[Sasha Volokh, 6:44 PM]
ROOTS: Was in California briefly, where I found parsley root! I've finally been able to find celery root in Boston regularly -- they actually even sell it at regular supermarkets, but parsley root had been elusive ever since I once tracked some down in a Bread and Circus (whole foods) supermarket in Brighton three years ago. I bought as much as I could carry (well, three bunches, which is quite a bit) and took it on the plane with me back to Boston. It would have been fun to see their faces if they had searched my bag at the airport.

Both celery root and parsley root are good for boiling in soups for flavor -- many of the soups in my mother's cookbook, The Art of Russian Cuisine, call for both celery and parsley roots, though you can make up for a lack of a root by putting more of the other, or even the lack of either root by putting in huge amounts of celery (which you could then throw out).

Note that you should freeze celery root if you're planning on keeping it around for months, since it goes soft and mushy (i.e., rots) in the fridge after a while; I cut it up into cubes before doing this, so I don't have to cut a frozen lump when I make soup. (I was shocked when I discovered that fresh dill rots quite dramatically in the fridge after a week.) I figure I'll have to do the same with my parsley roots.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 6:29 PM]
RECYCLING (see Eugene's post below): I recall, from my days as a solid-waste and recycling analyst, that the need to have two fleets of trucks is a significant capital expense which actually often makes recycling not worthwhile. But I was under the impression this didn't happen much anymore, since lots of municipalities have combined collection in a single truck. (This is a cautionary tale, by the way, for those who use current technology to evaluate regulatory proposals -- recycling mandates, in many ways, are technology-forcing (like many environmental regulations), so a comparison of recycling vs. non-recycling using pre-forced technology can be misleading.)

I was surprised to hear L.A. still does it the old way. I myself never studied this particular question head-on; my former boss Lynn Scarlett would know where to go for this result, but she's now at the Department of the Interior and no longer does garbage. Possibly it's discussed in our study Packaging, Recycling, and Solid Waste (June 1997), but that doesn't seem to be on the web. But for a discussion of recycling generally, by Lynn and me, see our article in Consumers' Research, "Is Recycling Good or Bad -- Or Both?" (September 1997), loosely based on the study above.

Also see my own web site for different recycling-related articles, including some on how government regulations discourage the use of recycled materials.

UPDATE: Reader Duncan Frissell points out that I don't mention, in my Consumers' Research article, the labor cost of forced consumer recycling or the psychic cost of being coerced. Quite true. It was also a conscious choice on our part -- the cost-benefit analysis we did applies to achieving a given level of recycling and recycled-materials usage, regardless of how that level was achieved. So even if we had 100% voluntary recycling and everyone wanted to buy recycled materials, we could still ask whether the effort spent recycling was worthwhile.

Of course, if you want to force a particular level of recycling, then yes, you should take into account the cost of people's time and the psychic cost of being coerced. (One can see those as really the same thing -- if people have a high psychic cost of being coerced, that's another way of saying the time they spend recycling is very expensive -- but I can see why you might want to separate them analytically.) Of course, the cost of people's time depends on how much they want to recycle. If they're truly indifferent as to whether or not they spend time separating recyclables, then the value of their time may be even negative, meaning, in a sense, that they'd pay you for the privilege of separating recyclables. Others go further and positively prefer to spend time separating recyclables; others would hate supporting an environmental cause even if it saved time.

This points, by the way, to one way governments can make recycling "make sense" economically -- cultivate a pro-recycling ethic. Even if the ethic is "false," in the sense of being based on a false environmental cost-benefit analysis, the ethic can give people enough happiness that it compensates for the lost material costs. And it needn't even be false, since environmentalism needn't be based on a cost-benefit analysis at all, even implicitly.

(I don't mean that as a criticism of environmentalism, which can be based on perfectly valid romantic notions of anti-consumerism, anti-industrialism, humility before Nature, or what have you; see my review of Peter Marshall's Nature's Web. Libertarianism needn't be based on a cost-benefit analysis either -- and a good thing too! Some people think a libertarian world is an economically efficient world and that "good economics is libertarian economics" -- I'm not one of them.)

Also, the assumption above that recycling takes time isn't true in communities where the recyclers actually pick up mixed garbage and separate it themselves -- this actually happens in many communities, and while the quality of the recyclables tends to be lower that way, you do get 100% participation.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 11:56 AM]
MORE DREAMS: I've forgotten most of this dream I had last night; all I remember is that I was trying to make things better.

