Is there a calculator in the house?

The NYT ran an article on how nice young men are bilking retirees out of their money by selling them insurance products that they don’t need. Since there isn’t much in the way of hard numbers, it’s hard to know how many people have really been affected (Massachusetts is considering action against some of the insurers, though.) However, I’m amazed at the way some things are phrased:

Regulators say annuities that begin paying immediately are often sound investments for retirees. A 73-year-old customer of one popular annuity, for instance, is guaranteed to begin immediately receiving $252 a month for life, in exchange for a $30,000 payment. If the buyer lives more than 10 years, that income is greater than the original amount paid.

That’s actually wrong. Sure, 10 times 12 times $252 is $30240, which is greater than the initial $30,000 outlay, but if you factor in the discount rate (how much you could have made if you parked your money elsewhere), you’re deeply in the hole after ten years compared to just sticking the money in a high-intrest bank account. (See net present value )

Right now, you can open a risk-free FDIC-insured account that pays 5% annually. (HSBC, for instance, has such an account.) Maybe you think that the feds will rejigger the risk-free interest rate (currently a shade under 5%), so let’s be conservative and say that you expect a 3% absolutely risk-free rate of return (compounded yearly). If the best you could expect is 3%, that $252 monthly outflow is only worth about $26,600 discounted at a 3% annual rate. You’d have to live about 12 years for your $30,000 to be worth $30,000 in today’s dollars. If the interest rate were higher (say, today’s 5%), it would take you just under 14 years to reach that point.

The advantage of the annuity is that it provides insurance in case you run out of savings before you die. Suppose that you put your $30,000 in such an account and made $252 withdrawls every month. At 3% interest (compounded monthly), it would take a shade under 12 years to deplete your savings – during which time you still had the option of moving your money elsewhere (say, if you wanted to help your grandkids make a down payment on a house). Of course, if you lived much longer than those 12 years (5% interest buys you an extra year and a half or so), you’d be in trouble, which I suppose is the point of an annuity. If you had an investment that paid 11.25% or so, you could live without touching the principal – but it’s unlikely that you’ll get that risk-free.)

The whole business seems a bit macabre, but insurance companies can cover the costs of unusually long-lived holders by setting payouts properly. (That’s assuming that they can’t earn at least 11.25% on their invested income, which would mean they wouldn’t need to worry how long the annuity-holders lived.) One shouldn’t, however, pay an annuity to just one person unless you’ve set it up to profit no matter how long they live. Or you might end up like François Raffray:

Jeanne Louise Calment (February 21, 1875 August 4, 1997) reached the longest confirmed lifespan in history at 122 years and 164 days. Her lifespan has been thoroughly documented by scientific study; more records have been produced to verify her age than for any other case.
In 1965, aged 90, with no living heirs, Jeanne Calment signed a deal, common in France, to sell her condominium apartment en viager to lawyer François Raffray. Raffray, then aged 47, agreed to pay a monthly sum until she died, an agreement sometimes called a “reverse mortgage”. At the time of the deal the value of the apartment was equal to ten years of payments. Unfortunately for Raffray, not only did Calment survive more than thirty years, but Raffray died of cancer in December 1995, at the age of 77, leaving his widow to continue the payments.

18:08 EST | permalink | /issues/scams

Household pests

A while back, the apartment had a mouse problem. A., since he was often up most of the night, saw a mouse scurrying around. I think E. mentioned that he’d seen it, too. Then I found a mysterious hole in a sealed bag of food I’d left in my room. Then I began to see the mouse itself: it showed up outside the common room, but escaped before I could catch it. Then, one day, I was tapping out an email and heard a rustling — it was rummaging through the stuff on top of my dresser (heaven knows how it managed to climb up there), with me ten feet away and the lights blazing!

Needless to say, when I crept over to catch it, it bolted. I discovered that it had chewed its way into a ziploc of chocolate-covered coffee beans, and had eaten the chocolate off of every last one of them. Coffee beans and chocolate dust were all over the dresser. (Picky little snot, wasn’t it.)

I decided that this was a good impetus to clean the room. I vacuumed up all of the beans, removed the radiator covers and looked for bolt-holes, stopped storing my luggage (could be nesting material!) under the bed, and plugged every hole I could find, which turned out to be just one very small gap in the baseboard in the corner. I couldn’t imagine even a mouse fitting through it, but I haven’t seen it since.

I even set a trap: a deep pickle-jar with some sunflower-seed butter and granola and a wooden ramp leading to the mouth. It was never disturbed. Maybe the hole was its point of entry.

Then, I was browsing the Intarweb today, and discovered that you can’t feed chocolate to your pet mice. It’s toxic to them.

Ha. Pwned.

