. Purely political blogs probably gain more credibility more rapidly, but if life is not a business (and it isn’t) neither is it a campaign. Besides, not even my ego is yet so vast as to presume I have something worth saying about every breaking story.

The freedom to write whatever one wants whenever one wants is both addictive and dangerous. I don’t believe that whatever one posts on the internet is really preserved for all time (witness the loss of my earlier writing at Inactivist and many extensive comments at Left2Right), but there is little doubt future historians will have a field day poring over the various eccentricities of our contemporary computer assisted logorrhea. If there is one thing bloggers suffer from it is the absence of sane, objective editing. Not only would it be an advantage to have some other eyes proofread for composition and other mechanical errors, it would be lovely to have someone one trusted who could say “Fergawdsakes, Ridgely, you can’t seriously intend to publish that, can you?” before hitting the Post key. On the other hand, the blogger is free to ignore or override his inner editor as the professional journalist is not free to override the real version.

I’m basically a wordsmith, or at least fancy myself as such, so I’ve tended to keep the blog text oriented, using pictures sparingly. For the time being, I am refraining from the popular trend of posting video clips on the blog for the same reason, although I will link to such clips as appropriate. I have a Quine-like preference for desert landscapes, not only in my ontology but in my web design, so I intend to retain the sparsely furnished look here. I am, however, modifying the current page to include two weeks of postings, as I have found stories remain relevant at least that long and people do not like searching back pages and archives any more than necessary.

My thanks to those slowly growing numbers of you who have supported this blog with your readership. Questions and comments are, as always, most welcome.

-- DAR

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Retired Header ‘Quotes’:

March 2007 – “Pay no attention to that man behind the veil!” – the Wizard of Rawls
April 2007 – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one may still post on the internet.” – Ludwig Blogenstein

Anamnesis

Although May 30th is its historical date, chosen specifically because it was not the date of any significant Civil War battle, we officially celebrate Memorial Day today. Unlike President Bush, I think it better not to use the occasion to argue politics.

My father was a World War II veteran, a sailor serving in the Aleutian Islands. My Uncle Ed was a soldier “over there” in France during World War I. He once showed me a box of decorations his grandfather had received for service as a Union soldier during the Civil War. A cousin by marriage was a Korean War POW and spent the rest of his life in a deep alcoholic depression. They are all dead now, though none died in military service.

My father’s family dates back to the 1600s in Maryland and the genealogical records show family service in the Revolutionary War and probably every military conflict thereafter. My mother’s family records were lost over time or destroyed during the Civil War, but suffice it to say there have been Smiths in Virginia for a very long time and they were all a scrappy lot. Of course, I never knew any of those men and thus I have no memories of them.

The war of my generation was Viet Nam. When I turned eighteen, I first had a student deferment from the draft and then a high lottery number, and then the war was over and so was the draft. Although I worked for several decades for the Army, Navy and Air Force, I never served in uniform and it is hardly the same thing. As for my cohort, there isn’t a single name on the Viet Nam Memorial of someone I knew. The few early deaths among friends in my generation were caused by diseases, accidents and drug overdoses. There is one ironic and tragic exception. One member of my high school graduating class joined the Marines, served in Viet Nam and returned safely only to be shot to death a short time later in his own home in a dispute with a family member.

Of the men of my generation who did serve in Viet Nam and came home safely, by the time an ungrateful nation stopped spitting at them and calling them baby killers they no longer felt inclined to share their experiences in that war except perhaps among each other. Too often, it seems, not even then. If there really are such things as lessons from Viet Nam, I don’t know what they are.

Memorial Day having started as Decorations Day in tribute specifically to fallen Union soldiers of the Civil War, it was met at first with resistance in the South and accepted there only after more wars and more war dead to which, as in the Civil War itself, the southern states contributed their share to the vast charnel houses of war. In the South of my childhood generally and in our family particularly, Memorial Day became a day of remembrance for all the dead, and I would drive with my father on Memorial Day to a cemetery in D.C. where he and I would tidy up the grave of my paternal grandmother, Ida.

Although my father was eligible for burial in Arlington Cemetery, my parents chose to buy adjoining cemetery plots not far from my childhood home. They are buried there together now for many years, though I have visited less than a half dozen times since my father’s death nearly twenty years ago. I know exactly where their graves are and exactly what their marker looks like. I see it in my mind as I write these words. Am I a disloyal or disrespectful son for not going there more often to actually witness once again the site of their mortal remains? I don’t know. I know only that I don’t go and that, for whatever reason, I sometimes feel guilty as a result, but my memory of my parents does not require that I be there.

As for the official purpose of Memorial Day, remembering those who died in military service to the nation, the point I was making implicitly above is that, unlike my memory of my parents, I have no actual memories at all of any such people. I can honor them, but I cannot literally remember them. You cannot remember someone you never knew, and I have never known anyone who died in military service.

That might strike the reader as a sort of fustian way of being dismissive of Memorial Day or of its purpose, but I don’t mean it as such. I note it because it simply will not do to pretend that my relationship with those men and women is at all the same as that of those who really knew and loved them. I am incapable, as it were, of anamnesis.

Anamnesis, like its better known cousin amnesia, derives from ancient Greek and translates roughly as memory or remembrance. It finds its first significant usage in Plato’s epistemology, his notion that knowledge derives from recollected memory of the forms or ideals; but it is also a critical concept in Christian theology and it is that sense I mean here. It is the sort of memory distinguished from the act of remembering obscure names or dates or facts of any sort but the memory instead that washes over us every time we see or think of someone we could never forget; a parent or child or spouse or lifelong friend.

It is that deeper, richer sense of memory and not merely the sense of remembering, say, that I once owned a blue 1966 Karmann Ghia or the lyrics to “Yesterday” or even the name of the girl I had a crush on in elementary school (Patty) that Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me” is meant to covey. We can honor those we have never known with rites and rituals or decorations and parades and monuments. We can understand the significance of their sacrifices and be appropriately grateful. But we cannot remember strangers as others can or once could, and we should remember that, too.

SHOES! SHOES! SHOES!

Social construct theory be damned, men and women are different. "How different," you ask? I have no idea. All I know is that, for example, no (straight) man would ever look at an unadorned window and either on his own or at the urging of his other straight male friends think "You know what? That window needs a treatment. Perhaps if I hung some folded cloth around the top and sides..."



So, too, even fashion conscious men do not care nearly as much about shoes as women, on average, do. Not even fashion conscious gay men. In fact, men who care as much about shoes as women do are called fetishists. By comparison, women who care as much about shoes as male shoe fetishists do are called, um, women. Furthermore, they both care only about women's shoes.



Men's shoes, on the other hand? Meh. Go figure.



Thus, in my never ceasing efforts to build this blog up one reader at a time, I once promised a certain Susan W-G I'd eventually get around to writing something about "the shoes." As it happens, there is exciting shoe news around the globe these days, with two major stories sweeping the media.

First, at long last someone has invented "Sensible shoes for work that become killer heels at night" or, in other words, adjustable heel shoes. This is a wonderful, practical idea and it is absolutely guaranteed to be an utter and complete financial and market failure. Of the various women I have known who care about shoes at all (my wife, by contrast, could care less except that they be comfortable and presentable), not a single one of them would consider buying one pair of shoes when they could, instead, buy two or three. Part of the very appeal of fashion and "killer heels" is that they are, by definition, impractical.



The second story requires a bit of background. Big box specialty stores are all the rage these days, including home improvement stores, furniture stores, electronics stores, clothing stores and, yes, even shoe stores. The earliest such big box specialty store, however, that I can recall was Toys R Us. As anyone who has ever taken a child to Toys R Us knows, even in these modern, egalitarian times around 80% to 90% of all toys are aimed at boys. Specialty big box clothing and shoe stores are, simply put, the revenge of the little girls once they've grown up. Sure, there's a tiny Men's section tucked away somewhere in the back corner with the clearance items, but the overwhelming preponderance of the merchandise is for women. Fair's fair, after all.

Historically, urban department stores were the first "big boxes," some upscale and some downscale; but there, too, the clothes and shoe departments for women have always been several multiples of the floor space devoted to men's apparel. Now, in what must surely be a new and historic moment for women's shoes, Saks Fifth Avenue announces that its new 8,500-square-foot space on the eighth floor of the flagship store in Manhattan will soon have its very own zip code. Not the entire store, mind you, but just the shoe department. Yes, come August, customers will be able to send mail specifically to 10022-SHOE for the Saks shoe department. A grateful shoe buying nation will no doubt remember to include adequate postage.



Even though I'm just a guy who, like most guys, pretty much wears the same two or, at most, three pair of shoes until they're completely ruined and who then and only then goes out grudgingly to buy a new pair just like the old ones, I say it's high time shoes got the recognition they so richly deserve!



There now, promise fulfilled. Other readers are welcome to suggest their own favorite topics. Maybe I'll, um, cobble together something for you, too!

"Trust me, I'm an expert."

Bryan Caplan certainly is getting a lot of press these days. Not necessarily good press, mind you; but as any publicist will tell you, bad press is better than none at all when you’re hawking a new book. Writing in that font of all economic wisdom, the New York Times, Princeton associate professor of politics and international affairs Gary J. Bass reviews Caplan’s book and writes as follows:

To the exasperation of the libertarian-minded Caplan, most Americans do not think like economists. They are biased against free markets and against trade with foreigners. Absurdly, they think that the American economy is being hurt by too much spending on foreign aid; they also exaggerate the potential economic harms of immigration. In a similar vein, Scott L. Althaus, a University of Illinois political scientist, finds that if the public were better informed, it would overcome its ingrained biases and make different political decisions. According to his studies, such a public would be more progressive on social issues like abortion and gay rights, more ideologically conservative in preferring markets to government intervention and less isolationist but more dovish in foreign policy.

If the public doesn’t know how to think, is there a solution? Caplan has some radical medicine in mind. To encourage greater economic literacy, he suggests tests of voter competence, or “giving extra votes to individuals or groups with greater economic literacy.” Until 1949, he points out, Britain gave extra votes to some business owners and graduates of elite universities. (Since worse-educated citizens are less likely to vote, Caplan dislikes efforts to increase voter turnout.) Most provocatively, perhaps, in an online essay Caplan has suggested a curious twist on the tradition of judicial review: If the Supreme Court can strike down laws as unconstitutional, why shouldn’t the Council of Economic Advisers be able to strike down laws as “uneconomical”?

Let’s back up a bit, shall we?

One of the reasons physicians enjoy a vastly better reputation than lawyers or economists is that there is no medical specialty dedicated to protecting the interests of viruses or cancer. Ethical issues abound in modern medicine, but physicians still treat patients one individual at a time and the life and health of each patient is of paramount and often exclusive importance. We might invoke a distinction and say that there is usually no serious conflict of interests between what we might call positive medicine and normative medicine – the health and physical well being of the patient comes first even if the physician has good reason to believe that the world would be a better place without him. Moreover, as far as other competing interests are concerned, even Peter Singer’s addled and adoring minions have not yet taken up the cause of the interests of malignant cells.

Lawyers also labor for the most part at what we might call the micro level, representing one party’s rights and interests to the exclusion of and often in opposition to the interests of others. Well, they can go get their own lawyers, can’t they? Still, like a life threatening disease, litigation is often a zero sum game and, win or lose, the parties to the dispute can’t help but notice that there are lawyers fighting for the ‘cancerous’ interests of their opponents. Part of the bad reputation lawyers suffer comes, ironically enough, from the professional ethics of the profession that requires the lawyer, once retained, to be a zealous representative and advocate of his client’s interests. Whatever qualms he might have about the plight of the sympathetic tenant about to be evicted from her apartment, his client landlord nonetheless has legal rights, too, and it is his lawyer’s obligation to see to their enforcement and protection. Still, helping to oust widows and orphans on to the streets isn’t an optimal public relations strategy.

Economists, by contrast, tend to work at the macro level as advisors to policy and decision makers who, in turn, take personal credit for decisions that work out well and blame their advisors when they turn out badly. Still, like lawyers and physicians, economists have a certain expertise noneconomists do not have. Their knowledge is far from perfect or complete, but they nonetheless really are useful in figuring out how best to achieve certain sorts of results. They are especially good at advising on questions of economic efficiency and the effect of incentives on behavior.

Note, however, that efficiency is, itself, a normative concept and, more importantly, that what sorts of behavior should be encouraged or discouraged is, except in terms of economic efficiency, a question beyond the positive knowledge of economics. Most of us agree that, all other things equal, efficiency is a good thing. Waste not, want not, as our mothers used to say. Whether economic efficiency is of paramount importance, however, or whether some of those other considerations should take precedence in matters of public policy is a question about which economics itself can shed no light.

Milton Friedman famously drew the distinction between positive economics and normative economics – between how the cause and effect of economics in fact works and how we should use that knowledge, arguing that economists should attend exclusively to positive economics. (Ronald Coase, in turn, famously noted that Friedman’s most widely read article to that effect was essentially normative.) Disputes over Bryan Caplan’s thesis need to take the distinction into account.

Unlike the general public whose opinions regarding free trade or immigration may well be the product of little more than ignorance and bias, professional economists insofar as they are applying positive economic theory to the question of the impact of trade or immigration on the economy tend not to differ wildly in their conclusions. There is no serious dispute over the basic mechanics of price theory among economists and even the major disputes of the past century over macroeconomics are far less in dispute than they were fifty years ago.

Thus, for example, in Christopher Hayes’s review of Caplan's book the other day when he mentioned hundreds of economists who supported a raise in the minimum wage, it would have been far more intellectually honest to note as well that those economists were not denying the general truth that a raise in the minimum wage will increase unemployment but only that under current economic conditions such effect would be minimal and outweighed, in their opinion, by other factors. But the other factors here are critical, for at least some of those economists were making normative claims, not merely positive ones – they were saying, in effect, “we prefer to accept the minimal bump in unemployment (among, for example, teenage part-time workers) in return for other effects we favor.”

This is a complicated topic about which I may feel compelled to write more. For now, however, this is the bottom line. If there were, in fact, clear and overriding economic goals and principles adopted by the nation as the economic equivalent of our constitutional principles, having a supreme court of economists overrule politically motivated legislation that violated those principles might not be such a bad idea. But, of course, we don’t.

Most people, if they understood economics better, would be inclined to support free markets and open immigration unless the effects of those policies adversely affected them in particular (e.g., if they were among the few to lose their jobs as opposed to the many to enjoy lower prices). Still, some people who do understand the economics involved nonetheless still prefer protectionism over open markets; that is, they are willing (for us all) to pay the price of bad, that is, inefficient economic policy.

Those of us who prefer economic efficiency should be more candid in admitting that fact and, more to the point, that any such view contrary to the purely economic view is “irrational” in only a very crabbed and technical sense. By the same token, those who favor bad economic policy for whatever other normative reasons they might believe or assert should be sufficiently honest to admit as much, as well.

Maybe, just maybe, if both such sides were more candid about such matters the voting public might be a little better informed and a bit less “irrational,” too. I wouldn’t worry about the public becoming too “rational,” however. After all, in their roles as private citizens and voters, many professional economists can be every bit as “irrational" as the rest of us.

Who Isn't Afraid of Democracy?

Writing in the "progressive" In These Times, Christopher Hayes asks the provocative question, Who's Afraid of Democracy?

I am. So, almost certainly, is Hayes, although he is unlikely to admit it. You should be, too.

Hayes's article focuses on George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. The issue Caplan addresses is how it can be that individuals acting as consumers and producers behave as the sort of rational, self-interested actors classical economics both presumes and predicts and yet as voters can and do frequently favor political policies such as, for example, minimum wage laws, that are clearly irrational from an economic perspective. Caplan's position as described by Hayes is that people act rationally as consumers because they directly and visibly experience the consequences of their decisions, whereas acting as voters they are rationally aware that their individual votes are inconsequential and thus feel free to vote for objectively irrational policies. Whether that is an accurate description of Caplan's position or not, it is a rational position.

Hayes's problem with that position, however, is that "it quickly leads to some very dark places," such as considering a requirement that people pass a basic economics test as a prerequisite to vote. Given that Hayes considers a recent bit of economic research suggestive "that we are all, more or less, intuitive socialists" and describes Caplan as being willing "to embrace the darkness [and] articulate in lurid detail the obscene id of Chicago-school, Grover-Norquist-style, free market fundamentalism," the prospect of Hayes, himself, voting suggests to me that there may be something to this notion of an economic literacy test after all.

Hayes also indulges in some muddled counterargument about economic consensus and the comparative value of public opinion versus economic expertise almost too silly to bother mentioning. Here, in any case, is Hayes's real objection. He writes, "Given a choice between democracy without free markets or free markets without democracy, many conservatives would gladly choose the latter."

Hayes is obviously happy to include libertarians without qualm or qualification into his over-broad definition of conservatives, but insofar as his topic is the sort of economic "conservativism" that is the hallmark of libertarianism versus "progressive" economic theory, perhaps that isn't unreasonable or unfair. The critical point, however, is not whether there is some per se ideological preference for markets over democracy insofar as they might lead to different results, but whether democracy is itself an intrinsic or a merely instrumental good. If democracy is an intrinsic good, well then, that's that. If merely instrumental, however, then it is entirely appropriate to ask what the limits of its instrumental value are and whether there are better alternatives. There is a reason why, for example, neither Mr. Hayes nor I decide what to order in a restaurant by a show of hands from the other customers.

Restaurants aside, without speculating too much about Hayes's own political or economic views, I suspect it is fair to assume that he, too, would contend that there are serious problems with democracy understood simply as majority rule. Even liberals and progressives understand the tyranny of the majority problem, perhaps better than many conservatives do, though far worse than libertarians do. So it simply won't do for Hayes to tut-tut the notion that at least some things are too important to us as individuals to permit a mere majority of others to vote them away. And if we are agreed at least to that extent, then we end up, as the old joke goes, merely haggling over the price; that is, Hayes's list of inalienable rights might differ from yours or mine, but unless he is willing to embrace the non-"elitist" notion that a majority (or even super-majority) vote to, say, reestablish slavery would be just hunky-dory, then he too must at least in principle fear unmitigated democracy.

