Is it just me, or has Blogger been slower than usual lately? There was such a lag yesterday on my dialup account between hitting the Post & Publish button and the publish occurring that I reposted the same thing a couple of times before I realized it was just taking its time.
Cable modem gets installed Friday. Once I have that and the new web space set up, it's off to Moveable Type I go. I'll always be grateful to Blogger and Blogspot for getting me started, but all good things and all that. Hey, my folks outgrew AOL, so I can outgrow Blogger. Stay tuned.
So apparently that Swedish study which claimed that many starchy foods, including things like bread, contain carcinogens was maybe a tad bit overstated. Perhaps the fact that the scientists announced their findings at a press conference before publishing them in a peer-reviewed journal might have been a tip-off as well.
The whole thing reminds me of a George Carlin joke: "Scientists have determined that saliva causes stomach cancer, but only when ingested in small quantities over a long period of time."
Justin thinks he and The Rapmaster may be the only bloggers watching the NBA playoffs. Not so - I've caught several games so far. It's been pretty entertaining, too. I'm already sorry to see the Dallas/Minnesota series end. And as a disgruntled Rockets fan, I'd take great joy in seeing Scottie Pippen help cough up Game 3 to the Lakers if it weren't for the fact that I hate the Lakers. Sacramento, San Antonio, Dallas - I'm counting on you to end our long national nightmare here. Don't let me down.
Linda Lay, the former First Lady of Enron, is set to open an "upscale secondhand shop" in Montrose in order to help friends and family with cash flow problems. I used to live about four blocks from the location given in the story. I may have to poke my head in and see for myself what kind of booty Mrs. Lay is letting go of.
Remember The Anarchist Cookbook? It was a straight-from-the-counterculture guide to making bombs, getting high, and generally giving the finger to The Man. I'm willing to bet most people reading this knew someone in high school who had a copy and carried it around, just in case.
Turns out that William Powell, the author of the Cookbook, has changed his mind about it and would like to see it removed from publication. Unfortunately for him, the publisher owns the copyright and has no desire to stop printing it. Take a look at William Powell's author comments on Amazon for the details. Found via The Straight Dope.
Joshua Trevino shares an interesting email from a former coworker who is now on the Ron Kirk campaign. It's the 29 APRIL 2002 5 entry, but I'll quote him here since he doesn't have permalinks:
Who knows how accurate this is, but it's worth sharing a bit from an e-mail of a friend who's working on Ron Kirk's Democratic Senate campaign in Texas:
The Senate campaign that I am working on is going really well. We handily won our Primary Election on April 9th and now we are in the marathon heading to November. The cool thing is that this race has attracted national attention, so it should be a very exciting campaign season for us. We are doing so well, in fact, that the Republicans have actually come up with an excuse to send Bush's counselor Karen Hughes back to Texas to deal with us. Honestly, I am a little scared of her...
Just figured I'd feed the rumor mill.
Now there's a conspiracy theory about Karen Hughes' resignation that makes some sense.
If Kirk is getting national attention, it's in part because he's actually sought it out. His companions on the "Democrat Dream Team" ticket are doing their best to avoid the national party as Clay Robison wrote in the Chron on Sunday. I can't say I'm surprised, and I can't say it's bad strategy for John Sharp and Tony Sanchez, but it's disheartening for me nonetheless.
Kirk has little to lose by aiming for a larger spotlight. His opponent, John Cornyn, is playing the Dubya card for all its worth. Bush will undoubtedly lend a hand to Governor Goodhair and David Dewhurst, but it's the Senate election that will matter to him and his agenda in the fall.
Mike points me to this article by Robert X. Cringely, who lost his infant son to SIDS last week, and what he hopes to do about it.
There ought to be a monitor, I thought, that could tell when a SIDS attack was about to begin. In the neonatal intensive care unit, where Chase spent his first few days, there are lots of monitors and they go off when they detect apnea -- a cessation of breathing lasting for 20 seconds or more. Chase had a problem with apnea. Twice he turned blue right in my arms, simply forgetting to breathe. The treatment for apnea is literally shaking a leg, reminding the kid to take a breath. The cure for apnea comes with age, and can be helped by treating with caffeine. A double latte for my baby, please.But to the medical establishment, apnea isn't SIDS. If apnea is falling asleep at the wheel and driving off the road, SIDS is falling asleep at the wheel and driving into a bridge abutment. The doctors tell me leg shaking won't end a SIDS attack and monitoring won't detect one.
Still, as a grieving nerd, I feel the need to do something. And I am not at all convinced that epidemiologists are to be trusted in this. After all, they are medical statisticians and mainly play the odds. I want to defy the odds. If current monitors won't work, I want to make ones that do.
So here is what I propose. It is my plan to devote much of my resources and a good portion of the rest of my life to combating SIDS. I can't cure it, but I think I can help babies to evade it. The trick is to first develop a very cheap, very accurate, recording medical sensor.
I wish him well, and I hope I'll never have that kind of incentive to do something.
When your wife calls you on the phone and the first words out of her mouth are "The good news is that I won't be going to Algeria in May", it's not really clear if you want to hear what comes next. Fortunately, there was no "And the bad news is..." forthcoming. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to pop down to the nurse's office for a Valium.
Great op-ed in the WSJ by John McCain, courtesy of Kyle Still.
It is the unenlightened rule of Arab dictators, not the plight of the Palestinians, that condemns the Arab world to the civilizational crisis in which it finds itself. Which Middle Eastern nation grants its Arab citizens the most political freedom? Israel. Which countries' leaders have the blood of innocents on their hands but hear nothing about it from the Arab League? Iraq, Syria, and Sudan, for starters. Which country has the most egregious record of occupying another today? Syria, in Lebanon. In which countries do Palestinian refugees suffer without rights and the most basic freedoms? Other than Israel, only Jordan has treated these people with any dignity. Which nation in the region has matched its payments to the families of Palestinian murderers with money for health care, education, and other development in the territories? Not one.How Arab leaders can abide their own hypocrisy is one question. Why they expect us to do so is a better one.
Arab leaders recoil in mock indignation from any suggestion that they have a responsibility to discourage Palestinian treachery. Instead, they demand that the United States pressure the government of Israel into forsaking its obligation to defend its citizens from terrorism that Arab governments celebrate and support.
I'm also distressed that some of our European allies are dismissing Israel's legitimate security concerns. In some quarters, Jews are once again threatened with attacks on their institutions. We are witnessing once again the torching of European synagogues. All world leaders must condemn, in the strongest terms, such despicable behavior.
It would be awfully nice to hear some of these self-evident truths be spoken aloud by our Commander in Chief. I recognize the need for realpolitik, but at some point you need to check your compass and make sure you're still heading in the right general direction.
I've become convinced that Bush's hopeless muddling of the Middle East situation is the best argument for a McCain-as-Democrat Presidential run in 2004. I have no idea if McCain sees it this way, but there's a lot of room to criticize Bush here, and I believe he'd draw a fair amount of Republican support (among voters, anyway) for doing so. McCain's military credentials would deflect any suggestion that he's somehow unfit (or worse, unpatriotic) to criticize the president on this issue. (John Kerry would presumably have this protection as well, but West Wing fantasies aside, I don't see any Northeastern liberals in the White House in the near future.) Of course, the general diminutiveness of the Democratic class right now makes blue-skying about McCain that much more seductive.
It surprises me that Bush has stumbled here. I grant that the Middle East is a tar baby of gigantic proportions. I grant that no one's hands are clean. I grant that we're forced to do business with some unsavory characters, and that it's neither wise nor desireable to risk the kind of Islam vs. the West war that Osama bin Laden was hoping to spark in the first place. But really, if there was one person you thought you could count on to see things in stark black-and-white, good-versus-evil terms, it was GW Bush. Somewhere along the line he forgot what he said in the days following September 11, and it shows.
What I want these days is simple enough. I want our President to remind the world, every day if necessary, what being a good guy in this fight is all about. I want him to remind us all that peace doesn't simply mean one side promising not to kill the other. I want him to stand firm for liberty and freedom. I didn't vote for him, and I have little faith in him, but even I think he's more than capable of this. Was I wrong?
The crazy thing is that if Bush had stood up more forcefully for Israel against the Saudi bloodsuckers and European anti-Semites, he'd have then had the moral authority to whack Ariel Sharon on the head with a cluestick and tell him that he wasn't making this any better or easier. Sometimes when everyone in a conflict is mad at the mediator, it means the mediator is doing a good job. Bush has clearly demonstrated that this is not always the case.
Patrick crystallizes something that I've been thinking about for awhile now, about the relative level of understanding of the world and how it works among Americans and Europeans. I came of age in the 80s. If you were a college student in the 80s and you were politically aware but not already a Young Republican, you probably didn't think much of Ronald Reagan. He was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he had a fairly simplistic view of the world, he said stupid thing about ketchup and trees, and he was surrounded by scary people like James Watt and Ed Meese. It was easy to base a political philosophy on denigrating Reagan.
The problem was that in this environment you would often find yourself around folks who believed this sort of thing a lot more fervently than you did. They didn't merely dislike Reagan and distrust his worldview, they took it to the next level and condemned American society and politics, both for ever electing Reagan in the first place and for being the kind of place that would ever elect a Reagan. If you hung around these people long enough, you spent a fair amount of time feeling vaguely guilty about being born American, and if you didn't go along with their wholesale condemnations and diatribes, you were somehow as backward and unsophisticated as Ronald Reagan and his supporters.
Not too surprisingly, these folks tended to be Europhiles. Many of them talked about moving to Europe or at least spending a lot of time there. If only America could be as enlightened as Europe, then maybe they'd find a reason to stay. I sometimes wonder what became of people like this. Did they become Jerry Rubin, or did they remain Abbie Hoffman?
I think recent events have shown pretty clearly that though we may have another simplistic boob who surrounds himself with scary people in the White House, we have no reason to feel inferior to Europe. I think Americans understand Europe better than Europeans think we do, and I think we understand Europe better than some of them understand us. In any event, I agree with Patrick. I've got enough things to feel guilty about.
Also in today's Chron, a 100-year-old synagogue in the small town of Wharton (about 40 miles southeast of Houston) is closing due to declining membership. The descendants of the original Jewish settlers have moved on to big cities here and elsewhere, and there aren't enough people left to afford maintenance on the 80-year-old brick building that served as their temple or to pay for a rabbi. It's a sweet but sad story.
From today'sChron:
Representatives of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah reportedly asked that female air traffic controllers be barred from their duties during his flights in Texas.A Federal Aviation Administration employee, speaking to The Dallas Morning News on condition of anonymity, said the request was granted on portions of the prince's flights between Houston and Waco.
Abdullah was in Texas this week and met with President Bush at his Crawford ranch on Thursday.
The prince then flew in Houston and took a train to College Station to tour former President George Bush's presidential library on Friday.
I'm sure we'll hear an explanation from the Bush camp that Prince Abdullah meant no disrespect to women and that we liberals are just being overly sensitive about the whole thing any time now. Good thing our president has moral clarity.
I see that Mac Thomason a/k/a War Liberal has his own domain now. Way to go, Mac! (Thanks to Ginger for the heads up.)
As for me, I've finally given in to the dark side and signed up for a RoadRunner cable modem, thus giving AOLTimeWarner of Borg an extra few ounces of flesh every month. Once all that's in place, I'll be relocating this spot. Stay tuned.
A "businessman and civic leader who also teaches Sunday school" named Bill White has penned an editorial about science and religion in today's Chron. I give him high marks for his attempt to distinguish between the two domains. I'm always happy to see a person of faith recognize the value of science, but I've still got a nit to pick:
Last week the Houston Chronicle reported remarks by U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Sugar Land, critical of Texas A&M and Baylor universities, as part of a debate concerning the teaching of evolution. Let's not allow a false conflict between science and scripture to divide us. Many people of both science and faith have flourished at great Texas universities. And let's respect the rights of DeLay and other public figures to express their own beliefs in a house of worship.
Unfortunately, this isn't a false conflict, certainly not from DeLay's point of view or the point of view of the person who complained that Texas universities aren't teaching creationism. DeLay has followed his original remarks about Texas A&M and Baylor by expressing the firm conviction that Christianity is the only way to live. It's certainly his right as an American to believe this, but it's more than a bit distressing to hear a high-ranking government official speak with such utter disregard for Americans who don't share his faith, never mind Americans who live quite happily without one. Private Citizen Tom DeLay can think and say what he wants, but Public Official Tom DeLay has a higher responsibility to the Constitution. The whole reason why this was news in the first place was because this was a powerful Congressman speaking.
Furthermore, the anti-science forces very surely see this as a real battle that must be fought fiercely. Creationists figure prominently in this group, but they're far from the only ones. Leftist academics who think all truth is subjective and that science is just another worldview (one which is racist and sexist, naturally), pyschics and supernaturalists, Luddites of all stripes - they all reject science. I wish Bill White were correct and this were just a disagreement among friends, but it's not. Those of us who do value science and want to keep it separate from matters of faith and belief need to take this battle seriously as well. Take a look at the Talk.Origins Archive, especially the Feedback section to see how vehement and uncompromising the opposition can be. Take a look at the James Randi Educational Foundation for even more depressing examples of ingrained ignorance and willful disbelief. Every time you turn your back, the other side is gaining ground.
For that reason, I disagree with White when he says we should accept DeLay's apology and move on. Tom DeLay isn't going to move on, he's going to keep pushing the idea that religious dogma belongs alongside, or even in place of, science in the classroom. That's one place where we can't cut him any slack.
