[A]ssassination futures were not among the planned securities, contrary to most press reports. The market design allowed traders to propose securities in various events, and the Policy Analysis Market Web site speculated that some traders might propose to add securities in assassinations. That off-the-cuff speculative remark had fatal consequences, alas.

The securities that were an essential part of the auction design were indexes of political, economic and military activity. The most useful such market would probably have been a market for futures in a "political instability index," a weighted average of various political indicators, like the number of mass demonstrations, unemployment levels, arrests--and, yes, assassination attempts. (Type "political instability index" into Google for some examples.)

If the markets had been pitched in this way, I doubt that there would have been many objections raised.

But instead politicians, reporters and editorial writers mistakenly jumped onto "assassination and terrorist attack futures" as a fundamental part of the market design.

Given the public outcry, it seems clear that there will not be a public market in assassination futures anytime soon. But there is no reason not to have a futures market in political, social and economic indicators, which is what the Pentagon's project was actually about.

We desperately need better ways to forecast political instability, and the Policy Analysis Market had significant promise. It's sad to see poor public relations torpedo a potentially important tool for intelligence analysis.

For instance, if a plan were proposed guaranteeing everyone the same outcome, Europeans would prefer it, even though that plan required that everyone would receive less than in a more dynamic system. By contrast, Americans would enthusiastically prefer a more dynamic system, in which the benefits of all would constantly be rising, even though the dynamism meant that some would receive more, and some less.

Europeans prefer equality at the cost of stasis. Provided that all have fair and open opportunity, Americans prefer dynamic growth, at the cost of strict equality of outcomes. Europeans watch equality like a hawk. Americans guard opportunity--and the chance to excel.

Because he faces Senate hearings, Mr. Tobias declined to be interviewed about the post, which would carry the rank of ambassador. He did discuss other matters in a telephone interview, including the failure of Prozac, Lilly's wonder drug, to save his first wife from depression.

Because one must point out the moose whenever it raises its head, it must be noted that he has just published a memoir and business advice book, "Put the Moose on the Table." "The moose" is a business buzzword for a sound-management principle, that if there is a problem that everyone in the room knows about--the moose at the table--it must be discussed, not ignored.

Some prominent executives, have been known to plop down a stuffed moose at meetings to encourage lively debate.

How many editorial conspirators did it take to get that little inside reference into the Times?

Speaking of books, thanks to all you fine people who've been pre-ordering The Substance of Style.

Sporadic blogger Esther Dyson, a Meetup.com board member, discusses its strategic challenge: "I’m working on how we navigate our strategy as the political side of our business gets great exposure, mostly because of Howard Dean (no relationship to Eric Dean!). It’s wonderful, but we don’t want to become all politics, all the time. Should we form a separate unit? What’s the difference between a political rally and a Meetup? And so on…"

Update: Meetup does have a problem, which that it works only for people with easily articulated interests, whether they're Dean supporters, vegans, or Ex-Jehovah's Witnesses. I don't see myself meeting up with any of these groups, unless maybe I get serious about learning Italian--or they convince me the Buffy fans won't all be 15.

The point of Sonia Arrison's article isn't, of course, to plug my first book. It's this:

The battle over how to stop online piracy of music and movies has thus far demonstrated a classic struggle between the static, institutionalized thinking of dinosaur-like entertainment companies and innovative, forward-looking technology firms.

The problem is that the technology community keeps coming up with different ways to distribute content, and instead of working out contracts to charge fees for distribution, the entertainment industry keeps trying to stop technology with the clumsy instrument of the law.

I'm all for copyright: Not only do I pay for my music, I don't even violate the NYT's copyright on my own columns! But it's not enough to "be for copyright." As Arrison argues, you have to develop institutions that work with distribution technology, not against it.

I was intrigued by your contention that Coulter is mentioned more than Moore in the New York Times and other "[p]owerful liberal voices" -- since it's the kind of claim that can be easily checked using Nexis, I thought I'd do so. (Things many people thought to be true have been proven to be false using this method -- see Geoffrey Nunberg's work on Bernard Goldberg's claim that conservatives are labeled as such more than liberals.) Anyway, checking the past two years for the New York Times, during which time Coulter has had two best-selling books and Moore has had one best-selling book plus an Oscar-winning documentary, I found significantly more mentions of Moore than Coulter - 60+ for Moore and 20+ for Coulter doing a quick count of relevant articles from the search results that excluded bestseller listings, letters to the editor and repeated capsule reviews. The Coulter mentions were generally snide remarks and asides, while Moore's were generally more positive or neutral, but there was significant variation. Hope you'll clarify this for your readers.

One final point: I would argue that Moore is often used in almost exactly the same way by conservative pundits as Coulter is by liberals -- to discredit a group by association.

