Beep Baseball

Today’s speaker at my lunch was....a blind baseball player.

Pretty inspiring.

Rule 8 from the official site:

RULE 8 BASE RUNNING

Section 1: When Batter Becomes a Runner

Article 1...A batter becomes a runner with the right to attempt to score by advancing to the activated base when he hits a fair ball.

Article 2...Runner scores one point for legally advancing to and touching the activated base before his fair hit ball is legally fielded by the defense.

NOTE: In case of a "tie" between the runner and fielder, the runner shall be called out.

Section 2: Touching and Return To A Base

Article 1...An advancing runner shall touch first or third base, whichever is activated at the time the ball is hit.

Article 2...A runner who overruns the activated base may attempt to return to touch it prior to the defense legally fielding his/her hit ball. No verbal or physical assistance may be given by any person to a runner who misses a base and attempts to return to it. PENALTY: Runner is out.

Article 3...For the act of the runner Touching the Base, touching applies to contact of any part of the runner or his/her clothing, if the clothing is reasonably well-fitted, with any part of the base or its wind-resistant device.

Section 3: Base Running Awards

Article 1...When a runner is obstructed while advancing to the activated base by a fielder in direct pursuit of the ball, the umpire shall award a score if the obstruction occurred in foul territory; or an out to the defense if the obstruction occurred in fair territory (interference). If there is doubt as to whether the proper call is obstruction (defense, foul territory) or interference (offense, fair territory), the head umpire may call a replay. If there is interference away from the ball by a defensive player not in direct pursuit of the ball, the umpire may award a run to the offense if the umpire feels that the runner could have touched the activated base prior to the ball being legally fielded had there been no interference. Award may be made whether interference was in fair or foul territory. EXAMPLE: The ball is it to the first base side, third base is activated, the third baseman interferes in foul or fair territory with the runner attempting to reach third base preventing him/her from touching the activated base before the defense legally fields the ball. The umpire may award the run since the third baseman was obviously not in direct pursuit of the ball. Judgement is necessary to assure the runner did not seek the third baseman to instigate the contact and draw the award.

Article 2...When a runner is obstructed by an umpire, or other game official, while advancing to the activated base; or a fielder is prevented from fielding a hit ball by umpire/official interference, the head umpire may award a score to the offense or an out to the defense, or call a replay.

Section 4: Runner Is Out

Article 1...The Batter/Runner is Out When:

[a] His/her fair hit ball is legally fielded (caught) by a fielder before he/she touches the activated base; or

[b] His/her fair or foul fly ball is caught by a fielder before it touches the ground, an umpire or other game official, a spotter, the pitcher or catcher, any object foreign to the natural ground, or any person other than another defensive fielder; or

[c] After hitting the ball, his/her bat again touches the ball in fair territory, or touches the ball before it has passed the forty-foot line when there is a change that the ball could have crossed the line if contact had not been made, the ball is dead and the runner is out. EXCEPTION: If the bat and the ball come in contact a second time while the batter is still holding the bat in the batter’s box, it is a foul ball; or

[d] Runner is out when he is touched by or touches a fair hit ball before the ball is touched by a fielder, unless such touching occurs while the batter is still in the batter’s box (foul ball); or

[e] He/she touches or is touched by his/her hit ball which is rolling toward first or third base, inside the base line, before the ball has crossed the forty-foot line and there is a possibility that the ball could have crossed the line fi the runner had not had contact with the ball; or

[f] There is interference with a fielder by any person associated with the offensive team.

Smith & Wesson Model 56

I have an office manager who HATES guns. Her dad was an Air Force guy who left her two S & W .38 Specials. She knew I had an interest so she asked me to take a look. I took to a gun show and did a little research and determined that they were worth about $400 each. I was going to buy both but her husband decided he wanted to hang on to one.

I told them I'd go to the range to make sure they were in good shape. I put that off for weeks.

Saturday morning about 5:00 I found myself in that too often state of being unable to sleep so I did a little more digging as I planned to take them to the range that day.

Turns out, they are very, er, special .38 Specials. 200 of about 15,000 survive an Air Force recall (I think they went to semi-auto instead of revolvers) in the early sixties. Seems they are a little out of my reach at appx. $2500 each. If you click on the pic below you can see they are "Mod. 56.")

George Will says Obama in a blowout, and that may not be a bad thing...

Video at Hot Air.

Re: (We have a computer hooked up to our "good" receiver/speakers.)

Is that an easy thing to do? I would think an amplifier would be necessary to get the full value of the good speakers.

Pandora

Pandora is the product of the Music Genome Project. From Wikipedia:

The Music Genome Project, created in January 2000, is an effort founded by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren to "capture the essence of music at the fundamental level" using over 400 attributes to describe songs and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them.

A given song is represented by a vector containing approximately 150 genes. Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical, have 300-500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is assigned a number between 1 and 5, and fractional values are allowed but are limited to half integers. (The term genome is borrowed from genetics.)

Given the vector of one or more songs, a list of other similar songs is constructed using a distance function.

To create a song's genome, it is analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song. Ten percent of songs are analyzed by more than one technician to ensure conformity with the standards, i.e., reliability.

The technology is currently used by Pandora to play music for Internet users based on their preferences. (Due to licensing restrictions, Pandora is available only to users whose location is reported to be in the USA by Pandora's geolocation software).

It's sort of like radio, in the sense that it delivers a stream of music where you haven't picked the specific songs you're listening to and you can't ask it to repeat something you've just heard and there's no direct downloading of the music.

Pandora allows you to create "channels" according to your specifications.  You create a channel by selecting an artist or a song.  It then finds music that is similar based on its genome and delivers hours of listening pleasure.  You can refine it by telling it whether you like the song you're hearing or not.  You can put multiple artists/songs in your specification for a given channel, and you can make as many channels as you want (as far as I can tell).  It allows you pick whole genres.  (For Michael's benefit, I just tested what you get if you just type in "opera", and it lets you select "Opera, classical period".)

Because of licensing issues (or radio regulation?) it won't necessarily play exactly what you asked for, at least not right away, though it may end up in the mix eventually.

Using email addresses, you can "see" and play other people's channels.  (Go ahead and look at mine to see examples.)

You can tag songs you like as you hear them and it keeps track of your tagged list.  There are easy links to access avenues (iTunes, Amazon) to buy the music you're hearing.

The user interface is super simple, which is both a pro and a con.  At first glance you won't be aware of all it can do.

Sure, it's not the sound quality you get from albums or CDs.  And it would be particularly disappointing if you're just playing it on your computer speakers.  (We have a computer hooked up to our "good" receiver/speakers.)  But it will help you find new music, and it's ideal for background music when you're not wholly concentrated on listening and for enjoying lots of music you may not need to own.

Texas Governor's Mansion Destroyed

by arson Saturday night/Sunday Morning.

DMN story here. KXAN video here.

The good news is that since the Mansion was being remodeled, none of the antique furnishings were in the house. I dislike Governor Haircut as much as anyone but why, why, why would anybody do this?

Just under 2 miles from my place as the crow flies.