Well, this was a fun afternoon at work. The comm group booted my port off the network because I have a Win2K server which wasn't properly secured. Today it became one of many machines across our enterprise that came down with a bad case of the Nimda worm.
Yeah, I know. I'm an idiot. Go ahead, get it out of your system. I won't be offended.
I'll mention that I am not the only person responsible for this server, which is running some beta software. Nor was mine the only vulnerable machine, as the global outbreak would attest. The "everybody else does it" defense isn't particularly compelling, but it's all I've got.
It's times like this that I'm glad to be out of user support. This sort of crap always seemed to happen on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons. You wanna test your stress level, it's a great way to do it. I'd sometimes feel like the Lloyd Bridges character in Airplane! - "I sure picked a bad day to stop sniffing glue." Whatever else you can say about project work, my pager almost never goes off.
Comments have been successfully added. Thanks to Larry for letting me use his. I'm still planning on migrating to Moveable Type in the near term, so this system is not permanent, but what the heck.
I'm still not sure if I will eventually like or dislike comments. I've noticed that a few sites (file13 and Electrolite, to name two) have removed them. I don't know what I will get out of having them, but what I'm hoping for, in addition to the usual witty discourse, is to get a better feel for who actually reads this thing. I can tell from my referral log where people are coming from, but I have no idea who it is. From the Google searches that lead people to me, I apparently get a mix of folks who are looking for nekkid pictures and Poincare's Conjecture, a unique demographic if ever there was one. Clearly, more study is needed, hence the comments.
So tell me what you think. I do appreciate it.
Houston energy trader Dynegy saw its stock plummet and its bond ratings lowered when lower earnings and an SEC review of a natural gas deal. They're also taking a $300 million charge related to their communications business.
Reading the story, it doesn't look like anything shady. But let's face it, after Enron and Compaq, the last thing we need here is another big company going boom.
Anyone can be a patent holder! It's true! Take a look at Patent 6,368,227 and see for yourself. Maybe there's something to all those intonements about there being nothing left to invent.
Via James Randi. Be sure to scroll down the page and read Mark Evanier's hilarious story about a Psychic Reading Gone Wrong at the opening of the immortal movie Flesh Gordon.
Via File13 we get this amusing story about how a professional comedian called attendees of the American Teleservices convention in their hotel rooms early in the morning. Now don't you wish you'd thought of that?
Via Patrick at Electrolite comes this story of the last survivor of Gallipoli, the terrible 1915 World War I battle fought by Australian and Turkish soldiers in Suvla Bay. Take a listen to the Eric Bogle song that commemorates it, The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, read the lyrics, and remember.
A redevelopment project for Houston's north side is looking at a rail line from Intercontinental Airport to Buffalo Bayou, just north of downtown. If I could take a train to Intercontinental, I'd never drive there again. Let's keep an eye on this.
Today's strange entry from the referral log: a Google search for "coffee drinker demographic". I think maybe you meant to look here.
Ginger writes about protest music from the 80s. I've been thinking about this subject recently. We think of the 60s as an era of political/activist music, mostly inspired by the Vietnam War and all the social upheaval surrounding it. The 80s, as Ginger rightly notes, was also a period where a lot of this music was recorded. That was largely inspired by Cold War fears and uncertainty.
The 70s and 90s, on the other hand, are more known for music that was fluffy (disco, boy bands) and self-indulgent (art rock, grunge). The 90s, of course, were a reasonably carefree decade, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ending with the longest economic boom in our history, so it's easy to see why pop music might have reflected that. The 70s weren't exactly a period of peace and prosperity, with the culmination of Vietnam, Watergate, oil embargoes, double digit inflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis, yet for the most part pop music paid little attention.
So I've been wondering - With the current decade off to a lousy start, and with all of the anger, fear, and anxiety we've gone through since September 11, will we see a resurgence in political music? I'll state up front that I am an Old Fogey who listens to Music That Caters to My Demographic (ie, classic rock and 80s stuff) because I think that most music produced today sucks. As such, there may be plenty of political music on the airwaves right now that I'm overlooking, and if so I'm sure someone will correct me. Assuming that's not the case, do you think the next wave of Bob Dylans and Tracy Chapmans are warming up, or do you think it'll continue to be All Britney All The Time?
In better and more relevant news, Playboy is in town to shoot the Women of Enron feature, scheduled for the August issue. Apparently, a couple of local homes will be used as backdrops for some of the shoots. Must really suck to have a pad like that.
There's talk of a launch party for the issue at the Mercury Room, which was also used as a photo shoot backdrop. Make your travel plans accordingly.
President Bush has finally found a foreign dignitary who will feel comfortable in hot, dusty, middle-of-nowhere Crawford as he sets to host Saudi prince Abdullah. According to this story in the Chron, which gets a two Claude rating for its headline, the Saudis plan to tell Dubya that his support of Israel hurts their feelings. I think this is the wrong President to be looking for a group hug, guys. Just FYI.
Meanwhile, Colin Powell displays his skill for diplomatic understatement:
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was absent from the Houston session but will attend the Crawford talks, said Wednesday he plans to discuss recent Saudi sponsorship of a $100 million telethon to aid relatives of Palestinian "martyrs.""There are some troubling aspects as to how that telethon money would be distributed," Powell said, referring to reports that money raised by the Saudis was being funneled to Hamas, a Palestinian group that has claimed responsibility for attacks on Israel.
Yes, raising money to promote a group that wants to kill us is a tad bit disquieting, isn't it. I'm sure Powell furrowed his brow while giving that statement.
There's also a link to Chairman Arafat's latest condemnation of terrorism. I feel reassured now, don't you?
Mark Evanier points to this page which has the slot machine payout at various Vegas casinos. My statement of 97% payout was too much. All I can say is that I have seen such advertisements, but I haven't been to Vegas in about ten years, so perhaps things are different now. In any event, this page has other useful gambling info, so check it out. His overview of gambling is a must-read.
Would it surprise you to learn that the Enron subsidy Portland General bought life insurance policies on its employees and that 75% of the payouts were used as long-term compensation for managers, directors, and top officials? I didn't think so.
By the way, Houston Congressman Gene Green is sponsoring legislation to require companies to notify employees within 30 days if they take out a "dead peasant" policy on them. Seems fair to me. The article says that Green's ultimate goal is to eliminate this form of policy, on the grounds that in most states one must have an "insurable interest" to take one out. This is also fine by me.
One of those MasterCard commercials where they list the price of a bunch of things, followed by something that's "priceless". This one had the theme of a party weekend in New Orleans. One item was "Crawdaddy dinner for two, $63". First of all, the correct term is crawfish, also known as mudbugs. Second, anyone who spends $63 on a crawfish dinner for two is eating at a very expensive restaurant. Your basic crawfish boil, with new potatoes and corn is $4 a pound, and five pounds is more than enough for two hungry people. A fairly high-end crawfish etouffee is $12 to $15. New Orleans is a tourist town, so its prices are higher than Houston, but c'mon. No one I know would spend $63 on a crawfish dinner.
Saudi Aramco is having a job fair here in Houston, for those who might like to travel to Saudi Arabia and "become a part of the Saudi Aramco experience". The line forms to the left.
Salon gossip columnist Amy Reiter points to this, ah, interesting photo of LPGA golfer Cristie Kerr kissing a trophy she just won. All I can say is "Oh, my".
Mac Thomason pointed to this article in which a GOP candidate for Congress proposed taxing science fiction books as a means of funding NASA. Not only is it a stupid idea, it's very likely an unconstitutional one.
In the case of ARKANSAS WRITERS' PROJECT, INC. v. RAGLAND, 481 U.S. 221 (1987) 481 U.S. 221, Arkansas imposed sales tax on all general interest magazines but exempted newspapers and "religious, professional, trade, and sports journals and/or publications printed and published within this State". An Arkansas magazine publisher sued to get a refund on sales taxes, citing a previous case, MINNEAPOLIS STAR v. MINNESOTA COMM'R OF REV., 460 U.S. 575 (1983) 460 U.S. 575, in which a "use tax" on paper and ink was voided. The Supreme Court voided the Arkansas tax as well:
2. The Arkansas sales tax scheme that taxes general interest magazines, but exempts newspapers and religious, professional, trade, and sports journals, violates the First Amendment's freedom of the press guarantee. Pp. 227-234.(a) Even though there is no evidence of an improper censorial motive, the Arkansas tax burdens rights protected by the First Amendment by discriminating against a small group of magazines, including appellant's, which are the only magazines that pay the tax. Such selective taxation is one of the types of discrimination identified in Minneapolis Star. Indeed, its use here is even more disturbing than in that case because the Arkansas statute requires official scrutiny of publications' content as the basis for imposing a tax. This is incompatible with the First Amendment, whose requirements are not avoided merely because the statute does not burden the expression of particular views expressed by specific magazines, and exempts other members of the media that might publish discussions of the various subjects contained in appellant's magazine. Pp. 227-231.
(b) Appellee has not satisfied its heavy burden of showing that its discriminatory tax scheme is necessary to serve a compelling state interest and is narrowly drawn to achieve that end. The State's general interest in raising revenue does not justify selective imposition of the sales tax on some magazines and not others, based solely on their content, since revenues could be raised simply by taxing businesses generally. Furthermore, appellee's assertion that the magazine exemption serves the state interest of encouraging "fledgling" publishers is not persuasive, since the exemption is not narrowly tailored to achieve that end. To the contrary, the exemption is both overinclusive and underinclusive in that it exempts the enumerated types of magazines regardless of whether they are "fledgling" or are lucrative and well established, while making general interest magazines and struggling specialty magazines on other subjects ineligible for favorable tax treatment. Moreover, although the asserted state need to "foster communication" might support a blanket exemption of the press from the sales tax, it cannot justify selective taxation of certain publishers. Pp. 231-232.
As they say, I Am Not A Lawyer, so take my word with an appropriate level of skepticism. My layman's reading of this sure makes me think that a tax on specific content wouldn't stand up to judicial review, however.
I was alerted to this by Kyle Giacco, a member of the Round Table mailing list, which Ginger recently mentioned. It's for reasons like this that I consider blogging and mailing lists to be complementary activities. I occasionally mention stuff I see on blogs (like this) to the list, and I occasionally point to links I've gotten from the list. Here, I forwarded something which led to an interesting thread and eventually to this post. If this were a corporate merger, we'd call that "synergy".
The cast of a Conroe production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is moving forward on plans to stage it elsewhere. Co-authors Peter Masterson and Larry L. King have given them public support, with Masterson promising to make a personal appearance if the show goes on.
I recently pointed to an article in our old hometown paper about my parents' exploits as bagel testers for the Portland Columbian. Yesterday the article ran in the paper, featuring a couple of quotes from my mom. Not too surprisingly, the panel of ex-New Yorkers didn't much care for the Northwestern bagels. You tell 'em, Mom!
Jeff Jarvis has been on an anti-lottery rant recently, challenging economists to prove that lotteries are not actually depressing the economy.
Calculate the total amount of income -- income at its most spendable -- drained from the economy; how much spending power did we lose? Then look at where the winnings went; what did it build? Then look at the net income to the government for all this and who paid and how much it cost to generate that income. Then answer the question: Are we better off?
Today, Max Power posted a justification for lotteries. Max correctly notes that the utility of a lottery ticket is as much its entertainment value as its chance of winning big bucks. He does a good job of deconstructing the arguments that lotteries are in "poor taste", and sums up as follows:
Maybe a better objection against government lotteries is that they're such a piss-poor ripoff. You don't see government lotteries in Nevada, because the state is full of casinos, and any casino that offered odds as bad as a state lottery would be out of business in a week. The government-enforced monopoly on gambling is what makes lotteries feasible. But the Jarvis objection to state lotteries would presumably go tenfold for legalized gambling.
I've come to the conclusion that this is indeed the best objection to lotteries, and it's a compelling one at that. I don't think people fully appreciate just how bad the odds are in a state lottery. Frankly, I think your odds would be better in a back-alley craps game. Let me crunch some numbers so you can see what I mean.
In Texas, the main biweekly game is Lotto Texas. As it says on the cited page, just pick six numbers correctly out of 54 - in any order! - and you win the millions.
Well. There are 18,595,558,800 possible ways to choose six numbers from 54. This is simply derived by noting that there are 54 ways of choosing the first number, 53 ways of choosing the second, and so on down to 49 ways of choosing the sixth. Multiply these six numbers together for the result.
Of course, as noted, the order doesn't matter. The arithmetic above considers 1-2-3-4-5-6 and 6-5-4-3-2-1 to be two different combinations whereas Lotto Texas treats them as identical. To remove the duplicates, multiply one through six to count up all the possible orderings (you'll get 720) and divide that out from the total. In the end, there are 25,827,165 winning combinations, so your odds of winning are one in 25,827,165.
A corollary of this is that the jackpot has to be at least that much for your one-dollar ticket to have an expected value equal to its cost. That's a fancy way of saying that the top prize must be that high for the odds to be favorable to you, assuming of course that no one else picks the same numbers as you.
How about the lower prizes? Lotto Texas pays off for picking three, four, or five numbers correctly as well. You can see their payout chart here. Let's compute those odds and compare them to the appropriate prize amounts.