If so, then how do we decide which rights are inalienable? Obviously, majority vote won't do. At least the "economic conservative," i.e., the libertarian has an alternative solution; namely, to the maximum extent possible, leave individuals alone to decide for themselves what to do with their liberty and their property. Surely, that is at least part of the background from which Caplan might well suggest that market solutions are often preferable to political solutions.

It is not, of course, an entirely unproblematic solution. But one might still ask what sort of solution Hayes thinks is preferable and how he ethically justifies his preferred solution. Perhaps intuitively?

Constant Viewer: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

First things first. Constant Viewer is constantly harping about movies running over two hours. Well, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End runs 168 minutes, well over two hours, but it doesn't feel long, so CV will hold his tongue. (Actually, a very difficult thing to do, anatomically speaking.) Sure, it could easily have been trimmed, but let's face it, we're talking about a movie based on a Disney theme park ride here, and the third such movie at that. We're talking, in other words, almost literally about a "sit back and enjoy the ride" movie, and sit back and enjoy it you will.

That said, there's little point in dwelling over tedious business like, oh, say, plot. Still, here's the plot outline: Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), Will Turner (Orlando Bloom)and Elizabeth Swann (Keria Knightley) must sail off the edge of the map to find Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and fight one last decisive battle. Complications ensue.

But you're not going to see At World's End because of the plot; you're going to go for the action scenes and special effects, for closure from the last two Pirates (the second of which was disappointing) and, most importantly, for yet another fix of Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow. Depp is one of the most interesting and talented actors of his generation and would have become a major star, anyway, but the first Pirate flick gave him a much wider audience. Appropriately so, because he made that movie entirely his own. Besides, the camera loves him and he's a natural in front of it. That's not to say Depp doesn't work at his craft, but only that he's working with gobs of talent and screen presence, neither of which mere training can recreate or replace. His Jack Sparrow, as a result, is an entirely believable unbelievable character. Okay, so it isn't Hamlet, but neither is Hannibal Lector, if you get CV's drift here.

Really, the film's only true weak point is that Depp is nowhere to be found in the early part of the movie and, once found, isn't around as much in the rest as fans might have wished. CV understands there are all sorts of plot threads that don't concern Sparrow directly and CV is even willing to believe there must be some people who care what happens to Knightley's and Bloom's characters. CV simply isn't to be counted among them.

Otherwise, there's plenty to enjoy. Many buckles get swashed and daring gets done, the sea battles and special effects are splendid and CV found himself almost willing to forgive the gratuitous allusions to current events in the opening scene and Knightley's politically correct heroics later on. The supporting cast is wonderful, even including a cameo role by Keith Richards, claimed by Depp to be part of his inspiration for the Sparrow role (the other part being that suave romantic, Pepe Le Peu). CV couldn't say whether make up was required for Richards's part or not.

Go, see the movie on the big screen. It's a big screen movie. Buy the large popcorn and soda, though. It's a long ride to World's End and back again. Better get some nachos, too.

Clinton Fatigue Nostalgia

Reading reviews of two new books about Hillary Clinton is like watching the trailers for a long anticipated sequel to a blockbuster movie. Or maybe like tuning back in to one's favorite soap opera after having kicked the habit for a few years. In either case, all the familiar characters are back, just as we left them.

[Broken link originally of Spy Magazine cover of Hillary as dominatrix]

Of course, there are the headliners, themselves. First and (at last) foremost, there's Hillary. Never really out of the spotlight, having parked her political career in a senate seat, a perfect platform to do a bit of damage control here, a bit of political horse trading there. Seeing to it, for example, that the Democrats ran a sure-fire loser in 2004, lest she have to wait too long to make a run for the White House herself.

And then, too, there's "our Bill." Tanned, rested and ready for... well, for the Big Show, for another chance to play in the World Series or Super Bowl of politics. As was always the case, what Hillary really cares about is the power, but what Bill cares about even more than power is politics, itself. Put differently, what Bill cares about most is the game; what Hillary cares most about is the score. Tell the truth, who doesn't want to see the master player of our age back on the field of dreams?



But our two stars aside, how long has it been since we read of Susan McDougal in her stylish orange jumpsuit or Monica Lewinsky in her stylish blue, well, you know; Web Hubbell or Vince Foster thumbing through the odd stack of FBI files sitting on a coffee table in the Rose Law Firm; Dick Morris or Gennifer Flowers? God, how we've missed them all! Alas, some are gone forever, but there'll be more. There'll be more. Attracting and then, as need be, disposing of colorful second bananas, bit players and one-episode walk-ons is mother's milk to the Clintons -- they are our Arkansas Sopranos and we hunger for more episodes.



Already, the familiar refrains, the set pieces of stage business are being rehearsed. The Clintons' response to the new books?

The Clinton camp hopes to brush off the books as mainly rehashing old news. "Is it possible to be quoted yawning?" asked Philippe Reines, her Senate spokesman. If past books on Clinton were "cash for trash," he added, "these books are nothing more than cash for rehash."

Old news! Yes! It's just like deja vu all over again, isn't it? Oh, the memories!

But seriously, folks (as the comics say), here's why Hillary Clinton will be our next president, painful though it is for me to write those words. Yes, she has extraordinarily high personal negatives; yes, Barack Obama currently enjoys much positive press and, yes, so long as he doesn't declare his candidacy, so does Al Gore. But much of Obama's currently favorable image derives from his being a charismatic cypher. Already he has begun to fumble a bit on the campaign trail and if there is any damaging information to be revealed, any weaknesses whatsoever to be exposed or exploited, rest assured the Clinton camp will get the job done.

Frankly, I think Gore is too happy in his current role as media darling to run again. Indeed, I think he has come to believe he can be more effective as a private citizen promoting his Global Warming agenda than he could be as president, and that may well be right. Gore never cared as passionately for political office as he has for environmental issues, and it shows. I'd explain why Edwards is an even bigger cypher than Obama, but why bother?

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is, without question, the most ruthless office holder in contemporary American politics. She's Dick Cheney in drag, if pantsuits count as drag. And our man Bill, a sui generis force majeure in American politics if there ever was one, is Karl Rove's political equal any day. Besides, the Clintons' front men are right, it is all old news, at least for now. If there was a shred of evidence that Hillary was performing satanic rituals or that Bill was considering a sex change operation or that Chelsea had picked up a crack habit the American Spectator would have been all over it in a New York minute. We really do know all the bad stuff about Bill and Hillary, including even the rarely false bad stuff. What other candidate still in the running can that be said about?

Finally, say what you will about Romney or McCain or Giuliani or the seven dwarfs, no Republican candidate can both secure the nomination and run far enough away from the negative baggage of the Bush Administration to win in 2008. It can't happpen; it won't happen.

On the other hand, losing the White House could be the best thing that could happen for the Republicans, who desperately need to free themselves from the neoconservative shackles of the Bush era, Iraq especially included. It is, after all, an accident of history that Bush became a wartime president and thus a strong president. Neither he nor his various lackeys, henchmen and underlings could have managed to drag the Republican party into the profligate pork addicts and empire building warmongers they have become in the past six years had it not been for 9/11. In a sense, that may have been the greatest damage the terrorists managed to inflict.

I don't say that with any partisan agenda. I dislike the Republican Party as much as the Democratic Party and have supported Republicans in the past only insofar as I saw them providing needed counterweight to the excesses of the Democrats. Historically, they have, between the two of them, represented too little difference politically for my tastes. Still, at least once upon a time it could be said that the difference was that the Republicans let you keep your money and property in return for controlling your private life while the Democrats did the opposite. Now they have converged to the point where both would equally steal our freedoms and our wealth, quibbling only over the details. For the good of the nation, one party or the other must literally reform. As it is at least temporarily in the ascendancy, that party won't be the Democrats for now.

A Republican Party that abandons and rejects the Bush era can regain Congress even as it loses the White House. And nothing would do more to make that happen than seeing Hillary Rodham Clinton sitting in the Oval Office.

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SPECIAL CLINTON NOSTALGIA BONUS: A Clinton era flash from the past -- the late, great Michael Kelly's I Believe.

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An Unrequested Response to QandO's Mr. Franks

I have some tenuous connection with QandO, having been invited by Jon Henke to participate in the first incarnation of the now defunct Inactivist, so I pop over there now and then and check things out. At the moment, Memeorandum is linking to a series of questions Dale Franks raises under the title Questions for Our Liberal Friends. I don't see myself as a liberal or a conservative, but they are good questions deserving some sort of answers from both sides of the political spectrum as well as from outliers like myself. Since I now find myself on the withdraw sooner rather than later side of the question, I thought I'd take a whack at addressing his questions.

First, I'm wondering what you think the result of an American withdrawal would be? And we really have to ask that about two spheres, the internal Iraqi results, and the effect on America's security.

Addressing the second point first, my guess is that the long term effect would be good for America's security. Personally, I do think there is something to the "keep the terrorists shooting at us over there" argument, but it's not a reasonable long term strategy. I do buy into the "blowback" theory -- that is, that the primary motivating factor among Islamic terrorists is the continued U.S. military presence in the Middle East (followed closely by U.S. support for Israel); thus, I think any significant reduction in that presence bodes well for a reduction in terrorist activity. Our presence in Iraq, however, is but one piece of that problem.

The first part of the question presupposes that a U.S. troop withdrawal now versus a withdrawal later would lead to different results. ("Now" meaning sometime within, say, a year.) I'm not so sure. To me, the best analogy to Iraq is Yugoslavia. Once the strong dictatorship is overthrown, be it Tito or Hussein, the resulting civil war among the ethnic and geographical factions that were, after all, involuntarily united in the first place is probably inevitable. The better question, if that is true, is what sort of support, if any, the varying factions (e.g., the Kurds) should continue to receive.

Do you reject the "you broke it, you bought it" idea?

I take that to mean something along the lines that the U.S. has created the current situation in Iraq and is therefore now obligated to stay the course to fix things. Yes, I do reject that notion as here applied. If I thought a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq, albeit with some sort of finite endpoint, was more likely than not to resolve matters, I might think otherwise; but as I do not, the question resolves to one of sunk costs and cutting losses.

Do you think the Iraqis will find a way to cobble their state together? Do you think it will descend into a civil bloodbath? If so, then why don't we have any responsibility to try and prevent it? Compare and contrast with Kosovo and Darfur. What if Iraq turns into a Taliban-like cesspool, and becomes a base for terrorist operation against the US in the same way Afghanistan was?

No. Yes. Because one does not have a moral obligation to attempt to prevent the inevitable. I have already compared Iraq to Yugoslavia. I think Darfur muddies the waters here unnecessarily and should be considered as a separate topic. Finally, the answer to "what if" type questions is "we'll see." Do I think the U.S. did the right thing by invading Afghanistan and wiping out, at least temporarily, the Taliban? Yes. Does that mean the U.S. should remain in Afghanistan forever? No. Does it mean the U.S. should take appropriate retaliatory action whenever and wherever Taliban-like cesspools provide safe havens and bases of operations for terrorist attacks against the U.S. Hell, yes.

Do you think that the Iraqis can build a stable, functioning democratic state? If not, why? Are they just not suited for Democracy as a people? If so, what are their deficiencies?

Ever? Sure, why not? In the near future? No. As individuals, we are all suited for democracy. As cultures, separated by long historical rivalries on tribal, ethnic, religious, etc. differences, I doubt the various populations of Iraq are collectively capable of sufficient peaceful coexistence for the sort of democracy I suspect Mr. Franks has in mind to work. Again, witness the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The other half of the question is what effect will it have on American security? Will it embolden terrorists? Will our withdrawal make it more or less likely that terrorists will begin marshaling forces for another 9/11 style attack? Why?

I think I've replied to some of that already. One problem with these questions and these sorts of discussions, however, is that neither "side" has adequate information. Has the Bush Doctrine worked in terms of preventing subsequent 9/11 type attacks or was 9/11 a one-off in the first place? I don't know. Neither does Mr. Franks and neither does anyone else, especially those of us who do not have access to classified intelligence information.

On the Global War on Terror more generally, will a withdrawal from Iraq help or hinder that effort? Or do we need to make an effort at all, other than some Special Ops stuff here and there, and intelligence, prevention, and law enforcement operations otherwise? What would be the US's military role after a withdrawal from Iraq? Does the US military actually have much a role beyond repelling an invasion?

As previously mentioned, I supported and continue to support U.S. military operations of the Afghanistan Taliban "cesspool" variety. Personally, I would never preemptively rule out any U.S. military operation or deployment of military power. For that matter, based on what the public was told, I supported the Iraq war at the beginning and might support a preemptive use of military force in the future. Whether that is consistent with a generally libertarian point of view doesn't bother me in the slightest. On the other hand, I don't see America's options when it comes to international terrorism or international policy generally to be limited to the sort of either / or dichotomy implicit in the question. Surely we can consider options in between an entirely isolationist, "guns at the border" U.S. military policy and one of the U.S. as "global cop on the beat," especially when much of that "beat" views the "cops" in question rather like U.S. urban minorities have historically viewed the police as merely being enforcers for "the Man."

Are we doomed to fail at achieving anything worthwhile in Iraq? Why? Is it something organic to Iraq, or simply a problem with the current president? Would another administration be able to achieve some reasonable level of peace and stability?

To quote T.E. Lawrence, nothing is written. That said, it cannot be unreasonable to believe that the Middle East will view any new U.S. administration as an opportunity for change. Change for the better or for the worse? Who knows?

Oh, yeah, and one final question: What if you're wrong?

Yes, we all need to answer that question, don't we? Well, that again depends on how wrong and with what consequences. I'm not making a cheap comparison here to Mr. Franks, but let me invoke the psychology of the drug addict or alcoholic who, as miserable as he may be, nonetheless fears life without the known risks and rewards of his addiction. The dangers of the unknown are more frightening than the dangers of the known, but that's no argument for avoiding a change when the evidence indicates change is called for.

Is that the case here, new and unknown risks included? I think so. I'm not sure either side in this dispute can, as Mr. Franks desires, "show his math." Would a relatively quick withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq be painless? Of course not. Pain, per se, isn't the issue. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree even now about the various pros and cons here, but is whistling past the graveyard really worse than standing silently at the graveyard, waiting in the certain knowledge that more dead are on the way if we continue to act as we have?

At Least Now We Know Why They're Pink

It sounds like the log line for the next John Waters movie -- Gay flamingos pick up chick. "A pair of gay flamingos have adopted an abandoned chick, becoming parents after being together for six years, a British conservation organization said Monday," reports the APF. Of course, Andrew Sullivan was one of the early bloggers to cover the story.

I admit to almost invincible ignorance when it comes to animal homosexuality. I mean, I've known lots of gay men and a few lesbians over the years (sure, I've know even more than I know about -- I'm just talking about the ones I knew were homosexual), but aside from these suspiciously recent press reports of allegedly homosexual behavior in animals, this is not a topic I've paid much attention to since I stopped watching the adventures of Yogi Bear and Booboo.

If, in fact, Carlos and Fernando, the flamingos in question, are gay, then following Sullivan's lead I think this raises all sorts of interesting theological issues. I suppose, for example, homosexuality among non-humans could still be considered theologically "disordered" and thus contrary to the will of God. One would be hard pressed to call whatever occurs naturally to be unnatural, however, and the theological nexus between sin, original or otherwise, and free will would seem at the very least to be a bit strained. Indeed, I'm not sure it makes any sense whatever to talk of sinful animals. Yes, I know, the notion of sin among humans is problematic enough for many people, but we're just doing a bit of conceptual analysis here.

On the other hand or wing, as it were, when Carlos and Fernando are referred to as a "gay" couple, does this really mean what, well, what one assumes it means when we're talking about people? I mean, what sort of sex lives do "straight" birds have, for that matter?

Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust in Slimbridge near Bristol (a Wodehousean name if there ever was one) representative Jane Waghorn claims that gay flamingos are not uncommon. "If there aren't enough females or they don't hit it off with them, they will pair off with other males," she said.

Of course, if there aren't enough females in, say, prison... well, you know. So there's my question. Were Carlos and Fernando living the avian equivalent of La Cage aux folles these last six years or were they and are similar "gay" flamingo couples merely playing The Odd Couple?

Top Ten Reactions to "Covert" Iran Destabilization Plans

ABC News reports that the CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government. With apologies to David Letterman, here are my Top Ten reactions:

10. “A coordinated campaign of propaganda, disinformation and manipulation,” huh? I wondered what Karl Rove was up to these days.

9. Thank goodness no one in Iran has internet access or reads English.

8. Upon learning that Elliot Abrams has provided advice regarding the covert operation, Iranian leaders have apparently hired Daniel Ortega in response.

7. Shouldn’t that be covert “African American” operation?

6. It was either this or Cheney was going to take Iran quail hunting.

5. It isn’t true that in deference to President Bush’s alma mater the campaign is named “Operation Mullah Mullah” or that Bush is referred to in the plan as “Cheerleader One.”

4. Rudy Giuliani has preemptively criticized Ron Paul over the insulting notion that the Iranians might object and retaliate.

3. In related news, share prices for the Acme Flammable American Flag Company rose 23% on heavy trading.

2. Leaked reports of other “nonlethal presidential findings” include 87 cents in loose change and a Smirnoff Preferred Customer courtesy card in the president’s jeans.

1. Osama who?

Does This Mean Stallone Will Be Banned From Competitive Acting?

