Civil unrest in Iran

In case you haven't already, it's definitely worth it to check out the Iran coverage over on Sullivan. Of course, all the videos, Tweets, etc. are very fragmentary and amount to unconfirmed reports, but you can still get a feel for the atmosphere over there. There's so much energy in those crowds, and confidence.

Now I'm just really curious as to what's going to happen. I don't know much about Iranian politics or anything. I don't know what the likely scenarios are as far as an end game for all this. But one thing that seems certain is that the protests won't just fade away. Something's gotta give. I guess at some point the generals will pick a winner...

Anyway, watch this haunting video. What you're hearing is the sound of thousands of people shouting slogans from their windows and rooftops:



How the hell does the Iranian government get out of this? They're in so deep..

NBA notes

• Ugh. What a terrible effort by the Lakers. And Kobe whining because he wasn't getting the calls he wanted wasn't very fun to watch, either.
  
• Apparently, Stan Van Gundy thinks there shouldn't be NBA games on Christmas, because it prevents the players from spending time with their family. I can't abide this whining. I mean, think of it: these people are paid millions of dollars to play friggin' basketball--the least they can do is work on a holiday. And guess what: there are millions of people who do work on Christmas Day, but who don't get millions of dollars for it. And what about the troops overseas? Not only are they working during Christmas, but they're away from home; and not only are they away from home, but they are in actual life-threatening danger; and not only are they in life threatening danger, but they're doing all this for practically nothing. So, spare me, Stan, and go play some fucking basketball. Lots of people would give their right arm to be in your position--you should just be thankful for that.
• How old do you have to be for it to be meaningful in any way that the Knicks are good? I'm always hearing about how "good for basketball" it is when the Knicks are good, and how classic and legendary and important Madison Square Garden is. But the Knicks never won a ring in the 90s when I was growing up--they were just standard issue Eastern Conference Jordan fodder. And in the 80s they didn't do anything either. And if you asked me to name a great Knick (besides Ewing, who wasn't even that earth-shatteringly great--nowhere near Olajuwan, for example)--I don't think I could. So I don't get what's so special about the Knicks.
  

Merry Christmas!

...and go Lakers! I hope it's a good game..

Decade in review: Shitty Events of the Aughts

The list is unranked. (Edit: on my machine the HTML is kind of wonky, such that the table is placed too low on the page. Apologies if you're seeing the same.)

No.	Shitty event	Cultural corollary	Explanation
1	Terrorists destroy the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/2001	Flag pins	It is worth noting that, for all the awfulness of the 9/11 attacks, their effects on the nation as a whole were primarily psychological. Strictly speaking, the destruction of two buildings in downtown New York hardly constituted an existentially threateneing attack--in a nation of 300 million, a mere 3,000 were killed, and America's infrastructure and capabilities were completely intact. Compared to a country that is actually attacked in a sustained conventional war--e.g., Britain during the blitz, or Iraq during the most recent invasion--the damage done was insignificant. Of course, the real felt threat of the attacks was that it demonstrated that another attack could come anywhere, any time. And it could be worse--it could, for example, involve a biological or nuclear weapon. Americans for the first time in memory felt physically unsafe--and, it seemed, not very prepared for this feeling. There didn't seem to be a protocol for what to do in a crisis like this--there was no tradition, for example, of the stiff upper-lip, "Keep Calm and Carry On" attitude as in Britain. So we seemed to be making up our own protocols on the fly. The most prominent and emblematic of these was, of course, the flag pin, which quickly became a ubiquitous accessary on news people and politicians everywhere. Though I think the initial sentiment behind it was a fairly benign one--establishing some sense of underlying national unity in a crisis--it was not long before it curdled into a cynical symbol of heavyhanded jingoism, one more politico-cultural bludgeon at the disposal of the pro-war right. The "death" of the flag pin came during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Barack Obama was criticized for not wearing the pin. Eventually the controversy fizzled when Obama began wearing the pin, but sporadically. By that time though terrorism had faded into the background, with the economic crisis at the forefront of everyone's mind. So the flag pin saga tracked, I think, the rise and fall of the post-9/11 "everything is different" mindset--the psychological effect of those attacks.
2	United States invades Iraq on false pretenses	B.O.B, by Outkast	Maybe this Pitchfork article puts it best: "B.O.B." is not just the song of the decade-- it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title-- aka "Bombs Over Baghdad", a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later-- is only the start of it. In "B.O.B"'s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear André 3000 and Big Boi fire off a synapse-bursting stream of ripped-from-the-headlines buzzwords ("Cure for cancer/ Cure for AIDS"), personal anecdotes ("Got a son on the way by the name of Bamboo") and product placements ("Yo quiero Taco Bell") that read like the world's first Twitter feed. We hear four minutes of utter fucking chaos yielding to a joyously optimistic denouement (a point reinforced by the Stankonia cover's re-imagination of the American flag, which anticipates a White House set to be painted black). In a lot of ways, I think, the Iraq War was the real crux of the Aughts--the American establishment's "original sin", as Frank Rich once put it, that revealed its character as utterly wanting, and its fealty to core liberal democratic principles a fiction. If 9/11 was the question posed, the Iraq War was the answer given: an answer that had nothing to do with the question, that was based on false evidence, that was, as Obama would put it during the campaign, "dumb". The Iraq War revealed so much: the failure of the mainstream press to hold those in power accountable; the willingness of the Bush administration to dispense misinformation to achieve its political ends; the utter incompetence of the Bush administration; the spread of torture techniques throughout the military; the failure of the Democrats to stand up to jingoism and demogoguery; the failure of the Democratic establishment in general to identify the war as a mistake at the time. It is no coincidence that the current president was the only serious contender in the primary who was against the Iraq War from the beginning--the war had tainted everybody else. The narrative arc of the Aughts--the crisis, the fall, the attempt at redemption--has, as its central event, the Iraq War. It's tentacles reach into everything, into both parties, into the past and the future. The war, after all, had been prefigured, since before 9/11--since before Bush took office, when the neocons ran think tanks instead of US foreign policy. Saddam Hussein was on the minds of top officials in the White House from literally the first days that the towers came down. The false evidence that was eventually used by Colin Powell to make the case for the war was extracted using the same torture techniques that would spread to Guantanamo and back to Iraq at Abu-Ghraib. The incompetence of Bush's war plan forshadowed the incompetance that would be on display years later in the handling of the Katrina aftermath. And, finally, the Iraq War begat the political career of one Barack Obama, who would bring--or try to bring, at any rate--the conflict to a close.
3	United States tortures detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and US law	24	America's shift to a torture state did not happen in a vaccuum: at some point, it became an acceptable mainstream moral position to support the use of torture in dire circumstances. Out of this mindset was Jack Bauer born--or maybe, out of 24 was America's pro-torture mindset born.
4	Domestic abuses of power by the federal government: illegal wire taps, politicization of the Department of Justice, interference with various regulatory agencies	Dick Cheney shoots a man in the face, and the man apologizes to Cheney	In the heyday of Republican power, the Bush administration seemingly got away with anything, whether it was conducting unconstitutional surveillance on millions of Americans, using Justice Department lawyers to settle political scores, or censoring reports by the EPA to make them more industry-friendly. Not only was there no legal consequences of any of these actions, but the mainstream press--and the US Congress--seemed uninterested in holding anyone accountable for these transgressions. We all knew we were really through the looking glass when, one day in February 2006, we were informed that Dick Cheney had indeed shot a man in the face with a shot gun. For a delerious day or two as confused accounts trickled in and Cheney exhibited odd, guilty-seeming behavior we thought the whole Bush ediface would finally come crumbling down in the craziest scandal ever. But in the end it turned out to be a common hunting accident--and the victims bizarre apology to Cheney for "all the trouble" confirmed the invincibility of the Bush-Rove-Cheney political machine.
5	New Orleans is destroyed by Hurricane Katrina	"George Bush doesn't care about black people."	Katrina was the moment when the establishment realized that Emperor Bush had no clothes--when the idea that the Bush administration was incompetent and reckless finally made its way into the canon of conventional wisdom. The failure of an adequate response to the disaster was not in question whatsoever. In those heartstopping few days after the hurricane struck, the nation shook its collective head in wonder at how there could be people going thirsty and dead bodies lying uncollected in the streets in an American city. Meanwhile, Bush dithered in his response--and it quickly became clear that he had staffed FEMA with a bunch of unqualified cronies. His legendary assessment of FEMA director (and former horse pageant judge) Michael Brown's performance marked the moment at which his administration descended into farce. That outward sign of this state of affairs was when, at some MTV related event, Kanye West went off-script and uttered, next to a memorably flummoxed Mike Meyers, "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Now, let me say that I don't think George W. Bush was or is any kind of racist, and that I don't think Kanye West is a very important figure in the grand scheme of things. But this little moment was significant because West's comment gained traction, as opposed to bouncing off Bush without incident. Bush was no longer the teflon president he once was. Katrina marked the beginning of a long downward slide in Bush's approval rating that ended at a record low 22% by the time he left office.