As always, there are the same 18,595,558,800 possible ways to choose six numbers from 54. The goal is to figure out how many ways there are to win. For the five-numbers-right case, we'll start by assuming that the first number chosen is not one of yours and the rest are. There are 48 choices for the "wrong" number (if 6 out of 54 are "right", then 48 out of 54 are "wrong"). After that there are 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2 choices for each of the "right" ones. That's 48 times 720, which is 34,560.
Now notice that there are a total of six ways to order where the wrong number is chosen. What's more, there are always 48 "wrong" choices no matter when it is picked. For instance, if one of your numbers is picked on Ball #1, there are 53 balls remaining but only 5 "right" ones, so there are still 48 "wrong" ones. The upshot of this is that there are six ways to order where the wrong ball is picked, and the total number of ways to pick the five "right" balls is the same each time. That means we can multiply the 34,560 ways by 6 to get 207,360. Divide that by 18,595,558,800 and we see that your odds of hitting five numbers are a pinch better than one in 90,000.
Looking at that payout chart, you'd usually collect between $2000 and $4000 for getting five right. To put that in perspective, that's about like someone offering you even money to roll a twelve at the craps table. If you know anyone willing to take that bet, send 'em my way. I've got some dot-com stocks in my portfolio that need a new home.
It's not much better for the four-number case. There are 15 ways to order where the two wrong numbers are chosen. Therer are 48 x 47 ways to pick the two wrong numbers, and 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 ways to choose the right ones. That's 12,182,400 winning combinations, or odds of one in 1526. With the average payout of a bit more than $100, it's like being given three-to-one odds to roll a twelve in craps. Better than the five-numbers case, but still abysmal.
Finally, the three-number payout. There are 20 ways to order the three wrong numbers, 48 x 47 x 46 ways to pick them, and 6 x 5 x 4 ways to pick the three right numbers. That's 249,062,400 winning combinations, or odds of roughly one in 75. The payout here is a sure $5, so it's on par with the four-number case.
The reason this is such a sucker bet is that it's designed to make money for the state. If you look at the Texas Lottery audited financial statement for 2000 and 2001, you'll see that the payout for all games (including scratch-off games and other, smaller pick'em games) was a bit more than 55 cents on the dollar. By comparison, some Vegas casinos brag that their slots pay out 97 cents on the dollar. Of course, Vegas casinos are in business to make money, too. These high-payout slots are designed to give lots of moderate rewards, and the constant ka-ching of coins falling into their trays is to entice people to come inside to play the real games, where the casino has a bigger edge.
There's an irony here in the belief that state lottery money goes towards education funding, a notion that Max Power dispatches. Of course, if our society were doing a truly sufficient job of educating everyone, far fewer people would be tempted by lotteries. Maybe it's just as well that the lottery revenue goes into the general fund.
So where do I stand on the morality of lotteries? I dislike lotteries and never play them. I don't like the idea of the state separating people from their money in such a tawdry fashion, but who am I to say how people should spend their salaries? I do my best to convince people why they shouldn't play, and the rest is up to them.
Max didn't specifically address Jeff's question about whether lotteries are an especially inefficient means of redistributing wealth. I'm not a Professional Economist, but I'll note that the aforementioned financial statements shows that Texas sold $2.8 billion worth of tickets each of the last two years and cleared about $800 million in revenue after prizes and overhead. We're facing a large budget shortfall this year, due to a slower economy and a property tax cut courtesy of our previous governor. If we had that extra $2 billion per year, it'd make a sizeable dent in the deficit. I daresay those who spend the most on lottery tickets will feel the greatest effect of whatever measures the state implements to acheive its constitutionally-mandated balanced budget. Make of that highly nonscientific observation what you will.
Kyle Still has his say about John McCain's theoretical candidacy in 2004. He also points to Mark Byron's interesting number crunching on this subject. Byron concludes that McCain would be better off running in 2008 when he likely won't have to take on a popular incumbent. I say that if McCain wants to run for President, it's got to be in 2004. The reason why is here in his biography:
The son and grandson of prominent Navy admirals, John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936.
John McCain will be 72 in 2008. That's three years older than Ronald Reagan was in 1980. If he wants to be President, I don't think he'll want to wait that long. I agree with Mickey Kaus in that 2004 is likely McCain's last chance to run.
Mac Thomason pokes fun at the proposed new ABC drama about the CDC.
At this rate, they're going to run out of government agencies and departments pretty soon.2003: Customs
2004: D.O.E.
2005: Postmaster!
2006: Joe Collins, FDA Inspector
2007: SSA Theatre
2008: Price Supports
I hate to break it to you, Mac, but there have already been two made-for-TV movies about heroic US Postal Inspectors. I give you The Inspectors and its cleverly titled sequel Inspectors 2: A Shred of Evidence, both starring Louis Gossett. My local post office has a poster for Inspectors 2 in it, which I may have to liberate one of these days as it is sure to be a hot item on Ebay in the future.
I'm still waiting for a show about a spunky young female paralegal who specializes in immigration law...
Real Men Don't Get Intimidated is the name of this excellent Bruce Feirstein piece which was written in rebuttal to Maureen Dowd's silly column that claimed men were intimidated by powerful women. It's smart and funny and well worth your time to read. Link via Matthew Yglesias.
I think I've not done a good job of expressing my disagreement with Avedon Carol regarding Cynthia McKinney. I'm going to take one more shot, then I'm going to move on to other things.
I have no problem with the idea of looking into the question of what we knew and when we knew it regarding 9/11. We certainly need to know how we can do better in the future. My point is that Cynthia McKinney's way of calling for investigations is absolutely the wrong way to do it. The "public inquiries" into train wrecks and plane crashes that McKinney cites are useful to our understanding of their cause because they are undertaken in an atmosphere of impartiality. A serious call for honest inquiry here would not have included speculation about profit motives. McKinney is pointing a finger first and calling for an investigation second. For that reason, I have no faith that she wants to get at the truth of the matter and not to go on a mission to find dirt to throw. It's no different than any of the investigations of the Clintons that Dan Burton was always calling for. I find that sort of thing distasteful no matter who the target is.
It turns out, by the way, that Rep. McKinney has had nasty things to say about Al Gore as well. I therefore retract my assertion that she would not have attacked Al Gore in the same fashion were he President instead. I stand by my underlying point that McKinney's statement was meant to get attention rather than to make a serious attempt at fact finding.
From my inbox, an article from 2000 about how slum children in India learned to use computers and surf the Web without any formal instruction. It's an interesting read and has some implications for how we could be doing a better job of it.
Tim Fleck of the Houston Press thinks the main beneficiary of the state Democrats' "dream team" ticket will be John Sharp, the Anglo candidate for Lt. Governor. I think turnout is going to decide these races, and I think the Democrats would be wise to ensure that Tony Sanchez, Ron Kirk, and John Sharp spend a lot of time extolling the other guys to make sure that the blacks and Hispanics they draw out to the voting booth don't just vote for their guy and to make sure that whites don't feel excluded.
One possible side benefit of these Texas races is that the national GOP is going to have to expend resources they weren't expecting in Texas. The Senate race in particular will draw a bunch of outside money, as the Republicans sure don't want to lose a seat in Dubya's home state. That may help Dems in contested races elsewhere.
San Francisco and Washington, DC have modified their bids to resemble that of Houston. Mostly, that means consolidating event locations so everything is closer to the central site. 2012 is a long way off and I may feel differently as it gets nearer if Houston should win the bid, but for now I support the efforts to being the Games here for the simple reason that it would necessitate building more rail. I'm in favor of anything that does that.
A blogger named Atrios disagrees with me regarding Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Avedon Carol's defense of her. First, he defends the congresswoman's statement:
What the [WaPo] article does, and what most people have done, is conflate two entirely separate points she makes, which she herself likely didn't mean to do. She says two basic things:
a) The administration likely knew something beforehand.
and
b) There are people who are close to the administration that stand to profit from the war on Terra.
It is only if you link these two things that her comments were potentially over the line. At least, over the line if she has no further evidence. In doing this, it makes it sound as if McKinney was saying the administration caused or let 9/11 happen in order to reap great profit. Though her radio remarks could be interpreted this way by a reasonable person, I admit, she didn't actually say it. And, her written statement makes quite clear what she meant.
I agree, her written statement does indeed make it quite clear what she meant. Let's go to the videotape, in particular this paragraph:
I am not aware of any evidence showing that President Bush or members of his administration have personally profited from the attacks of 9-11. A complete investigation might reveal that to be the case. For example, it is known that President Bush's father, through the Carlyle Group had -- at the time of the attacks -- joint business interests with the bin Laden construction company and many defense industry holdings, the stocks of which, have soared since September 11.
McKinney is not saying that "people close to the administration stand to profit" from the war. She's suggesting that the President himself as well as members of his administration may be profiting from it. Putting aside the point that Presidents put their assets into a blind trust, the question of financial gain for those close to the administration is unavoidable and irrelevant. Of course people close to the administration will likely profit from the war effort. So what? What would you have had Bush do on September 12, say something like "Well, I'd really like to go after these guys for murdering three thousand of our citizens, but gosh darn it, my old frat brothers are a bit too heavily invested in Boeing and Morton Thiokol, so I guess we'll have to try sanctions for awhile until they can rebalance their portfolios"? Maybe McKinney would like to push for a Constitutional amendment that bars federal officials and everyone they know from holding defense-related stocks, as any military action would be subject to this line of questioning otherwise.
Given that, the subtext of McKinney's charge is that the administration went to war against our enemies because of the profit potential for themselves and their buddies. The rightness of our actions in destroying the Taliban and al Qaeda has nothing whatsoever to do with who might make a buck off of it. To suggest otherwise isn't just wrong, it's obscene. And of course, given that there were advance indicators of the attack, it's a short hop from McKinney's words to the wacky world of conspiracy theory, where Bush et al took action to ensure the attack so they could reap the bounty afterwards. Are you begininng to see why some people took exception to Rep. McKinney's statement?
It's also damaging to the cause of those Democrats who would like to challenge President Bush and his policies more forcefully. Now all the GOP has to do when someone questions the wisdom of attacking Iraq or the mushiness of Bush's Middle East stance is to point at McKinney to discredit what's being said. I made the same point about Samizdata when Dale Amon cited the loopy tax protester group We the People as part of his case against the US income tax. Aligning yourself with wackos and conspiracy theories does more damage to your credibility than good. McKinney has done no favors to legitimate dissent against Bush, which is why Democrats and liberals have rightly distanced themselves from her.
Atrios also thinks that government investigation is more likely to get to the truth of what we knew and when we knew it regarding the 9/11 attack. I actually do think that congressional committees will have a place, but I don't have a lot of faith in their abilities to do the initial legwork. I think they serve better when they're prosecutors rather than researchers. Let's face it: Any revelations about incompetance or interference prior to 9/11 are going to be deeply embarrassing to one party if not both. It's not in the interests of Congress to delve too deeply into that until they are forced to by facts brought to light by outsiders.
Finally, Atrios needs to read my point about Al Gore's oil connections more closely. I did not say that since Gore has oil money all of Bush's actions where oil is involved are excused from scrutiny. What I said was that Cynthia McKinney would not have tried to paint Al Gore as a cynical profiteer in the war on terror if he were president instead of Bush. McKinney was throwing red meat to her base by making unfounded statements about a boogeyman, just as Jerry Falwell used to do when he pitched a videotape which claimed that Bill Clinton was a murderer. It serves no purpose other than to score political points and to distract from the real issues.
The signal-to-noise ratio in politics is dismal enough already. We don't need Cynthia McKinney or anyone else making it worse.
Seven years ago today, a bomb exploded outside the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. It killed 168 people, many of whom were children at the building's day care center, and injured hundreds more. At the time, it was the deadliest terrorist attack on Americal soil.
Like September 11, the attack was carried out by a small group of people with careful planning and low-tech equipment. Like September 11, the murderous rage, insane hatred, and utter indifference to human life of the attackers remains incomprehensible to us. Like September 11, the attack was intended as an attack on all of America, with the hope of eventually destroying America's government and society. Like September 11, the attackers failed to acheive this goal.
When news of the attack was first aired, many people thought it was the work of Middle Eastern terrorists. It wasn't. The attackers were American, part of a larger movement of militias, posses, freemen, sovereign citizens, and white supremacists who believed that the American "Zionist-Occupied Government" was dominated by Israel and that the "white race" was threatened by extinction due to racial mixing. Though this movement has declined in force, and though we don't hear much about them today because our attention has been focused outside our borders, they remain a threat. Many of them have expressed regret that they were not part of the September 11 attack, and are using that attack to recruit new members.
Seven years ago today, one hundred and sixty eight people who were going about their everyday lives were wiped off the planet by evil. We must never forget the events of that day and the people who were forever affected by them.
The building in which I work has several large monitors on the walls of the computer operations center. Most of the time these monitors display status and alert information about our many servers. On April 19, 1995, they were tuned to broadcast TV. We watched the scenes of devastation in slack-jawed horror. The only other time that these monitors have been used as televisions was September 11. I cannot tell you how much I hope and pray that they will never be used as televisions again.
In the aftermath of September 11, some Oklahoma City survivors spoke of feeling ignored, as vast charitable donations flowed into New York. Such emotions are surely understandable, but we must make sure they are never necessary. We owe them our remembrance.
There is an official memorial in Oklahoma City to remember its lost brothers and sisters. The Federal Highway Administration remembers the 11 employees it lost on that awful day. You can read a chronology of the events here, and you can read about our homegrown terrorists here. Take a look at this photograph and never ever forget April 19.
We will never forget. We must never forget.