At the time Brendan and I wrote, my Nexis password was many thousands of miles away from me, so I had to delay a thorough search. (A Nexis search is not, in fact, easy for most people, by the way. Most people do not have access to the subscription-only service.) I was sure about Noam Chomsky, whom I also mentioned, because I'd once done a Nexis search to see how the Times identifies him, discovering that they scrupulously ignore him, mentioning him occasionally as a linguist. He may be the left's version of the John Birch Society and the black-helicopter crowd, but pretending he doesn't exist creates a false picture of his influence.

First let me say that I agree with Brendan's final point. His charge is certainly true, and the practice is unjustified. Aside from Moore's essential status as an entertainer rather than an intellectual--Coulter tries to have it both ways--he's better described as a leftist than a liberal. But that's a topic for another day.

At the moment, however, conservatives have no media outlets that approach the cultural significance of the Times or that act as similar gatekeepers in the public discussion. (Classical liberals like me have next to none, but our social liberalism makes us more comfortable with, and less disconcerting to, liberal places like the Times.) The Times example is the core of the argument.

A simple Nexis count--I went back a year--does show exactly what Brendan says: more mentions of Moore than Coulter. But almost all of those mentions occur because of a) Moore's Oscar and b) Moore's speech at the Oscar ceremony, and some of the others are celebrity gossip items. None of them discuss his books or his ideas, nor do they hold him up as an exemplar of left-of-center thinking. Indeed, writing in the Times Magazine, James Traub declares, "Put Michael Moore behind a desk, and watch the right-wingers squeal. The problem is that many Democrats would squirm as well. It is just a fact that the Republicans are now the party of passionate convictions, while the Democrats are the party of grave reservations."

Traub's column is a lot of humbug. Both parties, and both broadly defined political camps (which is not exactly the same thing), include people of all temperaments and every degree of nuance. The much-derided nasty partisanship in Washington comes in part from the clash of the two parties' passionate wings, acting through their more pragmatic political representatives.

That said, I think I was indeed a bit unfair to the Times. A newspaper is not a monolith, and many Times writers understand that Moore and Coulter are intellectually lightweight entertainers who represent only themselves and the delighted fans of provocation.

The most serious treatment of Moore is a Frank Rich piece that portrays him as a wildly successful entertainer whose political grenades sell more movie tickets. "In America, at least, all is fair not only in love and war but also in entertainment. If Mr. Moore forgets his pact with the audience and makes a habit of preaching as he did on Oscar night, he might as well seal his own mouth with duct tape. But if he ambushes America with humor 16 months from now, he may be more of a factor in the next election cycle than all the other, more glamorous Oscar attendees now lining up at fund-raisers for Howard Dean."

As for Coulter, the official Times position, if such a thing existed, would be something like that expressed in the July 20 style section profile titled Blond Lightning on the Far Right: "She has been fired by MSNBC more times than George Steinbrenner canned Billy Martin, and she has come to grips with life as a single girl, personally and professionally, endlessly peddling her Lethally Blond franchise to a reluctant media that finds her reprehensible, but not resistible."

Could we now go back to talking about something more interesting?

More generally, I think Richard's genius is to see/assert/argue that various problems in ethical and political philosophy are in fact best thought of as legal issues. I'm never sure if Richard, the consummate lawyer, is aware how revolutionary he is in this regard. The idea of reducing much of philosophy to law is shocking, if you think about it (well, it is shocking for us non-lawyers!), and it is one reason why he outrages some of his readers.

I know Richard, have read most of his books (but not his latest, which I recently bought), and have talked with him about his general project. Never have I concluded that he's trying to reduce ethical problems to law. I'd say he's trying to develop a consequentialist ethics and apply it to law. I'd also say that he believes that human beings have, through trial and error, discovered ethical ways to live and embodied them in the kinds of dispute-resolution rules expressed in common law.

But I decided to ask the man himself what he thought of Tyler's description of his work. Here is his response:

Obviously, praise is nice for a book that does not seem to have gotten all that much attention thus far. But I would put my stance somewhat differently. I don't worry much about the boundaries between disciplines. I only worry about arguments that seem to cohere on a given theme. The number of philosophers who have invented well established legal rules is very large; e.g. Ross and Nozick in recent times; Hume, Locke, Kant etc. Most of them are not first class lawyers so that they miss some key points about the issues in question. All I do is try to show how if you know the legal arguments well you can avoid the pitfalls and iron out the anomalies. The point here is to be sure that technical skill in law is brought to bear on problems that invite abstract speculation by folks who do not understand the infrastructure. Call it the academic principle of comparative advantage.

To draw your own conclusions, here are links to the trilogy that defines Richard's general philosophical project:

Skepticism and Freedom, his latest
Principles for a Free Society
Simple Rules for a Complex World

The books are not easy reading, but neither do they require a law degree.

But wait, there's more: Over on this page, they promise interviews from the famous L.A.-based blogger Mikey Kaus. They also spell Will Saletan's last name as Salatan.