Lamar Odom is a really weird guy

American pantheism

I'd go so far as to confer "must-read" status on Ross Douthat's latest column, which uses Avatar as a jumping off point for the kind of elevated discussion that you don't often find in a newspaper op-ed piece, and offers some pretty cutting observations:

Today there are other forces that expand pantheism’s American appeal. We pine for what we’ve left behind, and divinizing the natural world is an obvious way to express unease about our hyper-technological society. The threat of global warming, meanwhile, has lent the cult of Nature qualities that every successful religion needs — a crusading spirit, a rigorous set of ‘thou shalt nots,” and a piping-hot apocalypse.

Go ahead and read the whole thing.

Like you do

I'm a sucker for caricatures. I'm even more of a sucker for caricaturists who find the time to do Eddie Izzard from Dressed To Kill:

American gibberish!

Just yesterday at a party I was mentioning that one thing I've always wanted to hear was someone who didn't know a lick of English putting together a string of English gibberish. And now today I see a video that features exactly that: specifically, it's an Italian doing American gibberish.

Enjoy!

Only a little arsenic

There's a big feature in the NYT comparing tap water safety all around the country. It seems that San Francisco County is doing pretty good, with the worst of it being just 3 chemicals that are within the legal limit, but above what's considered healthy. However, those 3 are doozies: arsenic, lead, and radon (although how bad can radon be for you? It's inert, right?).

Not batshit, but then, not really serious either

I got momentarily excited by Conor Friedersdorf's insistence that I read one Jim Manzi's "manifesto of sorts" that lays out a "framework for understanding the challenges that America faces". I was promised that his would be a "serious voice" that moves us beyond "bromides about liberty and tyranny" that you typically hear from the right these days.

Anyway, I read the thing, and was unimpressed. Far too high-level and vague to be of any use to anyone, it strikes me more as a formulation of right-wing conventional wisdom and political narrative than any real attempt to deal with substantive issues or engage the opposition in an intellectually honest way. He passes comment on things like the bailout of Wall Street and the nationalization of GM without any sort of discussion of what the consequences would have been if those actions had not been taken; he pooh-poohs cap-and-trade as "economically extravagant" (which is something of a non sequitor, I might add) without addressing the costs of not regulating carbon output; he utterly fails to address military spending as a component of the government's precarious long-term financial position; he urges the repeal of fiscal stimulus without offering an alternative approach to alleviating America's 10% unemployment rate; he offers no way forward on health care reform.

If his goal with this essay was to engage in a productive way on any of these fronts, I'd say he failed. If you're going to dismiss cap-and-trade, for example, you have to at least address why you think it's a bad policy--whether that means a critique of the way the policy will be implemented, or empirical skepticism about the dangers of global warming, or whatever. But Manzi offers no such arguments; just blank, high-level assertions that seemed to be backed by nothing other than implicit conservative conventional wisdom.

In any case, here are a few specific things that I think Manzi either mischaracterizes or doesn't address:

• He mainly frames America's politics as a tension between Great Society liberal welfare statism and Reagan-era economic deregulation, but I think this picture is no longer accurate today. In the first place, it's not the case that today's liberals are fighting to undo the Reagan revolution: Reagan won that war, and liberals conceded long ago. To see this, just check out what marginal tax rates were like before and after Reagan took office:
  
  During the Great Society era top marginal rates were up around 80%; by the time Reagan took office they had already been coming down quite a bit, but part of Reagan's legacy is that that level of taxation is permanently off the table. Of course, taxation is more than just the top marginal income tax bracket--but I find this to be a useful barometer for the overall level of taxation a population is willing to bear. Keep in mind that accompanying this were decreases in the capital gains tax and, at the state levels, significant rolling back of property taxes, following the Prop. 13 "tax revolt" in California. No serious liberals today propose we fully reverse these cuts and return to Great Society levels of taxation, and even the mainstream Democratic establishment favors pro-market policies such as free trade and economic incentives such as cap-and-trade rather than direct government regulation and intervention. We live in a supply-side America.
  
  Secondly, not only is the conflict that Manzi sets up already resolved, but he misses the crucial point that the fiscal sins that have occurred since Reagan have been largely perpetrated by the Republican party and (too many) centrist Democrats. I don't want to make this too partisan a point, so maybe I'll just say this: since Clinton took office, we've seen the California-fication of the federal government, where de facto supermajority requirements in Congress--the Senate specifically--make it impossible to implement tough decisions (like increasing taxes or cutting entitlements), and yet still allow politically popular spending initiatives to go through (like Medicare Part D and the Bush tax cut). By the time the financial crisis hit, and Bush was forced to pass a stimulus bill and a Wall Steet bailout (yes, Bush did both those things; Obama then passed a second, far larger stimulus bill), the US found itself badly overextended, and with mounting health care costs to boot.
  
  So the narrative is not Great Society social cohesian vs. Reagan supply side economics forever dueling for our national soul; it's more like, Reagan wins, then the Republicans totally lose their bearings and abandon conservative fiscal principles while in power, and then meanwhile leverage an increasingly disfunctional Senate to obstruct any Democratic reforms from coming through.
• Manzi shows here he doesn't understand the rationale for stimulus spending:
  

  Only about 5% of the money appropriated is intended to fund things like roads and bridges. The legislation is instead dominated by outright social ­spending: increases in food-stamp benefits and unemployment ­benefits; various direct and special-­purpose spending relabeled as tax credits for ­renewable-energy programs; increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services; and increased school-based financial ­assistance, housing ­assistance, and other direct benefits.