The show may go on after all, as the cast of the now-cancelled showing of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas is thinking about finding another place to perform. Break a leg, y'all!
Meanwhile, the Houston area's most famous Stupid White Man, Tom DeLay, is claiming that his remarks about Baylor and Texas A&M were taken out of context.
Last week, DeLay was tape recorded without his knowledge telling 300 people at Pearland's First Baptist Church not to send their children to Baylor or A&M. A male questioner had expressed frustration that major Texas universities do not teach creationism, and asked DeLay for advice.The Chronicle published Delay's comments Thursday, prompting him to issue the following statement:
"My response to a concerned parent has created a misunderstanding. I was giving advice for the specific type of education they were seeking for their child. Let me make it Texas clear: I've been a longtime supporter of Baylor and Texas A&M. My daughter went to A&M and in Congress I've worked hard to help fund these two prestigious universities. I apologize for any misunderstandings my comments may have caused."
DeLay also urged the churchgoers to pressure state legislators to "throw the PC out and bring God in" at Texas public universities.
DeLay may have finally picked on a group that can fight back hard enough to damage him - Aggies. They have very little sense of humor about their school and its traditions, and they have long memories. Of course, they also tend not to vote Democratic, but maybe enough of them will sit out this year's election to give DeLay concern. It's nice to think about, anyway.
Oh, and if you read the whole article, you'll see that DeLay once attended Baylor but was kicked out for "extracurricular activities" and "too vigorous a social life." Naturally, he denies that this had anything to do with the animosity of his remarks.
Read about my dad the bagel tester, as reported to our old hometown newspaper.
Now that that's out of my system, I'll say something nice about Avedon Carol's weblog, which is certainly worthy of praise. This piece about why David Brock is credible is right on. I've had the same thought all along but never formulated it. Go read what she says, and read the rest of The Sideshow while you're at it.
One more reason to believe David Brock: David Horowitz is calling him a liar. (OK, that's a cheap shot...)
Avedon Carol has been kind enough to mention my blog a couple of times lately, so I regret that my first mention of her blog is a disagreement. Regarding Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and her much-criticized remarks about what the government knew or may have known about the September 11 attacks, Carol quotes from McKinney's statement and then says
The thing is, they are all legitimate questions. The suggestion of impropriety in the Bush family relationship to the Carlyle Group and the bin Ladens is certainly more compelling than the one that still obsesses the Republicans about the Rich pardon, but there shouldn't even be questions asked? The warnings from before September 11 are well known and were known at the time even to observant members of the public. The FBI itself has complained about being actively prevented both before and after 9/11 from investigating the bin Ladens - including Osama. And George Bush's arrogance toward other world leaders, both before the tragedy at the WTC and since then, has not exactly ameliorated world tension. He appears to be throwing away the victory in Afghanistan and to have exacerbated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.I've heard it said that McKinney is just blaming "us" for the attacks on 9/11, but I seem to have missed the part where she says that. As far as I can see, it's pretty generally accepted that bad guys arranged for those planes to fly into those buildings, and those bad guys aren't "us" - there is no need to keep reiterating this. But if there was incompetence and neglect in Washington that left us unnecessarily vulnerable to actions against us by others (or even natural disasters), then we need to know about it and make sure it is corrected. The absence of an investigation is itself more neglect. In fact, it is astonishing that there is anyone who is resisting such an investigation - unless, of course, they actually have something to hide. If you don't believe me, just ask your insurance company how they feel about you leaving your car unattended with the doors open.
Once again: The people who planned and executed the 9/11 attacks are the ones who are responsible for the attacks. But if the administration's neglect resulted in leaving us more vulnerable and unable to prevent the attacks or the amount of damage they did, we need to know - and if it's true, than it's not "us" who is responsible for that neglect, it's them. I'm not George Bush and I take no responsibility for his arrogance and incompetence. After all, we didn't even elect this guy.
I've read McKinney's statement, and I've read the WaPo article which contains a few juicier quotes. I agree with Carol that McKinney asks some good questions, but I don't think a government investigation is needed to answer them. I'm quite sure there are plenty of reporters and writers who are looking into all of these questions and more, and should any of them find something damning to the Bush presidency, I've no doubt it will the top story for weeks. If there's one thing we did learn from the Enron investigation, it's that Congressional committees are more about facetime for the panel chairs than getting to the bottom of things. Our press corps is frequently and justly maligned here in blogland, but there are a lot of pros working out there, and an actual smoking gun would be a hell of a coup for one of them.
Beyond that, it's the way McKinney framed her charges. It's not that she's blaming "us", it's that she's charging deliberate negligence on the part of the administration for the purpose of enriching their cronies in the oil and defense industries. That's a pretty damn serious charge to make, and it's also a pretty damn disingenuous one. McKinney is playing the game of throwing out a lot of disjointed facts and suggesting that there must be some kind of intent behind them. It's not quite as sleazy as the Clinton Death List, assuming that all of the things she alleges are in fact true, but it's first cousin to it. There is such a thing as coincidence in this world, and what's more there is such a thing as simple incompetence. There are likely many reasons why intelligence about the 9/11 attacks didn't get to the right people, and why those people didn't take action when they did know. I'm willing to bet a fair amount that most of those reasons boil down to the old saw about never attributing to malevolence that which can be ascribed to stupidity.
(Again, this is not to say that the reasons shouldn't be looked into and the guilty parties, such as they are, held responsible. If some State Department flunky buried a memo or impeded the FBI, that person should be fired. If the problem goes higher than that, I have faith it will come out and the political price will be paid.)
And I said that McKinney's charge was disingenuous. I say that because I'm also willing to bet that Al Gore, who is no stranger to oil money himself, has friends and cronies in the same businesses that are profiting right now from the war and related buildup in defense spending. Politics is full of rich people, and many of them have a few questionable income sources in their pasts and presents. We here on the left-hand side of the equation frequently point out that the GOP loves to score points off Democratic misdeeds while overlooking the same peccadilloes when a fellow Republican is involved, so I have to ask: Would McKinney be saying the same thing if 9/11 had gone down as it did with Al Gore in the White House? I kinda doubt it.
If Cynthia McKinney had merely spoken about the need to understand all that we could about how we can prevent another 9/11, no one would be up in arms about it. That's partly because no one would have heard what she said, since that wouldn't have been particularly newsworthy. McKinney knew how to get attention, and she got it. The fact that she had something worthwhile to say doesn't mitigate the slimy way in which she said it.
Britney Spears. Mariah Carey. Coming soon, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.
And movie executives blame piracy for profit worries? Who in their right minds would pay any price for this crap?
The director and almost all of the cast of a Conroe production of "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" have quit after the theater's board of directors demanded that they trim naughty words out of the script. There were also concerns that some of the girls cast as employees of the infamous Chicken Ranch were under 18.
The board met several times after rehearsals were under way and began questioning the propriety of the profanity and the casting of several teen-age girls as prostitutes, [director David Fernachak] said.Fernachak added that rumors had been swirling in the community that he intended to shock the community with a pornographic production.
[...]
He said board members were satisfied when they learned that the parents of actors younger than 18 were at the auditions and were aware of the musical's content.
Board members insisted that the profanity -- the ultimate four-letter word was used three times in the script and g--damn 27 times -- be removed from the script, Fernachak said.
Fernachak agreed to remove the four-letter word, [Ric] Sadler [who portrays Sheriff Earl Dodd] said.
"He had even come up with some places where we could soften" the other profanity, he said.
But Fernachak refused to remove all of them, arguing that they were central to the understanding of the play.
According to the play, the Chicken Ranch closed after an outcry over the sheriff's use of profanity toward Zindler while the cameras were rolling.
"In a scene following that, other characters talk about how nobody would have cared how we had a whorehouse, but the one thing you can't do is say bad words on television," Fernachak said.
Conroe is a mostly rural community about fifty miles north of Houston. There is hope for its future, though:
The board issued Fernachak an ultimatum at a Monday meeting: Delete the words or resign as director, he said.Fernachak chose to resign and [theater board president Don] Hampton agreed to break the news to the cast at Tuesday's meeting.
Learning of the decision, some of the teen-age cast members called Hampton's attention to the name of the play and how its title advertised its adult theme.
"What were you people thinking?" he recalled one teen asking.
Texas has bluenosed head-up-the-ass people in it. Lord have mercy on our souls.
Tom DeLay thinks that Baylor and Texas A&M are too liberal, and that parents who want to protect their young'uns from the pernicious effects of premarital sex and evolution should look elsewhere.
At Friday's gathering, DeLay said his daughter attended A&M and was appalled to discover that students have sex in dormitories."Texas A&M used to be a conservative university," he said. "It's lost all of its conservatism, and it's renounced its traditions. It's really sad. My daughter went there, you know, she had horrible experiences with coed dorms and guys who spent the weekends in the rooms with girls, and all this kind of stuff went on there. It's just unbelievable."
Well, y'know, some old-time Aggies think the school started on its road to perdition when they were forced to accept girls in the first place. After all, students couldn't have sex in the dorms if there werre no girls to have sex with, right? They'd have to do it like Clayton Williams did and go down to Mexico to get "serviced" by hookers.
I'm pretty sure than the current and former students at A&M (there are no Aggie alumni; you're an Aggie for life, so when you graduate you become a former student) will be surprised to hear that A&M has renounced its traditions. But I suppose if Tom DeLay says so it must be true.
And if you do visit that den of iniquity in College Station, do drop by the George Bush Presidential Library and tell them what DeLay says. I'm sure once they understand what an unsuitable location they're in they'll decide to move.
Salon has an article about how women who wear glasses are indeed sexy. I couldn't agree more. I got glasses when I was ten. A couple of years after I got them, I noticed a framed, autographed photo of 1979 Playboy Playmate Missy Cleveland (this is a 1999 picture) in my opthamologist's office. She was wearing glasses. I've been hooked ever since.
Here's some advice from a married guy to women: Men don't like just one look. Lots of us find the kind of women who don't appear on magazine covers sexy. Don't assume that a given guy does or does not like a particular feature. Ask. You might be surprised. And whatever you do, never ever pay attention to women who have no clue about men but write about them anyway as if they do.
I note that Ginger is also happy to see this Salonarticle. You tell 'em, Ginger!
After reading my post below, Duncan Fitzgerald emailed me to point me to this ad by The National Review for "the National Review Post-Election Mexican Cruise", where you can rub elbows and consume fruity rum drinks with the likes of Kenneth Starr, Bill Buckley, Dan Quayle and Kate O'Beirne. I'm trying real hard not to make a cheap joke about Ann Coulter and Wicked Weasel bikinis, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop myself.
Matt Welch points to an interview with his buddy Tim Blair about life, the bloggyverse, and everything. Blair's a funny guy, and the interview is largely amusing, but Blair seems to suffer the same tired sense of victimization that many conservatives wrap themselves in:
John Hawkins: Why do you think that so many of the popular political websites on the web are conservative?Tim Blair: Because conservatives are starved for conservative content and analysis in the general media. Lefties always point out Rush and O’Reilly and Will in the US and the few con pundits who exist in Australia, but these people are massively outweighed by the liberal bias of the non-pundit mainstream press. And, for that matter, by the non-con punditry as well. I don’t see the government helping fund a right-wing NPR.
Remember those red-lensed glasses with cardboard frames you'd get as a kid that let you see "secret messages"? The secret messages were hidden under red ink, so putting the special glasses on allowed you to filter out the red ink and see what was there. I swear, conservatives must wear some kind of special glasses that filters out "conservative content and analysis in the general media" and makes them see nothing but NPR and Maureen Dowd. It doesn't matter that all evidence suggests that there's plenty of conservative voices in the newspapers' op-ed pages, conservatives will complain that they're starved for conservative content.
When Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North et al started dominating talk radio, it was because conservatives are starved for conservative content and analysis in the general media.
When FoxNews launched with its "we report, you decide" slogan and started killing CNN in the ratings, it was because conservatives are starved for conservative content and analysis in the general media.
When right-wing publications like the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard created popular web sites, it was because conservatives are starved for conservative content and analysis in the general media.
Now that blogland is awash in highly-trafficked conservative and libertarian sites, including Blair's, it's because conservatives are starved for conservative content and analysis in the general media.
Hey, Blair. Is there any point at which you guys are gonna start eating and stop whining?
Wal-Mart is praised far and wide, including in blogdom, for its innovation, its selection, its low prices, and its shareholder value. Indeed, Wal-Mart is now ranked first in the Fortune 500 for all of these reasons.
Turns out Wal-Mart is innovative in less obvious ways as well. Did you know that Wal-Mart routinely took out life insurance policies on low-level employees? The families of these employees often didn't know that. Wal-Mart is now being sued by these families to collect some of those benefits. As of January, according to this story, Wal-Mart no longer buys this kind of insurance. You can read that as a simple economic decision. Or you can believe that Wal-Mart recognized that it was in a hole and, being the smart company that it is, decided to obey the First Law of Holes: When you find yourself in one, stop digging.
This morning on NPR's Morning Edition, I heard a story about how a British mathematician claims to have solved one of math's great unanswered questions, the Poincare Conjecture. You can listen to the story here. They spoke to Arthur Jaffe of the Clay Mathematics Institute, which is offering a $1 million prize for each of seven great unsolved problems, about this problem and its possible solution.
Like many great unsolved problems, the Poincare Conjecture can be broken down into a bunch of smaller problems. With some of these conjectures, if one solves a smaller, more focused question, one gets the desired larger result. That was the case with the so-called Last Theorem of Fermat (it can now be properly called a Theorem since it has been proven; before that it was merely a conjecture), which was solved by Andrew Wiles by proving the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.