But here's something more interesting -- a dream I had a few months ago, inspired by Peggy Noonan. How often does that happen? Last December 14, she wrote, in an exceptionally good column of hers:

And, most delightfully to me of all, yesterday in Rome, at the end of a general audience, Pope John Paul II for the first time ever activated a Web page. They brought him a laptop and he hit a key with his Parkinson-pained finger and suddenly www.virgendeguadalupe.org.mx was born.

So I had this dream that I was the technical guy in charge of setting up that web site. I was in the Pope's office getting the Pope's laptop ready for the activation of the web site, and the Pope comes in! But he's actually this big, broad-shouldered, energetic guy in his 60s. So I shake his hand and start talking to him in Italian -- God only knows why, since he's Polish and speaks English, but maybe I thought this is a new Pope who is, like almost every other Pope for the last several hundred years, Italian. But I get the feeling that he didn't really like talking to me, and when he sat down at the laptop to log in, he looked back and scowled at me because he thought I was trying to see his password over his shoulder.

Then there was this other dream I had in 1989, where I was copying down my scribbled economics notes into my notebook (this was in high school), and these Mongol warriors keep running into my house, flying off their horse, and crashing through my window, right after I'd removed the body of the previous Mongol warrior and replaced the glass. Then I called up Winston Churchill, who, at the age of 114, had been assigned to an insignificant position at the British consulate in Los Angeles. He answered the phone directly when I called, and we started talking about World War II and British politics, but like the Pope in that future dream, he didn't really want to talk to me and was speaking slowly and sighing heavily. This call came in on the other line, so I put him on hold and talked to my friend Laurent for half an hour before I realized that this first line was still flashing. So I got back onto the line and said, "Mr. Churchill, I'm sorry I kept you on hold for half an hour, but could I call you back later?" So he hung up, but not before telling me: "In the Middle Ages, the force behind the unity of Europe was the Catholic Church, but by the Renaissance, this power had begun to be eroded by the growing influence of the national monarchies on the Atlantic seaboard."

And finally -- a dream I had just a day or two ago. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the Terminator (don't remember whether this was the old or new Terminator), was on a rampage through this library I was working in, overturning bookshelves, not even paying any special care to the Ayn Rand shelves, and I was wondering whether the Incredible Hulk could beat him. There were ladders instead of stairs between the floors, and the ladders also served as crossword puzzles (i.e., try to fit a ten-letter word into an eleven-rung ladder).

UPDATE: Dan Hartung corrected the spelling of "Guadalupe" above. But as that was a cut-and-paste from OpinionJournal, this puts me in mind of a long-time puzzle: Why are there so many spelling mistakes on OpinionJournal? Is it actually sloppy newspapering? Or are they Web version mistakes that don't appear in the print version (perhaps only in made-for-Web-only articles)? Or is this no sloppier than newspapers generally (perhaps I just notice this because I actually read OpinionJournal)? OpinionJournal's a great source, just spelling mistakes generally jump out at, and annoy, me.

Reader Paul Donnelly remarked that "i.e." in the last paragraph above should have been "e.g."; I disagree (the ten-letter word wasn't an example; it was the whole entire phenomenon), but he still suggests that "viz." would have been better. I like "viz." myself, but "i.e." above is staying.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 1:09 PM]
BEATING THE DEAD HORSE: I was critical of Garrett Moritz earlier for his posts on the inconsistency of conservatives when it comes to the marriage penalty. But I think he has it right on the vouchers and pledge issue. Garrett says, "I don't think you'll find many proponents of vouchers seeking to apply the same principle of neutrality they applaud in the context of vouchers to the pledge case." Probably true (though hey Garrett, here's one of them!) -- I'm sure lots of people who like the vouchers decision but hate the pledge decision haven't thought through what they really mean by "neutrality."

 
[Sasha Volokh, 11:45 AM]
ME, ANTI-UNION? Reader Mitchell Freedman says, in response to my post about the projectionists, "You do hate unions, Sasha!" and adds, "When you gleefully cross a picket line and then tell people to challenge the union without even knowing about the economic issues, you're anti-union. And the bit about 'government benefits' to unions, well, that's just a big giveaway."