18:26 EST | permalink | /issues/pest-control

When it rains, it pours

Here’s more from the “unsolicited parenting advice” department:

This is what 3 a.m. looks like at the Costello house, a diminutive red brick three-story in the West Village: On the second floor, Harrison, age 5, is splayed, sideways and snoring, across his parents. king-size, Anglo-Indian four-poster, having muscled his mother out completely and pushed his father, Paul, a 35-year-old photographer, to the extreme edge of the bed.

[…]

“I used to get hysterical and wonder, what is this new life of stumbling around in the middle of the night?” Ms. Costello said. “Now it’s just so oddly part of the routine. Paul and I wonder, will we ever sleep together again?”

W. T. F.

Allow me to rip off an Internet celebrity: if your kids aren’t capable of handling the “stay the hell out of the bedroom” rule, then you have failed as a parent.

It’s parenting like that that creates kids like this.

00:44 EST | permalink | /issues/parenting

Three cheers for John McCain

For making it really, really easy for me to not vote for him:

A forthcoming bill in the U.S. Senate lays the groundwork for a national database of illegal images that Internet service providers would use to automatically flag and report suspicious content to police.

The proposal, which Sen. John McCain is planning to introduce on Wednesday, also would require ISPs and perhaps some Web sites to alert the government of any illegal images of real or “cartoon” minors. Failure to do would be punished by criminal penalties including fines of up to $300,000.

[…]

It also covers obscene images of minors including ones in a “drawing, cartoon, sculpture, or painting.” (The language warns that it is not necessary “that the minor depicted actually exist.”)

I suppose that means this image of a naked bearded man fondling a naked boy would be illegal. (Note, of course, that it’s a tondo painted 470 BC that today resides in the Ashmolean Museum.)

The real problems in the U.S. are obvious: social security is doomed. Congress can’t control its spending and doesn’t want to try. Iraq appears to be entering a civil war. Ten million illegal immigrants are living in the U.S.; a non-trivial minority of whom are involved in organized crime. Public education is a trainwreck in progress.

But no presidential candidate has the spine to tackle these problems. Instead, we get feel-good legicrap like the baseball steroid hearings, the Terry Schiavo travesty, the everyone-knew-it-was-doomed Federal Marriage Amendment, and this.

Are child molesters escaping justice because we lack a law that forces ISPs to face fines of $300,000 for failing to report ancient Greek paintings? I have my doubts.

But there’s a silver lining. I might have actually struggled over the campaign-finance issue, because I thought McCain’s views were, besides that, decent. But now that he’s cast his lot with the panderers, “pay no attention to the abortion that is the federal budget—Here! Over here! We’re saving your kids from perverts!” crowd, it will be very, very easy to vote for someone else.

That he managed to take a giant dump on the Internet industry in the process (since they’ll have to police their customers or face enormous fines) is icing on the cake. I have an idea: every time the Feds want to delegate the functions of government to private industry, they should be required to estimate how much it will cost American business. Ditto federal agency rulemaking. If corporations have to file environmental impact statements, I daresay that the government should be expected to file business impact statements. (We already have the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act, so this isn’t entirely implausible.)

That’s the sort of pandering I could get behind.

21:00 EST | permalink | /issues/political-excess

More meat for the meme morgue

From the “The 100% of the Usage Panel recommends that this phrase be taken out and shot” department:

“mommy wars”

When Drudge picks up an AP story about the thirty-something full-time mother of four who lobs a fragmentation grenade from the cockpit of her kid-filled Lincoln Navigator through the open top of her high-powered-childfree-consultant (and Yale classmate)’s BMW M3 while they sit stranded in traffic on I-80, then, and only then, will I feel comfortable with the phrase.

See also

15:32 EST | permalink | /issues/hyperbole

Seen and not heard

ORLANDO, Fla. - AirTran Airways on Tuesday defended its decision to remove a Massachusetts couple from a flight after their crying 3-year-old daughter refused to take her seat before takeoff.

[…]

“The flight was already delayed 15 minutes and in fairness to the other 112 passengers on the plane, the crew made an operational decision to remove the family,” AirTran spokeswoman Judy Graham-Weaver said.

[…]

The Orlando-based carrier reimbursed the family $595.80, the cost of the three tickets, and the Kuleszas flew home the next day.

They also were offered three roundtrip tickets anywhere the airline flies, Graham-Weaver said.

The father said his family would never fly AirTran again.

I, on the other hand, plan to fly with them whenever possible. This is a victory for air travelers everywhere.

I’m all in favor of children, certainly—America has anough child-free nitwits, although certainly not as many as Europe.* And children can certainly be loud—that’s why I wear earplugs. But if your kid is going to waste a collective 28 man-hours* of innocent bystanders’ time, then slip her a damn mickey before the flight. Or drive.

[*] On that note, don’t miss this Mark Steyn column.

[**] (In fairness, the article doesn’t say if the 15-minute delay was the kid’s fault or if the plane was already late before they boarded.)