Poincare's Conjecture differs from Fermat's in that most of it has already been solved. The Conjecture has to do with classifying geometric things known as "manifolds". One talks about manifolds of a certain number of dimensions. For example, a two-dimensional sphere is just what you think it is - something that looks like a beach ball. The object itself is represented in three dimensions, which is how we see it, but is called a two-dimensional object because its surface is similar to the two-dimensional plane. (Mathematicians say that any neighborhood on the two-dimensional sphere is like the two-dimensional plane. This should be apparent to you because as far as you can see, the surface of the Earth on which you now sit looks flat.)
Anyway, the Conjecture attempts to state when two manifolds are mathematically the same thing and when they are not. A two-dimensional sphere is mathematically the same thing as a two-dimensional box because you can transform one to the other without poking holes or tearing the surface. You can't change a beach ball into an inner tube by squishing or stretching or flattening it, so they're considered different mathematical structures. Of course, mathematicians need more exactness than this, so Poincare developed a way of identifying each manifold with a "group", which is a set of numbers and an operation (such as addition) that follows certain rules. (That's an oversimplification, but it'll do.) The benefit here is that it's easier mathematically to deal with groups. Two manifolds are said to be "isomorphic", which is a fancy way of saying "identical", if they have the same "fundamental group" associated with them.
Poincare himself proved the Conjecture for all two-dimensional manifolds. They are spheres (beach balls), toruses (inner tubes) and projective planes, which is what you get when you take a Moebius strip and glue its edges together. Unlike its other two-dimensional siblings, you cannot represent the projective plane in three dimensions, so I can't give you a better picture of what it looks like than that.
The Conjecture is known to be true in all dimensions other than three. Six dimensions and higher were fairly easy to solve. Five dimensions and four dimensions were harder to solve and were accomplished fairly recently, in 1960 by Stephen Smale and in 1980 by Michael Freedman (for which he won a MacArthur Genius Grant), respectively.
The three-dimensional case is the really tricky one. One thing that makes it tricky is that there's more than one kind of "fundamental group" which can be associated with manifolds. In the three-dimensional case, Poincare found an object which has one kind of fundamental group identical to the three-dimensional sphere, but not another. For whatever the reason, the three-dimensional case is more complex than that of other dimensions.
You may ask what the point of all this is. Why do we care about these silly things? I can (as Albert Jaffe did) point out that an awful lot of abstract math has turned out to have applications in unexpected places, like particle physics and cryptography, but I believe there is value in learning for its own sake. The mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote a book called A Mathematician's Apology in which he expressed regret for not doing anything useful but was proud that he added to the world's knowledge. Turns out Hardy spoke too soon - his work in number theory has had wide application in cryptography. So who can say where Poincare may eventually lead us?
As a math major and math geek (as if you couldn't tell), I'm always happy to hear about my favorite subject in the news. Math doesn't get a lot of mainstream respect. I'd love to see a TV show make math look sexy in the way CSI glamorizes science, but even I'm hard-pressed to imagine how it could be done. For now, I'll settle for an NPR segment on one of the subject's enduring challenges, and the thought that some now-obscure professor may be on his way to claiming a million bucks.
joins the cast of 24 for the remaining five episodes of the season. Strangely, he's been cast as a psycho bad guy. Whoda thunk of that? Anyway, the article failes to mention Hopper's previous experience with star Kiefer Sutherland, though considering that it was the movie Flashback, maybe that was a kindness.
It's not new information, but until I read today's Chron I didn't know that Land Commissioner and Republican candidate for Lt. Governor David Dewhurst worked for the CIA in Bolivia in the early 1970s. There were some bad things going on down there in that era, such as the US-backed coup that overthrew the Bolivian government in 1971, but no evidence that Dewhurst was involved in any of them. He says he was basically a "glorified clerk who read newspapers and wrote reports to send back to CIA headquarters". The CIA, for its part, is typically helpful:
A Houston Chronicle Freedom of Information request to the CIA seeking information on Dewhurst's service received a reply that the agency could neither confirm nor deny that he had ever worked there.
Considering that Dewhurst and his Democratic opponent John Sharp combine to have less charisma than Norman Mineta on antihistamines, we should be thankful for stories like this. It's a long time until November.
The domino chain of closings fell in its prescribed order, and so without an excess of hubbub we are the proud owners of our new home. We managed to move everything yesterday without breaking anything (that we know of), and are slowly starting to figure out where everything goes. The first night here was a bit weird. After nearly five years in a house, there's a lot about it that one takes for granted. Now we're learning a new system without a manual or an instructor. It'll take some time to find a groove and fit into it.
Harry has been staying with Tiffany's sister since Saturday. Packing was traumatic enough. We get him back tomorrow. I think not having him around contributes to the feeling that this isn't quite right just yet. He had his favored places in the old house, such as the closet in the den, which was where he'd go to hide during thunderstorms. We've been trying to guess where he'll pick to hang out here.
All the utilities got switched over without apparent problem. The cable was hooked up today. Dealing with AOLTimeWarner of Borg is never a pleasant experience, but at least the damn thing is working. And just in time - there's (at long last) a new episode of Angel tonight. Woo hoo!
We're still missing a few things, and it'll be a long time before things like books get unpacked - we have a ton of books and a lot less bookshelf space here since the old house had builtins. But we're moving along and feeling a sense of accomplishment. And on the odd chance that we miss packing things, we get to give my inlaws some quid for their pro quo this weekend, as they are about to embark on a renovation of their downstairs. The fun just never ends around here.
Well, tomorrow is moving day. The house is almost completely packed now - boxes as far as the eye can see. You really don't appreciate how much crap you actually have until you remove all of it from its normal storage spaces. And since we're moving into a larger house, that means we get to delude ourselves into believing we need more stuff. It's times like this when I think that the anti-consumerism yobbos may be onto something.
Tiffany's mom helped us with a lot of the packing. She is a fearsome sight to behold when she's in the zone. It's a good thing we took Harry over to Tiffany's sister's place for the duration or we might have discovered him in a box on Monday.
We took a break this afternoon to go on the Houston Heights Spring Home and Garden Tour. The Houston Heights is adjacent to my neighborhood and takes its role as a historic neighborhood seriously. It's a great antidote to the soulless lotbuster townhomes now dominating Montrose and Neartown as well as generic gated-community suburbia. There are photos of the featured homes on the Home Tour page. The last one shown, built in the 1890s, is the only one of its kind left in Houston and is the most interesting house I've ever seen, from its turret-roof library to its aviary and chicken coop. You can almost picture a Victorian-era staff bustling about keeping the house running.
The thing I like to look at the most when I tour a house is books. This is partly because I'm a nosey parker and partly because, as an aesthetic retard, furnishings and wall treatments mean little to me. It's the occupants' taste in reading material that gives me a picture of who they are. And of course, especially for home-tour-type houses, I can usually feel a bit smug about how at least I don't have as much useless crap as whoever these folks are.
So anyway, I'll be shutting down the computer sometime after posting this, which means no updates until Monday at the soonest. I figure if I can find my toothbrush and a change of clothes tomorrow night we'll have done all right. Wish us luck.
Well, I wasn't given a cute nickname by the warblogger watch guy. I wasn't outed as a profiteer by this guy. I suppose having a tip jar would increase my odds of getting money from this page. I figure it's like how buying a lottery ticket increases your odds of winning the jackpot - in each case, the difference is pretty minimal. And I didn't get spammed by this guy in his quest to build an audience the easy way. (Here's a free clue for the future: Add permalinks.) Some days you just feel like you're wielding a crayon on the padded walls, y'know?
Oh well. I still get love from Google whenever someone wants to see Jaime Sale or Andy Fastow naked. And surely my post about Koleen Brooks in Playboy will send a few more of the Innernut's finest my way. So I guess it all evens out.
Craig writes about Israeli doctors giving a life saving bone marrow transplant to a Palestinian boy, asks if we could imagine the reverse, and quotes an on-point passage from The Fellowship of the Rings.
Reading the cited story reminded me of a bit from Studs Terkel's wonderful book The Good War, an oral history of World War II. One person Terkel spoke to was an American army doctor. The doctor told a story of treating a young Nazi soldier's injuries. During the treatment, the soldier started to cry. When asked why he was crying, the soldier said "You're an American. I've been trying to kill you, and here you are taking care of me." The doctor then told the soldier that he was a Jew.
The Israeli doctor who will perform the transplant operation, Reuven Or, said the doctors at Hadassah treat patients of all religions."For us a human being is the most important thing,'' he said. We don't have any criteria.'' In a place where thousands have died because of their differences, hatreds and history, Or said, "We'll fight all day to save one life.''
That's what it's all about, folks.
Charles Dodgson disputes Josh Marshall's take on the Joshua Green story about how much Team Bush has spent on polling. Says Dodgson
It's not as if I've been any particular friend of the Bush administration, but complaining that it's "cynical" for them to even hire a pollster is naive. And complaining about remarks from Bush administration officials, including Bush himself, which soft-pedal and downplay the use of polls (even though they do in fact use them) isn't much better; to some extent, they're just acknowledging the difference Green pointed out.
He also agrees with Mickey Kaus that Bush's use of polling to spin unpopular ideas is not cynical but arguably more righteous than Bill Clinton's use of polling to determine a course of action. You can certainly make the case that Bush is using polls to figure out how best to convince the country that his ideas are optimal, rather than using them to find easy pickings. I personally don't buy it, but it's a defensible position.
But I don't understand why Dodgson says he doesn't understand why Bush's use of polling is cynical. The problem is not that polling, whether for Bushian or Clintonian means, is inherently a Bad Thing. The problem is that Team Bush made a big deal on the campaign trail about being different from Clinton, and one of the ways in which they are different is that they eschew polls. As author Green wrote
[It's] a strategy that has served Bush extremely well since he first launched his campaign for president---the myth that his administration doesn't use polling. As Bush endlessly insisted on the campaign trail, he governs "based upon principle and not polls and focus groups."
They made a big deal about not using polls when in fact they do use polls and go to some trouble to hide that fact. What would you call that if not cynical?
UPDATE: Dodgson responds to me, saying that Team Bush is using polls to spin and not govern. I think we may just be arguing semantics here. Perhaps what they've done is merely weaselly and not actually cynical. I'll say again that polling is not a Bad Thing, for the reasons Dodgson cites. I just think that claiming to not use polls when in fact you do - for spin or for policy - is a Bad Thing.
I forgot to mention yesterday that Rob and his wife Jenn, whom I met at Wednesday's Houston bloggers happy hour, are neighbors of mine here in the Heights. The Heights-area Axis of Left-Leaning Bloggers grows ever stronger! Take a moment and check out Rob and Katie and all of Houston's fine bloggers.
I've written several times about the plan to widen I-10, known as the Katy Freeway, here in Houston. This has attracted the attention of some folks who agree with me that there are quite a few questions which should be addressed before we rush off to pave vast stretches of west Houston. In addition to discussing issues such as the impact of added pollution and noise, the fact that rail was never adequately explored, the potential for flooding, and the likely bottleneck at the junction of I-10 and Loop 610, they will be exploring the possibility of litigation. The meeting is Wednesday, April 24. If you're in Houston and would like to know more, drop me a note and I'll pass along the full details.
Former stripper and ousted mayor of Georgetown, Coloradao Koleen Brooks announced that she has posed for Playboy. An article and photos will appear on Playboy.com today. Says Ms. Brooks "Depending on how many hits I get will determine my fee", so be sure to drop by and help a gal who's down on her luck.
BTW, the photo accompanying this article is not particularly flattering. Here's a better one. Relax, it's work-safe.
PETA has released its top ten list of vegetarian friendly ballparks, and our own Ballpark Formerly Known As Enron Field made the Top Ten. PETA especially lauds our hometown boys for offering veggie dogs, a culinary treat that I must say I've not sampled, nor am I likely to. Apparently I'm not alone here. As Chron columnist and fast-food junkie Ken Hoffman notes, the veggie dogs aren't exactly selling like hotcakes, vegetarian or otherwise.
On average, Astros Field sells about 10,000 all-beef hot dogs per game.Veggie dogs?
"So far, we've had six regular-season games and two exhibition games," says Marty Price, top dog for Astros concessions. "On average, and I'm estimating high here, we sell about ...
"Five veggie dogs per game."
Another Houston blogmeet last night in which pizza was consumed, beer was imbibed, and a good time was had by all. Quite a few people came this time, and it looks like we will have regular get-togethers. Take a look at the participants here. I daresay this will become a regular event.
In the spirit of cross-country blog siblinghood, I'll direct you to the Big Apple Blog Bash, hosted by Asparagirl and Orchid. Sorry I can't be there, ladies. Have a beer for us Houstonians.
The San Francisco law firm of Morrison and Foerster, known as MoFo, is suing a spamhaus for violations of California's antispam laws.
In its fight, MoFo is suing a Silicon Valley e-mail marketing firm called Etracks. Mr Jacobs says while it wasn't the only company sending unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE), it was one of the biggest offenders and more importantly it's based in California.[...]
In its suit, MoFo says Etracks broke California's anti-spam laws by sending unwanted e-mail and advertising a range of items without the required advertising label and using the company's mail server to distribute the e-mails.
MoFo also claims a legally mandated free phone number or valid return e-mail service to request removal from the marketer's list was missing.