No glass ceiling for entertainers in MN

The DFL in Minnesota has just selected Al Franken to be our candidate for Norm Coleman's Senate seat. Sad day for party activists who generally favored his competitor Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer. I guess we're trying to keep up with California (Sonny Bono, Arnold) in retraining entertainers for new careers (Jesse the Body and now Franken). Should be a circus.

Glass ceilings

Here's a line from Hillary's concession speech:

Although we weren’t able to shatter that hardest, highest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.

Huh? Black people don't bump into the glass ceiling? If she's going to count all the votes she received as cracks in the glass ceiling, shouldn't she also count all the votes Obama received? The line should have read "36 million cracks", and "we still have a chance to crack it".

And now in post-speech interviews, Terry McCauliffe is going on and on about her 18 million votes cracking the glass ceiling. Sigh.

Paid Family Leave

In follow-up to our earlier exchange about paid leave, here is a post by K.A. Geier at Tapped today, noting that "[a]ccording to a recent study done by Harvard and McGill universities, 169 of the 173 countries studied offer some form of guaranteed paid maternity or parental leave. Alas, the U.S. is one of those four countries which does not offer the benefit, putting us in the [company] of such stellar economies as Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland." The piece goes on to discuss paid leave in terms of economic theory.

Music Map

Same thing for music. Frank Zappa appears on a map for Chopin.

Literature Map

Check this out.  You can identify an author you like and it will show you a bunch of other authors you might like, in a graphical representation where supposedly the most similar are closest the author you identified.  Can't vouch for the results, but it's an interesting idea.  

If Google can do it, so can I

I know it's like being a Manchester United or Green Bay Packers fan but I love this painting:

Holland House Cocktails

Here's Scooter's aforementioned Holland House Ad:

Re: Prediction (not hedging)

Let me say this: how deeply I regret that I cannot get behind the first legitimate African-American candidate for president.

Would that the first had been any of the conservative African-Americans about whom I've posted before and to whom I've contributed. I could pull that lever in a second...ok, maybe not Lynn Swann. Given the Republican candidate, I might even have considered Harold Ford (my favorite A-A Democrat).

I've long believed and hoped that the first woman or first A-A prez would be an elephant. I hope that belief is not shattered in November.

Odds: McCain vs. Obama

Oddschecker.com compares odds available today through various betting channels:

Prediction

Three days before the convention, The Obama Bombshell drops. Hillary is nominated. It is discovered that Team Clinton was behind the Bombshell. Obama supporters are outraged, stay home on election day. McCain wins in a landslide.

[Update:  Stephanie has added color and bolding.]

Holland House Cocktails

Re: Golf Gear

Perhaps you'd prefer some Sen. Obama winter gear.

Golf gear?!

John McCain's revamped website features four tabs, one of which is "Golf Gear":

Oh my word. I expected he'd be a more worthy opponent.

Update: H/t Josh Marshall at TPM.

With apologies to Mr. Lileks

Dang. I can't figure out how to post a Holland House Cocktail Mixes ad I just found in a December, 1963 Life Magazine.

Picture a Rob Petrie-like man with smile on his face leaning back on the couch feet on stool with lovely wife Laura sitting on the floor next to him with her elbow on the couch as she gazes lovingly. The picture is funny enough but the text just kills:

This is Mrs. Charles C. Walters of San Mateo, California, a very considerate wife. Today, between the hours fo 4:30 and 6:00 p.m., she bathed the baby, fed the other two children [apparently they did better than replacement rate in 1963] and sent them out to play, freshened herself up, started dinner and still had time to greet her husband with a refreshing, delicious Daiquiri.

Picture is beneath that paragraph and this paragraph follows:

This is Charlie Walters, a very tired husband. Today he got a call from the comptroller about his expense account, was told his raise would be held up six months, and rode home in a bus that broke down twice. Home at last, he's welcomed with an utterly delicious Daiquiri. Actually, Charlie was looking forward to a Bourbon Manhattan [isn’t that like saying a gin martini?]. But he drank the Daiquiri and had to admit it was great. (And why not? It was made with his own favorite rum!) Maybe tomorrow Marge will make him a Bourbon Manhattan. She makes all kinds of cocktails equally well with Holland House Cocktail Mixes.

Oh to live in 1963 forever.

RE: Prediction

I am forced to type with one hand since arm is being twisted. If the election were held today, I think Obama would win easily, both popularly and electorally. Fortunately for me, the election is not tomorrow.

By November, I say McCain wins comfortably in the electoral college though the popular vote should be close.

[Update:  Stephanie has added color and bolding to Scooter's post.  Am sure Scooter would have added these if he'd been typing with both hands.]

DNC rejects lobbyist and PAC money

Politico reports: [T]he DNC will no longer accept checks from federal lobbyists or political action committees, mirroring the strict standard Obama adopted for his presidential campaign.

So you might think, cynically, that they'd make this announcement today and declare a date in the future when the new policy would kick in, thereby leaving plenty of time to collect checks from these orgs before getting on the moral high ground.

But no. It's effective today. It's all about the grass-roots (see Karen Tumulty's piece in Time); and isn't that the antithesis of elitism?

Re: Prediction

Absolutely no chance Sen. Clinton runs as third party candidate. None. The Clintons have already soured many of the Dems and most of the MSM. Were she to run as a third party candidate, the Clintons would become anathema to both.

I also think that there is almost no chance that she is offered a VP slot though I think she’d take it. She’d want the kind of freedom and power that Reagan offered Ford when RR was looking for a VP before deciding on Bush the Elder. And while Lynne Cheney is as smart and charming and active as any Second Lady I can recall, still we hear very little about her. Can you imagine the headlines and camera time President Clinton would seek as Second Husband? The "dream ticket" is a three for one. If I were Senator Obama, I’d never do that.

What I might do if I were Obama is promise to nominate her for (shudder) a place on the Supreme Court. This was a topic of discussion on The Corner yesterday. I don’t think she could get confirmed unless the predicted slam of the Republicans in the Senate races actually takes place. I would publicly decry but privately and hypocritically support any stall tactics the Rep. Senators could muster. I think she might have just enough hubris to think she could make to the bench and therefore accept Sen. Obama’s offer.

As for the prediction, still too early for me. McCain is polling much better than I expected but I don’t think all those Sen. Clinton supporters we heard about this weekend are really going to stay home or vote for McCain in November. I agree with Steph (and Stewart and the Fox panel) that he was a disaster on Tuesday. There is no way McCain can compete with Sen. Obama on charisma. His handlers need to tell him to be himself...the "straight talking," curmudgeonly, veteran grandfather type. America can embrace that because we all know that guy. It is too bad that Reagan already used the age issue against Vice President Mondale in a single debate line that, had that election been close, I’d have said won it for RR. RR ran as the charming optimistic grandfather. McCain should run as the, if not dour, then gruff optimistic (oxymoronic, I know) grandfather.

Sheesh. I hope he’s talking to Sarah Palin. Her name has not been tossed around enough.