"Nothing is over! Nothing!" -- John Rambo

Among the many things Sylvester Stallone and I have in common must be counted a very limited talent for acting, aging flesh and the desire to self-medicate. The last, alas, cost Stallone fines and court costs amounting to around $13,000 after a guilty plea in Australia to possession of 48 vials of the human growth hormone Jintropin and four vials of testosterone.

I, by contrast, only wanted some antibiotic eye drops but ended up instead with a lingering eye infection and several unnecessary trips to an opthamologist.

Stallone, like several other old lions of his generation's action hero stars (notably, Bruce "I see old people" Willis's soon released Take the Blue Pills and Die Hard, or something like that), has been racing the reaper to complete his valedictory outing as Rambo. While his recent Rocky Balboa wasn't nearly as bad as I, in my affected and uncredentialed role of Constant Viewer, expected it to be, there was still something mildly bathetic about the sixty year old Stallone lumbering into the ring for one last round. Well, time and tide and all that.

"I will not be without these. I cannot be without these," Stallone said when discovered with the goods, and I can well understand why. Why the hell should he be without them? If the man is vain enough and deluded enough to want to pump himself with steroids and such to play the heroic lout one more time, I say more power to him. It's his career and his life, fergawdsakes!

And by the way, while Stallone's geriatric action heroics are easy to ridicule, Stallone is a very good screenwriter and director in his genre and the original Rocky easily deserved its Oscars as much as any of Frank Capra's legendary melodramas ever did. It is worth remembering that Stallone became the third person ever to be nominated for both acting and writing in the same year for Rocky, following Chaplin for The Great Dictator (1940) and Orson Welles for Citizen Kane (1941). Call that declining standards, if you will, but that's pretty damned good company. So, also, Bruce Willis turned out to be (or become) a much better actor than his Moonlighting mugging or early John McClane machismo would have led me to believe.

Anyway, enough of this Hollywood hoopla. Let's get back to the real topic which is drugs and me. (Me! It's all about me!) Being both lazy and stupid, I left a pair of extended wear contact lenses in for too long and ended up with an infection in one eye. Now, I admit it might not have been a mere infection. All sorts of things could have been wrong with my left eye, but an infection was by far the most likely problem, it having happened to me before and the prescribed treatment being antibiotic eye drops and refraining from wearing contacts for a while.

As it happened, being lazy and stupid and knowing I was due for an eye exam shortly anyway, I did nothing and, as will more often than not happen, my immune system kicked in, my eye felt better though not entirely well, and I decided to just leave the contacts out and wait until it was time for the regular exam. Now, had I been able to run down to the pharmacy to buy a bottle of antibiotic eye drops in the first place, the infection would have healed faster and that would have been that. Of course, as I said, it might not have been a bacterial infection, in which case the eye drops would have done no good (but no harm, either) and I would have known to seek medical attention at once. But you can't buy antibiotics without a prescription, dagnabit!

I know, I know. Antibiotics abuse is a public health problem, and some people are allergic to some antibiotics and so on and so forth. But if you can buy topical antibiotic creams and soaps and if you can buy tetracycline for tropical fish, ferchristsakes, then you damned well ought to be able to buy antibiotic eye drops without a prescription.

When I finally saw the doctor some weeks later, he noted the still mildly infected area and guess what? He prescribed antibiotic eye drops! Plus, of course, a couple of return visits to check the course of the treatment -- treatment which I could easily have self-administered weeks earlier at far lesser risk to my eye.

Okay, so I'm stupid and lazy and cheap and physician-resistant, as well. But they're my eyes and I don't need or want to be saved from myself. Or, if I do, it still isn't the business of the state to do so. (Who, oh who will save me from the state?) If I want to run the risk of self-prescribing the wrong medication, it's my own lookout. Yeah, I know. Literally, in this case.

Same with Stallone. If it's that bloody important to him to have one last fling as an action hero and it takes controlled substances to permit him to do it, why the hell should Australia or the U.S. or any other state prohibit him from doing so?

"There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run."

So writes Nina Plank in an op-ed column in today's New York Times, discussing the death of 6 week old Crown Shakur, whose vegan parents fed him mainly soy milk and apple juice. The infant weighed 3.5 pounds and died of starvation. His parents were subsequently convicted of murder, involuntary manslaughter and cruelty.

I don't know Plank's qualifications, though I assume the Times vetted her before running the piece. Further, while I am definitely omnivorous, I have no problem with vegetarians of any sort so long as the ones who refrain from eating meat on what they believe to be moral grounds refrain as well on prudential grounds from trying to argue the point with me. If free range tomatoes are your cuisine of choice, more power to you as long as we're talking only about what you, personally, choose to eat.

The case of Crown Shakur's death, however, points dramatically at what are and properly should be the limits of social tolerance of parental authority over children. That isn't a controversial notion among either liberals or conservatives; they differ for the most part only in the sorts of personal liberty they enthusiastically wish to prohibit. It is, however, a controversial notion among too many libertarians.

Too bad. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree whether, say, corporal punishment ought to be illegal or what minimal level of education parents should be responsible to ensure their children receive or even whether certain vaccinations or other medical attention should be required.

But there is no such thing as a reasonable case for permitting parents to starve their infant children to death. None whatsoever. And those who would argue on ideological grounds for complete parental control over children, unfettered by state interference, are on an equal moral footing with those whose merely different ideology could result in this sort of senseless and entirely avoidable death.

Constant Viewer: Credentials? We ain't got no credentials. We don't need no credentials. I don't have to show you any stinking credentials!

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Thus sprach Time film critic and book reviewer Richard Schickel, who makes the other salient observations that Edmund Wilson and George Orwell were better critics than most (all?) bloggers trying their hand at it and that, presumably among many others, Philip K. Dick and Cornell Woolrich are currently enjoying inflated reputations or would enjoy them if they were still alive. These things are true. Constant Viewer readily admits them.

Schickel goes on to say:

[W]e have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.

Here, alas, he loses CV on several grounds. First, he conflates reviewing with criticism; that is, were he writing about criticism his position would be far more defensible. Second, by his own standards, much of professional (read: paid) reviewing fails utterly as well. Schickel might not mind that so much, but CV hazards the guess that were he to dredge up some of Schickel's work from the mid 1960s it wouldn't fare all that well by those standards, either. CV, um, asserts this opinion having never read much of Schickel's work under the principle that anyone who doesn't get better at what he has done for over forty years should have packed it in long ago.

Criticism aside, a film or book reviewer's work is little more than an aid to the prospective viewer or reader. Here are the credentials required to be a useful film reviewer: be consistent in your tastes and write what you believe. Readers will fairly quickly discover after several reviews whether and where you can be trusted to share their tastes or not. Knowledge of film making and of the principle cast and crew is useful but not essential. People do not read reviews to educate themselves generally or to improve their taste. Their question is "Will I like this movie?" Just about everything else in the review is posturing; entertaining posturing, maybe, but posturing nonetheless and specifically film reviewing posturing as film criticism. CV knows of one reviewer who apparently doesn't know his aperture from a hole in the ground as far as film making or film history credentials go, but if this guy likes a movie, chances are very good that CV will like it, too. Maybe not for the same stated reasons, but that makes no difference in his value as a litmus test.

Sure, an informed and talented reviewer can occasionally accomplish the loftier goals to which Schickel would have him constantly aspire. But Schickel fails to understand how his elitist perspective and attitude (the latter of which CV largely shares) nonetheless fails to support his implicit conclusion that this internet free-for-all is a bad thing. Yes, most blog reviews suck. But so do most paid reviews, a fact Schickel all too quickly acknowledges.

Maybe Ernie the car parts guy has something worth saying and maybe he doesn't. Chances are he doesn't, but so what? Maybe Ernie will turn into a decent reviewer if he keeps at it long enough. The notion that all real writers find publishers or that, at the very least, they keep writing despite rejection after rejection is, one notes, a notion held almost exclusively by published writers. Let Ernie have his fun, even if it is little more than "cocktail-party chat."

Chances are good that more people decide which film to see or book to read next from cocktail party chatter than from Mr. Schickel and his ilk's reviews or criticism. Chances are even better there's a good reason why.

It Takes One To Know One

I owe to Jimmy Carter the debt of having learned always to hedge my bets when it comes to such titles as Worst President Ever. Carter, after all, followed the detestable Richard Nixon, during whose administration I naively assumed I would never live to see a worse president. Among his many other negative accomplishments, Carter's own feckless administration almost single-handedly set the stage for most of the problems the United States has faced in the Middle East since the 1970s. Being a worse president than Richard Nixon was no small feat, but Carter managed the job almost effortlessly.



For a number of years after his utterly failed single-term presidency was finally put out of its misery, Carter earned wide praise as the best ex-president in U.S. history. His do-gooding was relentless and some of it, I freely admit, did some genuine good. In recent years, however, and especially after he finally won his long campaign for the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter has become a cantankerous, quarrelsome old coot, routinely sticking his self-righteous proboscis on the world stage where it no longer has any legitimate business. As self-appointed U.S. Ombudsman, Carter's criticisms of U.S. domestic and especially foreign policy exceeded Clinton's rumored sexual conquests a long time ago, also no mean feat.

Now Carter has publicly blasted the Bush Administration as the "worst in history" in international relations. And guess what?

I agree.

It just goes to show that, just like in sports, records are made to be broken. I just hope I don't live long enough to hear George W. Bush say some subsequent president is the worst ever and have to agree with him, too. God help us all if that should ever happen.

Giving Less Than Your All

As promised or, depending on your point of view, threatened, I want to revisit Steven E. Landsburg’s new More Sex Is Safer Sex, this time addressing his contention that, given certain assumptions, it is preferable for a person to give his entire charitable contribution to whatever he deems the most worthy charity rather than parcel out his charitable contributions among various worthy charities. (Title reference: Landsburg discusses this in his chapter, "Giving Your All.")

Here is the basic logic of the argument. Begin with the key assumption that among the various charities under consideration, they are all sufficiently large and address sufficiently large problems that, however much your contribution may be, it will nonetheless represent only a very small increase in their endowments and, when spent, similarly address only a very small part of the problem they seek to solve. Landsburg uses CARE and the American Cancer Society as examples, so I will, too. The thinking here is that your $10 or $100 or $1,000 isn’t in and of itself going to be the determining factor in finding a cure for cancer, nor will it feed all the hungry children in the world.

Let’s say you plan on contributing $1,000 to charity and, as a preliminary matter, thought you’d make your contributions in $100 increments. If you deem feeding hungry children a better cause than cancer research, then your first $100 will go to CARE. Landsburg’s argument, in the proverbial nutshell, is that however much good your $100 did to feed one or more hungry children, the number of hungry children is vastly larger, the other children (metaphorically) waiting in line to be fed next are equally deserving of your charity and so your next $100 should go to CARE for the same reasons your first contribution did.

The size of the problem and of the charity is critical. Looking at small scale charitable contributions, e.g., should you contribute $100 toward fixing up a playground for children or toward fencing in a neighboring dog park (my examples), even if you like dogs more than children, at some determinate point the fencing gets paid for and it makes sense to contribute to the playground as well. That is, as Landsburg claims, you can make a real dent in small scale problems whereas your contribution, viewed in isolation, cannot make such a dent in the overall problem of world hunger or medical research.

So far, so good. Of course, we’re simplifying matters here by considering only two charities, whereas the world is filled with other possible objects of your charitable attention. (The Ridgely Early Retirement & World Cruise Fund springs to mind here.) In principle, however, you could rank the worthiness of every such charity and one would eventually come out on top. If you really couldn’t decide which of your top two charities was worthier, Landsburg says “flip a coin and give everything to the winner. If the two causes are equally worthy, sending $200 to either is just as good as sending $100 to each – and it will cost you just one postage stamp instead of two.”

Well, no. Landsburg “does the math” in an appendix to make his point. The math is good; the assumptions underlying the math, not so good.

Landsburg’s argument depends on distinguishing between the satisfaction, however derived, one gets by giving to charity and the good such contributions do for others. Analytically, that makes perfect sense. Insofar as we are capable of drawing that distinction and focusing solely on the latter, the math works out just fine. Unfortunately, however, his “defense of pure reason” (which is more Spockian than Kantian) presupposes that people are capable of arriving at moral conclusions by reason alone; that is, that they are capable of and should be willing to set aside the self-serving motives of charity and to do the research required to crunch the numbers.

In fairness, Landsburg acknowledges both the reality and usefulness of self-serving motives and the limits to which one can, should or will incur the search costs of ferreting out charitable bang-for-buck. But it seems to me he significantly underestimates them both. As with voting, information costs can be formidable and so there is a real element of rational ignorance involved in deciding among charities for most of us. But, okay, let’s say that putting in some time and effort sorting out charities is legitimately a part of our overall charitable contribution.

It may be true that, having thus invested a reasonable amount of time and effort into investigating not only, as in Landsburg’s oversimplified model, the endowment of the American Cancer Society and CARE but also their relative overhead costs, likely other sources of income (Landsburg says it shouldn’t matter if I know you are also going to give $100 to CARE, and he’s right. But what if I discover that some billionaire has just left his entire estate to CARE the day before I write the check. Might not that matter? Assuming you were dumb enough to contribute to NPR in the first place, might not Joan Kroc's $200 million contribution a few years ago have rationally swayed your coffee mug purchasing "membership" elsewhere?) and so forth, I determine that $200 to one is as good as $100 to each. Oh, and forget the stamp, they send pre-franked envelopes and there’s always the internet to give through, anyway.

Well, then, it would be irrational (and in that strictly utilitarian sense, immoral) at that point for me not to consider self-serving reasons why I might wish to split my contributions. I would, as economists say, have failed to maximize utility, would in effect have decreased the net wealth of the world by not taking my own happiness into account. To tart up the point with a bit of slightly misused economics jargon, once I truly am indifferent regarding the two charities in terms of the good they will do for others, it certainly doesn't follow that I should be indifferent as to other distinguishing factors.

I further question the underlying assumption that there is anything approaching an objective answer to the question: which is better, curing cancer or feeding hungry children? Landsburg blithely sets up the dilemma as one of blind instinct versus logical analysis, but logical analysis gets us to interpersonal utility comparisons and all sorts of other messy concerns. There is such a thing as the illusion of objectivity, too; and one of the most notorious sorts of such illusions is the mathematical formula which, upon close enough inspection, turns out to be using unmeasurable or incommensurable factors. I admit, however, that these concerns would require a more extended consideration than I am giving them here.

Viewed as a matter of economic logic, Landsburg’s key insight is that among two unequally worthy major charities, the marginal utility of one’s subsequent contributions to the most worthy would not be decreased sufficiently to justify giving to the second charity instead. Sure. It’s a great exam question, but it may still be highly questionable considered as real ethical advise.

Wolfowitz's Possible Successors?

Milton Drysdale:

Pros: Extensive experience providing banking services for gun wielding semi-literates.

Cons: Miss Jane Hathaway, real brains behind Drysdale's success, fled to undisclosed location in 1967 with accomplice Jethro Bodine after bank examiner discovered fifty million dollars missing from Bank of Beverly Hills vault.


Rich Uncle Pennybags (a.k.a. Monopoly Man):

Pros: Holds two Get Out of Jail Free cards. Once won second prize in a beauty contest. Snappy dresser.

Cons: Tendency to tear down residential housing to build luxury hotels.


Gordon Gekko:

Pros: "Greed is good" motto reduces Invisible Hand and rational self-interest theories to terms underdeveloped nation populations can understand.

Cons: Sharp dealing reputation inconsistent with high moral standards insisted upon by World Bank for all non-Third-World personnel. Hideous taste in neckties.


Scrooge McDuck:

Pros: Favors fiscal and monetary policies designed to discourage runaway inflation.

Cons: Insistence on gold backed currency and tight credit limits money supply growth in pace with expanding economy.


C. Montgomery Burns:

Pros: Gay friendly employer. Understands importance of safe, clean, reliable source of energy. Comfortable with monopoly ownership typical of kleptocracies.

Cons: Victorian attitudes may prove offensive to post-Colonial regimes. Preference for nuclear power poses weaponization risks.

Ron Paul: "Double Plus Ungood?"

Well, the good news for both Mitt Romney and Ron Paul is that their New Hampshire Zogby Poll numbers have both roughly tripled from January to May. Of course, that's an improvement from 13% to 35% for Romney and a change from 1% to 3% for Paul, but, hey, you gotta take your good news where you find it.

Over at Unqualified Offerings, Jim Henley thinks Paul's libertarian-in-the-punchbowl act (a.k.a. to Michelle Malkin as a "9/11 Truthist" or to FOX News more generally as "the Invisible Man") may actually enjoy enough blowback to remain "viable late into the primary season." Covering his bases (as I would, too), Jim notes Paul may well flame out long before then, too.

The interesting question to me at this point is whether Paul's continued presence is helping or harming either the front-runners or the Republican party's prospects in general.

Julian Sanchez probably should be working on a PhD in philosophy rather than wasting his formidable intellect vivisecting the conceptually challenged follies of the Republican Idol lineup. Nonetheless, as G.E. Moore once said of Wittgenstein's "dissertation," Sanchez is fully qualified for Talking Head gigs, even if only of the self-produced variety, as here.

Julian suggests that Paul may at least make campaign b.s. more difficult for the front-runners and the other wannabes, who "have a vested interest in preserving a certain level of ambiguity," as when he noted that "enhanced interrogation techniques" was just so much New-Speak for torture in the last 'debate.'

Maybe. I fear such distinctions without differences will continue to be uttered by the candidates because, with or without Paul to call b.s. to such tactics, they resonate with a public deeply desirous of someone who will get the "dirty but necessary" job done but who also will spare them the gory and thus blame-sharing details. (I say this, by the way, as one who does not believe torture never works or can never be morally justified. However, having taken such a position, I think it would indeed be immoral to then try to hide from what an ugly thing it is.)