The response from the spammer tells you all you need to know about why the current setup doesn't work:
The lawyers for Etracks did not return calls to BBC News Online but its attorney Kenneth Wilson told the San Francisco Chronicle that Etracks only uses e-mail lists provided by clients who assert the recipients have opted to receive its messages or have an existing relationship.On its website Etracks says it is a member of the Direct Marketing Association, an 85-year-old organisation which sets out ethical guidelines to its 5,000 members on best practice.
The organisation distances itself from spamming.
"No DMA member can send spam and the DMA agrees that people should be able to ask to get off mailing lists and stay off," says DMA's vice president of ethics and consumer affairs, Pat Faley.
To that end the DMA has designed the "e-mail preference service" where anyone can submit their e-mail address to be removed from all members' lists, says Ms Faley.
The problem, she says, is that it has no control over anyone who is not a member of DMA.
First, the Etracks lawyer is (I know this may shock you) very likely lying. Just about every piece of spam I see - and in the course of my job I see quite a bit - contains a claim that the recipient is being graced with the mail because he or she signed up to receive it. If that were true, then my friend Andrea would never receive messages telling her how she could increase her penis size, and my coworker Steve would not get advertisements for breast enhancement.
Opt-in mailing is the right answer, as long as there's enforcement behind it. Opt-in means that if you want this stuff, you go sign up for it. Do nothing, and you get nothing. Historically, the DMA has opposed legislation to make opt-in the standard, as it would reduce the potential audience of their advertisements. However, it appears that they have changed their tune and now agree that "spam [is] sending a commercial e-mail to someone with whom a marketer has not had any prior business relationship and as being sent to someone who has not asked for the e-mail". Way to go, DMA!
Anyway, this is why weasel spammers like Etracks claim that everyone who gets their spam must have asked for it in the first place. The burden of proof should be on the sender, since the act of sending unsolicited email imposes the cost on the ISPs and the recipients. I join those who have praised MoFo for taking this action. As one of their partners said, "I have been practising for over 15 years and I have never done anything as a lawyer that has been this popular."
Jonathan Gewirtz posts a note from a friend of his who has a decidedly pessimistic view of how things have gone so far in Afghanistan. I don't know if he's right or wrong - let me rephrase that, I sure as hell hope he's wrong - but it's worth your time to read and consider.
If you were disgusted by the sicko anti-Semitic cartoons in the Arab News that Little Green Footballs linked to recently but didn't know how to respond, take a peek at File13 and see how a pro handles it. Really, you should check him out every day for a perspective on the news you won't see anywhere else. One tip: Never consume beverages while reading this site. You have been warned.
The ongoing saga of who really won the Texas Academic Decathlon ended yesterday when the state Supreme Court told the lower courts to butt out, thus denying Pasadena Dobie a chance to challenge victorious Lubbock. Apparently, at the state match in March, one of the Dobie students' tests was misplaced and he was given a zero score. His test was later found, and the Dobie faction claimed that had it been graded at the time, it would have been enough to put them over the top. Lubbock countered by saying that some of their tests had not been graded accurately, and if they had been Lubbock would be the champ regardless. Both school districts sued in their home counties, with each getting the result they wanted upheld. After several rounds in court, with Dobie pushing for a complete retest and Lubbock demanding that the original certified result stand, the Supremes stepped in and called a halt, giving the victory to Lubbock by a TKO.
Is it just me, or does anyone else see Bush v. Gore parallels in this? Look at it this way, Dobie - now you know how the world really works. Better luck next time.
Last night I had the rather amusing experience of being called by a pollster. The young woman on the other end of the phone said she was calling on behalf of "Luntz Research". "Frank Luntz?" I said. "The Republican pollster?" She said she didn't know. Well, you didn't have to know anything about who the pollster was to have some idea of how they were hoping you'd answer the questions.
The survey started off with questions about the state of health care in America. If there was any doubt as to what angle the questions were coming from, it was erased when I was asked the question "Which of the following groups would you say are the most untrustworthy?" The choices were, and I swear I'm not making this up "Lawyers, litigators, plaintiff's attorneys, and politicians". Another question was "Who do you trust more, doctors or lawyers?" After I reeled off a list of family members who are lawyers (father, sister-in-law, father-in-law, uncle, various cousins), I very emphatically chose the latter.
Eventually, the questions focused on the prescription drug OxyContin. I was previously unaware that there's a controversy over this drug, as it is an opioid and thus rather addictive. The questions focused on whether a drug "that brings great relief to millions of people" should be banned because "a few hundred teenagers have died from abusing it". Some of the questions were truly outrageous, asking if the pharmaceutical executives should be arrested because of this. I believe in individual responsibility, and I understand risk/reward ratios, so I sided with those who want to keep the drug available. Many of the questions put the choice at total freedom for the drug manufacturers to innovate and make our lives better without interference versus the safety of drug-abusing teenagers. There was no middle ground. I refused to answer several questions because of that.
After ten minutes of that, the questions shifted to intellectual property. How did I feel about downloading music and movies for free off the Internet? Once again, the bias of the questions was obvious - brave and righteous content producers versus amoral copyright infringers. There was some lip service paid to the artists, but not too much. When the questions got around to enforcing copyright protection laws so that content producers could continue to enhance our lives, I went off on a rant about the CDBTPA, fair use, and bad business models. Unfortunately, I don't think the surveyor had any space on her answer sheet for that.
It's been a long time since I've been polled like that. It happened to me once in college. I forget what it was about, but it took forever and wasn't nearly as entertaining as last night. For that first poll, when they got around to asking about my demographic information, I told them I was a 27-year-old unemployed Jewish Eskimo automobile mechanic. I figured if they were going to waste my time, I might as well waste theirs. I didn't feel that last night's experience was a waste of time, but I do feel as though many of the questions did a poor job of capturing how I really felt about the issues. (I wish now that I'd taken notes, but the conversation started while I was blogging and ended while I was eating dinner, and I just never thought about it.) Life is not a multiple-choice test, y'know? And don't forget the leading nature of many of the questions. How can you get good results when you blatantly color the choices? Well, I suppose it depends on what you consider "good results" to be.
This morning a coworker told me a story from his visit to one of our Dutch offices last week. The hotel he was at had a little nine-hole par-three golf course on it, with a bar next to it. He wandered into the bar one evening and started chatting with another English-speaking patron. The other fellow bought him a round, then it was my coworker's turn to buy one. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bunch of Euro coins (the beer was very reasonably priced at 2.5 Euros per glass). He was scanning his handful of coins when the other guy pointed to a particular coin and said "Get rid of that one first". This puzzled my coworker, so he asked why that particular coin had been singled out.
"That's a French Euro," the other guy said. "The other ones are Dutch Euros. Get rid of the French Euro first."
Forget all that navel-gazing crap. The real reason we blog is for the sheer thrill of discovering that you are the #2 result on Google for Green karaoke singing aliens.
It's official, Ron Kirk has defeated Victor Morales for the Senate nomination. It will be interesting to see how he does against John Cornyn this November. Are you paying attention, Jason Zengerle?
The still permalinkless Mickey Kaus takes a poke at Rick Berke for this article in which Berke says that Enron will be a big political issue for the Democrats. Snarks Kaus:
Does anyone, from the distant historical vantage point of two months later, think Enron will be a huge issue for the Democrats?
Emphasis Kaus'. Well, you may be right, Mickey, but I'll remind you of this story from today's news. At the least, it'll bring Enron back into the public consciousness for a few days, and who knows? Maybe David Duncan has a few juicy tidbits to tell in return for a soft sentence. As the Chron says
As part of his plea agreement [Duncan] will meet with investigators at their bidding to testify, review documents, provide documents and share any other information he has related to "knowledge of all criminal activities."
Like I say, you may well be right, but I'll wait and see how this ends before I agree.
Virginia Postrel has a recent column in the NYT about how a lack of land use restrictions leads to cheaper housing. I live in the capital of cheap and easy land, so I won't dispute the notion that making it easy to build makes is easy to buy. However, I think there's more to this story than Postrel's breezy overview. Here's the part of Postrel's piece that I object to:
The difference between the land prices is the implicit cost of all the local land-use controls, from zoning to the time it takes to get a permit. Some regulations simply raise the cost of building by slowing down the process. Others limit density, making it illegal to subdivide expensive land."If I look around me in Cambridge," Professor Glaeser explained, "there are a large number of $3 million houses on one-half of an acre. Cambridge is also filled with $1 million town houses on a 20th of an acre. If you're an enterprising developer, if you're not stymied by zoning regulations, you tear down the $3 million house, you use the half an acre, and you put up 10 town houses."
Presto: You've made $7 million, minus construction costs, and Cambridge has added nine units to meet the rising demand for housing. If land could be subdivided, that sort of process would happen whenever land prices became high.
But it cannot happen in Cambridge, or most other places in "blue America," because of land-use regulations. The result is soaring prices.
That's fine, of course, with people who already own their homes. "The overwhelming political story is that the majority of homeowners have absolutely no interest in there being affordable housing," Professor Glaeser noted. "The overwhelming reason that we have the web of zoning controls that we have is that local homeowners are powerful over their local areas, and they want to make their housing as expensive as possible."
There's an implicit assumption here that maximum housing on the available land is the most desireable end. The laws of supply and demand certainly say that more available housing means lower prices for all, and there's no question that that's generally a good thing. As I've written before, though, there are other issues involved in how much construction best belongs where, issues such as drainage (a highly nontrivial thing here in the Bayou City) and parking. The free market has no memory or concern for these things, but when ignored they can have a direct impact on everyone in the area, and that impact translates into an externally imposed cost, since after all the builders don't pay for your flood insurance.
And of course, also as I said last time, no restrictions on building may mean that someday you'll wake up to find that your new neighbor is a nasty concrete batch plant. Shouldn't homeowners have some kind of say in that matter?
There's also the fact that while fewer land use restrictions means lower housing prices overall, it doesn't mean that these lower prices are equally distributed throughout a given metro area. Right here in Houston we've seen a huge boom in the housing market in the neighborhoods near downtown. Prices have skyrocketed as builders have tripped over themselves to cram luxury townhomes on the smallest lots possible. Putting aside issues of what this sort of construction has done to the charm of these neighborhoods, it certainly hasn't done anything to make housing more affordable in the area. You used to be able to buy cheap property in Montrose or the Heights, but now even bulldozer bait goes for $100,000 or more. If you want cheap housing, you'd better aim for the outlying areas because it doesn't exist inside the Loop any more.
This has been no boon for the rental market, either. Ten years ago I shared a 3-1 duplex in Montrose, roughly 1400 square feet, for $750 a month. You'd be lucky to find a decent garage apartment in the same area for that price nowadays. Besides, with housing prices as strong as they are, hardly anyone rents anymore anyway. Why be a landlord when you can make a tasty profit selling?
My point is simply that while there's way more high-end housing now available near downtown, there's a lot less middle and low-end housing in the same area. It's not zero sum - there are quite a few more units available - but the housing boom has definitely not meant more affordable housing, at least not everywhere.
Finally, what's so wrong about homeowners controlling their local areas to "make their housing as expensive as possible"? Isn't this a weaselly way of saying to "protect their investment in their homes"? I bought my house where I did in part because I liked the look and feel of the neighborhood. I've happily signed petitions for deed and land-use restrictions in my subdivision precisely because I don't want a developer to come in and start building lotbuster townhomes all over the place. If I'd wanted to live in that kind of area, I could have, but I wanted an older neighborhood with a certain architectural style. Who gets to decide, me or the Chamber of Commerce? People pay a premium for neighborhoods like this one, and that's their choice, just as living in the low-price suburbs is a choice. How is this kind of choice any more restrictive than the one Postrel and her professors are advocating?
Via Kyle Still comes this request by Scott Rubush for tips on how to get out of jury duty. I have to say, I have no patience for this kind of whining. Whatever complaints one may have about our justice system, it's what we've got and it needs all of us to make it work. In my opinion, anyone who expends effort trying to weasel their way out of this infrequent commitment (this is the first time Rubush has been called) loses all right to bitch about stupid verdicts and pantywaisted plea bargains, just as anyone who can't be bothered to vote has no business moaning about lousy officeholders.
Reading the comments, I see that several people believe that being too "educated" will get you excluded. Well, at the risk of being immodest, that didn't work for me. I served on a jury for a DUI case. The voir dire was very basic - other than standard questions to ensure that potential jurors did not know any of the parties involved, there were a few questions about one's attitude towards drunk driving and the police. If either lawyer could have determined my educational pedigree from that, they're smarter than I am. Being smart didn't get me excluded, it got me elected jury foreman. Caveat emptor, Scott.
For further confirmation of this, I asked my father, who spent 14 years as a state Supreme Court justice in New York. He tells me
[J]urors today are better educated than those who made up the pool when that idea became the norm. In my experience, a jury of twelve in cases I tried were almost all college graduates or at the least had education beyond high school. As a matter of fact, I tried a case when 9 of the 12 had advanced degrees.
Another commenter says that being a "hang 'em high conservative" will get you off. Being an opinionated jerk of any political stripe will probably get you exlcuded, but again, there's no guarantee that the question of your core beliefs will arise. I suppose you could interrupt the voir dire proceedings by screaming "Death to the infidel! Viva Reagan!" or some such and hope that the judge doesn't feel like citing you for contempt. Personally, I'd rather maintain my dignity but hey, it's a free country. Dad agrees that showing an obvious bias will get you out. He also confirms that a judge could cite you for contempt if you're particularly egregious. He never did it himself, but he's a pretty laid-back guy. Do you feel lucky, Scott?