  The point of stimulus spending is to increase overall demand in the economy. You can do this by building roads and bridges, yes, but you can do it just as well by, say, lining the pockets of a poor person with some cash that he will be certain to spend in the near future (like, say, on food). What matters is the stimulative effect of the spending, not on whether the spending happens to be on infrastructure or more welfarish services.
• More:
  

  All told, finance, insurance, real estate, automobiles, energy, and health care account for about one-third of the U.S. economy. Reconfiguring these industries to conform to political calculations, and not market-driven decisions, is likely to transform American economic life. And the fiscal consequences of the spending involved will be enormous. The federal budget deficit for 2009 was about 11% of gross domestic product, which is far higher than any the United States has experienced since World War II. This deficit spending is the real stimulus. Something like 10% of all the economic demand in the United States is supported by government borrowing from the future, which is essential to propping up the current "recovery."

  Gah. Where to begin. First: "This deficit spending is the real stimulus." That. Is. The. Point. The whole point of fiscal stimulus during a liquidity trap (i.e., when the Fed's interest rate is at 0% and cannot be lowered any further) is that the government's deficit spending props up demand until the economy gets going again. It's no big secret that stimulus spending is deficit spending. Second: nobody is reconfiguring the real-estate industry. Nobody--and it's a shame, really--is reconfiguring the finance industry. As for energy, cap-and-trade is a market solution--no different in principle than a carbon tax. Health care you can make more of a case for, obviously, but it's also true that a) the government already accounts for a high percentage of medical spending in the US, since we have, you know, socialized medicine for everyone over the age of 65, and b) the whole aim of the current health care reforms is that they will reduce the deficit over the course of a ten year time frame. Third: in economic terms, there's no difference between a recovery and a recovery with scare quotes around it--a recovery is a recovery, a job is a job. Conservatives seem to have this thing where a recovery fueled by government spending is somehow "artificial", or that jobs created by the government aren't real "jobs" (make-work, I think the term is they use). But this isn't a meaningful distinction at all (that said, I think you really can call the current recovery a "recovery", not because it is propped up by government deficit spending, but because it's a jobless recovery--asset prices are coming back up--yay Adobe stock--but unemployment remains sky-high at 10%--boo human misery).
• Here Manzi makes some proposals without giving an ounce of thought as to their consequences:
  

  we must unwind some recent errors that fail to take account of these circumstances. Most obviously, government ownership of industrial assets is almost a guarantee that the painful decisions required for international competitiveness will not be made. When it comes to the auto industry, for instance, we need to take the loss and move on. As soon as possible, the government should announce a structured program to sell off the equity it holds in GM. Similarly, the federal government should relinquish direct control of banks and insurance companies. Moreover, one virtue of the slow rollout of spending under the stimulus bill is that most of it can be stopped — and should be.

  Look. If these were normal times, and GM was going under, you know what? I'd be as solemn as the next guy in saying that it should die a natural death. But these aren't normal times; these are perverse times. Here is what I think happens with folks like Manzi: in normal times, we get accustomed to the idea that markets, among other things, give you information: if the price of apples goes up, that tells you something about the supply and/or demand for apples. If a business goes under, that tells you something about the quality of its products and/or the efficiency of its processes. If an individual or company goes into debt, that tells you something about the financial decisions about that individual or company. In other words, though the market may cause pain--for example, the slow death of the American auto industry--the pain is justifiable, and in the long run it's better for everyone to suffer the pain now and move on so that the overall economy can continue to perform at a high level. And I'm more or less fine with all that. But the thing is, all that's only true in normal times, when markets are functioning. But when the financial crisis and recession hit, markets stopped functioning properly. Prices no longer reflected value; they reflected the fact that everyone was selling in a panic at the same time. Companies started failing, not because their products were of low quality or inefficiently made, but because they could not get the credit they needed to keep their business running. Saving, in normal times a virtue, suddenly became a collective vice, as the force of everyone pulling back spending caused demand to drop and the recession--and unemployment--and the condition of everyone's pocketbooks--to worsen. As Paul Krugman likes to say, we're through the looking glass--markets are no longer giving us good information about the real world.
  
  And so you can't just cut GM off. Because, even if GM deserves to die, surely other car manufacturers with factories in the US like Toyota and Honda don't deserve to die, too. And yet that's exactly what could have happened if GM went under, because of a "supply shock"--the companies that sell parts to GM would have gone under, and the assembly lines of the other companies they sell to would have ground to a halt--which, in the midst of the worse recession since 1928, could have led to scary results indeed. And you can't just unilaterally sever the government's stake in the big financial entities like AIG--because this could trigger a panic and another financial meltdown.
  
  Finally, you can't just revoke the stimulus. Or, if you do, you better tell a damn good story as to where the demand is going to come from that's going to lift this economy back up and bring unemployment back down. Everyone agrees that normally, with a non-zero interest rate, you would lower that rate and induce spending and investment that way. But we're at 0%, and can't cut the interest rate. So rather than inducing demand, we're straightforwardly creating it via federal deficit spending. The spending will roll out over the next couple of years, but, that's okay, because unemployment will remain high for at least that long. So you think this is a bad idea? You think the underlying economic principles are unsound? You think perhaps that stimulus won't have a significant impact, or maybe, alternatively, that the costs of a higher deficit outweight the benefits of stimulus? Fine. But tell us what your argument is.
• ...
  

Well, this post is getting out of hand--I think you all get the picture. But let me be quick to reiterate: I don't think Manzi's essay is lacking because I disagree with its conclusions. I think it's lacking because it doesn't offer any arguments against opposing views or explain in any discernible way the rationale for its own views. Hopefully, either Manzi or someone of his ilk will get around to making a case that we can all sink our teeth into.

More on the dubious benefit of financial innovation

Via Yglesias.

Monkeys! Dogs! Elephants! Holy shit!

Milo's Last Show: A Parable (Pt. 1)

It was a few weeks ago that I first saw the boy Milo, as I was hurrying to my reporting assignment at the United Confederation of Planets headquarters in New York. He was easily the most pathetic creature I'd ever seen: not older than ten years old, a face rounded by baby-fat, and a cowed posture that hinted at many years of abuse, if not physical than at least verbal. To make matters worse, we was bound literally by a leash, which seemed uncomfortably snug around his neck. Incensed, I marched straight up to the leash-holder, a burly Italian-looking man with a whimsically large handlebar mustache. The two were standing on a busy street corner, both passing out fliers.

"Just what the hell is this all about?" I said. The anger faded from my voice slightly as I noted that the top of my head came up no further than the rough man's chin.

"Wha?" The bushy eyebrows above his watery eyes arched up as best they could--he looked wounded. "What ees what about, eh? You come to our show?" He handed me the flier:

The Amazing Baldini Presents: the Human Puppet!
THRILL as his every move is predicted!
FRET as you realize that you, too, are no less bound!
$25 at the door; $20 if you bring this flier

I crumpled it up and put it in my pocket. "Why do you have him on a leash like this? Are you his father? Look, it's digging into his throat." I looked down at the boy but he turned away.

"Wha? No, no, no, thees ees Milo, we do tha show. He has no family--I take him from the streets. Here, look." He loosened the leash on Milo. "I'm sorry Milo--you should have said something." Milo didn't speak.

"Look--just, forget about it, " I said, and turned to walk away.

"Hey Mister!" shouted the burly man after me. I turned around. "You an' me--we no different from Milo. We are on a leash. We jus' never met the man who hold the leash." Rolling my eyes, I once again turned around and walked away.

"You come see tha show! You'll see!" he shouted. Breaking into a jog, I made my way quickly to UCP headquarters, putting the disturbing scene behind me and readying myself for two hours of mind-numbing bureaucratic double-talk.