Re: Prediction: McCain vs Obama

This election is the poster-child of the "I'll vote for not who is best for the job, but who won't be the worst". My prediction comes with a caveat. In the past several days, I've heard the rightie radio hacks promoting a Hillary 3rd-party Independent run (ala Ross Perot). They claim that would be a good thing for Conservatives. Not sure I really follow that logic, except for the un-stated hope that Obama and Hillary will split the Dem vote, therefore McCain would win. I can't really see her doing that, unless she feels snubbed by not getting the VP slot. So my prediction is... Obama if Hillary doesn't run as an Independent; McCain if she does.

Prediction: McCain vs Obama

On the record, everyone. Who will be the next President of the United States of America?

(Proposal for stakes: Losers have to read and report on Scooter's materials on monetary policy if he hasn't made himself do it by November. Other ideas welcome.)

My prediction: Obama. I make this prediction after seeing McCain & Co's debacle on Tuesday night. To see Stewart's take on it, start at the 5:00 minute mark:



The problem isn't merely that McCain is a poor public speaker. The problem is that he has hired for his campaign a group of folks who orchestrated this mess. Someone advised him to be on TV giving a speech on Tuesday night next to Obama; someone chose a green background; someone thought it'd be adequate to give the speech in front of 100 people; someone wrote the speech; someone coached McCain to bare his teeth at the end of every sentence; and no one has told him not to hee-hee-hee as if he's reading it off the prompter. And then the candidate himself. Yeesh. Seriously, this is his second run for the Presidency, and this is as much skill as he's been able to acquire? This appearance displayed incompetence from beginning to end. It made me yearn for Bush's bud Brownie, the icon of incompetence. I don't think the electorate is in the mood for bush-league this year. Pun intended.

Some might point out that Bush wasn't a very good speaker either and that didn't stop us from electing him, but Bush merely had to compete with Gore and Kerry, both of whose manners or bearings were tough to take.

Re: dimes

How does this fit?

Fed, can you spare a dime?

$50 billion here, $100 billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Yikes. That can't be good.

H/T Ezra Klein at The American Prospect who labels it "Chart of the Day: Holy Shit Edition" (and gives h/t to Nick Beaudrot).

Philip Bobbit’s Terror and Consent

VDH’s conclusion on Philip Bobbit’s Terror and Consent:

I end with a modest suggestion. Bobbitt is too valuable a voice not to be heard. A range of authors, from Robert Kagan to Christopher Hitchens, have appealed to general audiences by condensing complex ideas into easily accessible and often short extended essays. Should Bobbitt write a brief summary of the 1,500 pages of The Shield of Achilles and Terror and Consent, his valuable and astute ideas might find the audience that his recent two books sadly will not — but surely deserve.

"Whitey" video

"removed by user."

Golf

I had the pleasure of playing the Tour 18 course in Humble/Houston yesterday in incredible heat (I did my Rachael Ray impression and wore an iced-down towel on my head most of the day). I think LJ has played this course, too.

It was a fund raising tournament supporting Methodist Retirement Communities, a client of my firm.

On my team's very first hole, the ninth for the course, we faced faced the famous island green of Sawgrass's 17th. It's not long but very intimidating.

First guy, in the drink. Second guy (moi), 20 feet from the pin, third guy (firm's important client), in the drink. Fourth guy, hitting his 28th tee shot ever...10 feet from pin, d--n him!

Could it be Gore?

Private jet flying now from Nashville to Minneapolis:



[Update: No, it wasn't.]

"Whitey" video!

Here.

Lee Child

New Jack Reacher book reviewed here. Article about Child here. I've read all the of the Reacher series and loved it, as has T.

Trash compactor on Death Star

was implausible and inefficient.

Diplomacy with Iran

Yesterday, David Brooks discussed diplomacy with Iran and noted that we don't understand Iran because Iran doesn't understand itself. He was painting a picture of their foreign relations as discombobulated with no clear org chart or process. Here's a post by Hooman Majd at HuffPo that offers interesting detail about Iranian diplomacy. I have no idea if it's accurate.

St. Paul victory party?

Halperin reports that Obama is considering a victory event in St. Paul on the cusp of the nomination. I think he's talking about next week. He notes that we're a swing state. I don't think we're very swingy, actually. I think we're soundly in the tank for Obama.

[Update: It's booked. Tuesday.]

Susan Sarandon's move...

to Canada or Italy. Haven't both those countries recently elected conservative gummints?

Life expectancy and health care expenditures

This graph is interesting too. This shows that in spite of increasing expenditures for health care (as a percentage of GDP), we are not seeing a significant rise in life expectancy. Of course, the data is only from 2000-2004. Also of note, though is how much higher the US expenditures are than everyone else's.

Luxembourg's PPP

Here. This graph shows PPP varying over time. I've "selected" Luxembourg and the US and clicked on "trails". You can see that Luxembourg's PPP matched with the US until about 1988, when Lux went on a tear.

Re: PPP

Pretty cool graph. If that is the definitive one, I don't see any real surprises.

GDP (PPP) per capita and life expectancy: Gapminder

I've found the definitive graph of GDP (PPP) per capita vs life expectancy at gapminder.org. It's better than mine because you can see the same data over time (since 1950) and dots are colored to correlate to parts of the world. And you can play around with it. By selecting particular countries, it will highlight their paths over time. Sort of hard to describe. For example, if you chart simply GDP over time, and you select Luxembourg and the US, you'll see that our GDPs matched and grew together until 1988 when Luxembourg's took off.

VDH's Works and Days

If anyone has been clicking on Hanson's Works and Days to the right and noticed no activity for a while, it's because pajamas media has been updating. Worth a look.

Now I'm going to fund the FLDS

via my tax dollars after the civil suit. Texas Supremes rule the kids go back to their families.

$7.5M just to get the kids out and into foster homes. Now they're going back. The size of the civil award will be such that the proceeds can go into a money market account and fund the operations of these guys for eternity.

Michael and I should have signed a few of these families up.

Cost of clothing

The price of most clothing has gone down over the past decade, reports the NYT."In current dollars, the 1998 suit would cost $788, the jeans would be $66 and the underwear would be nearly $24." In 2008, these items (same brands and products) would be $598 for the suit, $46 for the jeans and $21.50 for underwear.

The article notes that prices have gone up for other goods: "As consumers adjust to soaring prices for gasoline, food, education and medical care, just about the only thing that seems a bargain today is clothes — mainstream clothes, anyway."

Here's an opening for Scooter to make the case that the market for these other goods is not "free" because of government regulation or the insurance industry and that's why their prices are up.

Super rollout

Josh Marshall at TPM describes why he doesn't believe Obama has had or does have superdelegates "banked" for orchestrated rollout.  His reasons make sense. But this graph is why I believe they've been in the bank and unrolled in an orchestrated way by the Obama campaign.  You can't convince me that the supers would just happen to endorse in such a uniform pattern (3-4 per day since May 7) left to their own devices.  And the reason he needs to control rollout is to avoid the headline and impression that the election was handed to him by the supers, though of course their votes were necessary to secure the nomination (in spite of having the majority of pledged delegates).

My prediction was wrong

I predicted that Hillary's assassination comment last week would bring a quick end to the primary by allowing Obama to release a flood of Super endorsements and bringing party pressure to bear on Hillary.  But nope.  I was wrong. Obama continues to dribble the Supers.  His eye remains steadfastly focused on reuniting the party when the primary is over and so he wants to avoid humiliating her and alienating her supporters.   And of course there was no way that Hillary could bow to party pressure after her gaffe because that would have required that she take responsibility for losing and that would cut against her victimhood approach.

