Zimbabwe: Shadows and Lies (on PBS)

I watched the Frontline World special last night on PBS, Zimbabwe: Shadows and Lies. The first 30 minutes or so was about Zimbabwe, and the horrible condition it is in, largely because of its dictator Robert Mugabe. The brief description of the program from their website is: "Frontline/World goes undercover in Zimbabwe to reveal what has happened to a country once regarded as a beacon of democracy and prosperity in Africa. Posing as tourists, reporter Alexis Bloom and producer Cassandra Herrman find a population struggling with hunger and poverty, and living in fear of a government that has become a brutal dictatorship."

This program is well worth watching. If it plays again, I highly recommend it... and apparently it will be available as a video online after July 5th. I figured it would be good, so I took notes while watching. Some amazing highlights include:

• Robert Mugabe has been in power since 1980. At first a hero of the fight for independence, he is now a ruthless dictator.
• Daily newspapers have been taken over by the government.
• All foreign journalists have been banned. The producers of this program had to pretend to be tourists at Victoria Falls to get into the country, and had to carefully film from behind their car's tinted windows so as to not be arrested.
• Jail cells that are meant for 6 people are sometimes used to hold 30-35 people.
• People (millions) leave for South Africa and elsewhere, but are often sent back. Desperate not to return and/or be caught by Zimbabwe soldiers/police, many will risk their lives to jump off the trains that are taking them back. To keep this from happening armed guards are on the trains and watch the cramped passengers being taken back to Zimbabwe.
• Inflation recently topped 1000%. It takes stacks of money to buy the basic necessities.
• Dictator Robert Mugabe lives in a huge home, with 25 bedrooms, marble from Italy, etc.
• Other leaders in the government live in grand homes, behind locked gates.
• Meanwhile, the Mugabe plan officially called "Clean out the Filth" led to the demolishing of thousands of homes and businesses, leaving nearly a million of the poor homeless (who were not homeless previously). The plan was to include new homes for them -- but it seems few if any of these have been built.
• Several years ago, members of the ruling government, were given land expropriated at gunpoint from the white farmers (some were killed, some fled the country). Since then, they have farmed the land so inefficiently that while Zimbabwe once was a net exporter of food, the country now can't feed its own people and there is likely to be mass starvation.
• The current life expectancy for men is 37, for women 34.
• About 1/3 of the country has fled in recent years, many to South Africa.
• People wait along the roads for weeks in lines at gas stations. There are lines of cars and trucks, grounded along the side of the road, and people live in their vehicles, hoping that gas will arrive at the station. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It wasn't clear where they would then go in their vehicles if they ever did get gas.
• People scavage in rotting garbage piles, alongside various kinds of animals, looking for food.
• People, mostly political adversaries of Mugabe, are tortured to confess to crimes they didn't commit.

And the most amazing highlight from the program:

• Mugabe's Zanu PF organization/party actually ran a TV commercial that first showed a car crashing (kind of like a slow motion crash test collision), with a narrator saying something like "This is one way to die. But there are others." And then the words come on the screen: "Vote Zanu PF and Live"

The producers of this program made it clear that this was not just a claim that voting for the opposition would be a bad thing and that voting for Zanu PF would lead to flourishing... it was meant as an explicit threat on the lives of the voters -- vote for us or we might kill you.

For general information about this poor country, see the Zimbabwe entry at Wikipedia. Some of the related entries also provide good info, most notably the entry on Land Reform in Zimbabwe.

See also this two-page article (available online) from the June 12, 2006 issue of US News and World Report: When Prices Soar and Hopes Plunge: In Zimbabwe, a disaster of one man's making.

I read this article a few weeks ago and was impressed enough by it that it went in my pile of topics to blog about someday soon. But the program last night was just astonishing.

Nimoy sings of Bilbo Baggins

I usually love to see two of my favorites joined together in a new way. Led Zeppelin and Enya songs make reference to Tolkien characters or events. Maxfield Parrish paintings appear here and there, e.g., on the CD cover for Enya's "In Memory of Trees". And then my last blog post linked to a hilarious video short that combines Star Wars and Monty Python.

However, sometimes the results are not as good. Actually, this video is my all-time favorite Internet short, so maybe it is good... in a sense. I can't help but laugh whenever I watch it... but the downside is the tune is catchy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC73PHdQX04

This is the infamous "Leonard Nimoy's Ballad of Bilbo Baggins". It has been making the rounds on the net for many years, but if somehow you've missed it... go watch it now!

