Archive | April, 2004

Radley Balko forcefully critiques those who harp too much on prosperity’s discontents, in particular focusing on those people who are making much of our supposed obesity, general unhappiness, and frustration flowing from having too many choices. Some closing paragraphs, which are perhaps a titch hyperbolic but still pretty sensible: We don’t need to slow the […]

More on Why do they hate us? Reader Adam Badawi writes, apropos my post on the virulently anti-Semitic libels being printed by Egyptian government newspapers: As I am of partial Egyptian heritage I had a couple reactions to your post. First, the writer’s comments are obviously bigoted and delusion. It saddens me when I read […]

“Diaperless Babies Seen as Earth-Friendly Solution”: As environmentalists celebrate the 34th annual Earth Day, some in the green movement are now advocating “diaper-free” babies to help save the planet. Citing concerns about plastic disposable diapers clogging landfills and the amount of washing and detergents that cloth diapers require, many environmentalists are taking a page from […]

Apropos my post below, reader Barry Jacobs passes along the data on the 10 most dangerous jobs, expressed in yearly job-related fatalities per 100,000 people: Timber cutters 117.8 Fishers 71.1 Pilots and navigators 69.8 Structural metal workers 58.2 Drivers-sales workers 37.9 Roofers 37 Electrical power installers 32.5 Farm occupations 28 Construction laborers 27.7 Truck drivers […]

Diego Gambetta is one of my favorite social scientists. His writings on the Mafia and on trust are classics. I offer you a recent article by him on rationality and terrorism. Most importantly, he addresses the question of will this happen again. Here is one money quote: “9/11 is a wild outlier among terrorist acts […]

Two posts at Crooked Timber on Friday, none on Saturday or Sunday. Three posts on Saturday and Sunday combined here at Volokh, even though Eugene’s finished reading the latest Stephenson doorstopper. (I haven’t started it yet. Conference season.) Nothing since Thursday from Drezner. Nothing since Thursday from John and Belle, who admittedly have an excellent […]

Lund & McGinnis on Lawrence v. Texas: On his Legal Theory Blog, Larry Solum has an interesting post today on Nelson Lund and John McGinnis’s recent paper on Lawrence v. Texas in which they take issue with my analysis of the case in Justice Kennedy’s Libertarian Revolution. While I have a very high regard for […]

How many jobs in the U.S. can you think of where the death rate from homicide alone has been nearly 2%/person/year (nearly 10%/person, with an average job tenure of 5 years)?      I suppose there might be some specialized high-risk military categories during wartime that fit this profile, as well as perhaps some high-risk civilian job […]

William M. Adler reports on astroturf op-eds in a Washington Post Outlook piece. Adler’s correct that this phenomenon is fairly widespread. Industry groups are always looking for compelling surrogates to advance their message. While one should be able to evaluate an argument without regard to the author, it helps if a spokesperson has academic credentials […]

There are not many new bands I like all that much. Maybe that’s part of getting older; the songs off one’s youth are indelibly written across one’s memories, such that later music fails to have the same effect. Or at least it seems that way sometimes. One new band I like quite a bit is […]

Malaria is on the rise in most of sub-Saharan Africa, despite an international campaign to control its spread. In Africa alone the disease kills approximately 3,000 people per day. Six years into the World Health Organization’s “Roll Back Malaria” campaign, malaria incidence has increased. According to Roger Bate of Africa Fighting Malaria “the main cause […]

Read the ever-insightful Randall Parker. The answer of course is no. Here is just one bit: “Hey, if it is standard practice for the Saudis to lower prices before US Presidential elections then maybe we should amend the constitution to reelect presidents yearly. Think of all the money we’d save. Given that the price of […]

in the Washington Blade (cute name for the newspaper, no?).

I am rationally ignorant on this subject, but those who are interested might check out this San Francisco Chronicle article. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.)

Could it be partly because their governments are distributing material such as this? (From MEMRI, which to my knowledge is a highly credible source, quoting an article from the Egyptian government daily Al-Gumhouriyya by deputy editor Abd Al-Wahhab ‘Adas; thanks to lawprof Michael Krauss for the pointer.) “If you want to know the real perpetrator […]