More on GDP (PPP) and life expectancy

I've reworked my charts illustrating life expectancy as a function of Purchasing Power Parity per capita for about 220 countries. I've used a scatter chart this time. It looks like this:

When we add a linear regression trendline, it fits like this:

When we apply a 2nd order polynomial trend line, it fits like this:

Neither trendline fits great and I don't know enough about fitting lines to data to know what to make of them. The linear regression line seems particularly off the mark for the high end PPPs. The polynomial looks to my eyes like it fits better, though the highest PPP (Luxembourg) looks left out.

Anyone know anything about these trendlines and how you know if they mean something?

As I mentioned earlier, all the data is from the CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/docs/rankorderguide.html.

I'm moving back to Denver...

99 on Saturday. 97 today. I'm melting. It's only May.

Stimulus checks?

Anybody got theirs yet? I filed via snail mail since I owed Uncle Sam. I haven't seen a check yet.

Purchasing Power Parity and Life Expectancy

I've discovered something called Purchasing Power Parity. If I understand it correctly, this makes for more meaningful comparisons amongst countries than GDP per capita.

In 1980, someone plotted this PPP against life expectancy and yielded this which shows a proportional relationship between PPP and life expectancy, i.e. the higher the PPP, the higher the life expectancy. At higher PPPs the curve flattens out. If this is still accurate in 2008, then my little graphs and conclusions below and below are all wrong.

But I'll re-do the exercise for the CIA's most recent numbers and we'll see how it looks. Predictions?

[Update: see above]

Kosher Coke

In Buzz on Friday, Lileks mentioned Coke made with cane sugar. This reminded me that I've heard that there's such a thing as kosher Coke that's made with sugar, instead of corn syrup, and it's distributed during Passover and maybe other Jewish holidays to kosher delis and such.

Jason at OfftheBroiler explains (in a post that has enough detail that I'm going to believe him):

According to Jewish law, nothing made with chametz (any of a number of proscribed cereals and grains, including corn) during passover may be consumed — so in order not to lose sales from observant Jews during that eight day period, a small number of Coca-Cola bottlers make a limited batch of the original Coke formulation, using refined sugar. Needless to say, stocks run out quickly and fans of Passover Coke have been known to travel many miles seeking out supermarkets with remaining caches.

He quotes this blurb from OUKosher.org:

Coca Cola will again be available with an OU-P for Pesach. Aside from the New York metropolitan area, Coke will be available in Boston, Baltimore-Washington, Miami, Atlanta, Houston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. This year, in New York, Coca Cola items will be made with an OU-P in 2 liter bottles and in cans. Other locations will have more limited Coke items made in different sizes. All these items, of course, require the OU-P symbol. Most of the bottling plants servicing these markets will designate the Passover Coke items with a distinctive yellow cap in addition to the OU-P symbol on the cap or shoulder of the bottle.

Maybe I'm out of luck here in Minneapolis, but I'm going to check it out, if I can remember next March/April.

Google maps

Finally got around to checking [Update: I meant the street view feature of] google maps. You can't really see my place because of all the foliage but you can see the back end of my truck in the driveway.

[Locke, Voltair, Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kant, Adam Smith, Jefferson, Paine and James Madison.]

A question since that was in Brackets: was that your insertion or the authors? Or, perhaps Alterman used them in various references and you compiled?

I just reread and figure you just reduced his list to ease your typing duties.

Legislated paid vacation...

"The United States is the only wealthy industrialized nation not to legislate any paid time off and holidays for its workforce."

Is this a big problem in the US?

I type this on a paid holiday and haven't taken a vacation in four years...but am going to Targhee, Idaho next month for a week. I suppose there are employers who make their employees work 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year but I can't believe there are that many. Anecdotally, I find that those working those 60-70 hour weeks do so by choice.

Paul Cartledge's The Spartans

Finished listening to the Spartans yesterday. I didn't finish it as excitedly as I began it because I had to listen in hour-long bites instead of in four hour chunks. I think it would be a much better book to read rather than listen to in the car.

It covers Sparta from roughly 700 BCE to the time of Octavian/Augustus in Rome in the late 1rst century BCE. The parts of Spartan history with which I had more familiarity were much more enjoyable because I could follow them much more easily. Since the only parts I know anything about are (i) Thermopoylae in 480 BCE and the subsequent ousting of the Persians following the naval battle at Salamis and land battle at Beotia and (ii) the Peloponnesian War 431-404 BCE, that's about 625 years about which I know very little.

Had I been able to read the book on the pages, I probably would have done much better with the names of people and places. Everybody knows about Leonidas, Alcibiades and Pericles (wow, the spell checker actually knows those names) but others were tough. Also, a history covering so much time is difficult to listen to without timelines. Shorter subjects covered in much more detail are easier because there is so much repetition.

One interesting item that seems a bit incongruous for Sparta. It was the only Greek city-state that formally educated its women. To be sure, women were second-class citizens but they could own property in their own right and were easily the most free of all the Greek women. When asked by an non-Spartan woman why this was the case, a Spartan woman (a royal, I think, whose name escapes me) apocryphally said, "Because we bear Spartan men." Aristotle apparently disdained Sparta in part due to the fact that they were "ruled by their women."

The author suggests that at the time of publication (2004), George Clooney (nooooo) and Bruce Willis were being considered for Leonidas in another live action version of the Battle at Thermopoylae based on Pressfield's Gates of Fire. (See also, The 300 Spartans and 300.) This is the first I've heard of such a movie but would pay dearly to see it.

One other item that was thoroughly confusing to this little mind as I listened. The early (or at least first quartile of) 4th century BCE would be 400-376 BCE and the late 4th century would be 325-301. When the author wrote "the turn of the" or the "late" or "early" __th century," I would always think the wrong end of the century.

GDP and Life Expectancy: Trends hold for top 48

Here's the chart that results from plotting the GDP per capita and life expectancy for the 48 countries with the highest GDP per capita.

Same trend: life expectancy varies inversely with GDP per capita.

Same methods and data sources as I used below.

[Correction: that's the top 47, not 48, countries. Why cutoff at 47 countries? Country 48 is the Falklands and there is no life expectancy available for it. Otherwise, I would have done top 50.]

[Update: see above]

Put this in your Trivial Pursuit pipe...

It was in the turbulent period of 1922-30, a time when the Soviets were still establishing themselves in Mongolia--when the Gobi was still accessible to Americans--that Roy Chapman Andrews of the Museum of Natural History in New York conducted several expeditions there, scouring the desert for dinosaur fossils. Chapman Andrews was a charismatic, larger-than-life big-game hunter and scholar-adventurer who uncovered the first skeleton of Velociraptor, the star dinosaur in Steven Speilberg's movie Jurrassic Park. Chapman Andrews would later become the prototype for the fictional archaeologist-explorer Indiana Jones in the movies of George Lucas.