Darth Vader as the Black Knight

Check out this video, an outstanding combination of Star Wars and Monty Python.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leEsz9ci5XE

This is probably one of the five funniest short videos I've ever seen on the Internet.

Kelo's Recent Birthday

Because of some recent news items, and because it is the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Courts already infamous Kelo decision, I have been reading a lot of items on Eminent Domain lately. Here is a run-down of several of the more worthwhile ones.

On June 8th Tim Sandefur wrote a brief piece for Cato, The Pain of Eminent Domain. A few highlights:

• Of the 16 states that have acted since Kelo was decided, only six -- South Dakota, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and Florida -- have imposed meaningful restraints on government power. Other states have either done nothing or have enacted laws so riddled with loopholes that they allow government to seize whatever property they consider "blighted."
• For example, in Alabama where Gov. Bob Riley declared his state the leader of the post-Kelo "property rights revolt", the new law there prohibits government from taking property merely for economic development, but that restriction does not apply to property that is declared 'blighted'. Blight is defined as "buildings ... which, by reason of dilapidation, obsolescence, overcrowding, faulty arrangement or design, lack of ventilation, light and sanitary facilities, excessive land coverage, deleterious land use or obsolete layout, or any combination of these or other factors, are detrimental to the safety, health, morals or welfare of the community." Under such vague standards, virtually any neighborhood can be declared a blight, and any home or business located there can be seized and given to developers.
• Government routinely causes "blight." By subsidizing idleness, failing to protect property rights and stifling job creation through burdensome regulations and taxation, government often chokes economic growth. And its anti-growth policies sometimes make it prohibitively expensive to construct new housing anywhere but on land already owned by someone else. There's something amiss when developers find it easier to cannibalize existing owners than to build new homes or shops on vacant land.

Also on June 8th, John Charles wrote a short piece for Capitalism Magazine, Eminent Domain is Never the Solution. In it he notes a current case in Portland, Oregon, where Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard wants the government to use its power of eminent domain to take property from one party and give it to another so they can build an upscale supermarket. He then notes an alternative to Eminent Domain:

In fact, there are other ways to improve neighborhoods and increase property values. Throughout the 20th century, St. Louis revitalized some of its worst neighborhoods by transferring control of streets to local homeowners. In 1974 the residents of one deteriorating neighborhood formed a residential association and assumed management responsibility for the primary boulevard. They raised $40,000 to erect a gate that partially closed the street, giving owners more control. A block watch was started, crime decreased, and the association borrowed funds to improve the street and housing. The result was that property values doubled.

Then on June 23, President Bush signed an Executive Order entitled "Protecting the Property Rights of the American People." That is a good thing, I guess. It starts by saying "It is the policy of the United States to protect the rights of Americans to their private property, including by limiting the taking of private property by the Federal Government to situations in which the taking is for public use, with just compensation, and for the purpose of benefiting the general public and not merely for the purpose of advancing the economic interest of private parties to be given ownership or use of the property taken."

That sounds a little vague to me still -- "for the purpose of benefiting the general public" could be easily stretched to include all kinds of things. Is it a "benefit of the general public" that local government have more tax revenue to spend on public projects? Or to allow for a lowering of everyone's propery tax rates? Well, everyone who still has their property that is.

And in legal matters I always pay close attention when I hear the word "merely" inserted. So if some alternate use would be mostly for the benefit of some other private individual, corporation, developers, or whoever, but also has some minor "public use" benefit, then this EO seems to just nod and smile and say A-OK to it.

Later in the EO there are nine exclusions listed, many of which are not surprising -- they allow for the traditional, pre-Kelo uses of Eminent Domain for roads, parks, government buildings, and so on (which I am also against, but that is an argument for a different day). But the last one is again quite vague: "meeting military, law enforcement, public safety, public transportation, or public health emergencies."

Again, whenever I see the word "emergency" used in politics, I pay close attention. It wouldn't take too many dishonest syllogisms for a politician to argue that the government should transfer your property to somone else, so that they can build something else on it, so that revenues from property taxes will go up, so that they can then spend on... public health "emergencies". Afterall, they can't fight public health problems without tax revenue. Or they could make the case that the lack of a good grocery store in a particular neighborhood constitutes a public health emergency for the people in that area... hence, you're gonna need to move on friend.