AirTran, incidentally, is the successor to ValuJet, which suffered the infamous ValuJet Flight 592 crash in the Florida Everglades. I’m not complaining: they fly the BOS-CAK route, cheap.

15:29 EST | permalink | /issues/children

Dead horses that should be retired. With prejudice.

“Battle of the sexes”

(This one’s so bad that it pains me to write it.)

(see also)

23:35 EST | permalink | /issues/hyperbole

Our Culture of Pandering

While raiding the KSG library for a copy of Christopher Lasch’s* The Revolt of the Elites that wasn’t falling apart (as was Lamont’s), a slim volume with “pandering” on the spine caught my eye. Since the propensity of politicians to pander is one of my (and Carlos’s) favorite laments, I pulled it.

It was Sen. Paul Simon’s Our Culture of Pandering, in which he bashes the American media, political, educational, and religious establishment. The book throws out a number of obvious and quite fair attacks: the increasingly centralized and profit-obsessed American media delivers salaciousness rather than substance, American public schools are the laughingstock of the developed world, American churches pay a lot of lip service to charity but few are willing to ask their congregations to sacrifice for it, and American politicians are decidedly unwilling to show real leadership. Regarding the last, Simon related a conversation with Rep. Richard Kelly (R-FL; later imprisoned for his role in the Abscam scandal). Kelley agreed that increasing foreign-aid spending was in the national interest, but said his constituents wouldn’t stand for it.

Simon asked how many letters Kelly received against foreign aid in the month prior.

“Probably half a dozen,” he replied.

Interestingly, the xenophobia (xeno-indifference might be a better term) theme ran through all four chapters. American colleges don’t send enough students to study abroad (Simon wonders if we would have had a war in Vietnam had LBJ spent a semester in Asia). American churches are far more willing to raise money for new buildings than for foreign or disaster aid abroad. American newspapers spend more time covering celebrity scandals than international developments (to say nothing of TV news). And American politicians (as above), even if they believe that more foreign aid spending would benefit America (to say nothing of the world), are generally unwilling to show much backbone on the issue. (After reading Easterly’s book, I’m more than a little skeptical of using raw spending as a measure of our commitment to helping the destitute abroad, but the point is well taken.)

00:46 EST | permalink | /issues/culturewar

Born too late

It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasurably long. Couldn’t the test of man have been carried out in fewer years? Couldn’t we have committed our first major sin at seven, have ruined ourselves for love or hate at ten, have clutched at redemption at a fifteen-year-old death bed?

There was very little that adult gangsters practiced or enjoyed that child gangsters did not contrive to reproduce on their own scale. There were boys’ saloons, with three-cent whiskies and little girls in the back rooms, and there were children’s gambling houses, in which tots could bilk other tots at the usual menu of faro, policy, and dice games. […]
If it seems that these children must have very early used up the entire stock of adult pleasures—sex, drink, gambling, extortion, racketeering, fraud, intimidation, unfair competition, price-fixing, terrorism—it should be remembered that the life expectancy for kids growing up under these conditions could not have been very high.The whole adult order of high and low sensations had to be experienced in fifteen or twenty years at best before they succumbed to disease, malnutrition, exposure, stab wounds, or gunfire.

04:17 EST | permalink | /issues/life-extension

The Anti-Sachs

Just finished Will Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good.

I read Lamont Library’s copy, so I had the benefit of someone’s crabbed marginalia. Among the more illuminating pencilings: “the worst neo-lib crap available on the free market” (on the title page), “so McDonald would be the big push? what a crap theory!” (below a section contrasting aid-planners’ inflexibility to Ray Kroc’s leap from selling mixers to running restaurants). This petered out after the first chapter — I suppose he or she dumped the book in disgust.

The central argument is that developing-country problems can be better solved with tweezers than with sledgehammers. In other words, aid-givers with narrow, well-defined goals and clear measures of success are more likely to do good than those with open-ended goals and hundreds of objectives, even if they have (as they often do) colossal budgets. Easterly calls the former “searchers” and the latter “planners” or “big push” projects, but he might as well call them “Smile Train” (insert any narrowly-targeted charity here) and “Jeffrey Sachs”. Unfortunately for the world’s poor, students of the Sachs school include Western governments, the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, big-name philanthropists, and Bono.