I disagree, and suggest that maybe we're dealing with two different concepts of "anti-union." If being in favor of a free-market approach to unions is "anti-union," let me be guilty. But even within those who are anti-union, some approach a dispute assuming that the union is wrong (now that's what I call "anti-union"), while others (that's me) approach it not knowing or caring whether the union is right or wrong, on the theory that this is just a dispute between two parties whom I know nothing about. In my previous post, I called such a position "principled apathy," and I generally apply it when observing disputes between private parties. (My friend Jack Schaedel, a labor attorney who assists employers "in staying union-free," plans to talk me out of this view tonight over dinner.)

(How did I tell people to challenge the union? Merely by informing people that, contrary to the union's claims, there was no bad projection quality at the theater. That's something I'd recommend people do even with no union and no labor dispute -- as long as someone else were spreading this false and harmful claim.)

But enough about me and the projectionists -- I'm posting because I have an independent chance to show my bona fides on this subject. The Los Angeles Times (link requires free registration) reports that Walmart has tightened its policy on gun sales beyond what's required by federal law. (Brief synopsis: Under law, if a background check returns a "not clearly O.K." (instead of a "good" or "bad," for instance because of errors in some records somewhere), you're allowed to sell the guy a gun. Walmart says no -- you need a definitely "good" to sell the gun, no matter how long that clearance takes.) Here's the NRA's view:

But gun industry officials said they have already started hearing grumblings from gun owners.

"Certainly this is cause for concern for us," said Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the NRA. "The NRA's position has always been that law-abiding gun owners ought not to have their rights infringed by any bureaucratic snafu" because the "flawed" background check system is too slow to process requests.

Arulanandam predicted that many gun owners would be incensed about the policy change.

When some Kmart stores briefly removed guns and ammunition from their shelves immediately after Sept. 11, the NRA issued an alert condemning the move and urging members to contact the company. But Arulanandam said "it's too soon to tell" whether the group will seek a boycott or similar action against Wal-Mart over its shift in policy. "We'll monitor it," he said.

Now, no one can accuse me of being anti-gun. But I'm with the NRA on the political question of whether there's a right to own a gun. Wal-Mart is infringing on no one's rights, because neither the Second Amendment nor the Moral Law gives you a right to have Wal-Mart sell you a gun. And while I wish that everyone were willing to sell everything that I like, I like it better when people do what they're comfortable doing, and if they're uncomfortable selling people guns when the background check isn't reassuring enough for them, then they should stop doing it. Now, it's true that if Wal-Mart does this, other stores may follow suit, and that may pave the way for more restrictive legislation, which I will oppose. But Wal-Mart's peace of mind is more important. (See my previous post on suing for Israel.)

Now the NRA is free to boycott Wal-Mart, but if it does, I will not participate in that boycott. (I'm not against boycotts -- I do boycott Revolution Books across the street, and I would consider boycotting (but wouldn't necessary boycott) Wal-Mart if it started engaging in reprehensible political action. But none of that has even been alleged in the case of Wal-Mart.) Well, full disclosure -- I'm a Kmart lover myself; I'm sure I'd love Wal-Mart too, but the nearest Wal-Mart is 12.3 miles away, in Lynn, while the nearest Kmart is 1.8 miles away, in Brighton. But if I ever find myself near a Wal-Mart and want to buy something, I will not feel compelled to avoid the store. If the NRA starts saying that Wal-Mart offers lousy service and I experience good service, I will let you all know (and say kind words to the management).

This is even worse than what I'm doing with the projectionists' union: I know the issues involved and my sympathies normally lie with the gun people, and yet here I am declaring my willingness to cross a picket line and say kind words to management. Does this make me anti-gun?

 
[Sasha Volokh, 10:14 AM]
PLUPERFECT SUBJUNCTIVE: Peter Berkowitz, in The New Republic, skewers Stanley Fish and postmodernism. I still don't see what all the fuss is about or what's wrong with postmodernism.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 10:00 AM]
PHILOSOPHERS ON STRIKE: So French philosophy teachers are on strike these days, and had threatened to not grade the philosophy baccalaureate papers. The horror! (The baccalaureate is the French high-school exit exam -- a difficult series of exams in all subjects, including philosophy; I suffered through that myself 13 years ago.) Fortunately, they later backed down from that threat.

As near as I can tell, the conflict is between the "Renaut" school, which wants a more targeted philosophy curriculum to better prepare students for the baccalaureate, and the "Fichant" school, which wants a more free-form high-school philosophy education. Luc Ferry, the new minister of education, proposed a compromise -- both free and targeted! -- but the philosophy teachers didn't believe that. The philosophy teachers also believe they should be consulted in the curriculum design process.