And ditto for "public safety". No doubt some amount of tortured logic could be used to argue that public safety would be improved by taking Joe's home and plot and giving it Jim's corporation to create jobs, so that people in the neighborhood won't be tempted to resort to crime... thereby improving public safety.

I'm not claiming that Mr. Bush purposely kept certain phrases vague, or that he hopes words like "public health" or "public safety" would be used in that way. Quite the opposite, I assume. But the words are vague nonetheless.

On top of all of that, if he really wanted to make a strong stand on the Kelo decision, he should have done more. The Federal government isn't the major player in such Eminent Domain cases anyway, so passing this EO won't have a huge effect (or so I've read). What could have a bigger impact would be to mandate, or push for legislation that mandates, that no federal funds can be given for such projects initiated by local or state governments.

Here are others who make essentially the same criticisms as the above: David Boaz of Cato here, and then here, Ilya Somin here, and Tim Sandefur here.

And if you aren't yet as skeptical of the value of Bush's EO as I am, read this post from Radley Balko, who notes: "Back in 2004, when Kelo was pending before the Supreme Court, the Bush administration not only refused to file an amicus brief on behalf of the property owners, but was actually on the verge of filing a brief on behalf of the land-seizing local governments."

Ouch! He then goes on to provide an amazing quote from Clint Bolick, an attorney for the Institute for Justice who represented Kelo in the big case. Good stuff!

Stats on Student Aid for College

Neal McCluskey had an interesting item for Cato today, Don't Believe the Ivory Hype. A few highlights are:

• Previous warnings in 2004 that the Chinese were going to graduate 600,000 engineers compared with only 70,000 for the US were wrong. Engineers with four-year degrees: China 350,000 compared to USA 140,000. Not nearly as big a difference. (I read elsewhere that part of this distortion came from originally including two-year degree students).
• According to the College Board's own numbers, between the 1994-95 and 2004-05 academic years, total inflation-adjusted federal student aid more than doubled, from $44.5 billion to $90.1 billion.
• And not just loans: Real Pell Grant funding rose from $7 billion to $13.1 billion, supplemental grants increased from $743 million to $771 million, work-study rose from $965 million to $1.2 billion, and federal tax benefits increased from nothing to more than $8 billion.
• Again according to College Board data, between 1994-95 and 2004-05 inflation-adjusted grant aid per student from both federal and other sources ballooned 51 percent, from $2,965 to $4,479, and overall aid rose 61 percent, from $6,261 to $10,119. Moreover, both grant and overall aid increases outpaced the growth in college costs.

Boston Red Sox All-Time Team

Today I posted my draft chapter on the Boston Red Sox.

For the book introduction and several other team chapters posted so far, see the book project index page.

Tom Glavine: The last to win 300?

Tom Glavine is off to a fine start with the Mets this year. He is 11-2 with a 3.33 ERA, which is outstanding for anyone but particularly in light of his last three seasons when he seemed to be in decline. He celebrated his 40th birthday in March, and until now it wasn't clear that he'd make it to the 300-win milestone. But since he now has 286 wins (against 186 losses), I'll assume he will make it at this point. If he does, he'll join two other active pitchers in that club, Roger Clemens (341) and Greg Maddux (325), and be the 23rd all-time member. And nine of these pitchers joined in the 1980s or later.

But this then leads me to ask: Who might be next to accomplish it? The answer might be that Glavine will be the last. Now, I wouldn't bet much money on a bold claim like that. Forever is a very long time, and probably someone will get 300 career wins, at some point in the future. But we are quite possibly in for a long wait.

Many others have written about this topic in recent years, and the reasons for coming dearth of 300 winners are obvious: five-man rotations limit the number of games a starting pitcher plays, pitch count tracking and conservative coaches and trainers keep starters from going as long into games as they used to, and the development since the 1980s of ever-more-specialized bullpen roles make it easier for managers to yank even their aces if they begin to faulter in the middle innings.

So who are the likely candidates? Only two I think deserve really strong consideration at this point. Randy Johnson has a 271-142 lifetime record, and has had a superb career. Whether or not he gets 300, he is assured a spot in the Hall of Fame. But he will turn 43 by the end of this season, and while still able to pitch 30 games a year it seems, he is far from his former, totally-dominating self. So far this year is 8-6 with a 5.21 ERA. Let's say he wins another 8 this year, which would leave him 21 shy of the mark. Could he pitch another two seasons? Possibly.