I’m occasionally a bystander to international-development chatter, so Easterly’s nonstop tweaks at ID bureaucratese were a nice touch. He devotes the middle of one chapter to such succinctly-titled entities as “The Open-Ended Ad-Hoc Working Group on Integrated and Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Outcomes of the Major United Nations Conferences and Summits in the Economic and Social Fields”. Near the end, he finds a report by the “Joint Venture on Managing for Development Results for the DAC Working Party on Aid Effectiveness and Donor Practices” called “Managing for Development Results, Principles in Action: Sourcebook on Emerging Good Practice.” One Scalian section lists reports produced by aid agencies:

“…besides the UN’s 3,751-page Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, we have the British government’s 453 page Our Common Future: Report of the Commission for Africa, plus the latest update of the IMF and the World Bank’s 1,246 page PSRP Sourcebook…”

For this world in which Bangladeshi children die of diarrhea while Big Aid keeps International Paper in business, Easterly blames misaligned incentives. Western aid agencies are not actually rewarded for achieving their goals, only for setting them. Mere expenditures are often used as a measure of success. Easterly’s reductio ad absurdam: would those who paid $10 to see the 2005 flop Catwoman be mollified in knowing that the producers dumped $100 million into the film? (The Catwoman analogy appeared in his 2005 Foreign Policy article – I guess it was too good not to reprint.) Today, the ONE Campaign advocates pushing 1% of the U.S. federal budget into foreign aid – on top of the $2,300,000,000,000 that the West spent on foreign aid over the last 50 years.

Perhaps to avoid the “neocon toady” slur, the second part of the book heaps scorn on the American nation-builders in Iraq in 2003 (and Afghanistan in 2001 and El Salvador in the 1980s and Vietnam in 1961 and Guatemala in 1954 and so on). As an economist, he proclaims himself unqualified to judge the national security benefits of each of these interventions, but finds that they did little economic good (besides spurring an “explosion of Vietnamese restaurants” and Guatemalan handicraft shops in the U.S.). He’s a fan of markets, but not of recent efforts to create them. On post-communist Eastern Europe, he explains that the “chief recipients of foreign aid were the Big Six accounting firms,” to whom fell the task of writing new laws.

AIDS activists also get their sacred cow gored: Easterly asserts that campaigns to bring (expensive) AIDS drugs to the poorest parts of the world are wasting money better spent on (cheap) prevention. One of his more macabre observations: spending money on AIDS treatment rather than prevention actually makes the AIDS crisis worse, because treated people live longer and can spread the disease further. Easterly blames anti-condom conservatives in the U.S. and AIDS activists who found an easy target in Big Pharma.

His success stories are narrowly targeted and often home-grown — private colleges launched by Indians and Ghanaians, a Unilever-sponsored handwashing campaign to fight diarrhea in India, entrepreneurs selling anti-malarial bed nets in Malawi (free nets tended to end up as fishing equipment). His parting shot calls for more of those narrowly-focused campaigns, a willingness of aid donors to forget about self-sufficiency (in other words, abandon the tired story about teaching men to fish and just feed the starving kids), and more independent evaluation of the outcomes of aid projects. He calls this, in not so many words, a scientific approach to aid. You’d think that this would be obvious, but then again, I was floored a few years ago when I started hanging out at Harvard Med and found out that something called “evidence-based medicine” was the the next big thing. (What on earth were doctors practicing before?)

The book is a few dozen pages too long, most of which are taken up by tedious and unnecessary examples of capitalism at work, many of which somehow manage to involve his children. The central dichotomy between “searchers” and “planners” makes the latter out to be so outrageously wrong that one might accuse Easterly of setting up a strawman. Since he takes on the entire 20th century’s worth of Western foreign aid and humanitarian military intervention, he could easily be accused of cherry-picking the worst examples of big-push aid to bulk up the scarecrow. But neither of these detract much from the book. Highly recommended, particularly if you can get a copy after a starry-eyed development groupie had a go at it.

P.S. Someone deserves an award for Amazon’s “search inside the book” feature. Have you ever wasted ten minutes looking for a passage that you know was there somewhere, should have bookmarked, but didn’t? I rarely have to do that anymore.

01:15 EST | permalink | /issues/poverty

More words that should not be used together. Ever.

“scary smart”

(See also: 1 2 3 4 )

21:39 EST | permalink | /issues/hyperbole

Truth pwns political satire, part 97

Exhibit A: today’s WSJ OpinionJournal:

The Fertility Gap
Liberal politics will prove fruitless as long as liberals refuse to multiply.

[…]

But the data on young Americans tell a different story. Simply put, liberals have a big baby problem: They’re not having enough of them, they haven’t for a long time, and their pool of potential new voters is suffering as a result. According to the 2004 General Social Survey, if you picked 100 unrelated politically liberal adults at random, you would find that they had, between them, 147 children. If you picked 100 conservatives, you would find 208 kids. That’s a “fertility gap” of 41%. Given that about 80% of people with an identifiable party preference grow up to vote the same way as their parents, this gap translates into lots more little Republicans than little Democrats to vote in future elections. Over the past 30 years this gap has not been below 20%–explaining, to a large extent, the current ineffectiveness of liberal youth voter campaigns today.

Exhibit B: a long-forgotten whitehouse.org poster:

Caption: “America can defeat terrorism in the bedroom!”

18:53 EST | permalink | /issues/partisanship

In your face, foreigners!