UPDATE: On the Luc Ferry "compromise," reader Steven Jens says, "I think we've reached bottom when politicians are emitting bullshit so transparent that French philosophers are calling them on it."

 
[Sasha Volokh, 9:51 AM]
A GOOD TAKE ON EUROPEAN POLITICS: Pierre Bedier, French secretary of state for the real estate programs of justice (there's got to be a better translation for that), talks, in an interview in Le Monde, about the government's program to build more prisons, and accuses his critics of angelism, which, as near as I can tell, means the belief that people (for instance, criminals) are angels, or the belief in the perfectibility of man and institutions, or the unwillingness to face the ugly facts of existence. Bedier says:

Q. What do you answer to those who accuse the government, by building prisons and detention centers, of throwing itself into excessive penalization, American-style?

A. First I'd like to tell them to change their record, because I find it a bit scratched. Then, I invite them to listen to the voters: if we don't succeed in restoring public authority, I'm not sure that the popular electorate will want to trust us with responsibility in the future. And that goes for us as much as for the opposition. Angelism makes the bed of extremism. . . .

Indeed.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 9:37 AM]
A NICE WAY OF THINKING ABOUT IT: S.R. Epstein, in Regional Fairs, Institutional Innovation, and Economic Growth in Late Medieval Europe, 47 Econ. Hist. Rev. (n.s.) 459, 469 (1994), writes (my emphasis):

A less naive version of the supply side argument [about the origin of medieval fairs, which holds that medieval rulers chartered fairs for their own economic reasons] is that fair charters simply provided the legal frame to what were already long-standing commercial events. Official fairs were to trade what marriage is to sex, an ex post legitimation of a phenomenon that had arisen under very different economic circumstances.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 4:41 PM]
HEALTH FACTS AND FEARS: Check out Health Facts and Fears from the American Council on Science and Health, edited by my friend Todd Seavey -- it's a good (and apparently sensible) source for debunking environmental and health scares. I've just read articles on whether microwaving plastic is bad for you, what's the problem with DDT (click here and here), and concrete examples of death by (FDA) regulation.

The moral of the last couple of linked articles: Technology has its risks, but nature also has its risks, which means that the risks of not having technology can be substantial. The precautionary principle is all well and good, but which way does it cut?

 
[Sasha Volokh, 4:37 PM]
ALL WE NEED IS BLOOD: Check out the future of artificial blood. This is good news, given how hard it is to get blood donors and how cumbersome it can be to screen the stuff. See a previous article of mine, from Reason, on FDA control over software, which also says some words about blood screening (though it's mostly about eye laser surgery).

 
[Sasha Volokh, 1:32 PM]
TREAD SOFTLY, FOR YOU TREAD ON MY DREAMS: This morning I had a dream that I had temporarily joined a rock band, which played music I didn't like, and I didn't know my lines, and I didn't have a very good voice for singing my solos, and we were also doing a performance of Shakespeare with a lot of Renaissance-language sexual innuendo. But we had to explain the jokes for the audience.

Similarly, I had a dream some weeks back, while I was in Prague -- I was at a convention with Ronald Reagan. That's the current Reagan, with Alzheimer's, but in the dream he was actually lucid and discussing how he had Alzheimer's. Also, there was the 1980 Ronald Reagan and 1980 Nancy (with the red dress). Current Reagan was telling jokes, some of which were pretty funny -- he was talking about the 1980 election, which was really close (it wasn't clear until the weekend before that he was going to win), and about how if it had been any closer he could have gone to court and asked for a recount. That was pretty funny and everyone laughed. (Current Reagan and I had a really good relationship around that table, so people were saying it was like we were father and son.) But then he told some joke that everyone laughed at just to be polite, but I said, "I don't get it," and Reagan whacked me upside the head!

Speaking of making up jokes in one's sleep, I made up this one joke in a dream I had in summer 1986, while I was in Dublin. There's this guy, see, who goes into a travel agency and asks to see a vacation, but the vacation wasn't in because it had gone on people. This seemed riotously amusing to the characters in my dream but apparently people generally don't think it's quite so funny in real life.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 1:27 PM]
RESTRAINING ORDERS AGAINST BIG HAIRY SPIDERS, PART 2: My mother, who is growing tomatoes in her garden, reports that there are some insects or animals or something that's gnawing at her tomatoes even when they're still green, which is why she's had to pick tomatoes when they become barely red, just as damage control.