Late night dorm room conversation time: free will

Seeing these silly posts about free will make me all antsy, because Alex and I totally have it all figured out. It's a pretty sweet package that includes: a conception of time that resolves all time travel paradoxes; a scientific account of free will and how it's compatible with determinism; and cameos by the halting problem, 12 Monkeys, and Being. It blows these childish "we all behave as though we had free will" musings (which don't even involve time travel at all) out of the friggin' water.

Pshh.

Financial "innovation"

I just finished reading Panic by Micheal Lewis, which is a collection of pieces that track financial panics starting with the 1987 stock market crash and leading all the way up through to today's housing bubble crisis.

I'll have more to say on it later, but one pattern that seemed to repeat itself involves the dubious activity of "financial innovation"--i.e., Wall Street geniuses inventing some complex new financial instrument that supposedly squeezes more efficiency out of investments, creating greater returns--but in reality just does a good job of hiding risk, fueling a speculative bubble. Here is how the pattern plays out:

1. Some Wall Street geniuses invent some new financial instrument.

2. The instrument is so complex that no one can accurately and independently assess its level of risk--and so they take the Wall Street geniuses' word for it that the financial instrument really does offer better returns for the same amount of risk--that it is a true "innovation". I mean, they're geniuses, right? Look how much math they know!

3. As people buy into the financial instrument, its value increases, creating a cycle of self-validation: the higher it rises, the more solid the "evidence" that the geniuses' theory was right, which leads to more investors hopping on board, which raises the value of the financial instrument higher, and so on.

4. The financial instruments take off on what is in reality a speculative bubble, but what is thought to be the fruits of true financial innovation. Everyone gets richer and richer, and increases their leverage to get richer still ("leverage" means borrowing money to invest, so that you can make even more money. For example, suppose I knew that a horse was a sure thing in a race, but I only had $100. If the payout is 2x, the most I could gross would be $200. But if I borrowed $1 million from my rich uncle, I could gross $2 million, pay back the loan, and go home with a cool $1 million. Of course, if I bet on the wrong horse, then I'm horribly screwed: I go home with a whopping debt of $1 million owed to my uncle).

5. Eventually the risk hidden in the financial instrument (the risk that nobody could see because the financial instrument's complexity obscured it) rears its ugly head, and investors get wiped out. But everyone is now so overleveraged, that the demise of the financial instrument causes a domino effect, where everyone suddenly finds themselves in extreme debt (like the debt I owed to my uncle when my horse lost) that they cannot pay, and all their creditors are suddenly not going to get the money back that they lent out. Markets threaten to seize up as no one can raise money to pay off their debts, because there are no buyers, because everyone is selling at the same time. Eventually, Wall Street is bailed out and upbraided by Senators with spectacles slid half-way down their noses, new financial regulations are solemnly put into place, a few CEOs are fired, and Wall Street returns to business as usual.

6. Go to step 1.

Or at least, something like that. But the real point is that what is happening is a kind of manufactured uncertainty is introduced into the market, which becomes the vehicle for a classic speculative bubble--and when the bubble pops, it threatens to take everything down with it.

But this is particularly troubling, because the whole justification of the financial sector is that, supposedly, it does a better job of any system yet conceived of directing capital to the most useful and efficient places--which benefits us all, by giving the world cheaper goods, new inventions, and steady employment. Fair enough. But if Wall Street is spending its energies chasing mirages and throwing huge amounts of capital into one bubble after the next, then it's not doing a good job at all of allocating resources: it's just kind of arbitrarily sloshing them around. So it's like: what's the point?

(By the way, it's worth noting that Matt Yglesias has often pivoted off the inevitability of Wall Street hijinks to make an argument for more redistribution: basically, the grand deal is made that we'll allow Wall Street (and the investor class in general) to be sickeningly rich and we'll suffer its panics when they come and we'll bail it out if need be, but in return, we get to levy high taxes on the rich that pay for universal health care, child care, and education. I think it's pretty reasonable.)

(Photo lifted from this article, which it turns out is definitely worth reading if you found this post at all interesting.)

Motion to reinforce stereotypes passes unanimously

The real interest rate on your ING account

If you're an ING customer like me, chances are that you were first drawn to the bank by their absurdly high savings account interest rates (upwards of 4%), but are now disappointed with the paltry 1.3% now being offered.

However, it's good to remember that in order to arrive at the true interest rate, you have to remember to subtract inflation. For example, if you are getting an interest rate of 4% but inflation is also at 4%, then you're really just breaking even--your pile of cash is maintaining the same value over time.

Currently, we're in a period of negative inflation, or deflation, which this month is in October was -0.18%, which means that the true returns on the ING savings account is was 1.3-(-.18)=1.48%. Indeed, if ING's rate were still up around 4%, you would be getting a ridiculous no-risk return of like 5.5%.

Of course, remember that inflation is a rough estimate: it's just an index that tracks a basket of consumer goods. So mileage will vary depending on what you spend your money on. But still, it's worth taking into account when frowning at ING's latest low savings account interest rate.

What do you say if we make applejuice and fax it to each other?

Absurd:

I can't believe it

Ever play Joe Montana Talking Football on Sega CD? I did. And I also remember how, inexplicably, "Fake FG" was the best offensive play to run. And how the announcer was continuously shocked throughout the game. "They line up for a field goal on first down and I can't believe it....Fake."

Cheney's dishonor

Over the last couple of days there has been a lot of indignant commentary like this:

The former vice president, the man who imported torture into the American constitutional system, failed to capture bin Laden, invaded a country under false pretenses, allowed the Afghanistan campaign to disintegrate, and added $5 trillion to the next generation's debt burden, is attacking a sitting president on a day he announces a critical military strategy in front of his troops.

It is, again, a breathtaking piece of dishonor from this bitter, angry man.

What's puzzling about it is that I don't quite understand why the mere act of "attacking a sitting president" should be considered so dishonorable. People seem to think there's some unwritten rule that says that former Presidents and Vice Presidents shouldn't weigh in on partisan political issues, but even if this is an unwritten rule, I fail to see what the benefit of it is, or why it's such a bad thing to break it. Certainly I wouldn't have had any problems if Bill Clinton decided to go into attack-dog mode on George W. Bush when he was president--in fact, I probably would have welcomed it.

Just to be clear, Cheney really is a dishonorable man. But this is the case not because he chooses to criticize the President contra some nicety of beltway decorum, but because he has done and believes in morally reprehensible things.

Ron Artest: "I've Killed a Man"

That, at any rate, is my best attempt at a Ron Artest Onion headline. The article would have to contain at least one instance of Artest referring to himself in the third person, and maybe include some speculation as to what kind of fine David Stern might impose ($25,000, say).

Yahoo, Verizon, and others profit by handing over your information to the government

Yahoo and Verizon are trying to block a Freedom of Information Act request as to how much they charge the government for wiretaps and such.

The public option: tastes like water!

Ezra Klein has a must-read post that succinctly describes the current state of the public option, as well as how it got to be the watered-down non-factor that it is.

Did you know that even if it passes and is implemented, it will only even be available to 10% of Americans--and that it would draw all its revenue from customer fees, and not the public coffers? A pretty far cry from a government takeover of the health insurance industry, and yet that is what the opposition's rhetoric would have you believe.

Theft!

I'm trying out Modern Family (ep. 2), but the subplot where the father steals his son's bicycle to teach him a lesson is lifted directly from an episode of This American Life!

John Bolton: coward

Greenwald utterly destroys the erstwhile UN Ambassador:

Yesterday, Bolton -- on "Washington Times Radio" -- revealed that he is so petrified of Terrorists that he would not feel safe in New York City during the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and would not even allow his family there (audio here):

• Continue Reading

Host Melanie Morgan: Given the nature and danger of bringing these terrorists to American soil, where do you think is the most safe place to be when they get here and this trial begins? Where would you put your family?

