Quote of the day

"I told my husband that "lying" was an unfairly strong word to use about Obama's discussion of Buffett and his secretary's tax rates. That was back when we thought she was making $200K+. But since it turns out she makes $60K, I think "lying" is putting it mildly. (See the end of this post by +Megan McArdle )."

- Virginia Postrel

While the figures are almost guaranteed to be bogus (to be fair, unless his secretary convinced WB to do his taxes for him, WB seems unlikely to have exact figures), the fact remains that WB probably had a lower effective tax rate (but much higher tax PAYMENTS) than his secretary. Whether that is a bad thing or not is not obvious though. The very wealthy still have the option to leave a country, and in a sense countries are competing for them. I believe there was a time when a lot of the English rock stars found it pointless to live in England.

Quote of the day

If Moses showed up as a Republican candidate you'd get headlines like:

"How many drowned during that Red Sea crossing? Cover up?"
or
"Mana from Heaven laced with deadly preservatives"

- Chucklepants

Quote of the day

"We found it populated mostly by innocent and well-intentioned, if confused, young people. Then again, that's how "Lord of the Flies" began."

- James Taranto regarding OWS

Quote of the day

At this point, I should repeat my long-standing conviction that speech errors, by politicians and others, are rarely if ever worth the fuss that they sometimes generate
- Mark Liberman

Sensitivity

Haven't blogged as such for ages, mostly just posted items on Facebook.  Makes sense for bits you just want to pass along without much commentary of your own.

Here's an item from back when (via, no surprise, Marginal Revolution) to break that more-or-less silent streak.  You've probably heard about sensitivity workshops - some unhappy college student says something racist or otherwise insensitive and is sentenced to some sort of re-education, usually without the accompanying risk of death common in Maoist days.  The item is about the opposite, humorously suggesting workshops for people in how NOT to be offended:

Exercise #3: An Awkward Moment.  Stand before the group and tells a story about a time you inadvertently gave offense.  After each story, the group chants, "It was no big deal!"

That's the sort of affirmation I could live with.

Genocide - what's the big deal?

The question is raised on The Volokh Conspiracy, not for the first time.  Nobody is saying genocide is OK - but there is an obsessive attempt to draw a line between genocide and "mere" mass murder.  If somebody wants to make the point that Stalin was a much nicer guy than Hitler because - despite Stalin maybe* being relatively responsible for more deaths - Stalin's deaths were just murders rather than genocide, I am not going to be especially impressed.  Nor, for that matter, am I going to be impressed with somebody who argues that Hitler is nicer than Stalin because his death-count was lower.  Both Hitler and Stalin were quite bad enough, and the idea of some sort of contest between them is macabre.

The issue came up because of the book Stalin's Genocides, which argues - well, it is pretty clear from the title what it argues.   Apparently, the issue is important from the standpoint of international law because if a country is committing genocide then it is legitimate to interfere, but if a country is only slaughtering millions of its own people without regard to ethnicity (kill all the educated people or all the rich people), then that is an internal matter.   It's pretty clear something is a bit off with international law here, but it's hard to get people to accept a definition that makes their own country guilty.














*I've heard figures going both ways.

Teach like an Egyptian

Saw Agora last night at the Little Theatre.

I'd read a lot about it, and already knew there were some historical inaccuracies (and unfounded plot points, such as crediting her with the discovery of elliptical orbits), but I wasn't much bothered by having the satellite view include the Aswan dam.  It is a story about a leading female intellectual from a time where females where better off staying out of the limelight, blended with religious strife between Christians, Pagans, and Jews.

Hypatia was acted brilliantly, and the movie had quite a few high points.  Overall, I found it dragged in parts, and a few other parts seemed a bit preachy - but I was still impressed and touched.  At the end of the movie, a manly tear welled in the corner of my eye, but I managed to stop it from spilling.

I'd recommend it to anybody fascinated by the subject matter, but not to everybody.

Liberatarianism (or Liberaltarianism) is actually doing well?

It doesn't usually feel that way, especially when you look at poll results, but a good case is actually made here.

Now I think that a lot of gains have been made that are actually being lost, but I suppose one should not forget the gains.

HT MR

MR brings home the headline bacon.....