P. 97, Robert D. Kaplan's Imperial Grunts.

Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America

I read Why We're Liberals by Eric Altermann in part because of that Mamet essay that I found to be completely incoherent. I couldn’t follow what it was Mamet thought liberalism was and what exactly he was rejecting. Nothing he said sounded like liberalism, as I view it. That made me wonder whether I was making up a liberal philosophy that didn't match what other people believe liberalism is. But Alterman crystallizes it thusly (and this does match my idea of it):

Liberalism’s bedrock belief in personal freedom, of thoughts, of expression, and of action is derived from and defined by the philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its children, a group that includes [Locke, Voltair, Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kant, Adam Smith, Jefferson, Paine and James Madison.] A liberal society strives to maximize these freedoms for the largest number of citizens while at the same time protecting the rights and interests of the minority, whose ideas of personal freedom may conflict with those of the majority. This focus on the freedom and the personal dignity of the individual fundamentally distinguishes liberalism from the tenets of both the religious right and the Marxist left, which stress instead unquestioned obedience to a higher authority for the benefit of the collective. Liberals find inherited and unquestioned belief systems – whether imposed by the Bible, the Koran, the Dialectic of History, or the Fatherland – to be anathema.

I wanted the whole of the book to be an unpacking of this: to walk through each of those philosopher/thinker's contributions to the liberal manifesto; to track its evolution; to compare and contrast it to conservative ideology; to describe how liberal ideals are reflected in policy.

But no. The lion’s share of the book is a listing of the nasty things right wing pundits accuse liberals of, followed by Alterman’s debunking or response. Altermann spends more space laying out the outrageous things the right wing pundits have said, than in his responses. My goodness. It truly is amazing to behold what comes out of the mouths of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.

Nevertheless, I don’t regard this as particularly useful in answering the question of “why we’re liberals”. Essentially, Alterman answers the question “why don’t we agree with Coulter, Limbaugh et al?” I didn’t need to read his book for that.

And it is filled with logical fallacies. For example, he purports to point out that conservatives are hypocrites because red states are higher in a whole host of metrics of bad behavior (related to crime, substance abuse and sexual promiscuity), while at the same time supporting tough agendas against such behavior. Here is one example of the 16 presented: The per capita rate of violent crime in red states is 421 per 100,000. In blue states, it's 372 per 100,000. That doesn't prove that red state folks are hypocritical. Maybe these states have a larger crime-committing population and that affects their attitudes about crime and leads them to choose candidates with a tough-on-crime policy agenda which is typically the Republican candidates. Or maybe policies in blue states actually lead to lower crime. We can't tell. But we can tell that this stat is not proof that conservatives are hypocritical.

Still, there is interesting stuff in the book. For example, Alterman notes the fruits of liberal policies that other countries have reaped:

The workers of France, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Norway all ... enjoy higher productivity per hour worked than do U.S. workers. The reasons for this are myriad, but almost all of them contradict conservative conventional wisdom. According to conservative ideology, high tax rates are supposed to kill personal initiative and depress growth, but they are much higher and more progressive across Europe than in the U.S. Welfare payments – again, allegedly the means by which the personal initiative of poor people is destroyed – are based in Europe on universal entitlements, with little, if any, means-testing. Finally, union membership, also the bane of conservative propagandists in the United States, ranges from 70 percent of the workforce in Norway to over 95 percent of the workforce in Finland, more than six times its level in the United States.

While these societies are hardly utopias – much of Europe remains riven by apparently insoluble Islamic immigration crises and relatively high unemployment – the benefits provided by many if not most of these societies would, for most Americans, prove a wonder to behold. Despite the fact that Americans work nearly four hundred more hours a year than those famously industrious Germans, and more than workers in virtually every western European nation by a considerable margin, these same states somehow sponsor far more generous programs of training and job mobility, and pay generous unemployment benefits. Families receive periods of paid maternity and paternity leave. Europeans also enjoy high-quality public health and education provisions, and all manner of public services, from parks to efficient and inexpensive public transportation systems, that are not available anywhere in the United States. To give just one example, Denmark spends nearly one-third of its gross domestic product on government-run benefits and taxes its citizens at an equivalently high rate. Its top bracket is 63 percent, nearly double the highest rate in the United States. With these revenues, the state spends more than 5 percent of its GDP on the unemployed and more than 2 percent alone on its “flexicurity” label market programs to help retrain displaced workers. This compares with a feeble 0.16 percent in the United States*, which is by far the lowest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Partly as a result, in mid-2006 Denmark’s unemployment rate was just 3.6 percent, well below the 4.7 percent in the United States. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, Denmark’s “Quality of Life” index proved superior to that of America as well, with advantages like universal health care and day care, and a poverty rate of just 4.3 percent, compared with 17.1 percent in the United States. (America has the second-worst record among OECD nations.) Meanwhile, Denmark is, at this writing, enjoying a small budget surplus, equal to approximately 0.65 percent of its GDP. The United States, meanwhile, is saddled with ever-exploding deficits, currently reaching 4.5 percent of GDP, and rising.

[Skipping a similar case for Finland]

American’s...welfare system, even in its most generous incarnation, raised poor incomes only moderately, and reduced the proportion of adults in poverty from 26.7 to 19.1 percent. In Germany, France and Italy, meanwhile, the proportion of adults in poverty hovers at around just 7 percent. . . . [W]hile roughly a quarter of all American children are condemned to grow up in poverty, the analogous proportions for the countries cited above are just 8.6, 7.4 and 10.5 percent. The lack of progress in this area in the United States is one reason American conservatives insist on making these programs so stingy. The truth is that, when it comes to social mobility, these European nations prove far more successful in providing what might be called “The Nordic Dream”. . . than the romantic notion of “the American Dream” that schoolchildren are taught to cherish. . . . According to two separate studies based on a set of data collected over a period of five decades the Nordic countries enjoy considerably greater degrees of social mobility than do Americans. In the United States, a son’s earnings are more than twice as likely to be closely related to those of his father than in most Nordic nations, and even Britain does a much better job at offering second-generation earners a higher probability of economic improvement than does the United States.

* I can’t tell from the text or the endnotes whether this figure for the U.S. takes into account the spending at the state level.  If not, he's probably not making an apples to apples comparison with the other countries.

Now, I think I know at least one of the things Scooter and Michael are thinking: “yeah, but what about the GDPs of those countries? GDP provides a picture of a nation’s wealth-generating engine (and we care about this because presumably wealth is a good thing) and the more socialist-tending a country is, the more anemic its economic engine. The purer capitalism is, the cheaper goods and services are, making more of them available to more people.” So here you go. I’ve plotted GDP per capita of the countries mentioned in the above quoted passages:

This shows that it is true that the U.S.’s GDP per capita is higher than almost all of these countries.

But the thing that I always wonder, and I think this is at the heart of liberal philosophy, is whether a more dynamic economic engine is the be-all end-all. Are human beings better off as a result of this better engine? To what extent does having access to cheaper, more plentiful goods provide real benefit?

What would be a key measure of the health and well-being of humans? How about life-expectancy? It’s not perfect or complete, but it must be a measure of the well-being of a species, reflecting intrinsically the degree to which basic needs for food and shelter are met and the level of health enjoyed (and that intrinsically reflects the level of stress the species endure, i.e. how difficult it is for us to meet our needs).