I pointed out to her that this mirrors the Tragedy of the Commons -- if everyone has access to an apple tree in the park, they should pick the apples when they become barely tolerable to eat, or else the next guy will get them, while if one person owned the tree, he would wait until the apples became nice and red. The problem is that there are no property rights between my mother and the critters. I suggest that she open up (Coasean) negotiations with them.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 12:09 PM]
WAITER, THERE'S A BUG IN MY SOFTWARE: A good article on MSNBC about why software is so bad; why programmers are so sloppy; how the problem is getting worse, not better; and how software bugs can cause huge property damage (the $500 million satellite payload of the French Ariane rocket lost in 1996 due to "systematic software design error"; an estimated $8.76 million lost to the "I Love You" virus) or can even be fatal (bugs in a radiation therapy machine in the mid-1980s killed at least three people through radiation overdoses, and a similar case in 2000-01 killed eight people).

Toward the end, the article asks: "Is litigation the answer?"

Software firms have been able to avoid product liability litigation partly because software licenses force customers into arbitration, often on unfavorable terms, and partly because such lawsuits would be highly technical, which means that plaintiffs would need to hire costly experts to build their cases. Nonetheless, critics predict, the lawsuits will eventually come. And when the costs of litigation go up enough, companies will be motivated to bulletproof their code. The downside of quality enforcement through class action lawsuits, of course, is that groundless litigation can extort undeserved settlements. But as Wallach says, “it just might be a bad idea whose time has come.”

In fact, a growing number of software engineers believe that computers have become so essential to daily life that society will eventually be unwilling to keep giving software firms a free legal pass. “It’s either going to be a big product liability suit, or the government will come in and regulate the industry,” says Jeffrey Voas, chief scientist of Cigital Labs, a software-testing firm in Dulles, VA. “Something’s going to give. It won’t be pretty, but once companies have a gun to their head, they’ll figure out a way to improve their code.”

And, yes, if software is going to become like the rest of the world (i.e., like the rest of products liability), that means we need more litigation. But should software become like the rest of the world? Or should the rest of the world become like software? The current tort regime is fine for accidents between strangers. But products are mainly a matter of contract. You can pay more for the privilege to sue, or save money by not being able to sue. By revealed preference, we see that people prefer the vibrant, innovative, somewhat sloppy world where new software comes out quickly to allow firms to respond to changing market conditions; sure, you lose a lot of money with some probability, but with a larger probability you get a neat product that's useful to you. (See Paul Rubin's Tort Reform by Contract.)

Maybe this should teach us something about the rest of the world? In other words, maybe what we need is a few more bugs?

 
[Sasha Volokh, 11:48 AM]
THE JOE KLEIN TOUR: Joe Klein has a European travel diary on Slate that's just wonderful. Would that my updates from the European road had been as insightful! It's long, but here are some highlights:

• Why France today is like America in the 1970s.



• "[C]ontrary to the popular British analogy, America is Greece, not Rome. (Britain, which styles itself Greece, used to be Rome and is now Gaul, though divided into four parts."



• "[S]omeone has finally managed to beat Berlusconi at his own game: [Italian union leader] Cofferati had the simpler slogan. 'I will defend your job,' he said. Berlusconi was left with the complicated, abstract notion that a less restrictive labor market would lead to a stronger economy. (Salesmen detest having to tout a complicated, abstract product.) Berlusconi -- whose campaign slogans tended to be of the 'lower taxes, higher pensions' variety -- had been caught on the wrong side of grammar, trapped in a compound sentence."



• "Poland is merely Polish, an experiment in ethnic deprivation; the unbearable whiteness of being."



• A nice discussion of how the Germans go overboard with their anti-anti-Semitism. "Paul Spiegel, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, called the Möllemann affair [where a German politician had criticized Israel and Jews, mildly by European standards] 'the biggest insult uttered by a party in the federal republic since the Holocaust.' Yet no one was able to say, 'Paul, put a lid on it,' for fear of being accused of anti-Jewish sentiments themselves. I suspect the role of national conscience is not a long-term winner for Germany's Jews, any more than the role of national scourge was."



• "There is much talk of silly regulations. Roland Berger had told me a regulatory joke: 'Do you know why so few German companies start in garages like Hewlett-Packard did? Because it's illegal. There's a law that says every office must have a window -- and another law that says garages are not allowed to have windows.' I've also heard businessmen say that if Bill Gates had been born German, he'd be middle-management at Siemens. 'That's not true! That's not true!' said Frank, a self-employed management consultant. 'You have to have a university degree to be middle-management at Siemens. Gates is a college dropout. They wouldn't allow him to be middle-management at Siemens.'"