In any case, unless the Republican Party is willing to thin the herd of all the declared candidates to pretty much the top three at this point, excluding Paul would be a bad move. Not only because of the potential blowback from Paul supporters and sympathizers but also because, truth be told, truth has nothing to do with these 'debates," as the positive reaction to Giuliani's attack on Paul's 9/11 blowback comments so clearly demonstrates.

What? No Drinking Section on the New SAT?

Former co-blogger Thoreau links to the Onion's provocative consideration of whether American high school graduates are being adequately prepared for college level drinking. While there, however, be sure to check out the tragic plight of American executives displaced by Mexican immigrants.

Ron Paul, Racist Anti-Semite?

Speaking of blowback, it seems the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy," which now apparently includes the likes of CNN, is focusing its firepower on Ron Paul, not only for blaming America for 9/11 criticizing American foreign policy in the Middle East, but also now for his allegedly racist and anti-semitic views.

Oh my.

Herewith, a 1996 Houston Chronicle article quoting excerpts from newsletters Paul sent to supporters in 1992, such excerpts apparently provided by the campaign of his then Democratic opponent, Austin, Texas lawyer Charles "Lefty" Morris. As quoted, Paul contended that black, teen-age male criminals are "unbelievably fleet-footed," that "polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action," that "we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal," and that "the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government."

I wasn't aware there was a good sort of Washington lobby, and surely there must be some less than fleet-footed black teen-aged criminals out there; but I have no interest in defending Paul, assuming the quotes are accurate and that they are not misleadingly taken out of context.

As I have repeatedly noted, Ron Paul is not going to win the Republican nomination and is not going to be President of the United States, and so all the backlash against Paul for espousing views well outside what counts as the current range of acceptable mainstream Republican opinion (more's the pity) and experiencing a surge of internet interest and activity is almost laughable.

So, for that matter, is the notion that among all the middle-aged white male candidates thus far declared as Republican candidates, Paul might be targeted by Republican conservatives as holding or publicly expressing (two quite different things) views that are beyond the pale on racial or ethnic grounds.

Here's the thing. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom of the Left, most Republicans, most conservatives and most middle-aged white men are not racists by any reasonable definition of the term. Neither are they either entirely pure of heart in such matters nor will their comments over the decades withstand close scrutiny for failure to show appropriate deference to current political sensibilities in such matters.

That said, accusations of racism (though possibly not of anti-semitism, interestingly enough) pretty much constitute the "nuclear option" in American politics. Maybe Paul can give an adequate account not only for those quotes but also for everything he has ever said or written that could be construed as indicative of racial or ethnic prejudice and maybe he can't. That all depends in large measure on what counts as racism, what counts as merely racially insensitive phrasing of an otherwise innocuous observation or opinion and what counts as fair comment on racial issues. But the same goes for every other candidate, as well, so they and their supporters had better be damned careful about that particular political gambit.

Let me repeat that I am not interested in defending Paul or any other candidate insofar as there may be legitimate evidence of that candidate holding racist or anti-semitic views. Who knows what we have yet to learn about any of the candidates as their campaigns progress? What does at least for now primarily interest and amuse and, just a little bit, worry me is how quickly and easily frightened certain elements of the Right are over what so far amounts to no more than a little internet buzz over a man who stands no chance whatsoever of being nominated or elected president.

Michigan GOP Chairman Seeks to Ban Paul from Future GOP "Big Top Tent" Debates

"Michigan party chairman Saul Anuzis said he will circulate a petition among Republican National Committee members to ban Paul from more debates."

So far, no word from Rudy "Oh Thank Heaven for 9/11" Giuliani as to the extent not having Paul to misconstrue and criticize at subsequent debates would damage Don Giuliani's campaign prospects.

Blowback

Actions have consequences. This concept is so obvious even the CIA understands it. In fact, it's so obvious even the Republican candidates for president understand it, though Rudy Giuliani appeared not to in last night's second snoozer of a 'debate.' The brief contretemps between Ron Paul and Giuliani, one of the few lively moments of the evening (Jim Gilmore naming names among his less than conservative colleagues being another), arose after Paul made the perfectly reasonable observation that 9/11 was precipitated by America's foreign policy, an observation Giuliani used as a springboard to attack Paul and implicitly wave the bloody red flag of his mayoral rise to national fame because of 9/11. Here's the exchange:

MR. GOLER: Congressman Paul, I believe you are the only man on the stage who opposes the war in Iraq, who would bring the troops home as quickly as -- almost immediately, sir. Are you out of step with your party? Is your party out of step with the rest of the world? If either of those is the case, why are you seeking its nomination?

REP. PAUL: Well, I think the party has lost its way, because the conservative wing of the Republican Party always advocated a noninterventionist foreign policy.

Senator Robert Taft didn't even want to be in NATO. George Bush won the election in the year 2000 campaigning on a humble foreign policy -- no nation-building, no policing of the world. Republicans were elected to end the Korean War. The Republicans were elected to end the Vietnam War. There's a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

Just think of the tremendous improvement -- relationships with Vietnam. We lost 60,000 men. We came home in defeat. Now we go over there and invest in Vietnam. So there's a lot of merit to the advice of the Founders and following the Constitution.

And my argument is that we shouldn't go to war so carelessly. (Bell rings.) When we do, the wars don't end.

MR. GOLER: Congressman, you don't think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?

REP. PAUL: What changed?

MR. GOLER: The non-interventionist policies.

REP. PAUL: No. Non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We've been in the Middle East -- I think Reagan was right.

We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?

REP. PAUL: I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we're over there because Osama bin Laden has said, "I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier." They have already now since that time -- (bell rings) -- have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don't think it was necessary.

MR. GIULIANI: Wendell, may I comment on that? That's really an extraordinary statement. That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.(Applause, cheers.)

And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that. (Applause.)

MR. GOLER: Congressman?

REP. PAUL: I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.

They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and they attack us because we're over there. I mean, what would we think if we were -- if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

For those who missed it, National Review Online has posted the video of the exchange here.

Of course, Paul said no such thing as that the U.S. "invited" the 9/11 attack, but I'll be glad to say so. Not intentionally, of course, but in the same sense that actions routinely invite unintended consequences. U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East since World War II has had three or four objectives. First and foremost, securing the supply of oil; second, Israel; third and fourth, trying to move the rest of the Middle East into the Western sphere of alliances.

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, these latter objectives were at least as much political as commercial, but they were political in the overriding context of the Cold War. The cultural, religious and other differences between us and the Middle East were given short shrift except as factors in that U.S. vs. USSR scenario. Nor has the U.S. in particular or the West in general been all that concerned historically about the grotesque human rights violations of the various regimes we have supported (Iran under the Shah, then Iraq under Hussein against Iran) or continue to support (Saudi Arabia) either to thwart the Soviets or to keep the oil flowing.

Are the Middle East's own politics, as Paul contended, irrational? If your definition of rationality is a sort of cold-blooded utilitarianism devoid of any emotional investment in religious beliefs or ethnic and cultural differences, I suppose so. After all, all the U.S. really wants from the Middle East is (1) oil and (2) Israel. Sure, it would be nice if they all embraced free market economies and representative democracies, too, but our continued alliance with the Saudis pretty much demonstrates how much the U.S. really cares about that. So the question occurs, how rational have our politics in the Middle East been?

Let's put on our cold-blooded utilitarian hats, then, for a moment and ask the following. If the U.S. is incapable of forgoing Middle Eastern oil (as indeed it is) and unwilling to forgo Israel (as indeed it should be unwilling to do) and its continued pursuit of those two objectives alone would continue to incur the unintended consequences of terrorist attacks, is that a reasonable price to pay? Moreover, if such attacks continue to be as expensive as they have been, either in terms of the deaths, injuries and property damage of 9/11 or the deaths, injuries and expense of military forces in Iraq and elsewhere as well as the liberty we have lost in pursuit of greater security, is that a reasonable price to pay?

Those are by no means the only foreign policy questions that should be answered by both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, but they'd be an excellent place to start.

Mini-Review: More Sex Is Safer Sex by Steven E. Landsburg

Steven E. Landsburg is my favorite economics writer. Admittedly, it's a small field of competition, but I'd have to say I don't think I really began to understand what economics is all about until I read his The Armchair Economist back in 1993. Economics is not about money, let alone money and banking, gross domestic product, or even supply and demand. Sure, that's the stuff that gets covered in an economics survey course, but the underlying theme, apparently lost on the vast majority of those who take the course, is about choices and the consequences and trade-offs of those choices. Money is only a convenient method of measuring. No contemporary economist I know (including, e.g., David D. Friedman, Steven D. Levett, Todd G. Buchholz and Tim Harford) does a better job of making the underlying "Big Picture" of economics more clear or more entertaining than Landsburg.

His latest book, More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics (Free Press, 288 pp.) is a delight and highly recommended, even though I find that I don't always agree with Landsburg (for noneconomic reasons) in some of his views. Well, that actually adds to the fun.

I will almost certainly write more about several of the themes and topics in Landsburg's new book when time becomes available. In the meanwhile, I encourage you to check out his "Why I Am Not an Environmentalist" and, for the libertarian crowd, I offer a bit of red meat from More Sex Is Safer Sex, as follows:

... Cabinet departments like Agriculture, Commerce and Labor have powerful constituencies that make it impossible to eliminate them one at a time. But what about eliminating them as a package?

The Agriculture Department helps farmers steal from workers and businesses; the Commerce Department helps businesses steal from farmers and workers; the Labor Department helps workers steal from farmers and businesses. With a plan to abolish all three, you could promise every American that he was losing one friend and two enemies.

Several readers took issue with my criticism of Ron Paul's performance during the Republican candidates' 'debate.' Let's not kid ourselves, folks, Ron Paul is not going to be our next president. Still, instead of confusing people with talk about the "inflation tax" and fumbling over why the Founding Fathers wouldn't want Arnold Schwarzenegger to be eligible for the presidency, the above quote is precisely the sort of thing he should be saying in his all too brief media exposure. So here's my current Paul campaign contribution: Dr. Paul, read Steven Landsburg's books and steal from them flagrantly every chance you get!

The Naked and the Nearly Dead

Here's some news you probably can't use. Nudist resorts have "become increasingly upscale." What's a young, budget minded nudist to do? More to the point, what must an increasingly graying nudist community with a median age of 55 do to keep from becoming "a gated assisted living community"?

To draw 20- and 30-somethings, nudist groups and camps are trying everything from deep discounts on membership fees to a young ambassador program that encourages college and graduate students to talk to their peers about having fun in the buff.

Think of it as the Baby Boomer naturalist's equivalent of Ladies Night at the local watering hole.

I wish them luck, 'cause I have every reason to think they're going to need it. If I were a twenty-something still, it would take more than a deep discount to get me to spend my leisure time amidst entirely dishabille fifty-somethings no matter how upscale the accomodations. In fact, you'd jolly well have had to pay me to wander in their midst, and that's even taking into consideration that I was no prime specimen in my 20's either.

To each his own. My own, however, is that the overwhelming majority of us look better at any age with our clothes on, and the advance of years, if anything, only increases this tendency. It has nothing to do with modesty, mind you. I'm not saying the human body in all its varieties is ever dirty; I'm saying it's usually ugly. Moreover, I base this conclusion on no small amount of empirical data. I've been to beaches so close to nude it's hardly worth mentioning the difference. Nor am I shy about my own body in particular, such as it is. I merely recognize the simple fact that it looks better altogether clothed than in its altogether. So, almost certainly, does yours, and if it doesn't yet, it soon will.

Then there's this whole "back to nature" aspect of nudism; hence, the "naturalist" synonym. Well, sorry, but nature isn't your friend and you shouldn't encourage it any more than necessary. The whole point of civilization, in fact, is to avoid or defeat the many distasteful, unpleasant or downright dangerous aspects of nature.

Sooner or later, nature wins. I prefer later to sooner, however. What's more, I plan on siding with civilization until the bitter end.

Transparency vs. Anonymity on the Internet

In today's Washington Post, former Post reporter and editor Tom Grubisich makes a bad case for greater "transparency" on the internet. It is a bad case because, among other things, Grubisich begins his argument with a false premise, as follows:

These days we want "transparency" in all institutions, even private ones. There's one massive exception -- the Internet. It is, we are told, a giant town hall.

The first sentence, taken literally, is obviously false. I don't want transparency in private institutions, do you? Of course you don't. Your family is a private institution, after all. How much transparency, whatever that means, am I entitled to about your private affairs, institutional or not. Precious little, and rightly so. Mr. Grubisich may want transparency in private institutions, though I seriously doubt it. Perhaps he's just accustomed to writing in the editorial plural. Regardless, the premise is false.

Furthermore, we're told all sorts of things about the internet. Sure, "town hall" is one such metaphor, but metaphors are not to be taken literally. You can't get arrested for speeding on the Information Superhighway, nor do you even need to buckle-up. The internet is a communications medium, similar in some ways to other media, different in others. That it can be used as a sort of public forum doesn't mean that it is sufficiently like a real town meeting or public gathering of any sort to make it reasonable to apply the same rules.

Anyway, Mr. Grubisich's principal complaint is the anonymity of many "hate-mongering" commenters on such websites as, well, as wasingtonpost.com. Grubisich again:

You would think Web sites would want to keep the hate-mongers from taking over, but many sites are unwitting enablers. At washingtonpost.com, editors and producers say they struggle to balance transparency against privacy. Until recently, many of the site's posters identified themselves with anonymous Internet handles -- which were the site's default ID. Now, people must enter a "user ID" that appears with their comments.

Hal Straus, washingtonpost.com's interactivity and communities editor, says the changes "move us in the direction of transparency." But the distinction is not quite a difference, because washingtonpost.com user IDs can be real names or fictional Internet handles. While the site prohibits comments that are libelous, abusive, obscene or otherwise inappropriate, Mr. anticrat424 could still find a well-amplified podium at washingtonpost.com.

The news and opinion site Huffingtonpost.com requires posters to register with their real names but maddeningly assures them that it will "never" use those names.

Well, now. Amused though I am to see the Washington and Huffington Posts thusly compared, a bit of perspective about those nasty anonymous commenters seems in order here.

In the first place, not that many people spend that much time reading that many comments on these or any other websites. Oh, sure, if a reader finds a particular article interesting he might well peruse the reader comments, agreeing with some, disagreeing with others, finding some amusing or insightful and others insulting or disgusting. There are a few popular websites where the readers' comments are at least as interesting and fun to read as the primary article (Reason's Hit & Run strikes me as one example, probably because I frequently comment there), but they are the exception to the rule, at least when it comes to MSM websites like the Post.

Knowing the writer's name would be of little additional value to the average reader at such websites and of no value to the website's owner and operator who can, in any case, delete offensive comments and ban commenters fairly easily. Yes, some internet trolls can get around such bans up to a point, but very few are willing or able to go to the trouble.

In the second place, while there are all sorts of reasons someone may wish to be anonymous on the internet (though some are better, in my opinion, than others), anonymity automatically carries with it a certain penalty in terms of credibility, the only exception being where anonymous commenters build up a reputation, for better or worse, at a particular website over time. In a sense, therefore, market forces are already at play in assigning value to reader comments.

Moreover, Mr. Grubisich's comparison to an actual public meeting is entirely inapt. Internet trolls or, for that matter, "hate-mongers," can't "take over" a website. They can't shout over other commenters and drown them out. Yes, they can collectively flood a site with spam; but that, in fact, rarely happens. In reality, Mr. Grubisich would apparently really rather that the anonymous "haters" have no voice at all on the internet or at least that they be marginalized beyond the extent to which both their anonymity and the substance of their comments already marginalizes them. After all, he already acknowledges that sites can prohibit comments that are "libelous, abusive, obscene or otherwise inappropriate," so what we are pretty much left with is that he would prefer those with whom he disagrees either identify themselves (why?) or, more likely, simply not comment at all.

Websites are free, and should remain free, to treat commenters as they see fit. As I have written previously, the notion that there is something special about an MSM website beyond the fact that it provides straight news reportage is a dubious proposition, though apparently a common one among professional journalists.

On a personal note, odd as it might seem, I am inclined to agree with Grubisich in that I, too, would prefer that commenters used their real names. Again, I understand why many believe they cannot or should not do so; but then I am, after all, merely stating a preference. In fact, my reasons are similar. Using one's real name tends to have a moderating effect on what one posts on the internet. At least it does for me, which is one of the primary reasons I use my real name here and elsewhere.

Now, I've written enough over the past five years or so on the internet that there are already any number of really dumb comments of mine encased in virtual amber for all times. Some of them I now recognize as dumb. Others I may eventually and probably already would have recognized as dumb were it not for the fact that I remain a bear of very little brain. Patience, dear reader, patience!

But the internet is a "big enough place" that there's room for dumb guys like me and for everyone else, too. Of course, neither the Washington Post nor any other website is obligated to give me or you or anyone a forum. But as is unfortunately more often said than believed in some journalistic quarters, the remedy for bad speech is more speech. Even including anonymous speech and even if the likes of Mr. Grubisich disapproves.

Housekeeping

I've been on the road -- well, in the air, actually -- this weekend, back now in the Old Dominion (aka Virginia) to do a bit of real housekeeping for the next month or so. So, if anyone's wondering why I haven't posted anything in the last couple of days or why, as I suspect will be the case, my blogging slows down for a while, that's the reason.

What Would Jesus Carry?

Okay, so there I was, reading about how a "Vote for Romney is [a] vote for Satan" ("D.A., stop pestering Satan!"), when I chanced upon a sidebar book ad which raised the following questions:

What would you do if armed terrorists broke into your church and starting attacking your friends with automatic weapons in the middle of a worship service?

Would you be prepared to defend yourself and other innocents?

Ignoring whether I could ever be considered an innocent, such a thing did apparently happen to the author, Charl van Wyk, who was present at the St. James Church Massacre in South Africa in 1993.