Believe it or not, what everyone generally wants is impartial jurors. Certainly, attorneys will use peremptory strikes to get a jury that they think is favorable to their side, but as with many things in life you just can't tell how it's going to turn out. Here's an interesting story on that subject from my dad:
I tried a Grand Larceny case. The defendant's fingerprints were found on the cash box. Open and shut if you believed the DA. Defense counsel left on the panel a 24 year veteran detective, [a] guy [who] looked like [Don] Zimmer. Anyway, after the case was put to the jury and we waited hours for a verdict, the jury came back and acquitted the defendant. Intrigued, I spoke to the cop and asked him about the deliberations. He said he didn't say a word until they asked for his opinion. He told the jury the only issue they had to determine was when did the fingerprint get on the box. If it was as the DA claimed, during the taking, or as the defense claimed it was before he separated from his wife (they were living with the cash box owner then) the case was easy to decide. Good choice for the defendant since he needed a cop on the jury who was an investigator; good choice for the DA because he wanted someone who had worked these cases before.
So if a defense attorney would allow a 24-year veteran detective on a jury, maybe one would allow a "hang 'em high conservative" as well. Unless, of course, you think it's a sure thing that no one would believe that such a person is capable of judging facts in a fair and reasoned manner.
I did come across one pretty good strategy for getting out of jury duty, which is to profess a belief that juries have the inalienable right to ignore laws which they think are illegal. You have to scroll down on this page to see an example of this in action. Of course, the folks on this page honestly believe this is true, and the page in question is about how they can survive voir dire and get to serve on a panel. To each his own.
Finally, Scott, jury duty in Los Angeles is similar to jury duty in Houston in that it's a one trial term. Basically, you call in and see if they need you. They may never need you for the five day period, in which case you're done. If they call you in and you wind up not getting selected for any jury, you're done. Only if you're called for a jury selection that spans multiple days or if you actually get empanelled will you be there more than one day. You can postpone your service if it's inconvenient, and under some circumstances you can be excused. So quit griping already and do your civic duty.
Today's runoff day, when we finally see who gets the Democratic nomination to oppose John Cornyn for the Senate seat that Phil Gramm is vacating. Once again there are some problems with missing officials at polling places around Houston, on a day when turnout is expected to be higher than usual (which still means 8 percent for the Dems and 5 percent for the GOP).
The Senate race took a few unexpected late turns, as Tony Sanchez quietly endorsed Ron Kirk yesterday. More unusual was a charge that the GOP is attempting to influence the runoff:
Meanwhile, state Democratic Party Chairwoman Molly Beth Malcolm accused Texas Republicans of trying to sabotage the Kirk-Morales runoff.Malcolm said that since Sunday afternoon, thousands of automated phone calls have been placed to Democratic primary voters in several parts of the state blasting Kirk for being a "paid lobbyist for corporate special interests," including tobacco giant Philip Morris.
Before he was elected mayor of Dallas, Kirk was a lawyer-lobbyist and Philip Morris was one of his firm's clients. He continues to draw a salary from the law firm while campaigning for the Senate.
The same calls praised Morales and urged voters to challenge the "Austin bosses" and encourage Morales to "keep fighting for the little guy." The calls, which didn't identify their source, didn't specifically ask for votes for the schoolteacher.
Malcolm said Republicans were trying to suppress the vote for Kirk because they believe he would be a stronger candidate than Morales against the GOP Senate nominee, state Attorney General John Cornyn.
"This is a classic Republican dirty trick," she said.
Texas Republican Party spokesman Ted Royer said the state party wasn't behind the calls.
"This is another Democrat conspiracy theory with no basis in fact," he said.
If this charge is true - and even I need more than Molly Beth Malcolm's word for it - it's interesting to think that the GOP might be worried about Ron Kirk. They've dominated state politics since 1994. Are they afraid they might lose some control this year, or are they just taking no chances? Perhaps we'll find out.
So former Enron executives are getting sued left and right by defrauded stockholders. They're likely going to lose many of these lawsuits. Do you feel a bit sorry for them because they could lose their homes and fortunes? Please. This is Texas. Texas law and some good lawyers will keep them in swag. Read it and weep.
The editorial writers at the Chron can't seem to understand why the Sacagawea dollar coin has been a flop, much like the Susan B. Anthony coin was years ago. It's no mystery to me, y'all. Why carry heavy coins in your pocket where they can fall out when you can carry nice thin dollar bills in your wallet? Vending machines have bill readers in them nowadays and most toll roads have some form of EZPass electronic payment system, so for the most part there's no real need for dollar coins. I understand the government's economic reasons for preferring coins, but I'll take a greenback any old day.
Guess I'm blogrolling this morning...From War Liberal comes this story about a group of scientists in Arizona who are campaigning for laws to help keep the skies dark at night. Excess light from the city of Tucson is playing havoc with the observatories in the nearby mountains.
The most comprehensive study of light pollution found that it affects 99 percent of the population in the United States.It also found that two-thirds of all people in the country live in places where they can no longer discern our own galaxy, the Milky Way, with the naked eye.
I'm a big-city boy. I grew up in New York City and I live in Houston. The smallest city I've ever lived in was San Antonio while I was in college. The first time I ever got a good look at a dark sky was when I took a trip with the Trinity baseball team to Kerrville (a small town about 60 miles west of San Antonio and the home of Kinky Friedman) for an afternoon doubleheader against Schreiner University. It was night by the time the games were over, and I still remember my amazement at how utterly dark it was. I had never experienced such darkness - there's no time in New York where you can't see outside, no place where you can hide from the city's ambient light. Here in Houston on a clear night I can count all the stars that are visible. On a murky night the Orion Constellation is about all you can see. In Kerrville that night I finally understood why ancient civilizations spent so much time looking at the sky. It was magic.
The folks at the nearby George Observatory are also pushing for a responsible outdoor lighting bill, which is working its way through the state Lege at this time. As Mac says, if the opposition is Clear Channel, who pollutes our highways with billboards as they pollute the airways with sucky radio, then there must be some merit to this.
Via Mark Evanier comes this excellent link about Matt Frondorf, an engineer who drove from New York City to San Francisco with a camera facing out the passenger-side window. He connected the odometer to the shutter release so that the camera would take a picture every mile. He started at the Statue of Liberty and wound up at the Golden Gate Bridge. Read his story and see a slide show of the pictures along with a map showing where he was when it was taken. It's way cool.
To further demonstrate that Norah Vincent had no idea what she was talking about when she claimed that "nearly every big-city newspaper in the country" serves up a "bowdlerized opus of [left-wing] ideals" on a daily basis, we have this interesting story, courtesy of Oliver Willis. Turns out that the various companies who syndicate columnists to the newspapers have a fairly balanced stable of liberals and conservatives, with a slight tilt to the conservatives.
"Conservative columnists are a bit more popular," agreed Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of WPWG, which has four liberal, three conservative, and eight moderate or hard-to-pigeonhole Op-Ed columnists. He said one reason why conservatives tend to sell better is that conservative publishers, especially at smaller papers, often influence editorial-page editors' column buys.
Imagine that. A free-market solution giving the customers what they want. Ever hear of such a thing, Norah?
We're not talking about exactly the same thing here, since Norah singled out "big-city" newspapers, and Alan Shearer above talks about "smaller papers". As I mentioned last time, big city folks have plenty of options as well. I'm pointing this out to counter the claim that readers in the Bush-loving heartlands are stuck with a drumbeat of monolithic liberalism. It just ain't so.
On a side note, to Evelyn Palmeri, who wrote in to Virginia Postrel to complain that victimhood is not something the Right engages in but "is a wholly owned subsidiary of the left", I have a free clue for you: When saying that you don't love victimhood, it's best not to claim victim status in the same paragraph. It weakens your point, y'know?
BTW, Virginia, if it makes you feel better, some boys like bossy girls. Just FYI.
We're eight days away from closing. We expect to take possession two days early, on Saturday the 13th, so we can move in. Our buyer is selling his house to someone who's selling theirs, so there's a four-link daisy chain of closings all scheduled for the 15th. We need to be out so our buyer can move in.
So that means we've been packing. We've been packing like banshees, and there's still a ton to do. We cadge boxes from wherever we can - family, friends, the office - and bring them home to fill and stack on top of other boxes. A couple of rooms are essentially done, but the master suite is untouched. We still have to live here for a week, after all.
I'm not sure if Harry is aware of what's happening. He survived the move into this house several years ago, shortly after I'd gotten him. I'm sure the chaos is upsetting to his usual routine, but beyond that I can't tell. I know when I first walk him from the new house he's going to make a beeline here, but after that he should be OK. He adjusts to things fairly well.
I just know I'll be glad when it's over. Unpacking is never as bad as packing. We should be in this house for a good long time, which suits me fine. My dad used to say that his next move would be to the cemetary - that was well before he and my mom moved from New York to Portland, Oregon. I know exactly what he meant.
Two articles in today's Chron which serve to remind us why we bother to vote. The first is about the runoff in the Democratic primary for Senate between Ron Kirk and Victor Morales. Both candidates are out trying to get supporters to the polls and to woo Anglo voters.
"White voters decide this race," said University of Houston political science professor Richard Murray. "And this time, I think they will go with Kirk."Murray and other analysts are quick to add a caveat: Anglo voters will decide the race only if enough of them go to the polls.
"If whites don't go to the polls Tuesday, that could change everything," Murray said.
Kirk, who has Ken Bentsen's endorsement, may benefit from a runoff in Congressional District 25, Bentsen's old seat. Morales may benefit from a few hotly contested races in primarily Hispanic counties. Given that the turnout in runoffs always sucks - I won't be surprised if it's in the 10% range - every last vote is going to help.
The other article concerns the State Board of Education and how religious conservatives have caused infighting among the state GOP, in part due to their willingness to challenge GOP incumbents whom they consider to be insufficiently conservative. In this context, that means "occasionally votes with Democrats", a sin which leads to the label "liberal" and some nasty politics. Compromise is not in these folks' vocabulary.
So in this climate where, as Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff says "not one person in 100,000 can tell who their board member is", ideologues with a dedicated voting bloc behind them can thrive. Religious conservative Board members have caused such a ruckus that the state Legislature has restricted their powers more than once.
Until the mid-1980s, social conservatives led by textbook critics Mel and Norma Gabler largely confined themselves to monitoring state textbooks and keeping out references to evolution. Their influence was checked when the Legislature abolished the elected board and appointed moderates to a new one.But after four years, voters chose to return to an elected board, which in 1990 voted for the first time to adopt textbooks that taught evolution.
The social conservatives' efforts to regain control of the school board date from 1992, with the election of Miller and former board member Bob Offutt, R-San Antonio.
The far right won four more seats in 1994 and began opposing the education plans of then-Gov. George W. Bush.
They said the plans were insufficiently conservative, and two of them campaigned against Bush when he ran for president.
They also resumed their inspection of textbooks, objecting to such things as a photograph of a woman carrying a briefcase. They argued that women in the workplace undermined family values.
The objections caused many publishers to stop offering textbooks to Texas.
The Legislature in 1995 moved to end squabbling on the board by reducing its power, including its power over textbooks. The board could reject a textbook only for factual error, physical defects or failure to follow state policy.
This last move by the Lege did not deter the conservative members, who now claim that points of ideological difference are actually factual errors.
I attended a lecture that the Gablers gave back when I was in college. The scary thing about them, next to their fanatical devotion to their cause, which is plenty scary, is that they come across as reasonable people with a measured grievance. Well, that's the initial impression, but eventually it's pretty clear that they're not quite from the same plane of reality as the rest of us. Still, their fame and longevity are a testament to how much can be accomplished by singleminded people in pursuit of an obscure cause.
It's easy to blow off low-profile elections. I'm as guilty as anyone - I have no idea off the top of my head who my district Board member is. I'm glad for the reminder of what happens when I'm not paying attention.
An interesting article about a professor at Texas Southern University and his quest to transcribe and preserve sprituals. I had no idea that Antonin Dvorak played a role in the history of this music. Check it out.
Blood banks are going to have a tougher time getting donors as new rules prohibit donations from people who have spent enough time in Europe and particularly the UK and thus are at risk of Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. In Houston, where so many oilpatch employees have done a rotation overseas, the local blood banks are really worried.
Tiffany did her doctorate at the University of Manchester, so she's been out of the game since this rule was announced. I'm midway through a two-year hiatus from donating, the result of having visited Korea last year, in particular because I went north of Seoul on a tour of one of the infiltration tunnels. This was particularly galling last September when I really wanted to give blood. So give if you can, since too many of us who want to can't.
Well, I dithered too long. YACCS is no longer taking new signups, so I can't use them to implement comments. Rats!
Once the move is over, I'm going to take a long, hard look at Movable Type, which has a comment system built into it. In the meantime, you'll have to give me feedback the old fashioned way.
Ron Kirk and Victor Morales traded barbs in a debate yesterday as early voting in the runoff ends today. Here's one opinion that Morales is in for a tougher time than 1996. I sure wish I knew what the score was so far, but at least I know my vote will be meaningful. Nothing like a low-turnout election to make you feel like you really do have a say in who gets elected.
A large number of the construction workers rebuilding the Pentagon are Hispanic immigrants. Just something to bear in mind when the subject comes up.