Indeed, these two are more than worthy:

Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts

and
Mongolian neo-Nazis: Anti-Chinese sentiment fuels rise of ultra-nationalism



Click through above for details such as

Their right hands rise to black-clad chests and flash out in salute to their nation: "Sieg heil!" They praise Hitler's devotion to ethnic purity.

But with their high cheekbones, dark eyes and brown skin, they are hardly the Third Reich's Aryan ideal. A new strain of Nazism has found an unlikely home: Mongolia.

Those exotic Antarctican accents really turn me on!

If you've heard about the recent spy case, the Russians were able to divert suspicion by pretending to have Belgian accents (if you follow the link, there'll be a bit of a rant on how we are not only disadvantaged here in not knowing foreign languages, we are provincially ignorant of the outside world). One spy even convinced a college friend she was from Antarctica (although she came clean later and told her she was actually from Russia - some spy)!

Now Quebec ... THAT makes sense.

HT MR

Dialog of the day

You'll have to follow the HT to see how

As an aside, I cannot refrain from relating another anecdote, which is told of Gore Vidal. In a TV interview he was asked: "Was your first sexual experience with a man or with a woman?" To which he replied: "I was too polite to ask."

fits into the Kagan confirmation hearings.

Don't cry over spilt milk - build storage tanks....

As though the EPA didn't have anything better to do, they were threatening to apply rules meant for oil spills to milk:

The EPA regulations state that “milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Thus, containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule when they meet the applicability criteria ...”

Unfortunately, Marginal Revolution didn't post this until weeks after it was announced that this would not be the case.

Hating BP "before it was cool"

Katherine Mangu-Ward gloats a bit here, about an article she wrote in 2006:

For an example of a company apparently trying to single-handedly save the planet through expensive public relations alone, one needn't look farther than the corporate darling of serious environmentalists and greenish consumers alike: BP

BP is first among many companies that have opted to do their environmental penance in the glare of the spotlight. British Petroleum (recently rechristened BP, following KFC's model in removing unsavory words from its brand name) has been much ballyhooed for its commitment to the environment. Most of the ballyhooing is being done by BP itself.

A gas and oil company with $225 billion in revenue, BP is part of an industry that will keep environmental advocacy groups in business for as long at it exists. Yet these days BP is styling itself "Beyond Petroleum" and declaring that it's "thinking outside the barrel." BP's Environmental Team has crafted an elaborate advertising campaign and rebranding effort, recently expanded to the Web. Its goal: to convince the world that a company that sucks dead dinosaurs out of the earth, turns them into gasoline, and delivers that gas to SUVs can also be environmentally friendly enough to use a green and yellow sunburst (or is it a flower?) as its logo....

One might be forgiven for wondering how BP is managing to take in hundreds of billions in oil and gas revenue, apparently in its spare time.

I've never been a big fan of finding scapegoats, but in this case it seems like there was some definite negligence involved. Of course, we'd all like to think this isn't a necessary cost of our need for energy....

Quote of the day

"Politicians are not magic. The less they do, the better."
- John Stossel

The man who mooned Spitzer

I've linked to Coyote before, but never realized that the crowning accomplishment of his life actually occurred back in his student days, and while he continues to soar it is too much to hope he could ever reach those heights again: mooning Spitzer.

(the link also has mild relevance to the Supreme Court nomination)

Things gone terribly wrong

"You shoot two dogs in front of a seven year old--who could have been killed by a stray round, and at the very least will carry this hideous recollection to the grave. And why? For misdemeanor pot possession?"

- Megan McArdle

Quote of the day

"Do we really want to live in a country where when someone busts into your house at night you're supposed to assume they might be cops?"
- Megan McArdle's Quote of the Year, by unnamed commenter.

Quote of the Day

To cure political correctness, we must commit to being more intellectually shameless.
- Dave Marney, commenting to the Volokh Conspiracy

One of the downsides of not having gay marriage....

...that I've heard described has been that married couples get fewer restrictions when visiting each other in a health care situation. But I never quite thought that a couple that was not married would be separated like THIS.

"According to the suit, when Harold, Greene’s partner of 20 years, fell ill, the county refused to let Greene visit him in the hospital, despite the couple’s meticulous efforts to name one another in their wills, powers of attorney, and medical directive documents."

One wonders whether even if there HAD been a marriage whether things would have gone any better...but in any case, it is shocking that this sort of thing could be going on even nowadays.