The article is a must-read (thanks to Rick Henderson, scourge of the Nevada Supreme Court, for the pointer), in part because it includes important initiatives that many pundits miss. It also points to a coherent, though not necessarily sound, idea underlying Bush's domestic programs:

Bush's view, expressed in his book and in the 2000 campaign, is that government curtails freedom not by being large or active but by making choices that should be left to the people. Without freedom of choice, people feel no responsibility, and Bush insists again and again, as he put it in the book: "I want to usher in a responsibility era." If one way to give people more choices is to shrink government, fine. But if another way is to reform government -- also fine. And if he needs to expand government to deliver more choices -- well, he can live with that. For Bush, individual responsibility and Big Government are not necessarily opposed to each other, any more than global stability and regime change are necessarily opposites.

And Jonathan points to an important, and Reaganesque shift, in foreign policy:

Underlying all of Bush's foreign-policy departures is a little-noted shift that may be the most fundamental of the bunch. Unlike foreign-policy realists (including his father), Bush does not believe that states should be regarded as legitimate just because they are stable and can be dealt with. And unlike internationalists (including his predecessor), he does not believe that states should be regarded as legitimate just because they are internationally recognized. He believes that legitimacy comes only from popular sovereignty and civilized behavior.

If this shift becomes consistent policy, Our Good Friends the Saudis are in (justified) trouble.

Until recently, there were few wedding resources for same-sex couples--but that is beginning to change, says Gretchen Hamm of Dallas, founder of the Internet sites TwoBrides.com and TwoGrooms.com. Her slogan is: "A mother-approved shopping site for alternative weddings."

Mrs. Hamm began her business three years ago, when daughter Katherine Hamm (a Greenhill graduate and women's soccer standout at Princeton) began planning her own commitment ceremony with her partner.

"I couldn't find things that were appropriate for them, such as photo albums or wedding-cake toppers," Mrs. Hamm says. So she began tracking down resources and reference materials, such as planning guides and decorative accessories, that would be useful for same-sex couples....

Mrs. Hamm even managed to find one manufacturer who made cake toppers portraying lesbian couples in "butch"; or "femme" wedding mode. Aside from such unconventional touches, however, Mrs. Hamm says, "Most of the gay or lesbian ceremonies I hear about are pretty conservative and traditional, actually."...

[M]ost of Mrs. Hamm's advice, she says, would be no different if her clients were a straight couple. "I always tell them," she says, "to get their reception site nailed down right away."

Ultimately, this sort of standard-issue "women's pages" feature will have a greater effect on public attitudes than whatever appears on the op-ed page--which isn't to say that some DMN readers won't raise a ruckus. When the paper announced that it would include gay couples in its wedding and engagement announcements, the letters page included plenty of angry subscription cancellations. (One thing I hadn't noticed, because I don't read the DMN wedding pages, is that these announcements are all paid advertising.)

In this case, the faux intellectuals are big-shot academics who lumped together everyone ever called a "conservative" (e.g., Hitler, Reagan) and then tried to find patterns in the "conservative" personality. Political bias (and ignorance) aside, the basic statistical methodology is ridiculous, since it assumes that "conservative" is an objective and consistent category like "male" or "45-year-old."

As someone who believes social science can and does discover new truths about how people live and think, I find this sort of idiotic research particularly appalling. It teaches the general public that social science is bullshit. (It also demonstrates that university press offices can be really stupid about what they choose to publicize.)

And, of course, I've written a whole book arguing, with copious examples, that--far from defining "liberal" and "conservative" minds--attitudes toward social and economic change cut across the traditional left-right spectrum.

It may be noteworthy that opinion editor Gail Collins, a Raines protege, reports not to Bill Keller but to Arthur Sulzberger Jr. The new regime may extend beyond the newsroom.

I, however, was interested in the article's unconscious demonstration that publishing execs, both old school and new, are making a fundamental business error. Here are the relevant quotes. First, from the old school:

''When I started in publishing, in 1946,'' Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus & Giroux recalled, ''it was a very different business. It was a profession for gentlemen, and they weren't running their businesses for large profits. They were interested in good literature. Now, the goal is to get larger. The easiest way to increase the look of your balance sheet is to buy another company.''

Now, from the new:

''Books are a flat business,'' [Bertelsmann CEO and Olson's boss] Gunter Thielen says. ''The only way you can grow is through acquisitions. And Peter is very interested in growth.''

Boy this is dumb. Growth through acquisition is not growth, at least not in the sense of rising value. Growth through acquisition is merely exchanging one asset (cash or equity) for another (a company). The balance sheet effect is a classic financial flim-flam, as I learned as a lowly college sophomore taking accounting from the amazing Uwe Reinhardt. In publishing, the executives are apparently fooling not just their stockholders but themselves.