The other I think is worth discussing is Pedro Martinez. He is currently 8th on the active career list in wins, owning an an oustanding 204-87 record. He is 7-3 with a 3.01 ERA so far in 2006, so if he gets another 8 wins this year he'll be at 212. He'll be 35 years old going into next season, so he should have several good seasons left in the tank. Although he has regularly started 29-33 games per season in his career, he has had some injuries, and generally seems a bit more fragile than some other longtime players. So I wonder how long he could go into his 40s, if at all. If he retired after the 2011 season, at nearly 40 years of age, he'd have to average nearly 18 wins a season to make 300. That doesn't seem likely, but not impossible.

What about Mike Mussina, who is 232-130 lifetime, and 8-3 with a 3.42 ERA so far in 2006? He is 37, and is not likely to win more than 16 games in a season ever again. Assuming he gets 8 more this year, he would probably need four more solid years to post 300 lifetime. Could happen I guess.

David Wells has 227 wins, but is 43 years old. Jamie Moyer has 210, and is 43 also. They are nearing retirement I assume.

Curt Schilling is still going strong at 9-2, 3.61 so far this year. He has 201 wins, but didn't start his career very well, and age 39 won't get near 300 I don't think. Ditto for Kenny Rogers who just noticed his 200th victory at age 41. And Andy Pettite is struggling this year, and with 178 wins at age 34 he seems a longshot to make it to 300.

It is an interesting game of "What If?" to consider John Smoltz here. He is now 39 and might have been well on his way to joining former teammates Maddux and Glavine, if not for spending the 2001-2004 seasons as a reliever. He was outstanding in that role, with save totals of 55, 45, and 44, and a 1.12 ERA in 2003. If he had only averaged 15 wins per season those four years, that would be another 60 to pad his career actual 181-133 lifetime record.

I won't speculate about the very young players whose names might one day surface in discussions of 300-win candidates. Few if any of them have even 100 wins yet, so I think it is a fair question to ask whether anyone, beyond Glavine and perhaps Johnson and Martinez, will ever join the elites already in the 300 club.

Thoughts anyone?

More Motorcycle Photos from India

A few days ago I posted with links to two blog entries from my friend Basia, who provides numerous photos of entire families riding on single motorcycles in Chennai, India. She has since added two more such postings, here and here. The latter demonstrates how to fit six people on one motorcycle, many of them small children, and with no one wearing a helmet.

This made me wonder what would happen if paternalistic government bureaucrats ("safety-crats" perhaps) saw these photos, or if they visited India and witnessed this first hand. Heart palpitations? Fainting? Or would they reflexively and fruitlessly call over the police to ticket these families? Perhaps make a citizen's arrest? Or lie down in front of the bikes? It would be an interesting experiment.

Some of My Favorite Rock/Pop Songs

Over time I'll be compiling and posting to my personal website various lists of my "favorites": music, movies, art, and so on. The first I posted tonight, a sortable list of a few dozen of my favorite pop/rock songs from all artists except a few that will later have separate listings (my top favorites which are Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Enya). The table is sortable by song, artist, or year. The songs are rating on a 1-10 scale, with 1 being best. Only those that I consider a 1, 2, or 3 are included so far. There is a good mix here: 1960s-1990s, from Harry Chapin and Simon and Garfunkel to Metallica and Ozzy.

I also included Wikipedia links to those songs that have their own entries (most already do!). And for four songs, I included some comments of my own below the listing.

Definitely Not Art

Folks, this is not a joke... I repeat, not a joke:

The Royal Academy in London, one of the most prestigious art galleries in the world, recently displayed a slate pedestal and a small piece of wood as a minimalist work. The sculpted head that was supposed to be shown had been separated from the pedestal and wooden support during preparations for the summer exhibit. The mistake was not discovered until artist David Hensel came in looking for his sculpture and found just the base on display. Museum curators, however, were unapologetic, saying the block of slate deserved exposure while the sculpture did not. "Given their separate submission, the two parts were judged independently," according to the academy's official statement. "The head was rejected. The base was thought to have merit and accepted."

While humorous, given the premises of many in the contemporary art world, this is not surprising. I repeat, this is not surprising. It is sad/stupid/ridiculous/etc., but not surprising.