This is what I’ll point to next time someone suggests that the U.S. ought to have compulsory voting like Australia or Brazil or what-have-you:

Three quarters of Americans can correctly identify two of Snow White’s seven dwarfs while only a quarter can name two Supreme Court Justices, according to a poll on pop culture released on Monday.
[…]
Respondents were far more familiar with the Three Stooges – Larry, Curly and Moe – than the three branches of the U.S. government – judicial, executive and legislative. Seventy-four percent identified the former, 42 percent the latter.

23:45 EST | permalink | /issues/elections

Rick Santorum would be relieved

In cases of polygamy, only the first spouse may qualify as a spouse for immigration.

Source: U.S. Department of State

07:23 EST | permalink | /issues/immigration

OMG CONSPIRACY

Advertising that promotes firearms or weapons of any kind is not allowed.

Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of certain weapons, such as firearms, ammunition, balisongs, butterfly knives, and brass knuckles.

I’m not the first to notice this, but does it strike you as odd that two of the top Internet search engines will not accept advertising for guns or ammunition?

I won’t assume that there’s open hostility to gun rights brewing in Redmond and Mountain View. There might be state or local laws pertaining to gun advertising that Google and Microsoft would rather avoid. However, I’m sure there are plenty of state and local laws pertaining to porn advertising—which neither site has in short supply.

Yahoo, despite its disgusting habit of helping the Chinese government put dissidents in prison, has a less (in writing, at least) second-amendment-hostile policy:

We will not accept sites that offer automatic weapons, military-style assault weapons, or integral parts for these weapons.

That said, a Yahoo! search for “ammunition” turns up zero “sponsored link” ads, which makes me suspect that this policy is narrowly written but broadly applied. (I wonder if the (quite legal) AR-15 is verboten, because it looks like the “military-style” M-16?)

17:14 EST | permalink | /issues/guns

Harvard’s immigration protestors and counter-protesters

Harvard students, fellow-travelers, and their oppontents mustered for an immigration protest/rally in front of University Hall this afternoon.

All of the participants stood on the paved paths, rather than the grass, so it’s hard to get an idea of the size of the crowd. My photos tend to exaggerate its size. The lawns are being reseeded and were roped off.

I was very pleased to see a small group of counter-protesters. (Surprised that any showed up, I asked, and was assured, that they were indeed “for real.” I noticed that they were standing fairly close to the Harvard University Police cruiser in the back — smart thinking.)

Poster: “I am an immigrant & I oppose illegal immigration”

(Update: 1/16/07) Shirt: “哈佛”, or “Harvard” in Chinese characters. Pronounced “hā fó” in Mandarin.

The last line of the sign (sorta-visible here) is in Japanese. I suspect they might have agreed with this article.

A video snippet of one of the speakers:

“…actually creates smoking-gun evidence that eclipses the fact that we Latinos, African-Americans, Pacific Islanders, Asians, European…we are here because you were there!”

The occasional “anarchism” logo on a poster suggests that this wasn’t just about immigration for some people:

Poster: No Fences No Borders Free Movement For All (The “A” in “All” is circled.)

I suppose this is the inevitable consequence of holding the rally on May Day.

I’d note that America doesn’t have mass strikes and protests on May Day, doesn’t want to start having mass strikes and protests on May Day, and that mass strikes and protests on May Day will only play into the hands of the xenophobe lobby, but, oddly enough, no-one consulted me on the wisdom of the date selection…

Here’s the complete album.

22:48 EST | permalink | /issues/immigration

Outsourcing media consumption

One thing I truly love about the Internet: other people listen to talk radio, so you don’t have to! (via Instapundit)

Did you catch Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, on the Imus Show responding to criticism from Talk Radio’s Michael Graham? Here’s the key quote:

“He [Michael Graham] also mentioned my abridgement of First Amendment rights, i.e. talking about campaign finance reform….I know that money corrupts….I would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, Iâ\u20ac\u2122d rather have the clean government.”

I can think of a certain island republic where Senator McCain would fit right in. From April 22nd’s economist, page 42:

When one of [former longtime Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s] young inquisitioners suggested that a bit more freedom of expression would make the country stronger, he retorted: “You mean to tell me that what is happening in Thailand and the Philippines is binding the people, building the nation?

He also gets an “F-” from the Gun Owners Action League. That does it—I’m going to write-in Condi.

Speaking of which, is anyone else utterly amazed by Tom Coburn, the senatorial superhero? He scored an “A+” from the gun nuts (the only A+ in the 109th senate), kept his term-limit pledge in the House, is leading a crusade against pork (admittedly with Sen. McCain ), and apparently continued to deliver babies after entering office.

You’ve got to wonder where he came up with this one, though:

According to The American Prospect, during Coburn’s 2004 senatorial campaign in Oklahoma, Coburn remarked that in the town of Coalgate, Oklahoma, lesbianism was “so rampant in some of the schools…that they’ll let only one girl go to the bathroom.”