Growth through acquisition is not the same as internal growth. An acquisition may increase productivity if you can consolidate certain overheads or, as is the case sometimes when big tech companies buy tiny ones, bring on talented employees who can be more productive in a larger enterprise. But neither story seems to hold for book publishing.

Otherwise, the only way that acquisitions increase your company's real value is if you somehow buy things for less than they're worth. That's a hard trick to pull off, especially repeatedly, and book publishing doesn't seem like the place to find financial sharpies.

"It's just like Iraq," I thought (proving once again that I am seriously weird). One report says everything's going to hell. Another says things are looking great. The evidence is conflicting enough to provide either story line, and both sell papers. The only way the poor reader will know which is right is to wait and see what happens.

Personally, I give Iraq better odds than J.Lo and Ben. Not that that's saying much.

CHARLESTON, W.Va.--This is from a story that Reuters news service ran this week with my byline:

Jessica Lynch, the wounded Army private whose ordeal in Iraq was hyped into a media fiction of U.S. heroism, was set for an emotional homecoming on Tuesday. . . . Media critics say the TV cameras will not show the return of an injured soldier so much as a reality-TV drama co-produced by U.S. government propaganda and credulous reporters."

Got problems with that?

I do, especially since I didn't write it.

Here's what I sent last week to Reuters, a British news agency that compiles news reports from all over the world:

ELIZABETH--In this small county seat with just 995 residents, the girl everyone calls Jessi is a true heroine--even if reports vary about Pfc. Jessica Lynch and her ordeal in Iraq.

"I think there's a lot of false information about her story," said Amber Spencer, a clerk at the town's convenience store.

Palestine resident J.T. O'Rock was hanging an American flag and yellow ribbon on his storefront in Elizabeth in preparation for Lynch's return.

Like many residents here, he considers Lynch a heroine, even if newspaper and TV reports say her story wasn't the same one that originally attracted movie and book deals.

Read the whole thing. What happened to Wrenn, and to her sources, is truly scandalous.

Posted by Virginia at 11:36 AM

Mr. Dia wears his own brand of clothing, which is sold in four Dia stores in France and is carried in 700 others. Sales are projected at $19 million to $22 million this year, up from $13 million in 2002. He drives a black Mercedes and has bought an apartment in Paris for his mother. In an effort to break into the American market, Mr. Dia is negotiating to open a store on 125th Street in Harlem with a special line for the United States. He will open the shop with Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-born hip-hop singer and composer.

In a country where class, education and pedigree still count, Mr. Dia is emblematic of a small new group of French entrepreneurs--hip, young and determined to escape the tough suburbs of the immigrant poor.

In Mr. Dia's case, the road to success came via New York. "America is a place where you can still dream," he said. "In America, if you want to succeed, you give yourself the right to do it and no one stops you. In France that can't happen."...

[H]is mother arranged for him in 1994 to spend the summer with cousins who ran an African food shop in Harlem. Arriving first in Baltimore with a friend with relatives there, Mr. Dia was stunned by the level of racial integration he witnessed.

"My first shock was to see so many black policemen in the airport" he said. "I couldn't understand it at all. In France out of 100 policemen, maybe one is black. I thought all blacks in America lived in the ghetto. Then I saw blacks with two cars and beautiful houses. I thought I was in the middle of a movie."...

Slowly, Mr. Dia came to realize that in America, destiny was not automatically determined by skin color or family history. "When I saw blacks making money, in responsible positions, I saw that I had a chance," he said. "I said, 'Why not me?'"

Dia's picture of America is more optimistic than even I would generally adopt, but it just goes to show that opportunity is relative--and that successful (and unsuccessful) entrepreneurs tend to see more possibilitis than the average person.

I once wrote in a Reason editorial that "Conservative intellectuals, meanwhile, incessantly declare that 'the' purpose of family life is to raise children. Follow this rhetoric and pretty soon the childless are not merely second-class citizens, but fake families and quite possibly less than fully human." I should have included liberal hacks as well.

Could Steve and I get back the thousands of dollars that being married cost us in extra income taxes last year?

Doing so led me to an insight that had nothing to do with architecture: Little kids don't make you read them the same story night after night just because it's comforting--adults' favorite explanation. They're trying to get it, to absorb the plot and meaning the way I tried to absorb Paul Shepheard's ideas.

Lo and behold, there is some academic research to back up my vacation insight. In today's NYT, Emily Yoffe writes about why kids want to see the same video a million times. She leads with a 7-year-old who loves Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and says he's seen it 1,000 times. "It's really, really, really, really, really, really complicated," he says. "I can't tell you all the details, but I understand the whole thing"--thanks to all that repetition.