Below I add the life expectancy, in purple in the foreground, from each of these countries.
Let's take a look at the linear regression trend lines for GDP per capita and life expectancy.

Life expectancy varies inversely to GDP per capita.  It appears that the more productive we are the sooner we die. (And perhaps the farther we tend toward pure capitalism, the more stressful life is and the sooner we die?)

Let me acknowledge there are plenty of problems with my exercise, and I'm only offering it as a starting point for consideration. I'm open to any suggestions as to how to improve it. A few of the problems I recognize are:

a) my method of selecting the countries to include (i.e. the ones mentioned in these few paragraphs of Alterman’s book) may not be yielding a true picture of anything; I should re-do this using all countries. I would hypothesize that at the lowest end of the GDP spectrum we’d see the opposite trend: life expectancy increases with increasing GDP.

b) to show a correlation between purity of capitalism and life expectancy, I would need some way to characterize and quantify the degree of socialism within each country. By simply using Alterman’s list of countries providing lots of benefits, I’ve taken a short-cut that yields results that may not bear out with a more complete data set. Obviously, there are other countries that are are closer to pure socialism than these.

c) GDP per capita isn’t the sole measure of economic well-being.

d) length of life isn’t a full measure of the quality of life.

e)  correlation is not cause-and-effect.

No doubt, something like this, but with much greater rigor, has been done by economists.  Still, it's fun to play...

The data for the charts above is here:
The data comes from the CIA's World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html

GDP is here:  https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html
Life expectancy is here: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html

Back to Why We’re Liberals, here are a few more factoids:

• The United States is the only wealthy industrialized nation not to legislate any paid time off and holidays for its workforce.
  
• The United States and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all of their citizens.
  
• Gay marriage is the law in Belgium, the Netherlands and even Catholic Spain, while gay civil unions are officially recognized by Norway, Sweden, Iceland, France and Germany.

Some might assert that we needn't look to other countries to suggest what our own policies should be.  But I think these types of things are relevant to how countries will compete for the best workers, in the coming decades as nation states (and therefore citizenship) grows less relevant.

The book raises many other topics worthy of discussion, but they'll have to wait for another day.

[Update: see above]

Gas prices

Sure, $3.85 seems high for a gallon of gas, but is it that high, historically speaking, taking inflation into account?
Yes, yes it is. (As Scooter noted earlier, you can enlarge the graph by clicking on it.)

The graph is published with permission of Financial Trend Forecaster and InflationData.com. Read the full article on Gasoline Inflation here.

Re: Hill's not the first

Karl cites nine "cases" where the assassination possibility is raised, not by the "Obama camp" as Michael stated, but by "Obama, his staff, his supporters and his friends in the media".

First of all, discussing the possibility is different from using the possibility to justify your continued pointless campaign.

Second, I looked at all nine of Karl's cases and here's who's talking:

1) Obama appears to be answering a question raised in an interview;
2) Nothing relevant; maybe a wrong link
3) Teddy, responding to reporter's question
4) An elderly Rhodesian woman
5) Earl MacRae (who is that? a Canadian journalist)
6) Regarding the apparent security lapse in Dallas
7) Obama describing not being aware that his motorcade passed the site of JFK's assassination, in response to reporter's question
8) An art installation on the topic
9) Rev. Billy Kyles responding to reporter's question. The Rev. was with RFK.

You simply can't form an impression that the Obama camp has pushed this image, based on these nine cited cases.

Hill's not the first [Updated: Steph shows otherwise]

to talk about assassination. Barry's camp has before, lots of times, as noted by Karl at Protein Wisdom. Via Allah.

Shocking new photo evidence re Hill's assassination comment

Here.

Well, actually...

Olbermann said Hewitt's comment about Olbermann being a sports guy was fair enough:

Olbermann on Hillary's assassination comment

I'm sure not everyone enjoys Keith Olbermann, but he's made a Special Comment regarding Hillary's "assassination" comment.

Perfect.  Long, but I enjoyed the whole thing.  It includes a listing of the many many outrageous things she's said during this campaign and it is pretty amazing to hear them all strung together in one place.

We didn't hear her the first time

Karen Tumulty notes that this isn't the first time Hillary suggested assassination was her route to the WH.  She said it in March in a Time interview.  How did it go unnoticed?

New poll--> Youza! or yikes!

Prediction

I predict that Hillary's "assassination" idea for getting the nomination is going to bring an abrupt end to her campaign.  The party is going to tell her its time to bring it to an end; Obama can stop dribbling the supers and unleash the rest.  Will take a few days.  This is who I've always thought she was.  Well, actually, I thought she had it in her to commission the hit.

[Update:  Wrong.  Supers still dribbling.  Probably smart on Obama's part whose eye has remained steadfastly focused on bringing the party together when the primary is over, and so won't do anything that would humiliate her.]

The Blue Religion

Collection of short stories from members of the Mystery Writers of America (edited by my man Michael Connelly) about cops. Hit and miss.

Every Dead Thing

John Connolly's debut novel and the introduction of Charlie Parker, whose fifth(?) appearance I reviewed here. Pretty good stuff.

Now, I really am ashamed of my vote

From WASHINGTON (AFP) :

The former first lady originally told a newspaper board in South Dakota she could not understand calls for her to quit the race, arguing that history showed that some past nominating contests had gone on into June.

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary, somewhere in the middle of June, right?" Clinton said in an interview with the Argus Leader newspaper editorial board.

"We all remember, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California, I don't understand it," Clinton said.

I'm ashamed. Life is uncertain. Any VP chance now gone.

When I voted, I did so because I thought her more beatable and, in the event of a McCain loss, she'd be a better president. I was wrong on the latter.

Democrat Senators who have fooled me, Al Gore and Joe Biden

Even as late as the campaign when Biden was still in it, I thought him the most reasonable foreign policy Democrat running. I suspect that the anonymous poster to your comment was Michael given the brevity of the comment but even if not, I have to agree. As I read Biden’s article, all I could think about was how wrong I had been last fall to ascribe any Scoopsonian qualities to him.

Just in case you’ve missed hearing about the lawsuit in Florida

From the South Florida Business Journal:

Three prominent Broward County Democrats filed a federal lawsuit Thursday morning against the Democratic National Committee, seeking to force the committee to seat Florida's delegates at the upcoming presidential nomination convention.

The suit was filed by state Sen. Steven Geller, an attorney for Greenspoon Marder in Fort Lauderdale; Barbara Effman, president of the Democratic Club in Broward County; and Percy Johnson, a convention delegate.

It's November, 2000 all over again.

Rep. Maxine Waters

The gift that keeps on givng.

From the NYT:

At another point, Ms. Waters brazenly suggested that perhaps the American oil industry should be nationalized, acknowledging that it was an “extreme step” but one that might be necessary if outsize profits and exorbitant gasoline prices continued.

Lileks defends MSP

Here.  He forgot to mention MSP's very famous men's room.

It's a crummy airport.  LJ, do you fly into MSP to get to your land?