12:09 EST | permalink | /issues/free-speech

Get ready for a “you heard it here first” press release

Somebody notify Jack Chick:

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

The Harvard Crimson, March 17

The Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters’ Alliance (BGLTSA) have applauded last week’s decision by the American Red Cross to call for the end of a government ban on blood donations from men who have had sex with other men.
The ban, implemented in 1990, is a policy imposed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

03:16 EST | permalink | /issues/aids

Don’t miss the rest

03:10 EST | permalink | /issues/obesity

More from the Frenchman

Don’t miss the religious map of the United States. Or the Ave Maria, Flordia photo essay. Or the meter maid purge.

12:57 EST | permalink | /issues/religion

More from the French blogger on this site

(src)

See also.

14:20 EST | permalink | /issues/political-excess

SOTU ‘06

I was a little put off by the “ban human-animal hybrids” section of the SOTU. Another blogger on this site speculates that George W may have been watching too much TV:

Also, there’s this.

03:09 EST | permalink | /issues/w

It’s ethnic insensitivity week here at barillari.org

If you spend enough time looking at the census database, you’ll find some wonderful surnames. Favorites so far:

• Balls (15928d in frequency)
• Oshita (29879d)
• Peniston (50053d)
• Penister (50054d)
• Ohotnicky (50168d)
• Ohno (50169d)
• Takeshita (59819d)
• Dickus (64576d)
• Penison (69214d)

Update: Should anyone accuse me of being unsympathetic to people with unusual surnames, I will only note that I have heard just about every possible perversion of “Barillari” in my public-school days. No, I’m not going to repeat any of them here.

19:24 EST | permalink | /issues/census-taking

You’d think this was a UNICEF food-drop

The U.S. has a long way to go to reach British levels of mob depravity, but this piece from South Flordia is a heartening indication that we won’t be left in their dust forever.

“Black Friday,” the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, began in South Florida early today with a 73-year-old woman being knocked down as a crowd at an electronics store rushed a metal security gate to get inside. The crowd of shoppers outside BrandsMart USA in Sawgrass Mills, angry at being forced to wait by security personnel, pushed their way under the security gate and down a hallway into the store, forcing dozens of people against the walls and trampling the woman.

This is the third or fourth (at least) consumer-riot that Drudge has linked to in the past few days.

16:36 EST | permalink | /issues/consumerism

The 1918 flu virus plot

Two computer science pioneers have a column in the NY Times denouncing the publication of the genome of the virus responsible for the 1918 influenza epidemic. (Thanks, Instapundit.)

The pair imply a plot straight out a movie: al-Qaeda molecular biologists will manipulate the modern milquetoast flu virus to recreate the 1918 superbug. Epidemic. Horror. Panic in the streets. Megadeath. Film at eleven.

The authors, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, offer a non-solution solution:

The precise genome could potentially be shared with scientists with suitable security assurances.

It’s a non-solution because genome sequences are like software: anyone in the research lab — faculty, research assistants, graduate students, IT support staff — could steal it undetectably. If al-Qaeda has teams of biologists, pipettes a-glistening, just waiting for that genome, they assuredly can sneak someone onto the IT staff of an institution working with the virus.

I posit that embargoing the 1918 flu genome to “trusted” scientists would actually make us more vulnerable to the flu. Here’s why: much of the work in academic science is carried out by graduate and postdoctoral students — more and more of whom (especially in the sciences) come from abroad [1]. (For instance, 35% of MIT’s grad students are foreign.) If just looking at the genome requires a security clearance (not the quickest process, as or so I’ve been told), I imagine most virologists will choose to work on something with more funding and less bureaucracy.

To embargo the last really deadly flu genome because of a terrorist threat would be downright dangerous. The world faces a far more immediate threat from a deadly avian flu strain than it does from al-Qaeda virologists. Somehow, making flu research harder strikes me as a bad idea. K & J analogize viral genomes to atom bomb blueprints, glossing over the crucial difference: an atom-bomb blueprint won’t help you radiation-proof a human being. But a viral genome will help you devise a treatment.

Bruce Schneier noted that that terrorists “don’t do movie plots.” Angelo Codevilla observed that it would be dead easy (and would shut down the nation overnight) if terrorists coordinated synchronized Molotov-cocktail attacks on school buses across the country. Gasoline and glass bottles are a lot easier to come by than reagents, pipettes, and know-how.

Here’s how to reconstruct the 1918 virus on the cheap: go somewhere with cold soil and dig up a corpse. I saw it in a movie (“Virus Fugitivo”), so it must work. (Oops, did I just tell terrorists how to start an epidemic? My bad.)

09:51 EST | permalink | /issues/terrorism

Zing!

William Easterly on aid to Africa:

Letting total aid money stand for accomplishment is like the Hollywood producers of Catwoman, recently voted the worst movie of 2004, bragging about their impressive accomplishment of spending $100 million on its production.