To see the display in question, visit this other news source.

Heroin, contra the standard view

Theodore Dalrymple of the Manhattan Institute wrote an article "Poppycock" published on May 25 for the Wall Street Journal. He raises significant questions regarding the standard view of heroin as a highly addictive, crime-causing, "hard" drug (relative to say, marijuana). I encourage you to read the entire article (it isn't that long), but here are a few highlights:

• It actually takes some considerable effort to addict oneself to opiates: The average heroin addict has been taking it for a year before he develops an addiction.
• It is quite untrue that withdrawal from heroin or other opiates is a serious business, so serious that it would justify or at least mitigate the commission of crimes such as mugging.
• It is well known that addicts present themselves differently according to whether they are speaking to doctors or fellow addicts. In front of doctors, they will emphasize their suffering; but among themselves, they will talk about where to get the best and cheapest heroin.
• Insofar as there is a causative relation between criminality and opiate addiction, it is more likely that a criminal tendency causes addiction than that addiction causes criminality.
• It is not true either that addicts cannot give up without the help of an apparatus of medical and paramedical care.

On this last point I got a good chuckle from what the author goes on to say: "Thousands of American servicemen returning from Vietnam, where they had addicted themselves to heroin, gave up on their return home without any assistance whatsoever. And in China, millions of Chinese addicts gave up with only minimal help: Mao Tse-Tung's credible offer to shoot them if they did not. There is thus no question that Mao was the greatest drug-addiction therapist in history."

National Assoc. of Scholars blogging on Nifong

I just read the recent NAS (National Association of Scholars) blog entry by K.C. Johnson, a History professor from Brooklyn College CUNY, on the subject of prosecutor Mike Nifong. It is an outstanding review of key aspects of the Duke Lacrosse Team / Rape case, with a focus on the shameful actions of prosecutor Nifong. This is such an excellent writeup, I can't just select a few quotes to include here.

Net Neutrality: Lies and Ignorance

I've been thinking about posting on Net Neutrality a lot lately, but I've never pulled the trigger. It is a complicated issue, and emotions run high, especially for those in favor of the Net Neutrality legislative wording that is being proposed (which I don't support, btw).

A couple of postings at TechRepublic on this I thought were important enough to pass along. First, we find out that Net neutrality proponents flagrantly lie about Craigslist blockage. Then even more interesting (though a bit heavy on technical jargon for any non-geeks out there), is the posting that Net neutrality extremists should stop playing engineers. I don't agree with the last proposal of this author, as I'd rather see no requirements of the type he proposes on any pipe expansions by telcos or anyone else, but this is a great post otherwise that provides good reasons to oppose the extreme Net Neutrality backers.

Worst Job Ever - Death Star Laser Tunnel Duty

A recent blog entry over at Tech Republic drew my attention to an old webpage that calculates how much power would be needed for the Death Star (from Star Wars) to actually destroy the planet Alderaan.

While the math and commentary is interesting stuff, I am really blogging on this as an excuse to note that in my humble opinion, the very worst job that I've ever seen is that of what I call "The Laser Tunnel Duty" guys. This math just furthers this belief. See this pic and notice the guys on the left. Unfortunately for the second guy, I don't think that covering your face with your arm is going to help much.

Maybe Ben should visit Chennai, India

I am a Steelers fan, so I truly hope that Ben Roethlisberger makes a full recovery from his recent motorcycle accident.

Regarding his decision to not wear a helmet... while I am against laws for adults on this matter, not wearing a helmet -- in just about all circumstances that I can imagine (caveat: I'm not a biker myself) -- just seems really dumb.

Consider, if you will, the following series of photos from my friend and colleague Basia Kruszewska, who is working in Chennai, India. It is quite the norm for a man to ride a motorcycle there without a helmet, and for his wife to ride side-saddle behind him, and to be holding a baby or young child as well (all sans helmets). Now, admittedly they aren't going 50-75+ mph, but Basia says they do reach speeds of 30 or 40 mph.

See also this followup with even more photos, this time with entire families treating motorcycles and scooters as if they were SUVs.

And btw, If you like those photos, I strongly encourage you to browse throught the rest of her blog (2.5 years worth!), at least for the wonderful photos. She has a great eye, and not only has hundreds of photos from India but also from her various trips in the southeast Asian region (Mt. Everest, doing work post-tsunami, and various exotic locales).