John Bolton: Well, not New York City, I'm afraid to say. This is part of the callousness and the really, lack of professionalism and judgment to put them on trial anywhere in the United States in civilian courts.

The cowardice on display here is difficult to overstate -- and to behold without being ill. I lived in Manhattan on 9/11 and for many years thereafter. For weeks -- even months and years after that attack -- it was widely assumed that New York would be a likely target for another attack, but I never heard a single New Yorker -- not one -- talk about fleeing the city or hiding their family in some faraway place.

I don't think that Bolton really believes his family to be in danger from a single unarmed, detained terrorist--I think he's just being incredibly cynical. But still, if your cynicism is going to lead you to say something completely ridiculous, you should be nailed for it.

The future of sausage is upon us

Via Paul Krugman, it seems as though lab-grown meat is one step closer to becoming a reality:

SCIENTISTS have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

...

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

I'm a huge proponent of lab-grown meat. Most people's initial reaction is one of disgust, but when you think about it meat grown in a petri dish can't possibly be more revolting than present day factory farm conditions. Moreover, you get the ethical bonus that there is no cruel treatment of animals (in fact, on this last point, I've often wondered why we don't try to genetically modify livestock to have essentially no brains, so as to alleviate animal suffering...this may seem horrifying at first, but how could it be more horrifying than torturing sentient creatures?).

But probably the biggest bonus is ecological: livestock, especially cattle, have a huge impact on the environment and on the climate change situation. Many people assume that when you talk about the carbon footprint of cows, you're mostly talking about cow farts, but that's only a part of the problem. First of all, most of the methane that cows are emitting come from burps, not farts. Second, though, a lot of the impact from cattle comes from the fact that feeding people cattle is a very inefficient way to use arable land, because you are using a whole bunch of arable land to grow crops to feed to cows instead of people. Or, if you're not giving feed to the cattle, you're burning down huge swaths of rainforest to create land that they can graze on--and, of course, the elimination of trees causes there to be more carbon in the atmosphere.

Anyway, it seems to me that a big win in the fight against climate change might be this ability to produce meat in an ecologically sustainable way--especially considering that beef is catching on in the developing world (in places like China).

(PS: I think envisioning things like sausage and gelatin and--I don't know, broth--rather than, say, a drumstick make the whole lab-meat idea far more palatable.)

Hey--remember Garfield Minus Garfield?

Charles O'Shea, Anecdotal Analyst

This is funny:

There seem to be more discounts on TVs this year, and shoppers are snapping them up, said Charles O’Shea, a New York- based retail analyst with Moody’s Investors Service. In the four hours he spent checking retailers in northern New Jersey, he saw several shoppers standing at bus stops holding flat-panel sets.

“It looks like everybody has caught the promotional bug pretty heavily,” O’Shea said.

Because nothing is more important in making a business decision than knowing what sorts of things Charles O'Shea saw people holding at a bus stop in northern New Jersey.

Humboldt squid

Megan McArdle is a libertarian who is basically sane, so she is not a global warming denier or anything. However, comments like this strike me as missing the point:

What's at stake is the degree of warming associated with our carbon dioxide emissions. In particular, to what extent the earth's many complex and not necessarily well understood feedback systems may mitigate (or exacerbate) temperature increases. I've long been skeptical of the more catastrophic scenarios, because all this carbon used to be in the atmosphere, which probably defines a ceiling on how bad it will get--a ceiling well below "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIEEEEEEEE!!!"

I think she's narrowing in too much on the temperature aspect here. While it's true that earth has "many complex and not necessarily well understood feedback systems" that determine what the average global temperature will be, what is really relevant here is that the biological environment is made up of even more complex and even less understood systems, and we simply can't predict what all of the consequences will be for these systems if and when the global temperature shoots up. To invoke some Rumsfeldese, there are known unknowns and then there are unknown unknowns. It is the unknown unknowns that really make global warming such a serious threat--the stuff that no one could have predicted.

Personally, when I envision ecological disruption from climate change, it's something along the lines of the Humboldt Squid takeover of the North Pacific. The story here is that since 1960 the numbers of this kind of squid has exploded, altering the ecosystem so that fisheries for "anchovies, sardines, hake and rockfish"--all species that the squid feed on--are threatened. They theorize that nitrogen-rich farming runoff is causing a favorable environment for the squid, but the region in which they dominate continues to expand, and nobody knows why:

In the KQED-TV story, Gilly says that the OML [oxygen minimum layer] may be growing -- getting thicker and coming closer to the surface. And where the OML grows, the squid follow.

Nobody knows why the OML is growing, though. Does it have something to do with climate change? Is it related to agriculture? It would be handy to know.

This is the kind of thing we should be envisioning, I think, when we talk about the dangers of global warming--stuff like, oh shit, now squid are taking over the ocean. Of course, in this particular case the success of the squid isn't really too disruptive (besides endangering some fisheries, the article doesn't seem to be too worried about any of it), but the point is that this is the type of system that's being affected, and these are the types of consequences we can expect to encounter as global temperatures rise.

The NBA on NBC opening sequence for a new generation

If NBC ever gets rights to the NBA again, this is how the sequence has to go:

First, we get Tesh back into the recording studio to record a "preamble" to the original theme--something very dignified with a lot of horns that evokes great Presidents of history and hallowed...er, traditions. You know what I mean: the horns come in--do do dooooooooooooo--and then a big drum--bum bum bum.

So anyway, this preamble is playing and the camera is zooming forward through video cutouts of Great Moments of NBA History, as well as Great Players That Defined Their Era. So you're going to have--what is it, Jerry West hitting some half court shot?--in black in white, and then Wilt's 100 point game, and all this stuff. But the thing is: this sequence is structured like the Wall Chart of History, so that the size of the video cutouts are proportional to their importance at that time. I don't know enough about NBA history to know how the first chunk of this sequence will be, but I do know that once you get to the 80s you start seeing Magic's baby hook, that one Bird steal, and big cutouts of Kareem hitting a skyhook and one of Magic posting up Bird or something. And then of course you have a nod to the Pistons teams.

Then, of course, you get to the 90s and Jordan just dominates the screen, and you have all sorts of classic Jordan highlights going, including one of him maybe hugging the championship trophy (and there can be some smaller screen flitting by that feature Barkley, Stockton/Malone, whatever).

And then beyond this you get the Duncan/Shaq era, and so these two dominate, and you show cutouts of various Horry shots and--er, whatever great Spurs moments there might have been. And then the way is cleared for the present Lebron/Kobe era (with I suppose some kind of recognition for KG, though, really, he's just got the one ring), with the two of them mostly taking up the whole screen.

And mind you--the preamble tune has been playing this whole time (along with audio snippets from the various video cutouts), and, oh, I don't know maybe ten or twelve seconds have passed. But when we ease into the Lebron/Kobe era, the music resolves into the beginning of the original NBA on NBC sequence (in which the logo is etched into that steel thingy with lasers--doo doo doo do do do do doooo), and then--there is some kind of explosion or flash, and we hit the ground running, with the revamped version of Roundball Rock going and an appropriate montage of present day players starts flitting around the screen, plus other basketball visual bric-a-brac. You can fill this bit in yourself.