• "To complicate matters, both men [the outgoing and incoming presidents of the European Council, the Spanish Jose Maria Aznar and the Danish Anders Fogh Rasmussen] have very dark hair and very deep tans, more teeth than regulation, and an aversion to immigrants; Aznar does have a moustache, thankfully."



• "Did Klein just call the EU remarkable? Yes. Here you have 15 tiny, inbred societies, suffering all the genetic calamities -- xenophobia, lassitude, rampant accordion-playing -- that inbreeding creates . . . ."

I know you won't read the whole thing, but try a bit.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 11:27 AM]
ECONOMISTS AND BANANAS: Steven Landsburg explains, in connection with the important question of whether you should peel bananas from the top down or the bottom up (and what do "top" and "bottom" mean anyway?), why you should never ignore general equilibrium issues and concludes that:

So far, there are only two findings I can report with any real degree of confidence. First, economists have a predictable and weak sense of humor. (No fewer than three of my colleagues independently "observed" that if you open from the bottom, the banana will fall out.) Second, if you take an economist -- any economist -- and give him a banana to hold by the stem and eat from the other end, he really will bear a remarkable resemblance to a chimpanzee.

On Steven Landsburg, see my critique of his column on takings and land use.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 11:22 AM]
EERIE: What's up with those Saturn ads on Slate? I hear the drumbeat even when I'm on an entirely different web page! Is God sending me a message on volokh.com?

 
[Sasha Volokh, 11:28 PM]
THE MAGIC OF NEWS CUSTOMIZING: I've been using washingtonpost.com lately to customize my news. The Washington Post itself provides several news categories -- Top News, OnPolitics Top News, Nation Top News, World Top News, and other categories like Science, Health, whatever state you're in, whatever country or region you're interested in (Russia, Western Europe, Andorra), your choice of columnists, your choice of comics, weather for your zip code, and so on.

Unfortunately, this isn't nearly as tailored to myself as I'd like. Fortunately, though, they provide a window where you can link to your favorite other sources (The Economist, The New Republic, Reason, Arts & Letters Daily, some foreign language sources, and so on). So I have a ton of those, and every once in a while I go through the Washington Post categories I've chosen and the news sources I link to and I print out a huge sheaf of papers, representing all the articles I think are interesting . . . . I staple them all together and there's my homemade newspaper. (This can be 100-200 pages, so it becomes several stapled sheaves of paper.)

I go around reading my homemade newspaper at my leisure, tearing off pages as I go and saving the most interesting articles to remind myself to blog them. This could take, say, a week or two, at which point, whenever it's convenient, I repeat the whole process.

Why am I telling you all this?

First, to share this useful method with you. Maybe there are others out there who never get around to reading all their favorite news sources.

Second, maybe you guys know of a better way? Do you have a favorite news customizer? Something that would let you choose articles more precisely (The Washington Post doesn't have a category about privatization, administrative law, the environment, prisons . . . and frankly, I prefer longer analysis articles than short news stories)? (Of course, I could do Eclipse searches on Lexis/Nexis, but that's more cumbersome.) Do you have any favorite news sources you could tell me about for environmental news, or admin law? For European news? Central/Eastern European news? What's your favorite Internet source for interesting articles about current affairs, culture, etc., in Spanish (the Spanish-language version of Time or Newsweek, say)? French? German? Russian?

 
[Sasha Volokh, 6:03 PM]
SPEAKING OF SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE AND FORMER KINGS: The Bulgarians are figuring it out . . . .

Failure to establish adequate control mechanisms also plays a role in facilitating malpractice [i.e., government corruption]. In a recent article, Georgi Ganev of the Sofia-based Center for Liberal Strategies writes that corruption flourishes because there is far too much money to be administered by the state without effective public control. As Ganev puts it, "We entrusted basic and vital responsibilities to the state, but we do not move a finger to control [the state]. The natural and inescapable consequence is corruption."

By the way, former king Simeon II is now Prime Minister of Bulgaria. He seems like a more reputable character than would-be King Leka.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 3:23 PM]
TERRORISTS, ROOT CAUSES, AND TIME-SERIES ANALYSIS: Princeton economist Alan Krueger and Czech Middle Easternist Jitka Maleckova have a fine article on whether poverty causes terrorism. Their answer: No. Alleviating poverty isn't the answer, and neither is better education; terrorism has more to do with "political conditions and long-standing feelings of indignity and frustration (perceived or real) that have little to do with economics."