I gotta say, I'm really conflicted about this. On the one hand, I certainly don't want to make light of even one such atrocity. Attacking people peacefully congregating in Houses of Worship under any circumstance for any reason is a moral abomination. And I'm a big Second Amendment guy, too, even though it is official Ridgely Family policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence of firearms either at Stately Ridgely Manor or on our persons at any given time.

On the other hand, I'm sorry, but when I read the following from the ad my immediate response was to yell "WTF?" You see, the author ...

... was not defenseless that day. "Instinctively, I knelt down behind the bench in front of me and pulled out my .38 special snub-nosed revolver, which I always carried with me. I would have felt undressed without it."

The book in question, Shooting Back, purports to give "a biblical, Christian case for individuals arming themselves with guns," including, I assume, while attending church.

Now, I live in Texas. Jesus is very big in Texas. (I know, I know. Everything is big in Texas, but Jesus is even bigger.) And so are firearms. I told an Episcopal priest of my close acquaintance about the book and suggested that a sign outside the church reading "Armed Communicants Welcome" would be a sure-fire hit around here. She was not amused. (Well, actually, she was. And, no, I'm not trying to make fun of Jesus or firearms or Texas.)

But I wasn't aware that the question whether Christians should own guns or, if need be, defend themselves with firearms was ever in any serious doubt. Sure, there has always been a pacifist element in Christianity, and I believe it is worthy of proper respect; but it has never been the prevailing position within the church, let alone official doctrine of any major Christian denomination, at least not to the best of my knowledge.

Even so, does it really need to be said that the United States in 2007 is not South Africa in 1993, that armed terrorists are not, in fact, planning a raid on First Christian Gospel Fellowship Holiness Church of the Covenant Word next Sunday and that it's probably safe to leave the handguns at home?

Because if it isn't, my next question has to be: Does a snub-nosed .38 special really have enough accuracy or stopping power?

Cats and Dogs (Updated: Oh, if only a reporter had been there!)

Oh goody, a Blogwar! Well, a skirmish, anyway. Voicing his views with perhaps unintentional irony by using, of all outlets, a blog, "grizzled reporter" and "no ivy tower thumb-sucker," Jonathan Alter takes Radar's Jebediah Reed to task for his coverage of a conversation including Alter, Tom Edsall and former Sen. Mike Gravel. Salon's Glenn Greenwald then weighs in, skewering the underlying pomposity and arrogance of Alter's journalistic gripes with the blogosphere.

Greenwald gets the better, so far at least, insofar as the the argument is over the parasitic faults of the blogosphere versus the parasitic faults of news reporters. Damning a cat for being an unsatisfactory sort of dog is foolish, especially for someone like Alter who has gone from dogged reporter to feline columnist (and consultant to that hard-hitting news organization, MTV, no less!) over the years.

For that matter, whether Reed's reporting of the conversation was bad (as opposed to Reed merely being "a bad reporter") seems less a matter to Alter of getting the facts wrong than of not interpreting or understanding what was said in the way that Alter, himself, would have done. Yeah, well, welcome to the club, Jon. Wanna take a poll of the people you've reported on over the years who might make the same sort of complaint? Hey, maybe Reed just isn't grizzled enough yet.

One point, though, I'll give to Alter. If the now infamous lunch in question was really "off the record," Reed had no right to report it as he did. Maybe that's a fact in dispute, too. I couldn't say. But fair's fair. Even a mildly grizzled ivy tower thumb-sucker like me knows that.

UPDATE: But wait, there's more! Now Reed fires back, claiming Alter not only knew the lunch wasn't off the record, save for a moment, but that Reed had his tape recorder running and note-pad out the entire time! Well, it could still technically have been "off the record" as background only, but it sure sounds now like there's some pretty good evidence not only that it wasn't but that Alter clearly knew it wasn't. Hmmmmmm. I think Mr. Reed is calling you a liar, Mr. Alter. Care to respond?

Reed's priceless P.S. -- "Thanks for the cup of black bean soup! (Actually, please thank General Electric.)" Meow!

Why I'm Not Blogging About Ron Paul (Yet)

I'm probably missing the web opportunity of a lifetime by not blogging more about Ron Paul, as Technorati still amazingly lists him at the top of its Top Ten "Where's The Fire?" list.

The fact is, though, I have nothing of interest to say about Paul. He's a decent guy, I like his politics, and he has a Texas snowball's chance in August of making it very far in the Republican presidential nomination race.

Rumor has it all this blogosphere traffic about Paul is the result of some small coterie of diehard libertarian supporters spamming web polls and such. I suppose the possibility can't be ruled out, but if there was ever a political category for which "herding cats" was the apt metaphor, it's libertarians. Just try to get a concerted effort out of three or more libertarians at a time, I dare you!

Maybe Paul is just the internet flavor of the month. If so, it can't be for his less than sterling performance during the first Republican candidates' "debate." He gets national air time and wastes it confusing people about the "inflation tax" or original intent regarding presidential citizenship requirements? Oh puleeze!

Still, I'll happily jump on the Ron Paul bandwagon just as soon as I have reason to believe its current momentum isn't from already having plummeted over the edge.

"That's none of your business."

I admit it isn't quite up there with, say, Grover Norquist's Taxpayer Protection Pledge, but if I was of an activist bent, I'd like to start a national movement to get all candidates for elective office to sign a Pledge promising to respond to all questions regarding their private lives with a simple and unqualified "That's none of your business." Break the Pledge, lose the election.

I'm willing to make an exception on health issues. If a candidate has been diagnosed with some imminently life threatening or debilitating disease, voters need to know about it. Not so much because the natural death or disability of a politician in office is such a threat to the republic but because it's disruptive and annoying, especially when your regularly scheduled programming is preempted for tedious and soporific coverage of the state funeral.

Also, anything already on the official record is fair game. If a candidate turns out to have had half a dozen arrests for driving while impersonating a Kennedy, have at him. Otherwise, "That's none of your business." Mere rumors are circulating about the candidate's three 8-ball a day crack habit, membership in a cult that worships a graven image of Carmen Miranda or has an unusual fondness for barnyard animals? I'm sorry, "That's none of your business."

Now the Drudge Report is leaking the "juicy tidbits" from a Mike Wallace interview with Mitt Romney scheduled for airing on Sunday. Drudge writes:

Romney's wife, Ann, who converted to the Mormon Church before they were married, is also interviewed. When asked whether they broke the strict church rule against premarital sex, Romney says, "No, I'm sorry, we do not get into those things," but still managed to blurt out "The answer is no," before ending that line of questioning.

Assuming the Drudge report is accurate, this puts Wallace in roughly the same category as whoever once asked Bill Clinton whether he wore briefs or boxers. The American people do not need to know whether Clinton wears briefs, boxers or frilly silk panties with lace trim. We do not need to know whether Mitt and Ann slept together before they were married. We do not even need to know if they sleep together now.

We didn't need to know whether Clinton smoked pot at Oxford or whether he inhaled, and we especially didn't need to know about his Oval Office ménage à trois with Monica Lewinsky and a Cuban cigar. Clinton spent a lifetime successfully weaseling out of scandal after scandal, and so naturally he tried to weasel out of that one, too. But the nation would have been far better served if he'd simply stuck to his guns and refused to answer questions about such things even under oath. Even if he was the one wearing the blue dress and someone had pictures. Sure, he might have faced a contempt charge as a result. Big deal.

Let me preemptively respond to the argument that such questions inform the public about the real character or expose the hypocrisy of the candidates. No, they don't. All politicians are liars and hypocrites because (1) they're politicians and (2) they're human beings. (Well, for the most part.) None of these people are running for sainthood and Messiah isn't an elective office. I understand people love gossip about the prurient details of the rich and famous, but that's what we have show business celebrities for. And isn't it more fun to learn the ugly secrets of beautiful people than the largely hum-drum peccadilloes of people so boring they willingly chose politics as a career?

We don't need to know anything about the purely private failures, foibles or follies, sins of commission or omission, minor vices or squalid little secrets of our politicians or their spouses or family members. Not only do we not need to know these things, I insist on believing, eternal optimist that I am, that the majority of us really don't want to know them, either. Hence, the "It's none of your business" Pledge. Candidates must promise to repeat this one and only one acceptable answer to all such "gotcha" questions from the press and public, preferably with the same facial expression appropriate to witnessing the questioner pick his nose in public.

The only permissible variation on this theme is that if the questioner is within smacking range and the candidate happens to have a large trout on hand, smacking the questioner over the head with the trout is encouraged. Candidates should, in fact, keep a large trout on hand at all times for this very purpose. Whatever ratings boost Mike Wallace might have hoped to garner from asking about the Romney's sex lives in the first place, it pales by comparison to the millions upon millions of Americans who would tune in specifically to see him get whacked with a trout.

I know I'd watch.

Life Imitates Zork?

You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States....

What do you want to do now?
> INVADE IRAQ


"Who is the boss? Me! I am the boss of you!"
-- White House legal memorandum (full text) regarding scope of Executive war powers.

Of Course It Isn't A Guarantee, It's From the Government!

My guess is that Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman is having a very busy afternoon. Contrary to what appears to have been a very clear policy decision made by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on April 11th, "particularly guaranteeing that [troops] will be at home for a full 12 months" between deployments in Iraq, the Stars & Stripes reports Whitman as saying that this “is [not a guarantee but merely] a goal, to have units and individuals to have an appropriate amount of time for recovery and for stability purposes at home station and to be able to be with their families.” Apparently, Gates was caught short when told of a company being redeployed to Iraq some three months short of the 12 month "dwell time." Defense Secretaries just hate it when that sort of thing happens.

Well, maybe Whitman is, in fact, speaking for Gates. Nobody who knows the slightest thing about the military (and I just barely qualify by that criterion) believes that its senior leadership would honor its word in such matters if doing so seriously and genuinely jeopardized the mission. Soldiers understand that. But if Whitman is speaking for Gates, this is precisely the sort of thing that will undermine the new Secretary of Defense's efforts to rebuild trust and morale after the long overdue ouster of Donald Rumsfeld.

Oh, and all that happy horsesh*t about individual soldiers transferring from unit to unit making a guaranteed 12 month stationing outside Iraq for every soldier impossible? That's just so much Penta-babble. Of course, soldiers are rotating from unit to unit all the time and the “United States military is not a static organization." But that's irrelevant and Whitman knew it was irrelevant when he said it. And as the story is making the rounds of the blogosphere, so does everyone else.

Nothing, In Particular

While dallying earlier today over at Urkobold® (your one-stop shop for all things internet trollish), I did a bit of research (read: "typed in a Google search") and came upon an unauthorized posting of an article by the late philosopher Peter L. Heath. My high respect for intellectual property notwithstanding to the contrary, having some personal knowledge of Professor Heath's sense of humor, I cannot help but think that nothing would please him more. Herewith, then, a link to what may very well be the all-time definitive short article on the subject of "nothing."

Put a bit differently, you will find a better article on nothing in particular nowhere, but what are the chances of ever finding yourself there? Oh, sure, many philosophers have written extensively about nothing in particular or at least nothing that was especially interesting and the number of philosophical treatises about nothing worth reading are legion. Still, although nobody has written more cogently about nothing than Professor Heath, nobody's work wasn't as readily available. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as no one I can remember at the moment once said.

Sadly, Professor Heath's other great work of philosophical whimsy, The Philosopher's Alice, a (serious) philosophical look at Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, appears to be out of print. Should you run across a used copy or find it in your local library, I strongly recommend it to you.

You'll Never Get Rich...

Say what you will about military service, the pay ain’t all that great. Never has been, never will be. Even general officers’ pay and benefits, while hardly subsistence level, pale by comparison to private sector executive compensation. Obviously, financial compensation issues are hardly at the top of the list of hardships and sacrifices made by members of our Armed Forces these days, but they are significant nonetheless.

Benefits do compensate somewhat for lower wages. Obviously, there is the matter of health care. Military personnel also qualify for education benefits and, of course, have access to commissaries and exchanges to do much of their shopping. These stores are extremely important for military personnel stationed overseas, but whether they are really all that much of a bargain and therefore benefit to service members back in the States in these days of big box discount stores is increasingly questionable.

Another military benefit is specialized recreational facilities. Typically, but not always, these facilities, e.g., libraries, bowling alleys, movie theaters, golf courses, etc., are located on military installations. Again, they are of great value to service members overseas. The question occurs, however, whether Armed Forces Recreation Centers, several of which are located overseas, should also be operated inside the United States. Currently, such centers are maintained in Hawaii and in Orlando, Florida and now one is being added in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I learned of the Virginia Beach facility at James Joyner’s Outside The Beltway, where a question of whether these facilities are tax subsidized or not arose. They are. While the day-to-day operations of the facilities may be self-sustaining from user fees and other non-appropriated fund revenues, the facilities themselves are paid for by appropriated funds (tax dollars) and, I know from personal experience, there are a variety of methods by which appropriated funds can also be channeled quite legally into such facilities. An installation commander might decide, for example, to locate some official function there, all costs for which would come from the commander’s (appropriated fund) budget. There’s nothing wrong with this, but the claim that AFRC’s are “self-supporting” is misleading, at best.

Another possible objection raised by Mr. Joyner is that these facilities charge lower ranking military personnel less than higher ranking, higher paid personnel. “The communistic approach of subsidizing lower paid employees at the expense of those higher in rank/grade is puzzling but fairly common for MWR activities. Day care centers and similar activities on bases typically operate that way, too.”

Well, it is indeed fairly common but not really all that puzzling. As one reader at Mr. Joyner’s site noted, the operation of these facilities permit poorly paid enlisted personnel the opportunity to take a vacation in Hawaii or Disney World or, now, the Virginia coastline. (Loyal Virginian though I am, this last isn’t quite on a par with the American Beach on the Italian Riviera at Camp Darby.) The Department of Defense publicly downplays the reality that the military services operate as a planned, command economy; but they obviously do, and that includes subsidizing low revenue activities with high revenue activities and sliding user fee scales for some recreational facilities. Yes, colonels pay more to use these things than sergeants, but they have a much easier time getting reservations there, too.

Even we minimum-state libertarians, or at least the majority of us, nonetheless recognize the need for national defense, a recognition quite apart from how large that military structure should be or whether we think the Armed Services are being properly used. In the grand scheme of government waste, fraud and abuse, I can’t imagine seriously begrudging the average soldier, sailor or airman a dollop of tax subsidy to support a vacation facility the service member can more easily and readily afford and enjoy. Nor do the socialistic mechanisms of these things bother me, especially after having had lunch a few times over the years in a general officer’s (tax subsidized) mess. Put differently, when we get anywhere close to that minimum state, then I’ll gladly take another look at such things.

Finally, on a personal note, Mr. Joyner writes, “I can understand having a place where soldiers serving overseas can get away and be among English speakers, although, frankly, doing that takes away most of the personal benefit of serving abroad.” I couldn’t agree more. Sadly, however, a significant number of military personnel and their families stationed, not in the Middle East but in Europe, mind you, do not consider such a posting the exciting opportunity Mr. Joyner or I might. In fact, many consider living, e.g., in Italy to be a hardship.

I know this first hand, having worked for the U.S. Army for several years in Vicenza, Italy, twenty minutes away from Venice. Of course, dealing with “the local economy” outside the military reservation is daunting for anyone who, like me, struggles with foreign languages. But it goes deeper than that. There, in a country with some of the best cuisine in the world, one enterprising American did very well for himself by opening right across the front gates of the camp, of all things, a Domino’s Pizza franchise.

Edward Hopper

“Calm, silent, stoic, luminous, classic.” -- John Updike

I probably won't be able to get to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts to see the Edward Hopper retrospective (May 6th to August 19th) including nearly a 100 of the artist's paintings, watercolors and prints, but maybe I can make it when the exhibition moves to the National Gallery of Art in September or next year when it travels to the Art Institute of Chicago. Without question, Hopper is my favorite American painter; his work evokes an immediate emotional reaction in me unlike just about any other artist I know except maybe Cezanne.



I suppose I'll have to settle for now on the slide show at the MFA site, the slightly different selection by Christopher Benfey noting the MFA exhibit over at Slate, and of course the images of Hopper's work variously located throughout the internet. I'm not sure I agree with Benfey's comparison of Hopper with the Surrealists, but then I'm one of those "don't know much about art but I know what I like" guys. Oh well. Hopper fans, especially those in the Boston, D.C. or Chicago area, enjoy.

"Con" is short for conservative and "neo" is short for, um, conservative?

Camille Paglia, the liberal feminist liberal feminists love to hate, resumed her former Salon column not too long ago. Paglia’s style and wit reminds me of a fireworks display – brilliant, colorful sparks flying every which way all at once. It suits her well and I’m happy her unique voice is back.

Cohabiting Salon’s virtual digs these days is Glenn Greenwald, whom my friend and former co-blogger Mona much admires but whose pre-Salon blogging I admit to not having much read. His column yesterday, however, reminds me of the indefatigable Paglia, with salvos flying hither and yon over his contention that neoconservatives hold themselves or their compatriots personally above the law much as they have been accused of contending that the state in its war against terrorism must not be constrained by the law of the land. (The latter criticism, I hasten to add, is all too valid.)

Greenwald writes:

[N]eoconservatives automatically and reflexively defend any neoconservative accused of wrongdoing, before any facts are even known. They insist that they have done no wrong, that the real guilty parties are the accusers, and that even where they have done wrong, they should not be punished.

It’s a very, very busy piece of writing and it would take a very long time to give each accusation due deference. I don’t plan to do that here, nor do I mean to contend that there is nothing at all to Greenwald’s concern. Still, where he sees a seemingly vast pattern if not a downright conspiracy among those he calls neoconservatives of both the official and pundit variety and the latter's varied reactions to charges leveled against some of the former, I’m afraid I see little more than politics as usual and nothing uniquely neoconservative or even generally conservative about it at all.