Biden responds to Lieberman on foreign policy

Joe Biden, making his case (well) to be Secretary of State:

At the heart of [Bush's] failure is an obsession with the "war on terrorism" that ignores larger forces shaping the world: the emergence of China, India, Russia and Europe; the spread of lethal weapons and dangerous diseases; uncertain supplies of energy, food and water; the persistence of poverty; ethnic animosities and state failures; a rapidly warming planet; the challenge to nation states from above and below.

Instead, Mr. Bush has turned a small number of radical groups that hate America into a 10-foot tall existential monster that dictates every move we make.

The intersection of al Qaeda with the world's most lethal weapons is a deadly serious problem. Al Qaeda must be destroyed. But to compare terrorism with an all-encompassing ideology like communism and fascism is evidence of profound confusion.

From Biden's op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Nope, I don't know this guy

From the Strib: Long-time Minneapolis peace activist and sometime-gadfly Ed Felien asked a Hennepin County District Court judge on Thursday to compel the county attorney to arrest President Bush when his plane lands for the GOP convention in September.

Full quote from Obama

In case context matters to anyone, here's the full quote:

All right. So that's what we want to do on global warming here in the United States. We are also going to have to negotiate with other countries. China, India, in particular Brazil. They are growing so fast that they are consuming more and more energy and pretty soon, if their carbon footprint even approaches ours, we're goners. That's part of the reason why we've got to make the investment. We got to lead by example. If we lead by example, if we lead by example, then we can actually export and license technologies that have been invented here to help them deal with their growth pains. But keep in mind, you're right, we can't tell them don't grow. We can't drive our SUVs and, you know, eat as much as we want and keep our homes on, you know, 72 degrees at all times, whether we're living in the desert or we're living in the tundra and then just expect every other country is going to say OK, you know, you guys go ahead keep on using 25 percent of the world's energy, even though you only account for 3 percent of the population, and we'll be fine. Don't worry about us. That's not leadership.

He wasn't saying we need permission from other countries to do these things; he's saying that if we are going to extract commitments from China, India and Brazil to make changes, we're going to have to too.

New poll -->

[Old poll: Americans 3, Jaytard 1.]

New poll: Agree or disagree?:

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and expect that other countries are going to say OK. That's not leadership. That's not going to happen."

Re: Re: What if... (Marriage)

I appreciate the going out on a limb, Scooter. And I like the red ink.

I remember a study that supports your proposition that marriage tames men. It showed that testosterone levels drop when men marry.

Biking to work!

I biked to work today for the first time this season.

Our office has a couple fabulous features that make it easy to commute by bike: 1) ultra-casual dress is acceptable and 2) it’s located right next to a major bike path through town called the Midtown Greenway. The Greenway extends east-west across the whole city and connects to suburban bike paths, making it possible to bike on a carless bike path from the Mississippi River westward to Lake Minnetonka, one of the largest metro lakes and the westernmost suburb.

Part of the Greenway, through the heart of the city, is built in what was a railway trench. It was built below street grade, with the city streets bridged over it. Seems like an obvious way to build a railway through the city so as not to disturb street traffic, but it was unusual (either the first or second such railway trench) when it was built. The glory of it for biking is that you can get across the city easily, without having to stop and wait for lights and traffic at every corner.

Last summer I biked to work as much as possible, which means all the days that I had no client meetings (and therefore didn’t need to dress up) and it wasn’t raining.

I’m not wild about biking for exercise. But I do love biking for transportation and especially for getting to work. I don’t do it for the environment. I don’t do it to save energy. I don’t do it to reduce my impact (if I have any) on global warming. I do it because it’s more fun that driving. There’s something about using a bike for transportation that makes me feel like a kid and, more specifically, makes me feel like ME as a kid. What could give you a stronger reminder of yourself as a kid than biking as fast as possible to get home before dark, which I had to do a couple times last fall.

Sometimes I don’t feel all that connected to the person I was at earlier points in life. But I suspect it’s emotionally healthy to feel one with all the yous that you’ve been. Because biking for transportation connects me to the kid me, I feel like it’s good for my soul.

There’s another aspect to biking to work that I love that I’m having trouble putting my finger on. It’s something about having a more direct connection to all of the ground between home and work.

A third fabulous feature of our office is that dogs are welcome. Here's Karma the Dog sleeping under my desk.
The result of this abundance of office riches, is that I’m going to have to choose each day between biking to work without Karma or driving with Karma. (I know, I could get a doggy trailer and I might, but a) she’s 50+ pounds so it’d be a chore to pull her and b) she’s easily frightened so I doubt she’d like it. I need to find a way to test it before shelling out $300.)

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Minneapolis is second only to Portland, OR in its percentage of workers who commute by bike. Austin is 18th. Houston is 41st. Dallas is 48th.

Re: What if...(marriage)

I'm going to go way out on a limb here.

On a purely personal and, I admit, probably religious level, my biggest gripe with the changing of the definition of marriage is that I do believe this:

Men without women at some basic, instinctive level are savage and destructive: self-destructive and others-destructive.

Marriage has a civilizing effect on men. There is in men a swashbuckling bent (ok, maybe it's just me). Marriage to a woman focuses that bent in a positive way. It re-channels those destructive forces into positive outcomes as the drive to cause destruction/chaos becomes a drive to protect--wives and children.

For this reason, I see real problems in a Chinese society going forward as boys are treasured and girls discarded. Who wants to live in a society in which men vastly outnumber women? That will be a scary place.

Doesn't resonate with my libertarian side but that is what I think. I also recognize that I generalize.

Re: Rollerball

A movie from the 70s (terrible recent remake) with James Caan and John Houseman in which nation states had been replaced with corporate states. The Rollerball team of which Caan was a part was the home team of Houston which was the "capital" of something like Petroleana. (Update: apparently it was something much duller: the Energy Corporation.)

Not exactly Bobbitt's "market states" but that is what came to mind.

I saw Rollerball at a drive-in in the 70s. There is a line in the movie that comes up when the shady muckety-mucks are discussing rollerball and Muckety 1 calls rollerball a "game."

Muckety 2 replies, "Game? It was never intended to be a game." He implies that it is really the current equivalent of the Coliseum and it is one of the key lines of the movie.

Seeing it at a drive-in, here is what I heard Muckety 2 say:

Game? It--the snack bar will close in 5 minutes--game.

LJ and Michael have probably heard me tell that story a dozen times. Can't help it.

Why can’t I clear some of this out of my little brain for something useful

I heard an announcement today at the office for one of the nurse/paralegals to take a call from what sounded like a “Dr. Tobor.”

Immediately a song from about 40 years ago (from a cartoon I once watched) popped into my head:

There's a prehistoric monster
that came from outer space.
Created by the Martians
to destroy the human race.
The FBI is helpless,
it's twenty stories tall!
What can we do, who can we call?
Call Tobor the 8th Man,
Call Tobor the 8th Man.
Faster than a rocket,
quicker than a jet.
He's the mighty robot,
he's the one to get.
Call Tobor the 8th Man.
Quick call Tobor, the mightiest robot of them all!

I recall it being the "Call Tobor the Eight Man" but it’s pretty close. I also recalled it being animation of the Clutch Cargo or Speed Racer variety. I didn’t recall that it was early anime. Or that Ralph Bashki did the opening sequence.