That reminds me of the wisdom of taking lines-of-code-written as a proxy for the usefulness of a piece of software.

20:42 EST | permalink | /issues/foreign-aid

Preventing genocide

The average Glenn Reynolds post is about 0.8 sentences long – which makes it all the more pleasant to see a piece like this.

00:41 EST | permalink | /issues/genocide

Next time, take Econ 101 first

The background of MIT’s home page features a different “spotlight” group or event every day. Today’s is a promotion of “fair trade” coffee.

Now, I have no objection to people who voluntarily pay more than the going market rate for a commodity. (The bottled-water industry thanks the Lord every day for those people.) But this “fair trade” campaign is (of course) run by a group that also opposes “sweatshop” labor.

There’s a big honking picture of Noam Chomsky at the top of the group’s website, which should give you some idea of how much careful thought went into the “anti-sweatshop” campaign. Maybe this gang should consider reading up on what another MIT professor (who’s since moved to greener pastures ) has to say about the subject.

I’m tempted to launch a campaign to help create jobs for the third-world (and for the poor in America) by shopping only at Wal-Mart.

Update: David emailed to note that “fair-trade” coffee programs tend to ignore non-Latin American coffee growers–namely, the #2 exporter, Vietnam– so the “socially responsible” dollars miss a big segment of the downtrodden growers.

The MIT website doesn’t mention particular countries, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were strictly Latin American. Latin American socialists have historically enjoyed far better marketing than their counterparts in Asia. You can’t spend five minutes on a university thoroughfare without spotting a Che or two, but when was the last time you saw a Ho Chi Minh t-shirt? I blame the beefcake factor: why else would a fair-trade site have a muscular, shirtless Dominican spreading his legs on the front page? (If the site has changed, the original is here. ) WASP coeds of the feeling-guilty-about-Dad’s-money set go ga-ga over Latins – the North Vietnamese just don’t have the same sex appeal.

23:41 EST | permalink | /issues/economy

Yet another word I can’t stand to hear or read

“stakeholders”

(See also: 1 2 3 )

16:31 EST | permalink | /issues/political-excess

You can’t make this stuff up

Mass backwards introduced me to the newest dead horse in the blog-world: 65 students at Timken High School (over 13% of the women in the class) are pregnant.

I have nothing to add, except to make note of Timken High School’s mascot:

See this page and this page, from which I pulled the logos.

Yes, that’s right. The Timken TROJANS.

May I suggest a different design for the mascot, reflecting the school’s hope for change?

21:26 EST | permalink | /issues/reproduction

Oh, great.

The U.S. Attorney’s office issued a warning regarding terrorists who disguise themselves as homeless people:

Homeless people easily blend into urban landscapes, the message said.

“This is particularly true of our mass transit systems, where homeless people tend to loiter unnoticed,” the e-mail said.

It referred to a recent incident in Somerville, Mass., in which a police officer became suspicious about someone dressed as a street person. The officer questioned the man, discovered he had a passport from a “country of interest” — typically a Middle Eastern or South Asian nation — and a checkbook with a questionable address, the e-mail said. The investigation is continuing, it said.

“Mass transit” in Somerville presumably means Porter or Davis on the Red Line.

Cute.

Addendum: I thought I’d see if someone in the Yahoo forums for the article had a link to the “State Department report that was issued last week” that the letter referenced. Big mistake:

19:37 EST | permalink | /issues/terrorism

Tafted

I have not been following the fiasco-in-progress in Ohio (it has something to do with Gov. Taft and a coin dealer, I believe), but today, it made the front page of Yahoo!.

A few months ago, Gov. Taft opined on the importance of avoiding impropriety before a group at Xavier University:

“Public employees can enjoy entertainment, such as golf or dining out, with persons working for a regulated company, or one doing business with the state, ONLY if they fully pay their own way.”

But just today:

Gov. Bob Taft was charged with four ethics violations Wednesday for failing to report dozens of gifts that included dinners, golf games and professional hockey tickets, deepening a scandal that has rocked Ohio’s Republican Party.

Naturally, I have no idea as to the veracity of these charges, which may well be politically motivated. But it wouldn’t surprise me if they were reasonable, either.

Several years ago, Gov. Taft came to my high school. The event was telecast to a few other high schools (I think the event had something to do with showing off the fancy videoconferencing equipment). I remember very little about the speech except for one item: I was seated at a table perpendicular to the governor’s seat. While speaking, the governor pulled his feet under his chair and pawed at the carpet with the tips of his shoes. This struck me as very odd.

21:10 EST | permalink | /issues/corruption

Non-sequitur of the day

(I suggest skipping this if you’re easily offended.)

A while back, Alex pointed me to one of the most tasteless asides I’ve ever seen (I’d missed it completely while looking at the same material.)

Read this Jack Chick comic. Notice anything unusual? Look carefully at the right-hand panel of the tenth row (this one).

What does the airport have to do with the story?