But the big question here is: what play do you use to finish the sequence off, before the announcer intones, "The NBA on NBC"? In the 90s, it was Jordan hitting the game-winner against the Cavs, but in today's NBA you'd have trouble because you'd have to choose between Lebron and Kobe. I suppose you'd have to go Kobe, since he's older and he's got the rings (and the larger catalog of great moments--I mean, Lebron has a ridiculous highlight reel, but the only meaningful things I think he's done are the Game 5 takeover against Detroit and the game winner against Orlando. But even then, he has no rings, so nothing he's done can be that important). I'm not sure what Kobe's signature moment would be--I suppose one of his buzzer beaters, but if it wasn't a clutch playoff shot I'd go with one of his more ridiculous moves, like for example that nifty pump-fake-spin-jumper he had in the 61-point game against the Knicks, or that one siiiiiiiiick, high-arch fade-away he hit over Lebron last year.

If I was rich I'd give NBC money to buy rights to the NBA. Or maybe just buy the theme song from them.

(PS: I forgot that a requirement for the last play of the sequence has to be a good Marv Albert call--so I retract those two suggestions.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

It was weird watching this again, because I'd forgotten that a quote from it had worked its way into my family's lexicon. Basically, my mom and my sister will say, "It'll be fun Kevin!" in this goofy way whenever they're trying to get me to do something. What they're mimicking is Adam Sandler saying to Kevin Nealon, "C'mon Kevin! It'll be fun." I doubt if either my sister or mom remembers what they're quoting from when they say that.

(In a similar vein, you will find a lot of people who say in a particular voice and cadence, "I like it--Ilikeitalot"--having long forgotten the source material for this, which is the 1994 movie Dumb and Dumber.)

An oddly relevant Dinosaur Comics

They even get the name right.

Some responsible lawmaking at long last: a war tax

It seems as though Congressman Dave Obey's proposal to levy a tax to help pay for the Afghanistan war is serious. Via Yglesias:

The details of the proposal:

Dubbed the “Share the Sacrifice Act,” the six-page bill exempts anyone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan since the 2001 terrorist attacks as well as families who have lost an immediate relative in the fighting. But middle-class households earning between $30,000 and $150,000 would be asked to pay 1% on top of their tax liability today — a more sweeping approach than many Democrats have been willing to embrace.

I love this idea. It's always bothered me that while we engaged in an elective war in Iraq, Congress was cutting taxes and Bush was keeping cameras away from soldiers' caskets. The American public was shielded from the costs of the war, precluding any reasonable weighing of costs and benefits from taking place. A tax like this would at the very least make the financial costs of the war salient for everybody.

I'd really like to see a Republican--or a Blue Dog Democrat--argue against this one. Especially after all this supposed concern they've been expressing about the deficit.

"I traced my dad... and discovered he is Charles Manson"

Egads.

Via my friend Laura.

It's-a me, Radiohead

I thought this was damn impressive:



It gets more intricate and clever as it goes on, so consider watching at least up through the transition to the "rain down" part.

Purity test

Via @zeekatai, it seems the GOP is considering putting together a "purity test"--which is a litmus test a candidate must pass in order to be endorsed by the Republican party. Apparently, a candidate would have to disagree with no more than three two of the following:

Here is the resolution’s list:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run health care;

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership.

I don't put much stock in this sort of thing--it's the kind of irrelevant noise you get from political parties who are trying to appear faithful to their base (kind of like all that meaningless haggling over wording in the parties' respective platforms when the conventions happen).

That said, it's interesting to me that the document is pretty unserious and shows a total unwillingness to set priorities or make tradeoffs. For example, it seeks "smaller government", "lower taxes", and "lower deficits" in (1), and yet in (6) and (7) commits to significant war related expenditures, and in (9) appears to commit unlimited funds towards health care (if you do not "ration" health care or deny it to anyone--um, that means you're going to be spending exorbitant amounts of money on health care).

Moreover, points (2) and (9) stand in contradiction to each other. Market-based health care reform doesn't entail no rationing of health care; it just means that health care is rationed by the price mechanism in a market, rather than in some other way. Moreover, if you have a market-based health care system that (by definition) does not cover poor people (because they are priced out of the market), then how can you also claim to oppose "denial of health care"? A market-based health care system entails a denial of health care--to the poor!

Also: (3) is contradictory as well, because cap-and-trade is a market-based energy reform! It's essentially a way of pricing the market externality that is greenhouse gas emissions. It is no different in principle from a carbon tax.

Arg.

Web 2.0's Moore's law: every two years, the smarminess of the latest communication platform doubles

I used to think that Twitter was pretty damn smarmy and pleased with itself--until I used Google Wave. Ho-ly Christ. Bold prediction: Google Wave will fail to take hold in any significant way, because it is way too over-designed and way too concerned with finding solutions to problems that don't necessarily exist.

Here's the thing: Twitter was smart in that it kept things extraordinarily simple for so long. They let actual user behavior lead feature creation, rather than the other way around. For example, users would come up with hashtags on their own, and then Twitter would develop features and widgets around that. With Google Wave, though, it seems just the opposite: there's this preening tone to the whole endeaver that just seems to say, "We Google geniuses are so genius that we know what you want before you do. We're envious of you that you are just starting out on your journey, and have not yet had your mind blown by the sheer elegance and revolutionary user experience that awaits you."

(PS: Key indication of an application's smarminess? "Cute" error messages. Fail whale???!?!?! Why, these aren't some boring old programmers--what a sense of humor! Everything will be "shiny"??!?!?! Hey--that's from Firefly! These guys have some serious cred!)

A sinking feeling

You know, it occurs to me that everyone who is alive in this era will be remembered in history as the horrible, short-sighted people who irrevocably destroyed the biosphere for all posterity so that they could drive around in cars and eat hamburgers.

We're the ones who burned the Library of Alexandria...

It's experts all the way down

A good bit from Target Practice--I can't really quote it, so just go read the whole thing.

MST3K takes a stand for robot gay marriage

Did you know that Tom Servo and Crow once nearly got married?


UPDATE: It turns out Mike is a Republican? Says Wikipedia:

Mike Nelson rarely discloses his personal beliefs in public.[8] During a 2004 interview with the fansite MST3K Review, Nelson described himself as a Protestant and a conservative: "I read the National Review cover to cover. Check in at Townhall.com every day. Check the Washington Times daily. Listen to Dennis Prager and Michael Medved on a regular basis. Read Mark Steyn with regularity. Read the Weekly Standard. So, yes, I do vote Republican."[9] He went on to refer to the Minneapolis Star Tribune as "the Star and Sickle, or the Red Star Tribune."[9] Nelson also stated that he believed that the devil "was behind American Beauty. And Pulp Fiction was one of his better works, too."[9]

That sounds kind of ugh-y, but actually going to the source cited revealed this much more modest statement:

I’d call my politics center/right, and since politics intersects one’s whole philosophy of life, it’s hard to pin down a when. Whatever the case, I try very hard to keep politics out of my work and not to be too public with my thoughts because it’s just not my area of expertise. I write funny stuff. [I’m] not so good with politics. Maybe someday I’ll write on it, but as of now, the world is safe.

Sounds to me like a guy who understands that he and his fan base are not ideologically aligned.

What ARE lobsters? We just don't know.

Mad Men

Now you too can understand the NBA salary cap

A handy link.

Testing Artest

When the Ariza-Artest trade first went down, my general opinion was that it wasn't nearly so bad as people made it out to be--that, sure, it would've been nice to keep Ariza but Artest is certainly comparable.