Austin Bay has an interesting thought in an op-ed piece in today's Chron. He notes the payouts to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers as well as the counterfeiting equipment that the IDF found, and asks the obvious question:
Of course, some of the cash must filter through the fingers of the Palestinian Authority. Israelis claim to have found a counterfeiting press in Ramallah -- one for faking shekels, not dollars. Shekels, however, are the local hard currency. One wonders if a few martyr families have been slipped plug nickels in exchange for a kamikaze child.
If it's ever happened, the irony would be amazing.
I just noticed that I've been added to Jay Zilber's Legion of Essential Pets. Thanks, Jay! As long as I'm not Scrappy Doo, I'll take this as an honor.
Lawrence Kaplan in The New Republic writes about the limits of America to influence events in the Mideast. One of the reasons for this is the fact that our current policy is contradictory.
But the principal reason the Bush administration can't intervene effectively in the crisis is that it can't make up its mind. Actually, it has two of them. And that's not likely to change. One, the "even-handed" approach, resides primarily at the State Department and is exemplified by Powell, Policy Planning Director Richard Haass, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns and his deputy David Satterfield, Ambassador to Israel David Kurtzer, and others. The other consists of the White House--where Cheney, his staff, and increasingly the president himself tout a line barely distinguishable from Sharon's--and the Pentagon, where officials like Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz have in the past taken an even harder line.Every time the administration wades into the conflict, this schizophrenia becomes more apparent. Just two weeks ago, for example, the Bush team was characterizing Israeli military operations as "not helpful" and professing sympathy for Arafat. Last week, however, the White House lent its support to Sharon's much more ambitious offensive into the West Bank. But State Department officials claim that Powell's words on the day the offensive was launched, which seemed to endorse Israel's strategy, weren't his own: Rather they bore the hallmarks of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their staffs, who weighed in on the substance of Powell's statement at the White House. In January the same factions split over the significance of the Iranian arms shipment to Arafat: Foggy Bottom publicly downplayed it, while Cheney and Rumsfeld proposed severing ties with the Palestinian leader. The two camps also repeatedly clashed over whether to dispatch Zinni to the region and over the content of Powell's November speech endorsing a Palestinian state.
Back in 2000, back when we were all happily ignorant of foreign policy because none of what happened out there in the non-American world actually affected any of us, Texas Governor and Republican Presidential Candidate George W. Bush dismissed concerns over his lack of knowledge about such things. He would, he assured us, be surrounded by lots of smart people whose job it is to know about foreign countries and stuff like that. They would guide him, so it didn't really matter if Bush doesn't know the name of some obscure Prime Minister off the top of his head, as some smartass reporter demonstrated.
This led Thomas Friedman to wonder what would happen if Bush's advisors ever disagreed with each other. What would he do then? Perhaps now we're finding out, and if so it ain't pretty.
In fairness, several folks, such as Steven den Beste and Craig Biggerstaff have characterized Team Bush's latest muddle as a strategic ploy to buy time. We'll see. And I also see that Matt Yglesias has weighed in on this as well, with a similar thesis as Kaplan.
Kathy Kinsley and InstaPundit praise Norah Vincent and her column about blogging for "getting it right". Maybe Vincent has actually read a few blogs, but I have to ask: What universe does she live in where the Left's "bowdlerized opus of ideals" are all you can find in the newspapers? Has she never heard of the Washington Times, the New York Post, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, or the Wall Street Journal, to name the more obvious counterexamples? Good grief.
Like Nick Denton and his inability to find "liberal" bloggers, Vincent needs to get out more. She seems to think that until blogging came along, poor helpless conservatives had no alternative to the icky left-wing opinions they were forced to read in their daily Tattler Tribunes. Oh, if only there were some conservative voices in the media - maybe a magazine, or a TV personality, or a radio talk show, anything. Thank God the Internet has freed us from our chains and given a place for our long-silenced voices to be heard!
Full credit goes to Virginia Postrel for seeing through Vincent's phoniness. Among other things, she points out that Alex Beam, the much-maligned Boston Globe writer whom Vincent piles on for his silly anti-blogging piece, has actually also written in praise of blogs. (It's interesting, btw, that Mickey Kaus, who was the recipient of Beam's praise in 1999 and again in the more recent piece, says that Beam "scores a few points". As with Postrel, Kaus is permalinkless, so scroll down to find the relevant bits.) She also detects a strong whiff of victim politics in Vincent's writing. Yes, Norah, poor you. Go have a beer with David Horowitz and talk about how oppressed you are. Maybe it'll make you feel more empowered.
An interesting essay by Owen Harries, an Australian scholar who seems to have a pretty good grasp of what America is and what it's about. His conclusion is a bit sobering:
Let me be clear: After the outrage of September 11, I do not believe that the United States could have reacted in any way other than as she did. But doing so will carry a cost. The long term significance of what happened some months ago may be that it forced America decisively along a course of action that-by emphasising her military dominance, by requiring her to use her vast power conspicuously, by making restraint and moderation virtually impossible, and by making unilateralism an increasing feature of American behavior-is bound to generate widespread and increased criticism and hostility towards her. That may turn out to be the real tragedy of September 11.
Link courtesy of a mailing list I'm on.
Mark Evanier weighs in with his opinion on the Speedy Gonzales/Cartoon Network brouhaha. (Scroll down, he only has one permalink per day it seems.) There's a bit more here than just a squeamish network caving in to Political Correctness, so if you're uncomfortable about being on the same side of an issue as Rush Limbaugh, maybe this will help to make you feel better.
Chron headline: Study OKs Cousins Having Kids. Sometimes, it's just too easy, y'know? I'm pretty sure I heard the writers at The Tonight Show cheer this morning. Let's move on.
No, wait. As is so often the case, Gary Farber has taken this seemingly fluffy story and mined it for something worthwhile. You rock, dude.
Lt. Governor Bill Ratliff has proposed a statewide property tax of $1.40 per $100 of a property's assessed value, which would then be distributed to districts on a per-pupil basis. The idea is to try to do something about the disparity in funding between rich and poor districts, which is $910 per pupil right now.
I'm not fully sure what I think about this just yet. I strongly suspect that this would raise my property taxes. I'm a good liberal and all that, but that doesn't mean I have to enjoy eating my vegetables. The usual cadre of anti-tax groups appear to be against it, so that means it probably will be effective. Neither Governor Goodhair or Tony Sanchez has issued a position yet.
I think this is probably a step in the right direction. It's awfully hard to discuss taxes in a rational manner anywhere, but here in Texas it's damn near impossible. Let's hope that the simplicity of Ratliff's proposal will at least make it reasonably immune to sound-bite attacks so we can critique it intelligently.
Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly makes his case that the NBA and the NCAA would both be better off if more star basketball players would stick around through their senior seasons. He makes a good point, but goes more than a bit overboard here:
The way it should be: Fans thrilled to the moves of Duke All-America Kobe Bryant, Michigan star Kevin Garnett and Kentucky hero Tracy McGrady.The way it is: Accountants thrilled to the moves of Bryant, Garnett and McGrady, all of whom jumped from high school to a paycheck in the pros.
Good grief, man, what are you saying here? That only those who profited from these guys' contracts have been thrilled by them? I'm pretty sure that Lakers fans have cheered for Kobe Bryant once or twice since he entered the NBA. I think I can even recall seeing these fellas on the tube a few times. Reilly has his blind spots, such as his vicious hatchet job on Barry Bonds last year, but he's usually more coherent than this.
Well, chin up, Ricky. As King Kaufman points out, "[s]tar players leaving big programs before their senior year have contributed to the rise, especially in the Tournament, of teams from so-called mid-major conferences, teams that tend to retain their stars, who aren't quite as shiny as those in the major conferences." This in turn leads to the upsets and Cinderella stories that, you know, help make the NCAA tournament exciting in the first place. Do you really want Duke to win the championship every year? I for one call that boring.
Further, I agree with Kaufman when he says that "the pendulum's going to swing back, and you're going to start seeing more top players stick around in college for longer". The NBA will eventually come to the realization that it's not in their best financial interests to do so much speculation on unproven kids in the draft. Market forces at work - whoda thunk it? Reilly himself provides evidence for this:
In the 2001 draft 54 underclassmen entered early, but only 36 were drafted, and five of those are already out of the league.
And sooner or later, some of these guys are going to conclude that maybe they ought to stay in school an extra year or two. Enlightened self-interest and all that.
The New Republic has an article about how blacks have had a hard time getting elected to high offices as Democrats lately. It focuses mostly on North Carolina state legislator Dan Blue, who is running an unfunded, unloved underdog campaign for the Senate nomination against Erskine Bowles. Along the way, author Jason Zengerle talks about the fortunes of black politicians at the national level since 1990, when political analyst William Schneider predicted we'll have a black on the national ticket sometime that decade.
Not only has that not happened, but by some measures black political power has actually regressed since Schneider's words. While black Democrats continue to win city, county, and down-ticket statewide offices, there are currently no African Americans in governor's mansions or in the U.S. Senate. And it doesn't look like that's going to change anytime soon. Just this week, Roland Burris--who in 1991 became Illinois's first black attorney general--lost that state's Democratic gubernatorial primary to a white challenger. And in New York, Carl McCall--a black Democrat who's served two terms as state comptroller--is in a fierce gubernatorial primary fight against Andrew Cuomo, who's never held elected office. In Louisiana, outgoing New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial unsuccessfully tried to amend his city's charter so he could serve a third term--reportedly because he knew that, despite two successful terms, his race meant he had little chance of winning higher office.
Um, Jason? Ever hear of Ron Kirk? I'm not saying he's going to win - he still has to defeat Victor Morales in the runoff, then he has the uphill battle against Attorney General John Cornyn to fight - but he's a viable candidate who's got the backing of the state party establishment as well as some national groups.
Look, I don't want to be like those people who point to one person's success as proof that a given group has overcome all of its obstacles. I'm just saying that overlooking Ron Kirk is sloppy. We'll see if November provides a refutation to Zengerle's thesis as well.
Do you feel guilty about eating too much fat? Have you ever tried a lowfat diet? Read this article and be astonished. I knew that there was a lot of pseudoscience in the weight loss and low-fat foods industries, but I had no idea it was that bad.
Karin and Larry note that Playgirl magazine is now looking to do a photo shoot on The Men of Enron. I think between this and the promised Playboy feature, we can safely say that the whole Enron thing has reached the end of its lifecycle. Can we get some new scandals over here, please? The audience is getting restless.
To answer Karin's question, why is it exploitation at all if adults choose to answer the call at either of these magazines? I don't see Hugh Hefner or Michelle Zipp walking around Houston looking to put a gun to any formerly-employed-at-Enron hotties' heads. As long as no false promises are made, I see no exploitation here, at least not in the usual pejorative sense.
Every time I read a report about the discovery of a planet or planetary system somewhere out there in space, I feel hope for our future. My hope is that one day not only will we know for sure that there are planets out there which are capable of supporting human life but that we will have the technology to travel to them. I believe that once we have accomplished this, we can solve the most pressing problems that our planet faces: We can tell people who don't want to share space with those who are not like them to go find some other place to live.
Yes, it is my fond wish that someday we can tell Islamists and Christian Reconstructionists and all other manner of religious extremists to pick a planet and set up shop on it. Someday I hope that anyone who believes that a certain class of people are, by accident of their birth or heritage, unfit to breathe the same air as they will be able to boldly go someplace where they can be sure that all of the cohabitants of their world meet their criteria for being allowed to live. Don't like blacks/whites/men/women/gays/Jews/capitalists/Freemasons/left-handed people/supermodels? Go start your own planet where such people aren't allowed, and take along everyone who agrees with you. I assure you, those of us who are left behind will not miss you.
Every day when I read about what this group is doing to that group and why these people hate those people, I look for a story that tells me that we're making progress on this dream. I hope I live to see it.
Jerry Falwell is trying to force the shutdown of jerryfalwell.com, which is a parody site that makes fun of him and challenges him to justify Bible verses that call for things like selling ones' daughters into slavery.
I'll pause for a moment so we can all feel sorry for him.
OK, moment's over. I have no sympathy. I find it interesting that a known xenophobe such as Falwell has no problems pursing this issue with the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. Maybe there's something to that One World Government after all!
Well, we managed to spend a whole week in Switzerland without causing them to rethink this whole entry-into-the-UN thing, so on that score alone I'd have to call the vacation a success. Seriously, we had a wonderfully relaxing time, and sometime between catching up on email, snail mail, voice mail, and moving houses I'll get the pictures developed and posted on our home page with a link here for those of you might be interested. In the meantime, here are a few thoughts to get my blogging muscles warmed up again:
- Man, you leave the country for a few days and the celebrities start dropping like dime bags at Marion Barry's campaign headquarters. Dudley Moore, Milton Berle, Billy Wilder, the Queen Mum - did I miss anybody?
- Did you know that Europe starts Daylight Savings Time a week before North America? That means we get to spring forward - and lose an hour's sleep - on two consecutive weekends.
- I swear, the one time we fail to put an emergency change of clothes into our carryon luggage is the time that our checked bags fail to make it to the connecting flight. Fortunately, British Airways fulfilled its promise to deliver them to us on the next flight, which was (also fortunately) later that same day.
- I hate the Big 12, so if they had to have two teams make it to the Final Four at least they both had the decency to lose there. Congrats to the Terps for their championship and to the Connecticut women for their perfect season.
- Baseball season! Woo hoo!!
- A week without Internet access is a loooooong time...
That's it for now. I'll be back to my usual posting routine tomorrow.