Yoffe quotes communications researcher Marie-Louise Mares, who wondered by surveys of parents showed that kids were less likely to watch videos more than once as they grew older. Wondering why, she interviewed 300 kids:

She found the need for repetition came partly from the children's accurate realization that they just didn't get it. She said one 3-year-old could anticipate scenes in "Mary Poppins" but had little idea of the story being told, let alone the themes being expressed. "She was an expert on `Mary Poppins,' but also clueless about `Mary Poppins,' " Dr. Mares said. When Dr. Mares showed children ages 4 and 5 a brief video made by another researcher about not judging people based on appearance, she found that it wasn't until the fourth viewing that they even had an understanding of the sequence of events and the message.

Absorbing truly new material doesn't get all that much easier as we get older. But we don't have the same patience with repetition, which may be one reason little kids are seemingly able to learn so much so quickly. Or maybe the repetition is just too boring. Eventually, I'll probably take another crack at Artificial Love, at least to cull some passages for the benefit of blog readers. It's a really fun book.

TR: Are there historical parallels to this phenomenon?

BROWN: Sure--it's the whole horseless carriage scenario. Early cars looked like carriages, early TVs looked like radios. Every time somebody brings you something tha's new, it looks like the old thing. It's only the second or third generation before it finally starts to look like the new thing.

TR: Design must involve study of human behavior.

BROWN: Yes, one of the interesting human factors questions about new technology is, how long does it take for social groups to adjust to new technologies? How long, in other words, does the etiquette of new technologies take to evolve? We're seeing, both with e-mail and with mobile, two massively influential and powerful technologies that we've yet to develop the etiquette around--the social graces that eradicate most of the technology's objectionable faux pas.

TR: What's an example of that?

BROWN: Well, think about e-mail. There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you're getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we've got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response. I think that the paradigm of e-mail as letters, as objects, is inappropriate. I'm waiting for a shift to the timeline, rather than the object, as the organizing principle.

If you think about a blog for instance, tha's a timeline. And it's a really good way of organizing huge amounts of information, because we're quite good at sequencing. We're quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that's how we treat e-mail now. But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you've got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time.

So I'm guessing that we'll start to see that sort of timeline become more and more important. Because I think it's the way that we as human beings tend to organize massive amounts of data.

(Via Core77.)

He sounds like David Gelernter, who's long pushed the idea of organizing information sequentially, as we experience our lives. But that's not how "we as human beings tend to organize massive amounts of data." When was the last library you saw that shelved its books by publication date? Chronology works only if it's a proxy for something more meaningful.

Besides, my email does organize itself sequentially, and that makes it a mess. The amount of mail is a lot bigger than the number of blog entries, even at InstaPundit. The only way to keep the mail straight is to file it in folders by subject and use various tags to single out important items. And even that doesn't quite work. The problem of information overload is information overload. Nobody's yet found the solution, other than having a really good memory.

From Jill Stewart's latest column (via Kausfiles, who didn't pick up the Connell angle)

A slightly kinder take comes from Democrat Kathleen Connell, who stepped down as State Controller in January after spending months blasting her fellow Democrats for their unchecked overspending, which Connell says clearly caused California's budget debacle.

Connell was a fiscal toughie who, had Davis listened to her, never would have permitted California to spiral into the reckless "get out alive" budgets Davis and the Democrats keep creating.

"You are going to see eight or so major players behind Gray during this recall, giving directly, or through vendors, or subsidiaries, and they are Haim Saban, Stephen Bing, [grocery magnate] Ron Berkle, [SunAmerica billionaire] Eli Broad and others," says Connell.

"The Democrats would lose their political control," Connell says. "Their greatest fear is if he's thrown out it destroys Democratic solidarity and it would create an opportunity for a Republican to be elected governor."

Some people think Connell's a bitch. But a) Professor Postrel, a former UCLA colleague, disagrees, and I tend to trust him on the issue of strong women b) a truth-telling bitch may be exactly what the state needs right now c) compared to Gray Davis, who by all reports is a really nasty person, the typical bitch looks like a sweetheart. Connell's bio is here.

The ideal candidate would:
1. Have enormous name recognition.
2. Have enthusiastic supporters who will come out in what is likely to be a light-turnout special election. (Doesn't matter much how many people hate him as long as a lot of people love him.)
3. Be able to raise money.
4. Not be associated in the voters' minds with the current mess.
5. Not have anything to fear from Davis in case Davis manages to squeak through.

I may be wrong about this, especially on #5, but I think Willie Brown fits the bill. (That parenthetical in #2 is crucial.)

By this interpretation, Kerry wasn't saying, "I'm a groovy guy," but "Don't bother me, I'm on the phone."

There's youth and there's youth. I've known journalistic prodigies who seemed much more experienced than their years. (One of them, briefly my colleague at Inc., became managing editor of the WaPost at 39.) In my own life, I was terribly immature and undeveloped as a 22-year-old WSJ reporter and completely qualified to become editor of Reason at 29 (despite the trustee who objected to the appointment of "that girl). And, as all Web readers know, there are Internet sites and Internet sites. It's a diverse medium.