But the more time goes by, the more worried I get that this was, in fact, a pretty bad move. Artest hasn't really impressed me so far: he seems kind of slow and lumbering on defense, and hasn't seemed to hit any kind of rhythm offensively. Meanwhile, Ariza is just getting better, as everyone predicted he would.

So the Rockets-Lakers matchup tonight should be an interesting test, as I'm sure both players will be playing hard to show up their former teams.

Fantasy aside: Josh Howard is injured "indefinitely"--which completely fucks me over. Thanks, fantasy basketball, for making me care about Josh Howard's ankle.

An interesting point

From Matt Yglesias:

I think it’s pretty clear that international terrorism has some dimensions that go well-beyond ordinary law enforcement, but if you have to put the whole thing in either the “crime” box or the “war” box, there’s a pretty strong case for erring on the side of crime.

In political terms, the right likes the war idea because it involves taking terrorism more “seriously.” But in doing so, you partake of way too much of the terrorists’ narrative about themselves. It’s their conceit, after all, that blowing up a bomb in a train station and killing a few hundred random commuters is an act of war. And war is a socially sanctioned form of activity, generally held to be a legally and morally acceptable framework in which to kill people. What we want to say, however, is that this sporadic commuter-killing isn’t a kind of war, it’s an act of murder. To be sure, not an ordinary murder—a mass murder—but nonetheless murder.

Oh, Yoko's alright

A mind poisoned by fantasy

I knew going into it that participating in an NBA fantasy league was going to have an impact on how I follow the sport--but I didn't realize the effects would be so instantaneous. I'm already secretly hoping that Lebron James gets swine flu and has to sit out the rest of the week...

Some day, one big wall?

This sort of thing is always interesting. Apparently Rupert Murdoch has plans to 1) erect a pay wall around all online Fox Corp content, and 2) block Google from indexing Fox sites. Not sure what there is to gain from (2)--maybe because he doesn't want Google caching the content of the sites?

In any case, it'll be interesting to see if the Great Fox Wall business model pans out. Conventional wisdom on the web says it is doomed to fail--that it will simply be undercut by comparable sites that offer their content for free. I tend to agree with this conventional wisdom.

On the other hand, though, it seems that at some point, newspapers and other content providers are going to have to start making money on the web in order to survive. A pay wall might work for some cases of specialized content--for example, the Wall Street Journal (which is behind a pay wall, and has been doing quite well). But I don't think it would work for general news and entertainment content--unless, maybe, you made the wall big enough?

The world can definitely learn to live without Fox, but could it learn to live without, say, Fox plus the major movie studios, major newspapapers, and big TV networks? If there were a critical mass of sought-after content behind one big universal pay wall, I could see a subscription model working--you buy one key that opens many doors. The companies behind the pay wall could then share the subscription revenue using some equitable sharing formula (based on, say, traffic numbers).

Hmm..

Kobe on the block

I haven't been watching the games, but I thought this was an interesting observation over at Forum Blue and Gold:

• This season, 36% of Kobe’s shot attempts have come out of the post. Last season that was 14%.

• I don’t expect the percentage to stay that high for Kobe when Gasol and Bynum return and need post touches — Phil Jackson said as much postgame the other night — but if team’s don’t adjust the Lakers should keep giving it to Kobe on the block.

In general, I've often wondered why Kobe hasn't gone to more of a late-period-Jordan post game. I feel like with his repertoire of fade-aways, spin moves, and drop steps--plus the ability to draw favorable whistles--he'd be far more efficient in the post than when he resorts to his patented impossible-to-hit-contested-20-ft-jumpers-that-he-somehow-makes-sometimes shtick. Moreover, I think once Kobe gets within 10-15 ft of the basket, his FG% goes way up--although that's just a gut impression, unsupported by data.

A rationale for hate crime laws

I left a fairly lengthy comment on a thread that I didn't realize till afterwards was probably dead. Oh well; here's the post, and here's my comment:

How about this:

When an attack on someone is motivated by racial hatred, the crime is compounded, not because the attack itself is somehow made worse due to the attacker’s hatefulness, but because the attack signals–as a matter of fact–a credible death threat against a group of people (gays, in this case). In other words, killing someone because they are gay–besides being an obvious act of murder–is also equivalent to sending a threatening note to every gay person in the community that reads: “I’m going to kill you.” And issuing death threats is, of course, against the law.

The important thing here is that the death threat component to the crime is purely an empirical finding: it is only due to the specific history of violent crime in this country that some classes are credibly “threatened” by hate crimes while other classes are not. So, for example, because there is no history of philosophers being singled out for attack, an attack motivated by hatred for philosophers does not constitute a credible death threat against the community of philosophers. But for a different class, say black people, the threat would be all too credible.

Interestingly, I think using this rationale you could also justify similar “hate crime laws” for situations not involving a broad class such as gays or blacks. For example, say the Hatfield and McCoy families have a long history of attacking each other. If John Hatfield attacks Bill McCoy out of a general hatred for McCoys, then I think you could make an empirical case that all members of the McCoy family were credibly threatened, and that therefore this death threat component should be added to John Hatfield’s crime.

So in the end, the rationale for laws against hate crimes reduces to the rationale for laws against issuing death threats. The final equation is “hate crime = violent crime + death threat”.

What do you think?

(PS: Another interesting twist to this is that I think the requirement that the death threat component be “credible” could have a mitigating effect in some cases. For example, in a town in which KKK attacks are common, a hate crime against a black person would constitute a very credible threat against the wider black population–after all, this is a group of likeminded people whose stated aim is to terrorize blacks and other minorities. However, if the attacker was just sort of this lone actor in a place where racially motivated crimes were extremely rare, the crime wouldn’t pose much of a substantive threat to others–it would mostly be discounted by the targeted minority as a freak occurrence. In this case, I don’t think a hate crime charge would be warranted–because the assailent in this case lacked the capacity to threaten anyone by his crime.)

Maine, gay marriage, Mr. Rogers, etc.

Katai has a good 'un.

Let the Artest era begin

"You know if somebody hits me, I'm going to react. I got hit with about three elbows. It's just not fair. I don't want to fight, I don't feel like doing it. If you throw an elbow into Ron Artest's chest, do you know who you're hitting?" -Ron Artest

Sigh. Here we go...

Breyer v. Scalia

Today I saw an interesting bit on C-SPAN, where Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia sparred on the merits of their respective approaches to interpreting the law. Scalia, a so-called originalist, believes that in deciding the law you should rely almost exclusively on what the text says and what the original intent of the law was when it was written, and is extremely wary of any sort of approach that implies that what laws mean--particularly those set forth in the Constitution--evolves over time. Breyer, on the other hand, believes that this is an impractical approach because the conditions in which those laws were created and in which the rationale for the laws emerged do not exist in modern society, and that a modern society could not function under a Constitution that was so anachronistically interpreted.

I was sympathetic to both sides, but one thing that didn't seem to be addressed was the fact that the reason, it seems to me, that they find themselves in this box in the first place is because the Constitution is so damn hard to amend. Passing Constitutional amendments is rare, and passing ones that are in any way controversial whatsoever is impossible (indeed, the Bill of Rights basically came with the Constitution; and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments only went through because there were no Democrats to vote against them--they had seceded). This means that, though the society itself may evolve considerably, the Constitution that governs it will remain frozen in place, allowing a very small minority to stop any kind of progress from happening at all. Of course, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be some supermajority requirements in order to amend certain basic rights--there should be (that's what makes them rights). It's just that the supermajority shouldn't be quite this difficult to achieve. The Framers, in other words, badly miscalibrated the mechanism for amending the Constitution.