Here’s the quick version of Greenwald’s thesis: Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Conrad Black, Paul Wolfowitz, and several AIPAC officials (with Eliot Abrams thrown in for good measure) have variously been accused, tried or convicted of various wrongdoings, some criminal, some ‘merely’ ethical, at least so far. They, in turn, have been defended “with virtual unanimity” by the “neoconservative” likes of pundits working for FOX News, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic . (Why doesn’t the Weekly Standard make the list? Bill Kristol, a writer who's so Neo that Morpheus probably thinks he's The One, gets mentioned but not his most quintessentially neoconservative platform. What gives?)

First, let’s note that there is a very wide spectrum of wrongdoing involved here. From charges of espionage (the AIPAC case) to the Libby conviction for his statements made in the investigation of the idiotic Plame debacle to the comparatively trivial case of Wolfowitz’s personal / professional conflicts of interest at the World Bank. So, at minimum, this is a very apples and oranges sort of list of wrongful behavior. Okay, apples and oranges are still both fruits; but I'd say selling secrets to foreign governments counts as more egregious conduct than juicing your girlfriend’s salary, wouldn’t you?

For that matter, yeah, I think Libby was a small potatoes fall guy in the Plame affair and should get a pardon, too. Does that make me a neoconservative? I hope the hell not. (Also, just for the record, I don’t really give a rodent’s hindquarters how Wolfowitz’s main squeeze, um, earned her raise at the World Bank -- which I, too, would like to see go bye-bye -- or how much U.N. coffers swag Kofi Annan managed to throw his son’s way, either.)

Greenwald writes, by the way, that Libby was “convicted by an obviously conscientious and unanimous jury.” Yeah, well, you need unanimity for any conviction last time I checked, and it isn’t as though the jury was entirely comfortable in doing its “conscientious” duty under the circumstances, either. I think for good reason. Apparently he disagrees.

But here’s really my basic gripe. Greenwald is simply painting with too broad a brush, or at least it seems so to me, when he rattles off all these various and admittedly conservative defenders of these various current and former administration officials and labels all such writers as neoconservatives. Thusly used, does “neo” do any work at all? Is Jonah Goldberg really a neoconservative? I think the fact would come as news to him (though that isn't to say he might not agree with some neoconservatives about some things some of the time.) Does it matter at all that what he actually wrote about Black was “to the extent I understand the charges, I am all in favor of defending Conrad Black” (my emphasis) and that even that sounds to me like a throw-away line in the context of criticism of a Tina Brown column? Is the entire editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal really comprised now exclusively not only of conservatives but of neoconservatives? Golly! No wonder Rupert Murdoch wants to pay a premium for it.

Look, conservatives, “neo” or otherwise, rising to the defense, sometimes inappropriately, of their fellow conservatives charged with wrongdoing is nothing new in politics, nor is such behavior unique to the right side of the political spectrum. It’s business as usual. Many of the writers Greenwald accuses of unprincipled defense of the likes of Wolfowitz or Libby do indeed qualify under the “neo” rubric, and I probably even agree with him about some of his examples.

But whether everything they or other "mere" conservatives write in such defense stems from the motives Greenwald ascribes to them seems to me a very different sort of thing. It is, after all, possible to do the right thing for the right reason, e.g., write against the onslaught of also dubious and biased liberal media criticism of such persons, even if one is a neoconservative, isn’t it? Or has "neoconservative" simply become a secular catch-all synonym for Satan and his evil minions in some quarters?

I gotta say, this sort of scatter-shot patterning is a lot more fun when Paglia is doing it.

POSTSCRIPT: Greenwald's piece in Salon today, urging Democrats to amend the Military Commissions Act of 2006 and restore habeas corpus is right on the money. I'd only add it would be nice to see more Republicans join in that effort, too. As always, I call 'em as I see 'em.

Q: Are We Not Men?

First there was the Lincoln-Douglas debates, then Kennedy-Nixon, and now...

The Hitchens-Sharpton debate!

The question under debate (“Is God great?”) and the speakers — two men who are often depicted in harsh caricatures by their critics — might have caused some to expect something like a circus. Perhaps surprisingly, it turned out to be the public intellectual event of the evening, a bit like Bertrand Russell vs. C. S. Lewis.

Well, maybe if Russell had a reputation for heavy drinking and blistering invective and Lewis was inclined to make slanderous, race-bating charges. (Are those harsh caricatures?) Anyway, these two theological powerhouses squared off not to discuss politics but to get this pesky God business straightened out, so maybe the better historical reference would be Darrow vs. Bryan in that staged celebrated debate better known as the Scopes "Monkey" Trial.

Speaking of monkeys, from the report of the debate neither Hitchens nor Sharpton managed to make nearly as much of a jackanape of himself as one might have expected. At one point, however, Sharpton did show something less than proper liberal respect for ecumenical diversity when he said, “As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyway, so don’t worry, that’s a temporary situation.”

Of course, that might have had more to do with Mitt Romney being a Republican than a Mormon. Still, it looks like Mitt can forget any hopes of getting the National Action Network's endorsement. I guess that also means Romney won't be proxy baptizing the Reverend Al after he goes to his non-Mormon glory. As for Hitch, he wouldn't go anyway, as I'm pretty sure the Latter Day Saints' notion of heaven is an alcohol-free zone.

"But I didn't say Minnie was crazy..." (Re-Updated)

Sometimes the set-up is just too good to be true. Here's FOX News reporting that Hamas is using a rip-off of the world's most famous cartoon character as a propaganda tool on a weekly children's program.

Excerpts from episodes that aired last month show the squeaky voiced mouse egging on children with nationalistic fervor.

"We, tomorrow’s pioneers, will restore to this nation its glory, and we will liberate Al-Aqsa, with Allah’s will, and we will liberate Iraq, with Allah’s will, and we will liberate the Muslim countries, invaded by murderers,” Farfur says in one episode that aired in April.

The message seems to be working. Poems and songs submitted by young viewers contain violent imagery. "Rafah sings ‘Oh, oh,’" one caller says as Farfur mimes carrying a rifle. "Its answer is an AK-47."

So what's a blogger to do? Go with the obvious "This proves what a Mickey Mouse operation Hamas really is!" or the slightly more analytical "If these people think Israel or the U.S. are evil, oppressive powers, just wait until Disney gets through with them!"

I blog, you decide.

UPDATE: The AP (via Der Spiegel) reports, "On Wednesday, after this story went live, the Palestinian Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti announced that the Hamas-affiliated television station al-Aqsa TV had complied with a government request to pull the show 'Tomorrow's Pioneers' for 'review.' He said the use of a cartoon character to urge Palestinian children to fight Israel and work toward world Islamic domination was a 'mistaken approach.'"

See? I told you those Disney lawyers are enough to scare even the Palestinians! Maybe Hamas should look up those out-of-work puppets from Team America as possible replacements. They struck me as mercenaries under the veneer, anyway.

(Hat tip to memeorandum.)

UPDATE REDUX: And now the Hamas television station is refusing to cancel the show in which the "Mickey Mouse look-alike named Farfur and a little girl [not only] urge resistance against Israel and the United States [but also stress] the importance of daily prayers and drinking milk."

My money's still on Disney parachuting in combat hardened airborne lawyers to kick a little Farfur butt; but who knows, maybe a flanking action by Big Dairy is in the works, too.

A Case of Wrongful Life? (Notes on Facts and Values)

Old joke: A doctor tells his patient, "I'm sorry but you only have six months to live." The patient takes the news stoically and asks the doctor how much he owes him. "Five thousand dollars," the doctor says. "But I'll never be able to come up with that much money in six months, Doc!" "Okay, then," says the doctor, "you've got a year."

I said it was an old joke, not a good one. Meanwhile, while I look for better material, John Brandrick, 62, was told two years ago that he had terminal pancreatic cancer and only months to live. Brandrick quit his job, sold his possessions and spent what he thought was his brief, remaining life taking vacations, eating in swank restaurants and such. A year later, his doctors revised their diagnosis. Brandrick was suffering from non-fatal pancreatitis.

Oops!

The AP reports:

"My life has been turned upside down by this," Brandrick said. "I was told I had limited time to live. I got rid of everything — my car, my clothes, everything."

Brandrick said he did not want to take the hospital to court, "but if they have made the wrong decision they should pay me something back."

The hospital said there was "no clear evidence of negligence" on its part.

"Whilst we do sympathize with Mr. Brandrick's position, clinical review of his case has not revealed that any different diagnosis would have been made at the time based on the same evidence," the hospital said in a statement.

Personally, I think the mere fact that the hospital used "whilst" in its denial is pretty clear evidence of negligence. No, not really. It's an interesting case, though. Here's this poor guy in his sixties, naked and carless, expecting to shuffle off this mortal coil any moment now, probably stuffing himself with fatty foods, gadding about in cabs instead of taking the Underground and tipping big all the while when suddenly his imminent demise is snatched from his grasp no doubt just as the money was running short.

Does he have any legal recourse against the hospital? I haven't a clue. Aside from not knowing how the British courts deal with the various potential tort or contract remedies that any first year law student could think of scribbling down on an exam together with all the likely defenses to those causes of action, the more interesting question is whether he should have some sort of legal remedy here.

I don't know whether there is settled case law on this particular situation, but something like it must have happened somewhere before and it would be mildly interesting to know how a court or jury trial resolved similar such situations. Aside from being interesting at that level, however, it is also interesting as a good example (regardless of what, if any, law there is on point) of how knowing all the facts of a situation do not necessarily resolve a dispute arising from that situation.

Moreover, it isn't just a straightforward case of the difference between facts and value judgments, either. It is a case of that, to be sure, but of more as well. There are also applicable legal rules or at least legal rules that we want to say are not "mere" value judgments and that should apply even though we may not know how to apply them. Learning the formal elements of negligence, for example, is easy: the defendant must have owed a duty to the plaintiff, must have breached that duty and that breach of duty must have proximately cause the plaintiff harm. Of course, it can get much more complicated than that, "proximate" is a special bit of legal jargon and so forth, but that's the nutshell version.

Even so, learning the mere rules tells you next to nothing about how to apply them in a particular situation, how they should be applied in this situation. And if we face a new and somehow different set of facts from the facts to which the rules have previously been applied, then we must decide which facts are relevantly similar and which are relevantly different from those prior cases and how much weight to give to those similarities and differences. Herewith, the late philosopher John Wisdom approaching the matter a bit differently:

In courts of law it sometimes happens that opposing counsel are agreed as to the facts and are not trying to settle a question of further fact, are not trying to settle whether the man who admittedly had quarreled with the deceased did or did not murder him, but are concerned with whether Mr. A who admittedly handed his long-trusted clerk signed blank cheques did or did not exercise reasonable care, whether a ledger is or is not a document, whether a certain body was or was not a public authority.

In such cases we notice that the process of argument is not a chain of demonstrative reasoning. It is a presenting and representing of those features of the case which severally co-operate in favour of the conclusion, in favour of saying what the reasoner wishes said, in favour of calling the situation by the name by which he wishes to call it. The reasons are like the legs of a chair, not the links of a chain. Consequently although the discussion is a priori and the steps are not a matter of experience, the procedure resembles scientific argument in that the reasoning is not vertically extensive but horizontally extensive – it is a matter of the cumulative effect of several independent premises, not of the repeated transformation of one or two. And because the premises are severally inconclusive the process of deciding the issue becomes a matter of weighing the cumulative effect of one group of severally inconclusive items against the cumulative effect of another group of severally inconclusive items, and thus lends itself to description in terms of conflicting ‘probabilities’. This encourages the feeling that the issue is one of fact – that it is a matter of guessing from the premises at a further fact, at what is to come. But this is a muddle. The dispute does not cease to be a priori because it is a matter of the cumulative effect of severally inconclusive premises. The logic of the dispute is not that of a chain of deductive reasoning as in a mathematical calculation. But nor is it a matter of collecting from several inconclusive items of information an expectation as to something further, as when a doctor from a patient’s symptoms guesses at what is wrong, or a detective from many clues guesses the criminal. It has its own sort of logic and its own sort of end – the solution of the question at issue is a decision, a ruling by the judge. But it is not an arbitrary decision though the rational connections are neither quite like those in vertical deductions nor like those in inductions in which from many signs we guess at what is to come; and though the decision manifests itself in the application of a name it is no more merely the application of a name than is the pinning on of a medal merely the pinning on of a bit of metal. Whether a lion with stripes is a tiger or a lion is, if you like, merely a matter of the application of a name. Whether Mr. So-and-So of whose conduct we have so complete a record did or did not exercise reasonable care is not merely a matter of the application of a name or, if we choose to say it is, then we must remember that with this name a game is lost and won and a game with very heavy stakes.

(John Wisdom, "Gods," reprinted in Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis, 1969.)

We would like to say, or at least some of us sometimes think we would, that facts and values and the rules we use to apply the latter to the former have some sort of determinate and separate logic to them -- "No ought from an is!" or "Ought implies can!" we might proclaim. If we are very sophisticated indeed, perhaps we pull out some bit of philosophical legerdemain like supervenience to bridge our tidy looking dichotomy between facts and values. At the end of the day, however, whether we come equipped with theory or not, we must decide whether the hospital was negligent or breached some contractual duty and whether Mr. Brandrick's spending-spree was proximately caused by a breach of some such duty or implied promise and thus constituted harm to him now that he will likely live much longer and so forth. That, in turn, requires the application of rules which are neither facts nor values or, if you like, are both.

How should we decide?

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... or something like that.

I like Newt Gingrich. Really. Yeah, the guy is an incorrigible fountain of often nutty ideas, but he has the courage of his convictions, whatever they might happen to be at any given moment, and unlike 99% of those who have ever been elected to any political office whatever, he’s interesting to listen to. So, for example, when Newt (we were once at the same party when he was still Speaker, so I call him “Newt” and he calls me “Who?”) says there is a political lesson to be learned from the recent French election, I’m interested. Here’s what he says:

In France, voting for change meant voting for the party in office, but not the personality in office. And voting to keep the old order meant voting for the opposition, not for the incumbent party.

This is, I take it, supposed to encourage Republicans to believe that if they offer a bold vision of change they have some hopes of hanging on to the White House in 2008. And Newt, let’s face it, knows something about bold visions of change. Still, Republican presidential hopefuls with any chance whatsoever of getting nominated (sorry, Dr. Paul and, for that matter, Newt) face certain obstacles in adopting this strategy.

First, short of renouncing entirely the big spending domestic programs the Republican’s have enacted in the last six years ("We're sorry we did it and we promise to stop stealing so much from you next time!"), there isn’t all that much on the domestic front Republicans can campaign on and still sound like Republicans. As always, voters don’t want program cuts; they only want tax and spending cuts.

Bush, to his credit, took a whack at Social Security and failed miserably. Voters may still balk at Hillary-Care, but if Republicans have any politically viable plan to reform health care, they’re keeping it better hidden than Nixon’s Secret Plan for Viet Nam. Basically, in other words, the Republican Party has bupkis to offer in terms of bold change on the domestic front.

Then there’s foreign policy. Let’s face it, the current mood in America is to withdraw troops from Iraq, let it go to hell in the handbag it seems destined to leap into at the first opportunity anyway and finally catch that bin Laden guy who used to be in the news all the time. Maybe that’s the right thing to do, maybe it’s the smart thing to do, and maybe not, but it’s pretty much where the average voter is at this point, anyway.

Well, guess what? There’s already a whole other political party gearing up to run on that position and it ain’t the Republicans. Oh sure, Hillary Clinton is staking out the moderate ground on that one for the moment, and that’s the smart thing for a female candidate to do for now; but if the polls keep heading south on Iraq, she’ll be on board with the withdrawal as soon as she can figure out a way to spin it so she doesn’t look weak by doing so. In short, if America wants out of Iraq – and it does – it doesn’t need a Republican to get the job done.

So sorry, Newt. I’m not saying the Democrats are sure to win the White House in 2008, although I think it’s still most likely at this point. Heck, it isn’t as though the Democrats have offered much yet besides not being Republicans and the elections are still a political light-year away. But if Americans do want significant political change in 2008, and except for a couple of key issues I’m not at all sure they do, they’re not likely even to look for it, let alone find it this time around in the Republican Party.

And Don't Even Get Me Started on The Price of Textbooks!

If I were a real economist, as opposed to someone who merely pretends to understand economics on the internet, I’d want to know why, since 1958, college tuition has continued to increase at an average rate of 8% and somewhere between 1.2 and 2.1 times the general inflation rate.

William F. Buckley, also no economist, offers the following analysis:

The marketplace rule is that competition reduces prices. Well, the marketplace rule is hogwash when it comes to higher education. The explanations for this are multifarious. 1) More Americans, especially in the two decades after the war, decided to attend college, making for great rises in demand. 2) Choice colleges are hotly competed for, giving them a relative immunity to market pressures. 3) Ever since the fifties, teachers have been demanding a living wage. 4) College perquisites increased; academic offerings for students with exotic interests are understandable, but some college administrators think themselves delinquent if they do not offer a course in jujitsu.

The free marketeer is tempted to address the problem with the kind of fatalistic glibness that makes us so offensive to so many fellow citizens. He will say: So what? There is the demand — a lot of students desiring a lot of things. And there is the supply — 4,140 colleges and universities nationwide. Obviously these colleges would not survive if the money needed to operate them were not provided. So what we have arrived at is an amalgam of contributors to the students’ needs.

The rest of Buckley’s column addresses that amalgam, including the increased role of the federal government in guaranteeing and subsidizing loans since the 1960s. Though he doesn’t especially stress this factor, my instincts are that it is crucial in understanding why the cost of college, together with the cost of health care, has consistently outpaced overall inflation.

Backtracking a bit for a moment, first, it is certainly true that more Americans and more Americans as a percentage of the overall population have sought a college education in the past fifty years. But that is true of the increase in demand for all sorts of goods in the last half century, too, some of which have actually decreased in real price over the same period.