Summary: I don't want to keep picking on support units, but in this case, I see a trend. Support units work hard in peacetime to keep our equipment running, often to the neglect of their own field training. The result is that they do not meet the standard for basic soldiering and warfighting skills. Of course, they learn through trial and error just like every unit. But the result of waiting to learn these lessons in wartime is that young Americans die as the unit climbs the learning curve. Our Army needs to embrace the warrior ethos in all units -- not just the combat arms -- and it needs to ensure that every unit can fight its way out of an ambush like this one.In the end, none of this may have made the crucial difference and saved the convoy. War is chaotic, and bad things happend to good units who do everything right. But commanders strive to set their units up for success; to do everything possible to make the fight an unfair one -- for the enemy. Training, maintenance, pre-combat checks, pre-combat inspections, and fieldcraft are what enable good units to execute when the time comes on the battlefield. The 507th Maintenance Convoy failed in these areas, and the effects were devastating.

(2) Lubrication. It's not enough to clean the M16 rifle, M249 squad automatic weapon, or M2 .50 cal machine gun -- you also have to regularly apply lubricant in order to keep the metal parts moving against each other. The standard military lubricant for small arms is called "CLP" (See this discussion regarding CLP at Winds of Change). It worked okay for me in Korea and Texas, but not well. My platoon sergeant (an avid hunter) liked to use special commercially-available lubricants that he knew worked better. Apparently, he knew more than the Army's procurement folks. In the weeks since the war, several after action reviews have concluded that the Army's standard weapons lube was inadequate for the job in the desert.

Lubricant: Soldiers provided consistent comments that CLP was not a good choice for weapons maintenance in this environment. The sand is as fine as talcum powder here. The CLP attracted the sand to the weapon. ?… Soldiers considered a product called MiliTec to be a much better solution for lubricating individual and crew-served weapons.

Various current and former military officers echoed this report, saying that CLP was one of the worst lubricants the Army could buy for the desert...

With this as the baseline, the onus then falls on the government to justify the restriction of liberty. Once an action is deemed to be a proper exercise of liberty (as opposed to license), the burden shifts to the government. Though he never acknowledges it, Justice Kennedy here is employing what I have called a "presumption of liberty" that requires the government to justify its restriction on liberty, instead of requiring the citizen to establish that the liberty being exercised is somehow "fundamental."

You should read the whole thing, but here's the conclusion:

In the end, Lawrence is a very simple ruling. Justice Kennedy examined the conduct at issue to see if it was properly an aspect of liberty (as opposed to license), and then asked the government to justify its restriction, which it failed adequately to do. The decision would have been far more transparent if Justice Kennedy had acknowledged what was really happening (though perhaps this would have lost some votes by other justices). Without this acknowledgement, the revolutionary aspect of his opinion is concealed, and it is rendered vulnerable to the ridicule of the dissent. Far better would have been to more closely track the superb amicus brief of the Cato Institute which he twice cites approvingly.

If the Court is serious, the effect on other cases of this shift from "privacy" to "liberty," and away from the New Deal-induced tension between "the presumption of constitutionality" and "fundamental rights," could be profound. For example, the medical-marijuana cases now wending their way through the Ninth Circuit would be greatly affected if those seeking to use or distribute medical marijuana pursuant to California law did not have to show that their liberty to do so was somehow "fundamental"--and if the government was forced to justify its restriction on that liberty. While wrongful behavior (license) could be prohibited, rightful behavior (liberty) could be regulated provided that the regulation was shown to be necessary and proper.

For Lawrence v. Texas to be constitutionally revolutionary, however, the Court's defense of liberty must not be limited to sexual conduct. The more liberties it protects, the less ideological it will be and the more widespread political support it will enjoy. Recognizing a robust "presumption of liberty" might also enable the court to transcend the trench warfare over judicial appointments. Both Left and Right would then find their favored rights protected under the same doctrine. When the Court plays favorites with liberty, as it has since the New Deal, it loses rather than gains credibility with the public.

(Via The Volokh Conspiracy.)

Just think what legalizing gay marriage could do for California's budget crisis...

Senator Kerry's initial idea for the shoot was to pose with his wife on the type of gunboat he captained in the Vietnam War. But in the end, the choice of location was dictated by when I could actually get the senator and his wife in the same place. When I entered his house in Washington, I was impressed by the art collection. It seemed every wall was adorned with a Dutch master or an exotic artifact. The senator's press people were conscious of this and didn't want the shot to seem overdone, so there were various discussions about where to shoot. When he entered the phone, he had his phone to his ear, where it remained for most of the shoot. He told me it was an ambassador on the other end and at one point offered me the hang-loose sign with his free hand. And for most of the shoot he had a very "go go go" attitude, but at the same time, he seemed a bit like a grown-up kid, flopping down on the chair, throwing his leg over the armrest, loosening his tie a bit.