Jack Chick is apparently a good deal more tasteless than his detractors will admit.

12:59 EST | permalink | /issues/terrorism

Get your cheap tickets…while they last!

Established bus lines (Peter Pan, for instance) are clamoring for an investigation of their ultra-low-fare rivals’ apparent refusal to serve the handicapped:

Not fare! Disabled rip discount bus company after being denied access

Bus battle heats up as business rival files suit

AG targets Fung Wah bus line: Carrier accused of discrimination

Hm, what’s next? Will the AG demand buses that don’t catch fire?

11:22 EST | permalink | /issues/handicapped-access

One stddev above the usual blog-post threshhold

The delightful Boston-area gun-nuts at mASS BACKWARDS pointed out a story in the Herald: to reassure the public of the safety of the subway system, Gov. Mitt Romney rode the Red Line from Park Street to Downtown Crossing. (For those who’ve never had the pleasure, those two (adjacent) stops are about 200 meters apart – there’s even an underground pedestrian walkway connecting them, for those who’d rather not wait for a train.)

In the midst of the journey of two thousand decimeters, he bumbled the price of a ride ($1.25) and managed to get harassed by a cat house owner – this despite his employment of a $350k/yr team to prep him for public appearances.

Of course, you could have read that in the article and on mASS BACKWARDS. I just wanted to note that Michael Bloomberg rides the subway to work daily.

Update: Oops. That was Gov. Romney, not Mayor Menino. Even worse.

00:59 EST | permalink | /issues/political-excess

Is David Brooks slowly turning into John Waters?

Will he someday start making movies? The title of this piece is suggestive:

Haley, 12, is a Travel Team Girl, who spends her weekends playing midfield against similarly pony-tailed, strongly calved soccer marvels. Cody, 10, is a Buzz Cut Boy, whose naturally blond hair has been cut to a lawn-like stubble and dyed an almost phosphorescent white. Cody’s wardrobe is entirely derivative of fashions he has seen watching the X-Games. In his vision, Patio Man can see the kids enjoying their child-safe lawn darts with a gaggle of their cul de sac friends, a happy gathering of Haleys and Codys and Corys and Britneys. It’s a brightly colored scene: Abercrombie & Fitch pink spaghetti-strap tops on the girls and ankle length canvas shorts and laceless Nikes on the boys.

(Incidentally, these were exactly the brand of children I mentioned in the last entry, except that the hair was longer.)

16:03 EST | permalink | /issues/lurking_horror

A good time to be a petty criminal

Sampan, a freebie paper in Boston, carried this comic on May 6:

…which followed a string of purse-snatchings and other delightful urban foibles in Chinatown. (Documented here and here)

What does a law-abiding citizen do when the police are unable to be everywhere at once? I’m reminded of what happened during the L.A. riots of 1992:

As she watched, the news featured vivid images of Korean shopkeepers defending their stores with shotguns and pistols.
“I thought, ‘Where are the police? Why are these store owners having to protect their own property with guns?’ ” she recalls.

There may be a lesson for the law-abiding denizens of Boston in this — but probably not. If you’re a permanent resident, rather than a citizen (as I’d imagine many Chinatown residents are), it’s completely illegal to carry so much as a can of pepper spray in Massachusetts. (You have to be a citizen to get the appropriate permit.)

05:04 EST | permalink | /issues/crime

Here’s how to _not_ sell me

I need some self-storage for a month. Google Maps named 10 places in the 02138 zip code:

• Cambridge Self Storage: no price information online. Plonk.

• Precision Self Storage – actually an auction site.

• Yellowbrick Self-storage Online prices – Yes!

• C-Free Self-Storage - Also has prices online – Yes! Low prices, but the smallest unit is bigger than I need.

• Planet Self-Storage. No prices. Plonk.

• Brighton Self-Storage – Prices: Yes!

• Storage Bunker. For the e-commerce section, they want to order their customers to use a specific web browser: “Invalid Web Browser. Sorry, you need Internet Explorer 5.5 or greater to use this site. You can download it HERE.” Genius. PLONK

• “Patriot Self-Storage” - No website.

• “Morgan Self Storage” - No website.

• “Self Storage Delivered” - Pickup/delivery included. Not what I want. Gratuitious use of flash. Retch.

15:45 EST | permalink | /issues/commerce

Puts a whole new spin on “pot-head”, no?

I’m not normally this macabre, but I hope you will forgive one post along those lines. From an April 11 article in ABC News:

Court documents said the suspect allegedly talked of using the man’s head as a bong or a pipe for smoking marijuana.

Damned stoners. Maybe he intended to sell it to a head shop?

01:55 EST | permalink | /issues/drugs

Trivia question of the day

What famous, outspoken Republican politican is frequently spotted in Cambridge, where 87% of voters turned out for John Kerry in 2004?

(Click for answer.)

20:56 EST | permalink | /issues/partisanship