As with health care, however, higher education is labor intensive, also using lots of high capital-investment labor, at that. Still, when you look at the PhD glut in some academic fields and the increased reliance on contract instructors for many undergraduate courses, the similarity between, say, hospitals and universities begins to shrink. So, also, while some academic disciplines require heavy capital investment, especially science, engineering and medicine, by contrast, law schools (which, by the way, almost invariably run at a profit) and most of the humanities and social sciences operate much as they did fifty years ago. If anything, computer assisted legal research has diminished the need for the one major capital expense of previous generations of law schools; namely, law libraries.

Choice colleges are indeed vastly more competitive than they were decades ago, but choice colleges represent a tiny fraction of the four thousand colleges from which students can themselves choose. Okay, so maybe Yale or Stanford or other brand-name universities can set their tuition pretty much wherever they please, but does that mean No-Name College can do the same?

George Washington University in Washington, D.C. charges nearly two thousand dollars more in annual tuition than Harvard ($35,630 vs. $33,709). GWU is a good school with a good reputation, don’t get me wrong; but it certainly doesn’t carry the same cachet as an Ivy League school, let alone better. What permits it and hundreds of much less prestigious schools to charge tuition comparable to that of the nation’s most elite schools?

Buckley’s third observation, that “since the fifties, teachers have been demanding a living wage,” is especially amusing from a man who ten years ago wrote, “Mr. Carey insisted that part-time workers for United Parcel Service earned ‘too little to live on,’ which prompts the question, Why aren't they dead?” Still, we know what he means.

Collective bargaining of one sort or another plus the genuinely rising value of academic stars over the years have largely eliminated the notion of an academic career as one of genteel poverty, at least for those who successfully run the tenure gauntlet. Still, unless fifty years of higher than inflation raises in tuition can be accounted for by faculty salaries, there must be more at play than full professors now earning six-figure incomes at many universities.

Finally, there is what I would call the amenity issue. There’s something to be said about this. College dormitories weren’t air conditioned when I was an undergraduate (and, yes, air conditioning had in fact been invented back then), nor were student lounges, dining facilities and many other amenities nearly as comfortable or in some cases downright posh as they are today.

Still, not counting the one significant and comparatively inexpensive option of community colleges, it is odd that in the absence of some extrinsic factor there would not be more price competition at least among the vast majority of schools that don’t make the cut in the U.S. News rankings every year. And the most likely culprit would appear to be ready access to subsidized loans.

Universities are free to set tuition at a level that factors in the student’s ability to borrow money. Were that money not readily available to prospective students and the result was a decrease in the number of students applying for or accepting admissions offers, there would be at least that much more pressure on the schools to cut or at least contain costs. In a crude sense, it is as though car dealerships knew that young car buyers could count on Mom and Dad (or Uncle Sam) kicking in a few thousand dollars toward the negotiated purchase price. How do you think the average dealer would use such information? Is there any reason to expect universities to act differently?

One critical factor missing from my argument is whether the amount available to borrow has increased commensurately over the years. The student loan market is a hodge-podge and the sorts of loans available to students have varied over the years. Thus, I admit I haven't been able to determine whether, as I suspect, increased tuition costs have successfully put upward pressure on loan limits. I know that students may borrow more nominal dollars today than in my student days, but I don't have any clear data as to how borrowing limit increases over the years, adjusted for inflation, have tracked tuition increases. [UPDATE: Reader AC directs my attention to a CATO Report that appears to close the gap here.]

In any case, I don’t contend that this is the only or even the major factor contributing to rising college costs, but only that it is likely one of the significant factors in play. Higher education is, after all, still a market. We shouldn’t be surprised when government involvement perversely affects that market’s prices or when the unintended consequence of attempting to make college affordable for some is making it less affordable for most.

To the Editor: Dear Sir, Who Cares?

In Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell's latest column, Online Venom or Vibrant Speech?, Howell writes, “Two important journalism values -- free, unfettered comment and civil, intelligent discourse -- are colliding.”

Oh dear. One might ask, only rhetorically mind you, just whose free, unfettered comments journalism has ever really valued?

I grew up with the Post, and I’ve read a number of Howell’s columns and she strikes me as no better and no worse than her WaPo predecessors. Putatively appointed to serve as mediators between the newspaper and its often critical and frustrated readership, ombudsmen such as Howell tend to rise from the ranks of working journalists and thus bring with them both the common prejudices of the trade and the typical obliviousness to those prejudices that especially infuriate their customers.

I don’t mean ideological bias. Yes, the Mainstream Media is biased toward the left, but journalism’s more fundamental problems would remain were the press right-leaning or dead center, whatever that would mean. Too heavy reliance on certain sorts of sources and too much skepticism regarding other sources, sloppy fact-checking and the tendency to ignore for as long as possible and then downplay as much as possible whenever reportage is shown to be erroneous or worse are all endemic problems with the profession. Thus, ombudsmen like Howell tend to see their role, wittingly or not, as one of explaining to critical readers why the newspaper is right and the readers are wrong. Actual criticism of their newspaper’s behavior tends to be both rare and timid, sometimes to the point of being almost apologetic to their colleagues.

On the topic of reader feedback, especially comments posted on the Post’s website, Howell writes:

Complaints first came from the newsroom. Reporters don't appreciate the often rude feedback, which I get, too. (A sample reader comment on my column last week: "I think we can all agree after reading Howell's lame comments week after week that the Post should save money by eliminating her position entirely. She is worse than a dupe.")

But the reader is wrong; Howell is no worse than a dupe. Okay, I admit that’s pretty snarky, but the real issue isn’t Howell. The real issue is that the very concept of a news ombudsman is a rear-guard tactic and a failed attempt at providing the appearance of objectivity and accountability. It doesn't matter. Thanks to the internet, the public no longer needs a media-provided conduit to its editorial desks. Whether the Post continues to publish reader comments at the end of its articles on its website is as irrelevant as whether it continues to publish Letters to the Editor in its print edition. (Which, by the way, newspapers do not print out of any sense of professional responsibility but because they increase circulation.)

Working journalists are absolutely essential to the real business of journalism, which is basic news reportage. But the media no longer needs to pretend to be self-correcting, nor can it withstand or control the forces that monitor and continually criticize and correct its work product any longer. Free, unfettered comment will continue apace, whether or not Howell or her superiors at the Post find it sufficiently civil or intelligent. I might even agree with them more often than not that much of such comment is neither. Fortunately, my opinion on the subject doesn’t matter any more than theirs does.

Constant Viewer: Next

It’s hardly up to his Oscar-winning performance, but once again Nicholas Cage squeezes a worthy showing out of a role that has him, well, leaving Las Vegas. What’s more, Julianne Moore reprises her FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling persona, albeit as Special Agent (they’re all special in the FBI) Callie Ferris this time around in Next.

Cage plays Cris Johnson, a stage magician with the unexplained power of seeing his own life two minutes ahead of time. Better still, knowing how his life unfolds if he zigs one way permits Johnson to zag instead and thus change his short-term future. This permits him to perform his low budget lounge act in Las Vegas and supplement his earnings with a bit of low stakes gambling on the side. Meanwhile, nondescript but decidedly European looking nuclear terrorists are on the loose. Somehow, also unexplained, both the FBI and the terrorists get wind of Johnson’s uncanny ability and set out to get to him either to prevent or keep him from preventing the bomb from causing eight million deaths. Johnson wants nothing to do with any of it and so flees Las Vegas, finding love interest Liz (Jessica Biel) en route to the rest of this preposterous and yet still entertaining movie directed by Lee Tamahori (Mulholland Falls, Along Came A Spider). Peter Falk has a nice though small role in the film, as well.

Philip K. Dick is currently the hardest working dead author in Hollywood, his stories having provided the basis for Impostor, Minority Report, Paycheck, A Scanner Darkly and now Next, all in just the last five years. Not bad for a guy who died twenty-five years ago and thus can’t take lunches with Hollywood players. Next is based on his 1954 short story “The Golden Man,” which Constant Viewer admits to not having read and thus will leave to others to say where Dick ends and the screenwriters begin here.

The thing about Next is that the viewer must completely suspend disbelief, and then just sit back and enjoy the ride. In return, there are three or four really fun scenes in Next that develop the potential of Johnson’s short range clairvoyance splendidly and Cage, himself, who takes the absurd premise and offers a convincing performance of a man whose gift (as Tony Shalub’s Monk would say) is also a curse. Movie goers who have already weathered Spider-Man 3 and are looking for something else to see until Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End opens on May 25th, will likely enjoy seeing what's Next.

Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

The Washington Monument is some 555 ft. tall. It is the tallest building in Washington and legal restrictions practically guarantee it will always remain so. It is not, however, the highest artificial elevation in Washington, that honor going to the top of the Gloria in Excelsis Tower of the Washington National Cathedral at some 676 ft. above sea level. Still, the Washington Monument towers over the National Mall, which is not really a shopping center except for K Street lobbyists.



But the borders of the federal city were not always as they are today, originally including a part of what is now the City of Alexandria and Arlington County in Virginia. In recognition that the federal government would never grow large enough to need all that land, the Virginia contribution to the city was retroceded to the Commonwealth in 1847. Thus Northern Virginians enjoy the dubious benefits of taxation with representation denied District of Columbia residents.

Arlington County is an unusual place on several grounds. Best known as the location of both Arlington National Cemetery and the Pentagon, it is one of the best educated “cities” in America (having a county form of government but being an urban area in demographic fact) with excellent public schools and the highest percentage of residents with graduate degrees in the nation. It is also one of the smallest counties in the U.S. at some 26 square miles, roughly the size of Manhattan.

There, however, with one minor exception, its comparison with Manhattan ends. The exception being that what little high-rise cityscape one finds inside the Capital Beltway is to be found primarily in Arlington County, especially that part of Arlington called Rosslyn.



Rosslyn lies directly across the Potomac River from Georgetown and is connected to Washington by the Francis Scott Key Bridge. It is in the local Washington news now because of controversy over plans to build two new high-rise buildings, one thirty stories tall, the other 31 stories in an effort to revitalize the area. The taller building would be 388 ft. tall, 76 ft. taller than the currently tallest building there.

Taller buildings might pose some problems for the flight paths of aircraft using Reagan National Airport, but most of the outcry is over the aesthetics of high-rise construction as it might affect the overall aesthetics of Washington. The Washington Post refers to these buildings and others already in Rosslyn as skyscrapers, absurdly comparing them to the Sears Tower and the Empire State Building. Only someone suffering from acute vertigo would find that comparison apt, but we’ll let that go for now.



The first such “skyscraper” in Rosslyn was the Key Bridge Marriott hotel, shown above. Built during my childhood – did I mention Arlington is my hometown? – it was the subject of great controversy for much the same reasons the proposed construction faces opposition today. At 14 stories tall, roughly half the height of the proposed new buildings, one gets dizzy just looking at it, doesn’t one? Okay, maybe not.

On a personal note, I will always have fond memories of the Key Bridge Marriott because it happened to be the location where the first great love of my life and I celebrated the occasion of her 18th birthday. (She later ditched me, found someone else and lived happily ever after. The second great love of my life, by contrast, suffered the great misfortune of being my wife for nearly thirty years now.) Nostalgia aside, however, the cityscape of Rosslyn not only does not overshadow the aesthetics of Washington architecture, it contributes to it. I can’t speak to questions of air traffic safety, but the notion that a thirty-some storey building or two will be a blight on the landscape of the Washington area is palpable nonsense.

That said, unlike Manhattan where real skyscrapers arose because land was at such a premium, there is no practical need for skyscrapers in most of the cities where they have been built. Tourists wishing to get a splendid view of Washington might well flock to the observation deck of a thirty-one storey building in Arlington, but that is hardly a compelling reason to build one.

No. The reason we build modern skyscrapers, unlike the reason we once built towering cathedrals or even soaring monuments to our Founding Fathers, is because the skyscraper is the ultimate symbol of Western civilization. It is, if you will, our monument not to gods or heroes but to ourselves as mere mortals; to our capabilities, our aspirations and our dreams. The 9/11 terrorists understood that, and that is precisely why we should continue to build them now.

Darwin for Dummies Conservatives

The New York Times coverage of the event is getting all the play in the blogosphere, but for my money Andrew Ferguson's report of the American Enterprise Institute debate, "Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes?" is the better read.

Of course, the Times also covered the rather telling moment during Republican Idol the other evening when Ryan Seacrest Chris Matthews asked the contestants candidates whether any of them didn't believe in the theory of evolution and three candidates raised their hands. Whether the raised or unraised hands of any of the candidates indicate their actual beliefs on Darwinism is an open question, but it must be said that their failure to balk at so controversial an issue being framed as a simple yes / no question suggests our species could use some evolution, at least at the political level.

The AEI discussion, in any case, sounded much more interesting, not concerning itself with the truth or falsehood of Darwinism but, as Ferguson phrased it, "the secondary question of whether Darwinian theory and political conservatism abet each other as ways of understanding and shaping the world." Historically, both the Left and the Right have selectively drawn from Darwin that which they believe fortifies their views. Ferguson again:

Throughout the late 19th century, Social Darwinists assumed that Darwin's theory had disproved the liberal (in the old sense) tradition of natural rights and natural law that inspired the Founding Fathers. John Dewey argued for Darwin's relevance to social and political arrangements, and so did most of his fellow Progressives: Woodrow Wilson, for instance, who said that "living constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice." Traces of Social Darwinism can be found too in Hitler and Stalin, both of whom were even worse than Woodrow Wilson.

Darwin, himself, apparently drew certain social policy inferences from his work, as on the downside of vaccinations:

No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Well, as Ferguson notes, anyone who writes as extensively as Darwin did is pretty much guaranteed to have written a few creepy sounding things. Take that diary entry of Gandhi's about how back in his college days in London he used to enjoy swatting baby kittens around with a cricket bat, for example. (Okay, so I make that up.)

Anyway, being neither a liberal nor a conservative and happening to be a Christian (well, an Episcopalian, and that's pretty close) who doesn't believe in Darwinism but certainly believes that it's good science and that good science is the best source for understanding how the world in fact works, Darwin's politics don't interest me in the slightest. Nor does the mileage liberals or conservatives might think they can squeeze out of the old boy. As panelist John Derbyshire said, "Conservatism and Darwinism are orthogonal. Neither one implies the other." A philosopher might say, instead, that science and ethics (political theory being a branch of ethics) are incommensurable or that they do not share the same logic or grammar or some such.

I will merely paraphrase Ferguson's concluding paragraph in my own terms. Science is excellent at answering how things happen to be as they are. It is, however, both utterly incapable of and, to its credit, utterly indifferent to why things happen to be as they are and what we ought to do about it. Whatever realm those questions lie in, it is not the realm of science, nor will we find any answers by a show of hands in a presidential debate.

Brutal, Barbaric Savagery

Shocking but hardly unusual evidence of why neither Iraq, nor much of the rest of the Middle East will be joining what counts in the West as the community of civilized nations any time soon, the U.K. Daily Mail reports of a 17 year old girl in Kurdistan brutally stoned to death for the crime or sin, take your pick, of having a romance with a boy of a different religion.

(As is nearly always the case now, the video from which the still shots shown on the first linked article were taken is also available for viewing, if you have the stomach for such things, here.)

Yes, my own culture and its people have too often committed or condoned and sometimes still commit or condone different sorts of brutal, savage acts; so, no, I won't be taking this opportunity to take a shot at cultural relativism. Let's just say instead that stonings, female genital mutilations and beheadings are among the many reasons why, not only do "they" not want to be like "us," but most of us don't have a clue as to how profound those cultural differences are.

Aside from their evidence of crimes, the only ethically legitimate reason to look at videos such as these (and I would just as quickly say to view evidence of our own acts of savage brutality) is to get a better sense of the human condition as it all too often really is.

Her Majesty's a Pretty Nice Girl

Every fifty years, just like clockwork, the Queen of England shows up at my alma mater, originally named “Their Majesties’ Royall Colledge of William and Mary in Virginia.” Founded in 1693, William & Mary discreetly dropped the “Their Majesties’ Royall” part after a bit of trouble with England back in the 1770s and then at some unknown point finally noticed and corrected the “Colledge” typo, too. Needless to say, the real King William and Queen Mary have long ago, as my Baptist relatives would say, gone to glory and, just like my rich Uncle D.A., left not so much as a farthing in their wills to the College, either. Still, the royal name remains and suffices for subsequent English monarchs to drop by when they’re in the neighborhood.

As was Elizabeth II, here to help honor the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown (as she was for the 350th) and soon to be dropping in at the White House for tea and chicken-fried steak sandwiches. No word yet on whether any of Pocahontas’s ancestors descendants [thanks, Seamus] were invited either to the Jamestown celebration or the White House fête or whether discussion of lax immigration laws are on the agenda.

I’m not sure what value the perpetuation of royalty still contributes to Great Britain. Some argue it is important as a matter of national identity, others argue it helps tourism. Maybe. It’s their business and not mine, in any case. I frankly feel a little sorry for Elizabeth Windsor. By all accounts she’s had a pretty stressful and a pretty boring life. Most celebrities find at least some private space where they can kick off their shoes and scratch where it itches, but I get the impression this poor woman needs to retreat to the smallest room in the palace to get that sort of privacy.

Our own Founding Fathers, who themselves have taken on a sort of Arthurian mythos by now, were pretty clear that titles of nobility were a bad idea for the new republic and made a point of making them unconstitutional. Of course, between the progressives’ notion of a “living Constitution” and our own George II’s increasingly imperial view of the presidency, this might not last much longer. Still, we tend to reserve our fawning admiration for actors, musicians and athletes whose celebrity can in at least some tenuous sense be said to have been achieved rather than inherited. Heck, these days it’s hardly worth even being born a Kennedy any more.