Kerry is on the phone in the photo, looking away from the camera, while his wife faces forward and gestures as though she's throwing something at us. Compared even to the awkward-looking Howard Dean, it's not a flattering picture. Kerry seems self-absorbed, and his wife seems weird. As Mickey Kaus has often said, people just don't like that guy.

BTW, on p. 32 in the same issue, Esquire's list of "Things a Man Should Never Do Past the Age of 30" includes, as item #3, "Flash the hang-loose hand sign, even if he is actually hanging loose." Nope, they don't like him at all.

After all, people have been getting married for thousands of years, while the marriage license is a relatively recent development. A sacrament requires God's blessing, not the government's, and that's the way it should be in any society that respects religious freedom.

Suppose a religious group decides to perform weddings between people of the same sex. Since Roman Catholics, Mormons, Baptists, Muslims, and Jews would not be forced to recognize such arrangements as true marriages, it's hard to see why they would have grounds to complain.

Likewise if same-sex couples benefited from the "legal incidents" of marriage that gay people understandably want to enjoy: the ability to adopt children together, to approve medical treatment for each other, to inherit each other's property, and so on. Allowing two men or two women to enter into a contract that provides such benefits does not compel anyone to change their moral views about homosexuality or their religious understanding of marriage.

I'm all for the movement from status to contract, in this as in many other aspects of life. But even business contracts implicate third parties, from creditors to employees. Business contracts also have default provisions embodied in common law and the Uniform Commercial Code, thereby making it easier to enter into and enforce contracts. A real contract, as opposed to an idealized libertarian argument, is messy and inherently incomplete. That's why a huge body of common law has developed, even in commercial relations.

Moving marriage from a one-size-fits-all standard contract (or a status relationship) to something more personalizable wouldn't make the problems of third-party relationships disappear. To take a relatively simple example, Wal-Mart has adopted a policy against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, but it does not extend benefits to gay partners. Instead, it uses the existing state definition of "marriage" to define who gets benefits. If such a default definition didn't exist, the company would have to make a case-by-case determination of spousehood. That would be so cumbersome and costly that the most likely result would be no recognition of any marriages at all.

Nor, barring a move to anarchist utopia, can the government remain utterly uninvolved. It, too, uses existing family law to govern all sorts of other decisions. Here, I find David Frum inadvertently making the argument for gay marriage even as he calls for a constitutional amendment banning it:

So we need to take preventive measures by writing marriage into the U.S. Constitution. Some proponents of same-sex marriage will say that this act is premature--they recommend that marital traditionalists wait until later, when it will of course be too late. Others take up the federalism argument, urging that each state be allowed to make its own decisions. In this case, though, federalism simply means letting the most liberal state in the country make policy for the other 49. Marriage impinges on immigration law, the Social Security Act, federal tax law, and federal criminal law, among thousands of other areas of jurisdiction. There can and will be only one standard for marriage in the United States--and it will be all one way or all the other.

David is right. Marital status affects all kinds of public policies just as, say, adoption law does. That means the inability to legally marry the person you love affects many more aspects of your life than those the two of you can govern by private contract. If, say, you and your other half are Canadian nationals, and you get a job in Washington, no spousal residency privileges come with your permission to work in this country. The two of you have to live apart. (This exact dilemma is why conservative essayist Bruce Bawer lives in Norway.) To someone who believes in committed relationships--or to a love-struck romantic like me--that is incredibly mean.

The policy argument about gay marriage is ultimately an argument over whether the heterosexual majority will extend its moral sympathy to include homosexuals: whether we will identify with the "you and your other half" in that sentence above. Do we think it's a terrible thing for the law to break up loving couples? Or do we think that gay couples aren't real couples (or, perhaps, real people)?

On that question, yet another blog item suggests that experience in fact begets empathy. This month Dallas Morning News started publishing gay commitment announcements on its wedding pages. Anticipating the announcement, Wick Allison, the editor and publisher of D Magazine and the former publisher of National Review (with the requisite NR politics and religion), wrote:

A Belo source tells us the News will begin, ala the NYTimes, running same-sex "commitment" announcements on the wedding and engagement pages starting July 1. I was ambivalent on this subject--partly from dislike of innovation, partly out of a feeling that marriage as an institution is somehow diminished--until the Times launched theirs. The very first couple the Times featured included Christopher Lione, my art director from Art & Antiques. My ambivalence disappeared; my only feeling was one of delight for Christopher. There are, of course, still legal and theological issues galore. But in the tangle of conflicting interests, surely personal happiness and stability are values to be cherished and upheld.

By presenting the public with only two choices, higher taxes or dramatic cuts in vital services, state politicians and special interest groups are taking a page from an age-old political storybook, absolving themselves of blame and scaring the public into believing it's up to them to solve the state's budget problems. Take your pick, people: Either pay more or prepare for a crime wave. Pay more or deal with a generation of uneducated kids. Pay more or get ready to toss frail seniors into the gutter. Are you really that cold-hearted? What an infuriating, self- serving ruse....