There seems to be little correlation between income/education level and terrorist activity (or the individual probability of being a terrorist), and in fact wealth and education helps you concentrate on things like nationalism and political philosophy, as well as making you more effective (more able to blend in in the West, fly airplanes, carry out complicated plans). (See my post on minority problems in Hungary and Gypsy education -- and that possibility that problems would increase, not decrease, as Gypsies become more educated in their own culture and become more ethnic-conscious.)

Krueger and Maleckova discuss a study of lynchings and poverty in the early 1930s which had claimed to find a correlation between the price of cotton (a proxy for wealth) and lynchings -- but a 1998 study showed that (1) replacing cotton prices with GNP removed the correlation, and (2) "the correlation between lynchings and economic conditions vanished once secular trends in both variables were taken into account. That is, apart from the long-term tendency for the number of lynchings to decline and the economy to grow, lynchings were unrelated to year-to-year economic fluctuations."

It is almost certainly the case that the inverse correlation reported between economic conditions and anti-black lynchings that launched the "aggression frustration hypothesis" was spurious, a coincidence of two unrelated trends that happened to move in opposite directions at the turn of the twentieth century.

Take heed, folks -- this is what happens when you ignore the teachings of econometrics. Recall the old correlation between babies and storks. When two time series both have a time trend, they automatically look rather correlated.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 3:07 PM]
ON REREADING YOUR OWN STUFF: The New Republic has reprinted their 1922 review of James Joyce's Ulysses (to celebrate Bloom's Day, June 16). The reviewer, Edmund Wilson, Jr., has various quibbles with the book (like, it's incredibly dull!), but otherwise thinks it's a work of genius, and has this priceless line:

Since I have read it, the texture of other novelists seems intolerably loose and careless; when I come suddenly unawares upon a page that I have written myself I quake like a guilty thing surprised.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 12:48 PM]
SUSTAINABILITY AND GLOBAL WARMING: Ron Bailey has, as always, an excellent Reason article about whether we've really overshot the earth's carrying capacity this time. Also, Andrew Kenny in The Spectator has an article about global cooling which may or may not be true but is interesting anyway.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 12:44 PM]
LAISSEZ FAIRE, LAISSEZ PASSER: A sensible article by Columbia economist Jagdish Bhagwati on trade policy. Bhagwati takes on the following misconceptions about global trade:

• the world trading system is “unfair”: the poor countries face protectionism that is more acute than their own;


• the rich countries have wickedly held on to their trade barriers against poor countries, while using the Bretton Woods institutions to force down the poor countries' own trade barriers; and


• it is hypocritical to ask poor countries to reduce their trade barriers when the rich countries have their own.

In fact, poor countries are the bigger offenders when it comes to tariffs, and Bretton Woods institutions and strings attached to IMF loans have been ineffective at keeping poor countries' tariffs low. Bhagwati also devotes some space to how to fight particular tariffs politically, separating tariffs that protect the rich in a country from tariffs that protect the poor:

Beyond this, an effective tariff-reduction strategy requires that we handle labour-intensive goods such as textiles separately from agriculture. The differences between them dwarf the commonalities. Labour-intensive manufactures in the rich countries typically employ their own poor, the unskilled. To argue that we should eliminate protection, harming them simply because it helps yet poorer folk abroad, runs into evident ethical (and hence political) difficulties. The answer must be a gradual, but certain, phase-out of protection coupled with a simultaneous and substantial adjustment and retraining programme. That way, we address the problems of the poor both at home and abroad.

Once this is done, church groups and charities can be asked to endorse a programme that is balanced and just. Such a strategy is morally more compelling than either marching against free trade to protect workers in the labour-intensive industries of the rich nations—while forgetting the needs of poor workers in poor countries—or asking for trade restrictions to be abolished without providing for workers in such industries in the rich countries.

The removal of agricultural protection does not raise the same ethical problems; production and export subsidies in the United States and the European Union go mainly to large farmers. That should make it easier to dismantle farm protection on the grounds of helping the poor. At the same time, however, agricultural protectionism is energetically defended as necessary for preserving greenery and the environment. With the greens in play, protectionism becomes more difficult to remove. But, just as income support can be de-linked from increasing production and exports, so measures to support greenery can be de-linked too. Such new measures, and other environmental protections added as sweeteners, must be part of the strategic assault on agricultural protection.