AFI's 100 Years, 100 Cheers

The folks at the American Film Institute ran another of the "Top 100" shows last week. This time, the theme was top "Cheers", meaning films that inspire us. You can visit the site here, and get the PDF with the top 100, as well as one with all 300 nominees (plus there various other lists).

As always, the show was entertaining and well-done, and kept me guessing. A few thoughts:

• I would have preferred to see Braveheart a bit higher than 62 (it was below Dances with Wolves, for instance)
• I think Star Wars could have been higher than 39
• I'm glad Field of Dreams made the list (28), and Pride of the Yankees too (22), but I'd have had The Natural on my list as well.
• I think High Noon should have been higher than it was (27)
• Hoosiers at 13 is good
• I think Apollo 13, which came in 12, should be way higher (top five?), certainly higher than Breaking Away (8)
• It's a Wonderful Life as #1? No way. In my view it should have been To Kill a Mockingbird (2), Schindler's List (3), Rocky (4), or Apollo 13 (12).

I'll probably get around to commenting on some of the AFI's many other lists someday. I love such lists!

String Theory - Not Even Wrong!

Thanks to Paul Hsieh for blogging about articles on Peter Woit's book that challenge's String Theory. (Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics). Sounds like a very interesting book.

From the Times Online article (see also here), after giving some background on string theory, there is this nice paragraph explaining the book title:

But is string theory true? Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University, has challenged the entire string-theory discipline by proclaiming that its topic is not a genuine theory at all and that many of its exponents do not understand the complex mathematics it employs. String theory, he avers, has become a form of science fiction. Hence his book’s title, Not Even Wrong: an epithet created by Wolfgang Pauli, an irascible early 20th-century German physicist. Pauli had three escalating levels of insult for colleagues he deemed to be talking nonsense: “Wrong!”, “Completely wrong!” and finally “Not even wrong!”. By which he meant that a proposal was so completely outside the scientific ballpark as not to merit the least consideration.

That is superb. I think I had heard of Pauli's tri-partite distinction before, but I am pleased at this reminder, and especially to hear of Not Even Wrong being applied to string theory. I also liked seeing the reference to Horgan's 1995 book The End of Science, and the analogy to deconstructionism in literary criticism.

I've added this book to my mammoth reading list.

If we have to pay more we can't hire as many!

This is rich... see this brief blog post from Cato on the for-some-reason-still-being-argued issue of minimum wage laws and their impact on employment rates. I love it.

And then for a bit longer, far more cerebral posting on the same subject, see also Will Wilkinson's recent blog entry. There are many nuggets of wisdom in this post, starting with easy to understand distinctions between economics and other fields of study, the applicability of the law of demand to minimum wage laws (contra some folks who contest this that Will is responding to)... and then some great discussion of studies and empirical data. It gets a bit dense here, but good stuff.

Then he ends with this aspects of minimum wage laws, something I had never thought of before:

Meanwhile, studies continue to appear emphasizing the hazards of minimum wage laws. I find Neumark’s recent paper with Olena Nizalova especially unsettling. They find evidence that minimum wage laws discourage teenagers and young adults from acquiring the human capital they need in order to get better jobs and higher wages later in life. That is, minimum wage laws work to ensure that those who already have the fewest opportunities to develop their capacities, have even fewer still. They say this baleful effect is strongest for young blacks.

This is insightful. Minimum wage laws, therefore, not only often have the direct negative effect on employment, but also have harder-to-see negative effects on the very people they are intended to help. This sort of negative externality is all-to-common with well-intentioned government policies. Far too few people in favor of such policies, or who support the politicans who create them, ever ask the important questions like "What else will happen because of this new law?" and "What will happen later as a result of this new regulation?"

Scientists Respond to Gore

See this enlightening article "Scientists Respond to Gore's Warnings of Climate Catastrophe".

In that article you can learn a bit about the "vast majority of scientists" that Al Gore refers to (are they relevant experts, that is climate change experts, or just scientists in various fields?), and more importantly, learn of numerous counterpoints to the claims Gore makes in his film.

Equal Opportunity to Suffer and Die

I've been reading lots of good posts and articles lately on the dire situation regarding organ needs vs. donation levels (e.g., kidneys).