Update: I certainly didn't remember this, "8th Man had special energy cigarettes that he carried in a cigarette case on his belt. Bad guys who made the mistake of allowing Tobor to have a final smoke before attempting to execute the worn down 8th man were rudely surprised to find that he would return to full strength." Foreshadowing echoes (yes, it's oxymoronic) of Sleeper.

Conclusion to Minneapolis school investigation

The Minnesota Department of Education has completed its investigation into whether the Tarik ibn Zayad Academy charter school in a suburb of Minneapolis is really a madrassa. It finds nothing in the school's curriculum that violates laws precluding government establishment of religion in public schools. It did direct a couple of changes that the school agrees to make (something about a prayer service on Fridays, and having buses available so kids can leave before a voluntary after-school activity is over). The school was cooperative with the investigation.

It was appropriate for Kersten to draw attention to this school; it was not appropriate for her to paint the school as nefarious and to write with an attitude that this was an outrage that the wacky liberal Dept of Education doesn't care about, asking "Why does the Minnesota Department of Education allow this sort of religious activity at a public school?"

There are a couple of interesting footnotes to Kersten’s story. The substitute teacher, Amanda Getz, who constitutes Kersten’s gotcha-gotcha eyewitness proof of the school’s nefariousness, is a Republican activist. Not that Republican activists can’t ever be reliable, but her affiliation with the party does raise the specter that Getz’s observation and reporting to Kersten (and apparently not to the Department of Education) wasn't as devoid of political agenda as Kersten would have readers believe. Here is more on that.

Further, Kersten’s piece relied on a freelancer’s report of what he saw at the school. He complains that Kersten mischaracterized his observations, and that what he observed was not an Islamic school.

Kersten's attitude toward the Department of Education is fascinating to me. She was faced with what she believed were facts about the school engaging in inappropriately religious practices. Instead of postulating, "maybe the Dept of Education doesn't have enough resources to police its schools well enough", she instead postulated "the Dept of Education doesn't care about schools engaging in Islamic practices; it only cares about stopping Christian practices". In so manner ways, in so many moments we are all confronted with situations where we have a few data points of information and, seeking to paint a full picture, we fill in the blanks with our imaginations, colored by our past experiences, our fears, our prejudices, our hopes. We all do it. It's human nature. It is not, however, journalism.

[Update 1: Here's a link to the MN Dept of Education's report.]

[Update 2: Adults at the school (school officials?) apparently assaulted a local TV camera man while he was filming the students.]

Philip Bobbitt's Terror and Consent

I’m going to have to try to read this one since Dennis Prager had him on his show. Prof. Bobbitt worked for Clinton (and Bush the Elder) and is a Democrat but supported the invasion of Iraq. If I’m not mistaken, he also dated Nanci Griffith for a while.

The Townhall Prager radio blurb:

Philip Bobbitt, Professor of Federal Jurisprudence and the Director of the Center for National Security at Columbia University. He is also Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. His latest book is Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century.

From the Amazon blurbs:

"Brilliant . . . This is quite simply the most profound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11--indeed, since the end of the cold war . . . It should be read, marked and inwardly digested by all three of the remaining candidates to succeed George W. Bush as president of the United States."
--Niall Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review

Texas Tort Reform

Last Thursday, the office manager of a cardiologist client of mine contacted me about a medical malpractice insurance carrier vying for his business at substantially lower premiums than he currently pays. My firm has a substantial, but dwindling, med-mal defense practice (interestingly to me, run by the most liberal lawyers in my firm) so I was able to find out about the company. My firm also is counsel of choice for the firm vying for the biz and it’s a good carrier.

In the WSJ this weekend from a former Texas state congressman:

Over the past three years, some 7,000 M.D.s have flooded into Texas, many from Tennessee.

Why? Two words: Tort reform.

In 2003 and in 2005, Texas enacted a series of reforms to the state's civil justice system. They are stunning in their success. Texas Medical Liability Trust, one of the largest malpractice insurance companies in the state, has slashed its premiums by 35%, saving doctors some $217 million over four years. There is also a competitive malpractice insurance industry in Texas, with over 30 companies competing for business. This is driving rates down.

Radiohead

C and I ventured back to the concert world last night to catch Radiohead's first Dallas appearance in over 10 years. It was a beautiful night and unlike the Roger Waters show a few weeks ago, we had lawn tickets for this show. The crowd, definitely a much younger one than for Waters, was very well behaved and quiet during most of the show. While everyone tries to sing along with the songs, it's tough because even on the cd's, Thom Yorke (Radiohead singer) is a mumbler. Half the time you have no idea what words he is singing. They had a very bare-bones show (no spotlights, no videos, no movies) that featured just grainy images of each band member (head shots, foot shots, no full body shots) in one of 5 video squares behind them. They did, however, have a very unique light show that consisted of long fiber-optic tubes hanging down all around them. Of the 4 or 5 songs that I really wanted to hear, they played 3. They don't have hits really, and even if they did, they wouldn't play them. Radiohead are VERY anti-establishment.

We had a couple from Oklahoma sitting next to us - quite the talkers. He is a lawyer (a month out of law school), she works for a oil and gas company. It was very apparent, at least to C and I, that we were old enough (or they were young enough) for us to be their parents. Not sure if that is sorta cool......or sorta weird.

Big Brother is watching

The City Pages, a local indie weekly, reports on how ugly it gets when protest is viewed as treason or terrorist-sympathizing:

What they were looking for, Carroll says, was an informant—someone to show up at “vegan potlucks” throughout the Twin Cities and rub shoulders with RNC protestors, schmoozing his way into their inner circles, then reporting back to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, a partnership between multiple federal agencies and state and local law enforcement. The effort’s primary mission, according to the Minneapolis division’s website, is to “investigate terrorist acts carried out by groups or organizations which fall within the definition of terrorist groups as set forth in the current United States Attorney General Guidelines.”

Carroll would be compensated for his efforts, but only if his involvement yielded an arrest. No exact dollar figure was offered.

What if...

we just took gov't out of the marriage issue (almost..so long as kids are not involved) altogether? I suppose the social security issue would be an issue for those currently married with which we'd have to deal. Remove any income tax benefits. I think property law could take care of most property issues.

Just make all "relationships" strictly contractual. One could enhance it with a religious ceremony if one so chose.

This idea goes against every religious fiber but resonates with every libertarian fiber.

Chopin prefers Mozart

I just heard the tail-end of a blurb on NPR (I think it was about Mahler). The piece included the tidbit that Chopin's last words were "Play Mozart for me, will you?"

[Update: Oh, for Pete's sake. Apparently there's some conflict about what Chopin's last words were. There's this, that describes he died of TB and said this: "The earth is suffocating . . . Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won't be buried alive." And there's this account: "But when he asked Chopin whether he was still in pain, we quite distinctly heard the answer: 'No more.' These were the last words heard from his lips." - Charles Gavard, witness to Chopin's death. And this: "Play Mozart's Requiem in memory of me."

While I was looking for this, I came across this quote attributed to Robert Schumann: "We may be sure that a genius like Mozart, were he born today, would write concertos like Chopin and not like Mozart."]