Other people’s royalty, on the other hand, continue to fascinate Americans. Many of us are impressed even by such minor honorifics as knighthoods and take to calling actor Anthony Hopkins “Sir Anthony” at the drop of a fava bean. Hopkins is a fine actor, but let’s face it, his stardom and hence his knighthood rests on having played the world’s most famous psychotic cannibal. (Lucky for Helen Mirren, I suppose, she got her damehood in 2003, long after the death of Elizabeth I and before her staring role in The Queen.) Though far from a psychotic cannibal, one has to wonder whether Mick Jagger quite personifies the knightly ideals of chivalry, either. Oh well, there’s always been a bit of supply and demand about these things. According to Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage, in the 13th century knights were expected to do military service and so many men therefore declined the honor that King Henry III began imposing fines on those who refused.

Anyway, while her Virginia visit is already concluded and you’re probably not invited to the big white-tie dinner at the White House on Monday, just in case you do bump into the Queen while she’s in the U.S. (she’s going to the Kentucky Derby, I hear), the Commonwealth of Virginia has posted a brief royal etiquette guide.

Oh, and if you are going to be at the White House Monday night and especially if you’re going to be hosting the dinner, I thought I might add a few more etiquette tips to the list:

1. Do not refer to your Guest of Honor as Queenie.

2. Do not have Queen’s Greatest Hit’s piped in over the White House stereo.

3. Do not invite the Queen to “pull my finger.” (The Duke of Edinburgh does this all the time at the palace and it really ticks the Queen off.)

4. Do not refer to the twins as “my own princess problems, if you know what I mean?”

5. Do not demand she show you a Five Pound note to prove it’s really her.

6. Do not ask her if it’s true J.K Rowling is worth a lot more than she is now.

7. Do not serve Steak Diane.

8. Do not offer a summer vacation swap of the White House for Buckingham Palace.

9. Do not ask if Prince Charles is planning to run for king when she retires. And finally,

10. Do not ask if she has any suggestions where you and Laura can get a good price on a couple of crowns.

Constant Viewer: Spider-Man 3

There is much to like about Spider-Man 3 and a fair bit to dislike, as well. Of course, it’s going to be a blockbuster, but whether it generates the repeat trade necessary to set box office records in keeping with its massive budget is anybody’s guess. Given the summer competition and the fact that it’s (1) dark and (2) long, Constant Viewer would guess it will not break records. Then again, CV thought All The King’s Men was a very fine film that should have generated multiples of the box office it actually drew.

All the usual suspects are back in Spider-Man 3, including even the obligatory Bruce Campbell cameo, one of the few appearances (along with an even briefer Stan Lee cameo) that generated an immediate audience response. As for Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franko and the rest, they perform in keeping with what the movie, after all, really is – a melodrama wrapped up in CGI action scenes and special effects. Director Sam Raimi captures a bit more of the comic book feel this time around – CV means that in a good way – especially in the early action scenes where more close up and zoom in shots replicate the sort of “camera work” framing of a well drawn superhero comic. CV almost thought he was looking at some Steve Ditko panels there for a moment.

The Sandman and Viper Venom [thanks, Chris] special effects were excellent and the three dimensional fight scenes framed by skyscrapers and reminiscent of the first Star Wars battle scenes were dizzying, perhaps too much so. Moreover, the CGI looked animated at points, which in a live action movie rather defeats the purpose. Still, it’s easy to see all the money spent on this movie right there on the screen. In fact, it’s impossible to miss.

This is a damned busy movie. The story is easy enough to follow but there’s just a hell of a lot of story going on. For those who don't already know most of the plot and want to know more, read the next paragraph. Otherwise, skip down.

* * * SPOILER ALERT * * *

Mary Jane’s theatrical career hits some major bumps while Spider-Man is the toast of the town. He gets caught up in his own celebrity and this sours their relationship. Meanwhile, Harry Osborn’s lot in life is like the one eyed, three legged mangy dog who answers to the name “Lucky,” This poor guy just can’t catch a break. Meanwhile, Flint Marco, involved in Peter’s uncle’s death, gets turned into Sandman because of yet another scientific experiment (when, oh when will these mad scientists stop tampering with nature?), leading Spider-Man to have to rescue Gwen Stacy (who, btw, was Spidey’s original main squeeze in the comic books of CV’s youth). Meanwhile, the alien who first invades Peter Parker turning him into not so nice a guy catches up with Eddie Brock, Parker’s photographic competition at the Bugle, and Venom is born. Meanwhile, well, CV is out of breath just thinking about it.

* * * SPOILERS END HERE * * *

Spider-Man 3 is too long, even with so involved a story line. A good ten to fifteen minutes could have been cut without harm and to the less patient viewer’s eternal gratitude. There’s simply no point in a movie of this sort running much over two hours, and CV thinks this current trend of films clocking in well over that mark is bad for the business. Good directors, like good writers, must learn to kill their darlings if for no other reason than that shorter films permit more showings. Anybody want to bet CV that Shrek 3, which should run around 90 minutes, doesn’t beat Spider-Man 3 in total gross?

But what the hell, Spider-Man 3 is a film for fanboys (fangirls, too) and they’ll be very happy with what Raimi and his cast have to offer. CV’s one qualm is whether the movie is a bit too dark for the younger fans who have a harder time with heroes acting unheroically and villains who turn out to be less than pure evil, after all. For that matter, CV attended a midnight showing with an audience that included some parents who had dragged their preschoolers along for a show that didn’t let out until 2:30 am. CV devoutly hopes these kids don’t have nightmares; but if they do, CV wishes even more devoutly that they scream loud enough to keep their dimwitted parents up all night.

Go, see the movie. You’re going to, anyway. Everyone’s going to go see it, and there’s not a single reason why (assuming you’re 10 or older) you shouldn’t. The summer blockbuster season has begun. And not a moment too soon.

UPDATE: So how well did Spider-Man 3 do on its U.S. opening date? Over $59 million, beating last year's Pirates Of The Caribbean 2 for the biggest U.S. opening day ever in film history. Still, as CV mentions in a comment, word-of-mouth feedback, especially from the crucial young male demographic sector, is that S-M 3 was a disappointment. So, will it make back its investment? Of course. Will it have "legs" and generate the sort of repeat viewing necessary these days to qualify as a mega-blockbuster? Given this summer's competition, CV would have to guess not.

Will this question be on the MPRE? *

ABC's Blotter reports that a legal secretary working for the D.C. law firm of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP has been suspended after revealing to the firm that she worked at night for the escort service run by the so-called D.C. Madam, Jeane Palfrey. She apparently worked both as an escort and as a clerical assistant to Palfrey.

The firm has a policy prohibiting full-time employees from holding any other jobs. "She did not seek approval for that particular job and would not have been given it," [Akin Gump chairman R. Bruce] McLean said.

McLean said the woman told the firm she was a government witness in the D.C. Madam case, and the firm was hesitant to dismiss her because of that.

Of course, Palfrey has pleaded not guilty to the sex-for-hire charges, claiming her escort service provided only "legal, fantasy sex." However, if it turns out the service did involve actual prostitution, Akin Gump faces the further vexing question of whether it must report the suspended secretary for the "unauthorized practice of law."

(* Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination)

Of course, in the original version there were only seven dwarfs

Mercifully, the first Republican presidential debate has now ended. I never thought I’d yearn for the likes of presidential primaries to begin, but anything to winnow this field of ten, count 'em, ten middle-aged white guys in dark suits can’t happen quickly enough. (And, yeah, I’m a middle-aged white guy who owns a dark suit or two, myself.)

Arnold Schwarzenegger sat with Nancy Reagan in the audience. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’d like to see Arnold as president, but it’s a pity he couldn’t be up there with the other stiffs candidates.

Why they call these things debates is beyond me. Not only don’t the candidates square off against one another, they don’t even answer the questions, having learned to segue into canned comments no matter how far removed from the original topic.

As a couple of semi-personal asides, I’d never heard Ron Paul speak before and can’t say I found his public speaking skills very impressive. His understanding of the Constitution may not be up to snuff, either. I was away from the screen when it happened, but Reason's David Weigel blogged:

"Matthews asks everyone if they'd support an amendment to allow foreigners - i.e., Arnold - to run for president. Ron Paul says no, because 'I believe in original intent.' Matthews says - into the mic! - 'Oh, God.'"

I might have done the same as Matthews, frankly. Could Paul have possibly meant the Constitution should never be amended for any reason? If so, that's beyond dumb, and not only because the Founders obviously intended it to be amendable.

If not, then he should have made whatever his point was differently. However, and whatever the issue-by-issue libertarianism any of the other candidates might lay claim to, he stuck to his guns (whether he shot anything other than his foot is another matter) and stood out from the crowd insofar as he was given much air time in the first place.

Also, Weigel predicted among other things that Jim Gilmore would lose the debate and then at the end admitted that all of his “predictions fell flat, except, arguably for the Gilmore one.” Wrong. Gilmore won just by being there, as did the other media-starved candidates in this Republican free-for-all. Personally, I think Gilmore is really shooting for retiring John Warner’s Senate seat, though I'm sure he’d be quite happy if his presidential campaign really took off, too. Hey, that's how we got Carter and Clinton, after all.

Dumbest question of the night? (And asking the dumbest question is no small feat for Chris Matthews.) Whether it would be a good thing if Bill Clinton returned to the White House. Best thing about the event? It reminded American that no matter what else happens in 2008, come 2009 George W. Bush will no longer be president.

“It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”

"That sentence from Hume," writes Roger Kimball in The New Criterion, "stands as an epigraph to The Road to Serfdom. It is as pertinent today as when [Fredrich] Hayek set it down in 1944."

Harkening back to my cyber-discussion with Mona yesterday, I don't know if The New Criterion could properly be called neocon or not, but it certainly is conservative in its perspective, at least in matters aesthetic and frequently in matters social, as well. Whatever my libertarian tendencies may be, since I happen to share much of their aesthetic and some of their social conservativism, I rarely have much of a problem with what I read at TNC.

As Reagan observed, my 80 percent ally is not my 20 percent enemy, and while the manner in which the 80 /20 divide varies, I find that true across most of the political spectrum. My point is only that there are plenty of conservatives of a certain sort who have not been corrupted by the Borg Bush Administration (just as there are many liberals of a certain sort) with whom I share all sorts of common cause. Besides, that leaves plenty to bitch about on both sides.

Be that as it may, the Kimball article is well worth a read, though it will tell Hayek fans (like Mona) nothing they didn't already know.

Sex in Space? Shiny!

There's good news and bad news on the Final Frontier Front. The good news, NASA plans a manned landing on Mars 30 years from now. The bad news, NASA plans to still be around 30 years from now. The AP reports:

With NASA planning to land on Mars 30 years from now, and with the recent discovery of the most Earth-like planet ever seen outside the solar system, the space agency has begun to ponder some of the thorny practical and ethical questions posed by deep space exploration.

Come to think of it, if the Earth-like planet in question is Gliese 581c, NASA plans on being around for a mission requiring traveling a one-way distance of 20.5 light years, by comparison with which a round trip to Mars and back of 110 to 200 kilometers is a walk around the block. Either we're much closer to Warp Drive than NASA is letting on, or those boys really believe in long term planning.

Based purely on anecdata, there is a surprisingly large percentage among those of us who generally oppose big government to make an exception when it comes to space. I don't think it has anything to do with economic arguments about capital investment costs, commercial viability or even funding for scientific research. I think space exploration is simply one of those exceptions libertarians are often willing to make to their principles because we grew up reading Heinlein, watching Star Trek, etc. and think space travel is just too damned nifty to let principles intrude. My basic position is that when it comes to wasting vast sums of tax dollars on failed foreign adventures, failed social welfare programs or (even failed) space exploration, I'd rather the money be wasted on space. Your mileage (or light-yearage) may vary.

Still, as fans of, for example, Firefly, realize, one of the real down-sides of humanity finally escaping our terrestrial prison via the likes of NASA is that where the government goes, government goes. Which also means that government consultants, special interest advocates and other parasitic life forms will soon be infecting space, as well.

There are, I suppose, all sorts of things to consider about life in space, though the laundry list of issues currently being considered by NASA seems to range from the sensible to the pointless to the absurd. Were you worried you might have to put in too many hours of overtime in space? Fear not, NASA has already established the 48 hour work week. Should genetic screening, currently prohibited, be used to select crews for long-term space missions? NASA's chief health and medical officer, Richard Williams, says "Genetic screening must be approached with caution ... because of limiting employment and career opportunities based on use of genetic information."

I trust the worry here is over leaked genetic information affecting the person's terrestrial opportunities and not the idiotic notion that we shouldn't screen crews because it would be prejudicial to deny someone with a high likelihood of developing a mission threatening disease or disorder during a long-term mission. But, hey, this is the government we're talking about, so you never know. Medical concerns are real enough, but chances are pretty good that medical advances will keep pace with or outdistance advances in space exploration technology as the decades roll by.

My guess is that, whatever the so-called experts are planning and predicting at this point, by the time there is significant human traffic in space, the model we will rely upon most heavily will be our history of ships at sea and how they, for example, have dealt with medical emergencies and shipboard deaths on the high seas. Unfortunately, I won't live to see much of it happen, anyway. Then again, if we leave the likes of NASA in charge, neither will my great grandchildren.

Ok, then, don't cancel my subscription. **

My cyber-friend and former co-blogger Mona asks me a few pointed questions, to which I respond, both here.

(** Inside joke.)

Something's Not Happening Here, Why It Ain't Ain't Exactly Clear

The Becker-Posner Blog raises the question, "Why No Violent Protests Against the Iraq War?" I question the word "violent," but that's not critical to the issue. Becker thinks, as I suspect most people do, that the absence of the draft is the primary answer. Posner disagrees and offers five factors he thinks may better account for the difference between the sometimes massive (and, yes, sometimes violent) Vietnam era protests and the relative absence of such demonstrations against the war in Iraq. I link, you decide.

Adult Sudden Death Syndrome

With a hat tip to the nice folks over at grylliade, the Australian reports that Chinese officials, um, believe this was the cause of the recent death of a prisoner. "'Li Chaoyang's sudden death conforms with adult sudden death syndrome,' said Mr Shi, citing a forensic report."

I don't want to sound overly cynical here; but, personally, I ain't buying it until I see a case of Adult Sudden Death Syndrome show up on House.

Still, it does raise the question, do we have some sort of exchange program between U.S. military "holding facilities" guards and Chinese prison guards? Just askin', mind you.

Kabuki Theater, Texas Style

With a hat tip to Jesse Walker over at Reason's Hit & Run, the New York Times reports that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told President Bush during a U.S. visit that he had “deep-hearted sympathies that the people who had to serve as comfort women were placed in extreme hardships” during World War II and apologized "for the fact that they were placed in that sort of circumstance.”

What Bush replied: "I accept the prime minister's apology."

What Bush should have said:

Thank you, Prime Minister Ginzu – by the way, Laura loves your knives. Let me just say in response to your apology that ‘All Your Sex Slave Are Belong to Us.’ No, no, that's just a little hip internet humor I learned from the twins one night when we were doing tequila shooters in the Lincoln Bedroom. Seriously, though, on behalf of my fellow sex slaves everywhere, I accept your apology and especially your promise that all sexual slavery in Japan will be abstinence based in the future. I also appreciate your not releasing a list of the U.S. clients of your World War II sex slaves like that blabbermouth Deborah Jeane Palfrey, or Mistress Debbie, as Dick Cheney likes to call her. But slavery and sex are only two of the many things we have in common. Let me conclude by saying again what I said back in 2002. For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. I thank you.

Labour, Law or Loyalty -- Take Your Pick

According to the Wikipedia – and can there be any more reliable source for meticulously researched, documented and verified information? – today is, among other things, Loyalty Day in the U.S. It is also Law Day, both such official designations being intended to counter the international observance of Labour Day, still celebrated by organized labo(u)r and once celebrated on May 1st (in apparent memory of the Haymarket Riot) by many socialist states and many would-be citizens of socialist states if not by any actual citizens of socialist states. This proves, if nothing else, the superior productive capacity of capitalism over communism when it comes to creating meaningless commemorations on May 1st which the citizens of both sorts of societies then proceed to ignore.

Speaking of ignorance, chances are you have never even heard of Law Day or Loyalty Day even though the Wikipedia assures us that the latter, at least, is celebrated with parades and celebrations throughout the United States. Both such commemorations are ensconced by Acts of Congress signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man whose administration will be remembered for his impenetrably convoluted syntax, his preference for golf over long hours in the Oval Office and being a better president than almost all of those who have since followed in that high office. Maybe that’s the real problem with George W. Bush: he doesn’t play enough golf and his own garbled English rarely rises to anything so sophisticated as compound- complex sentence structures.

I may be a bit glib about these things, but I have nothing against either law or loyalty. (Labor, my own at least, is another matter.) That is to say, law is a very good thing even if most laws aren’t and loyalty is a noble virtue if, but only if, it derives from more fundamental virtues. The accident of birth, either geographically or ethnically, is not such a virtue. That is, loyalty like diligence and conscientiousness is a secondary virtue. If one were, for example, a Nazi, it would be ethically preferable for him to be a lackluster and disloyal Nazi, all things considered.

Still, there is much about the United States and especially about its people and the society we have built and continue to build that is worthy of loyalty even as one can properly be loyal to one’s family and friends despite their various faults and shortcomings. In this case, such loyalty and respect for the law might lead one to criticize Congress for wasting time and taxpayer resources on such purely symbolic and unnecessary gestures as Law Day or Loyalty day, though I think a better case can be made for encouraging Congress to spend even more time on irrelevant symbolism, thus leaving them less time for doing substantive harm.

Anyway, while I am unaware of any parades or celebrations in my neighborhood, I resolve to do my part and try not to break any laws at least for the rest of the day. It will be difficult, but it is the least a loyal American like myself can do.