And so Scalia's position, which I think is the more intuitive one, becomes unworkable--it would lead to a society in total disharmony with the supreme law of the land (imagine, for example, that Plessy v. Ferguson was never overturned). A more expansive interpretation of the Constitution, though, allows you to effectively change the Constitution extra-legislatively, relieving the tension between a modern, morally evolving society and a rigid Constitution. In fact, you could even say something like: the expansiveness of interpretation that is required to effectively govern with a Constitution is proportional to the difficulty of amending it.

So in the end, judicial interpretation, it seems to me, is tied to the basically empirical political realities presented by a Constitution that does not function very well. And whereas folks like Scalia see their task as mechanistically following their interpretive principles regardless of this fact--fiat justitia ruat caelum--other folks, like Breyer, see their task as doing the best they can to pragmatically apply an ancient document to a modern and dynamic society.

The federal budget as a reflection of America's character

The amount of defense spending in the federal budget is truly mind-boggling, and, I think, pretty sickening too. This year alone we will be spending $680 billion on defense--not including the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Meanwhile we are busy haggling over a health reform bill that will cost a mere $90 billion per year ($900 billion over a 10 year time frame).

I wonder if some day we will have a political culture that is capable of saying "no" to military spending.

Why politics is boring

It's a recurring theme for him, but Ezra Klein once again does a good job of summarizing what is wrong with the American political system: the Senate. It's broken. And you can have a million pundits write a million articles and posts and do a million interviews about this or that tactic or strategy or poll or gaffe, and it's all noise, because the simple, boring, underlying reason that we're in the position we're in is because it takes sixty--sixty--goddamn votes in the Senate to pass a law.

As the refrain goes: We're all Californians now.

The internet hits a walk-off homerun

This is it. It's over. INTERNET WINS:



From a cool blog that filters 4Chan for you.

When slogans go meta

The other day I saw a bus ad where the slogan was:

One of our unyielding principles: strong principles.

So odd. I guess it makes sense: in this company's set of principles, some are classed "unyielding"--they are never violated come what may--and some are merely classed "strong"--which to me suggests something weaker than unyielding. So the upshot, I guess, is that all principles are, at the very least, strongly held--and this will continue to be the case, come what may.

I have no idea what the ad was for.

Bad Beatles

I thought this was pretty funny. They're just awful:



I like John's "We'd like to play another song--I think."

Go Lakers!

Well, with pitching like that, and hitting like that, you're not going to get very far. Such a weird postseason--first we seem to dominate the Cardinals and catch every break, and then the Phillies just clean our clock in every facet of the game. Sigh.

A good post

From TNC. Just thought it was worth passing along.

A good thing to know

Jumping off from the previous post, it seems to me that a good a priori statistic to know would be the following:

Suppose that two teams meet in a 7 game series. If you suppose that they are evenly matched, then you'd expect Team A to win the series 50% of the time. Okay. Now, suppose Team A loses the first game. A is down 0-1. What would have to be the odds of A to win each game such that Team A would have a 50% chance of winning the series? Does Team A have to be 55-45 good? 60-40? 70-30? What would bring the odds for winning the series back to parity? This, I think, would be a good set of figures to know to have a good intuitive grasp of how improbable a series win is for a team that falls behind.

Of course, these figures are just fixed mathematical calculations that you could apply in any sport. Unfortunately I don't know how to do the math to calculate them out, but maybe some bored genius will help us out.

The value of ad hoc statistics

More questionable baseball statistics, this time about the Yankees:

The math certainly bodes well for them. Since Major League Baseball adopted a best-of-seven format for the ALCS in 1985, the team that won Game 2 has advanced to the World Series 17 of 23 times.

I'm always wary of this sort of statistic because it can be misleading. Of course, for any Game n in a series, you expect the eventual series winner to have won that game more often than the loser, if only because in every series the winner is guaranteed to have 4 wins spread over those 4-7 games and the loser only anywhere from zero to three wins spread over the same. And of course, by definition, you expect the series winner to win Game 7 100% of the time.

So what are the a priori probabilities here? Well, running a simulation of 10,000 7 game series in which each team has a 50-50 chance of winning, these were the results:

Team A wins 4922 out of 10000 series
Series winner wins
Game 1: 6541/10000 (65%)
Game 2: 6565/10000 (66%)
Game 3: 6579/10000 (66%)
Game 4: 6643/10000 (66%)
Game 5: 5896/8732 (68%)
Game 6: 4692/6220 (75%)
Game 7: 3084/3084 (100%)

So a priori, assuming evenly matched teams, we would expect the series winner to win Game 2 about 65% of the time. The statistic in the article said that the series winner in the ALCS has won Game 2 17 out of 23 times, or about 74% of the time. Considering that the sample size is very small--23 games--this difference of 10% doesn't seem to be terribly significant.

(Bonus section: in the above example, I'm actually being conservative, because I'm assuming that the teams are evenly matched. But of course, in real life the teams are sometimes not evenly matched, in which case we should say that one team has a (e.g.) 60-40 or 70-30 chance of winning. If we run the 10,000 series simulation with 60-40 odds, we get this:

Team A wins 7140 out of 10000 series
Series winner wins
Game 1: 6766/10000 (68%)
Game 2: 6690/10000 (67%)
Game 3: 6784/10000 (68%)
Game 4: 6724/10000 (67%)
Game 5: 5853/8436 (69%)
Game 6: 4456/5748 (78%)
Game 7: 2727/2727 (100%)

If we run it with 70-30 odds, we get this:

Team A wins 8729 out of 10000 series
Series winner wins
Game 1: 7318/10000 (73%)
Game 2: 7286/10000 (73%)
Game 3: 7274/10000 (73%)
Game 4: 7305/10000 (73%)
Game 5: 5558/7532 (74%)
Game 6: 3474/4363 (80%)
Game 7: 1785/1785 (100%)

So what we see here is that, when we account for the fact that teams are not always evenly matched--that sometimes a team will have a odds-on advantage in winning each game--it only nudges the probability that the series winner will win Game 2 upwards. Which makes my case a little bit stronger....

...although, we should note that the probability probably never swings too far away from 50-50. Remember that, in the regular season, the best team in the league rarely has better than about a 65-35 advantage when it plays 165 games against all the other teams in the league (which includes a lot of crappy and mediocre teams). When you consider that in the ALCS the best teams are playing against each other, I imagine that the odds of the team favorited to win doesn't go much beyond 60, if that.)

Anyway, to conclude: the statistic cited in the article is not particularly meaningful. Moreover, it's odd to focus in on Game 2 in isolation of the fact that the Yankees also won Game 1. It seems like, if anything, the statistic we should be getting is: what are the a priori odds that the Angels will come back from 0-2 to win the series, assuming they're evenly matched with the Yankees (a good assumption, I think)? Well, assigning the Angels to "Team A":

Team A wins 1893 out of 10000 series

Doesn't look too good for the Angels.

(Photo used sans permission from here.)

On Rush and the Rams

Harinder wrote to me asking what I thought of the controversy surrounding the NFL freezing out Rush Limbaugh from buying a minority stake in the Rams, and I have to say, I think there's not much to it. Not only is Rush Limbaugh a polarizing and supremely distracting national figure, but he also has a history of making racist comments about football players. Making him part-owner would have been a terrible business decision for the Rams and for the NFL. The only thing that surprises me is that he was seriously considered in the first place.