David Holcberg recently wrote an excellent op-ed on this subject, Human Organs for Sale? It ends as follows:

If your life depended on getting an organ, say a kidney or a liver, wouldn’t you be willing to pay for one? And if you could find a willing seller, shouldn’t you have the right to buy it from him? The right to buy an organ is part of your right to life. The right to life is the right to take all actions a rational being requires to sustain and enhance his life. Your right to life becomes meaningless when the law forbids you to buy a kidney or liver that would preserve your life. If the government upheld the rights of potential buyers and sellers of organs, many of the 90,000 people now waiting for organs would be spared hideous suffering and an early death. How many? Let’s find out.

Also, there was a brief blog post from Virginia Postrel with lots of great links. Included is a link to the Monday, June 12 conference from AEI titled "Buy or Die: Market Mechanisms to Reduce the National Organ Shortage" (video is available online). Postrel's own presentation at this conference is available online as a PDF of her PPT. She also links to a brief news item on the recent AMA ruling change that allows as ethical the solicitation of organs if it helps to increase the organ supply. That is at least a step in the right direction...

On June 10, Postrel wrote a great Op-Ed for the LA-Times titled Cash for Kidneys.

And Craig Biddle at the Objective Standard journal blogged on the connection between the morality of altruism and the suffering and unnecessary deaths caused by current policy against a free-market for organ donation. (The title of this blog post derives from a quotation in that blog entry.)

Yankees All-Time Team

Today I posted my draft chapter on the New York Yankees.

For the book introduction and several other team chapters posted so far, see the book project index page.

Color Illusion

And thanks to Diana again for pointing out this interesting color illusion. Keep your mouse off the image. Stare at the black dot for 30 seconds. Then keep your eyes completely still while hovering your mouse over the image. Until you move your eyes, you will see some color in the image (sky blue, grass green)... even though it is a black and white photo.

Diet Coke and Mentos

Thanks to Diana for pointing out the interesting video of what happens when you combine Diet Coke with Mentos.

White Sox All-Time Team

Today I posted my draft chapter on the Chicago White Sox.

For the book introduction and several other team chapters posted so far, see the book project index page.

Fascinating Hobby: Rube Goldberg Machines

Thanks to my friend Steve Davala for pointing out the following video of Rube Goldberg machines from Japan. (see this entry on Rube Goldberg from Wikipedia for more info). This would make for an interesting hobby if one were so inclined and skilled. Also, I can only imagine it is a great way to teach basic principles in science for kids of a certain age, e.g., magnetism, gravity, friction, aerodynamics, etc. It would also promote patience and discipline, ever more lacking in the young today. As I'm starting to sound like an old fogey, I'll stop there.

Giants All-Time Team

Today I posted my draft chapter on the New York/San Francisco Giants.

For the book introduction and several other team chapters posted so far, see the book project index page.

What bloated tax code?

See this brief news item about GE starting to file its taxes electronically instead of by paper forms.

GE is of course a mammoth corporation. But yikes... if they still did it by paper their tax forms would have been 24,000 pages long (which is said to be a stack 8-feet high?). Instead it is 237 MB of electronic data. Glad to see they can save money over the long run by making this change... good for them. And good for the environment too.

Now if only the Congress and the IRS could radically simplify the tax code -- for both individuals and corporations -- so that taxes would be a far less costly thing to report, not to mention pay... wouldn't that be nice?

Unmarried Couples Insanity

Thanks to Diana Hsieh's blog for pointing out the story out of Black Jack, Missouri (suburb of St. Louis) where a couple living together with their three children face eviction because they... are living together with their three children. Here is a link to the AP story on this, as found in the Kansas City Star. Here is the summary:

The city council in the St. Louis County town Black Jack has rejected a measure that would have changed the definition of a family to include unmarried couples with two or more children. The measure was rejected Tuesday in a 5-3 vote. As a result, Mayor Norman McCourt said in a statement that those who do not meet the town's definition of family could soon face eviction.

Some people in this country just don't understand the concept of individual rights at all. Like the person quoted at the end of this article:

Black Jack resident Rose Curtis, 65, said she thought the council made the right decision. 'As a woman, I'm not going to let a man have babies by me and not marry me," Curtis said. "I think it was a fair decision. It's cut and dried.'

Well that is all well and good for you, Rose. But why do you -- or those you support on the city council -- get to impose this choice of yours on everyone else through the force of zoning laws? Why do you get to evict a family of five from their home simply because the parents aren't married?

Very scary stuff here folks.