The state has been unwilling to play by the most basic financial rules you can't spend more than you earn without running into severe problems. During the dot-com boom politicians gave systematic favors to the special-interest groups that finance their campaigns, like the prison guards union, jacking up their budgets, salaries and pensions way beyond anything necessary for inflation or population increases. The numbers tell the real story: State spending has increased 40 percent in the last four years alone, as revenues increased 25 percent (spending for inflation and population alone would have increased the budget 21 percent).

Read the whole thing.

Riffing off an LAT article, CalPundit illustrates the mentality that led to this mess. Every feel-good idea becomes politically untouchable, and every program is assumed to a) achieve its goals and b) be the only way to achieve its goals. His favorite, and mine, is the $50/month payment to blind people for dog food: "[Republicans are] proposing to eliminate dog food for blind people? I can see the TV ads already." Now think about that. Sure, blind people may need dog food. But they need shampoo, deodorant, electricity, and computer equipment too. Does every need require a special--and untouchable--appropriation? Isn't that what disability payments are for?

This attitude doesn't just protect nice-sounding programs to support dogs and blind people. It also protects the powerful prison-guard lobby. Deny them anything and you'll see crime running rampant. Who could be against more money for prison guards?

The Reason Public Policy Institute has a special website section devoted to the California budget crisis here.

I'm now going home to Texas, where there's no income tax and they still build roads to handle the traffic.

In the ever-competitive marketplace of political ideas - in a world of blogs and talk radio and cable news - it's increasingly hard to stand out. Coulter's answer to that dilemma is two-fold: look amazing and ratchet up the rhetoric against the left until it has the subtlety and nuance of a car alarm. The left, in turn, has learned the lesson, which is why the fraud and dissembler, Michael Moore, has done so well.

Spinsanity makes a similar analogy, minus the explanation:

Treason is the culmination of a dismaying trend toward factually misleading and inflammatory books from pundits such as Michael Moore, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage....These authors may delight partisans and make their publishers rich, but their work impoverishes our political discourse.

The analogy between Coulter and Moore is a telling one, but it misses an important disparity. Powerful liberal voices like the NYT tend to ignore Moore (though not as much as they ignore Noam Chomsky). But they find Coulter impossible to resist. She's a publicity magnet, because she confirms all their prejudices. Here's Frank Rich's latest reward for her rhetorical excesses. He not only panders to his readers' belief that conservatives are irresponsible idiots, but by doing so he confirms the prejudices of Coulter's readers as well. It's a perfect arrangement.

There is only one (partial) solution to this "impoverish[ment] of our political discourse." Just say no to reviews of and columns on stupid books. Discuss something more interesting. Easy advice to give. Hard to follow.

The dean of the state's political writers, Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee, recently proposed a solution. His column carried the headline "We act like a Third World nation--so treat us like one":

Here's a thought: When the World Bank is finished with Chad, it should come to California, whose public finances these days resemble those of a Third World corruption pit more than those of a modern, presumably enlightened, industrial society.

When Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature received a $12 billion windfall of tax revenues in 2000 they, like the ruling clique of an oil-boom nation, lavished it on the politically connected with no thought as to the long-term consequences. Now California has an immense budget deficit, is dependent entirely on loans from out-of-state bankers and is locked in a seemingly intractable political war over the crisis.

The state will begin a new fiscal year Tuesday without a budget in place, and few in the Capitol doubt that it will be many weeks, perhaps months, before the underlying conflicts are resolved. In the meantime, those dependent on Sacramento for money--schools, local governments, the poor, medical care providers, etc.--will be scrambling to survive. Despite the immensity of its economy and its riches, in other words, California finds itself in exactly the same condition as one of the World Bank's basket cases.

Here's the magical thinking paragraph: "The project will continue the decline in affordable housing on the Westisde. Replacing 10 highly desirable rental buildings in the range of $1000-$1700 per month, by condos offered for $500,000-$550,000, will adversely impact a renter profile of students, artists, young workers and seniors, who are being driven out of the Westside by high housing costs." [Weird commas in the original--vp.]

These concerned neighbors are not offering to sell their tiny bungalows for less than a half million dollars--or, for that matter, to rent them out for "affordable housing." Instead, they want to block an increase in the number of multifamily units, which offer relatively more space and luxury for the money. In the magical twist, they imagine that limiting supply while demand is skyrocketing is the way to create affordable housing.

Of course, if they succeed, it will be good for the Postrels, if not for the general public, since we still own the old but spacious condo we bought at the bottom of the market. I suspect we aren't the only ones aware of the financial advantages of limiting competition.

On a positive note, Steve dropped by UCLA today and a former colleague told him that California's energy crisis disappeared as soon as consumer electricity prices rose. Now peak prices are very high, and people are careful about what they use. The price system works! It must be magic!

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