Is that really the best way to fight tariffs? Do we have to endorse redistribution or environmental regulation to get rid of tariffs? Is the cure clearly better than the disease? Well, at least he's intelligently thinking about the political problem.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 12:27 PM]
BACKSTAGE WITH THE TATARS: Central Europe Review has an interesting article by Marius Dragomir about Cairi Riza, a Romanian Tatar who started up his own private Tatar folklore ensemble. The English isn't entirely correct, but what it lacks in polish it makes up for in enthusiasm, and the article is a good illustration of how government aid corrupts art. Riza's group has consistently refused government aid, though it's been eligible. Tatar groups in Romania got 5 billion of some currency or other in 2001 . . .

Riza was ready to accept public money several times, but realised in due time that this would mean low-down compromises and a debt that he would never be able to pay without tarnishing his image. For example, Riza says, if you accept money to organize a tour abroad, "sponsors" are subtly telling you that you bring officials' relatives who are eager to travel. That has become a common habit in the country's cultural affairs, Riza says. Last year he had planned a tour in some Central European countries with the financial support of "a so-called impresario." Riza says: "He just wanted to take all his relatives plus chiefs and "people in charge with spare time" to Europe, meaning that beyond the 15 artists I was to take other 30 people who were just to gad about."

Refusing such deals, Riza arouse many people's hatred. "Not only that they didn't help me, but put a spoke in my wheel," Riza says. "I'm talking here about the leaders of the Tatar Union who couldn't see their children or nephews in the ensemble or couldn't take their families on my ensemble's tours. But their biggest envy is that the numerous commissions and committees in charge with culture couldn't manage at least ten percent of the success of a private ensemble which didn't get a single penny from the state budget or other state structures."

Riza says, "In the Ministry of Culture, Tatars are represented by a dubious guy, a former Communist activist who's drastically censoring my work, forbidding my appearance on minority broadcasts on the national TV channels 1 and 2" (my emphasis).

It's a heart-warming story about how Riza manages to put on high-quality shows and get (voluntary!) money out of regular people and regular businesses -- most of which aren't Tatar -- and it has some priceless jabs at his less artistically serious competition:

"With these wonderful children, I managed more than others did who are organizing tens of symposiums and round-tables where a clique of quill-drivers talk frivolities and play ducks and drakes with billions from the state budget in sprees with fiddlers and belly bottom dances."

Indeed.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 12:11 PM]
IT'S GOOD TO BE THE KING: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reports:

Leka Zogu plans to return permanently to Albania on 28 June, AP reported from Tirana. Leka left Albania as a baby in 1939 and spent most of his life abroad, primarily in South Africa, where he was an arms dealer. He returned to Albania briefly in 1993 and then again for a longer stay in 1997. After losing a referendum on the restoration of the monarchy, Leka was involved in violent protests in which one man was killed. The pretender to the throne left the country before the police could question him about the incident. They issued a warrant for his arrest, but he was pardoned by President Rexhep Meidani earlier in 2002. In June, he was asked to return by a vote of the parliament.

Yes, the glorious arms-dealing, coup-attempting, riot-causing, town-skipping man who would be king.

Short background: Leka Zogu is the son of Ahmet Zogu (1895-1961), who became prime minister of Albania in 1925 and three years later declared himself King Zogu I (sometimes called King Zog I, which sounds more sinister). King Zog fled the country when the Italians invaded in World War II, and formally abdicated in 1946 after the Communists took power and abolished the monarchy. For a somewhat fanciful vision of King Zog, see the movie Aria, where Zog is played by, yes, Theresa Russell.

 
[Sasha Volokh, 9:44 PM]
MASCULINE NAMES: A short note about the movie The Emperor's New Clothes, with Ian Holm, about Napoleon (not a spoiler): The movie opens with Napoleon's friends plotting the Emperor's escape from his exile at St. Helena. The plan is to substitute a look-alike -- a sailor named Eugene Lenormand. Napoleon hears about this and says (since he'll have to play the part of Eugene Lenormand until the plot is unveiled) something like (this is my memory), "Couldn't we have gotten someone else? Eugene is such a feminine name. What about someone named Alexander? That's a masculine name!"

(Note: "Sasha" is short for "Alexander" in Russian.)

UPDATE: Matt Bower suggests that it's hard to imagine a "Eugene the Great." On the other hand, there is Eugene the Jeep.