Right of publicity vs. the First Amendment: Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to sue a company that is distributing Arnold Schwarzenegger bobble-heads. Schwarzenegger's claim is not unprecedented, even among political leaders: The Martin Luther King, Jr. estate successfully blocked the distribution of busts of King; I discuss the case in my Freedom of Speech and the Right of Publicity article.

     But as I argue in this article, Schwarzenegger ought to lose, even though under current law he has a good chance of winning. The bobble-heads are hardly incisive political commentary, but they do send a message that Schwarzenegger ought not be taken too seriously. The message is ambiguous and contestable, as it is in much art (consider Andy Warhol's Mao print or his Marilyn Monroes print). But, as with other art, the expression should still be constitutionally protected.

     And, unlike with copyright law, there's very little justification for allowing the subjects of such works a right to block them: There's no reason to think that the right of publicity materially increases people's incentives to become celebrities, much less political leaders. Copyright law restricts expression in order to promote more expression and more creativity; moreover, reading the First Amendment as preempting copyright law would mean that the Bill of Rights largely eviscerates a constitutional provision (the Copyright and Patent Clause) that was passed more or less contemporaneously. Right of publicity law restricts the use of people's likenesses and names without promoting more expression and more creativity, and it lacks this specific constitutional hook.

     This litigation also illustrates, I think, the weakness of the "transformativeness" test that the California Supreme Court set forth in Comedy III Productions v. Saderup (again, discussed in my article). "Transformative" uses, the court held, are protected by the First Amendment, and the court gave Warhol's Mao print as a paradigm example of a transformative use, even though it just depicts Mao: "Through distortion and the careful manipulation of context, Warhol was able to convey a message that went beyond the commercial exploitation of celebrity images and became a form of ironic social comment on the dehumanization of celebrity itself." On the other hand, nontransformative uses, such as Saderup's charcoal drawings of the Three Stooges (in which the California Supreme Court Justices could "discern no significant transformative or creative contribution"), are unprotected by the First Amendment, and may lead to a right of publicity lawsuit.

     But which category does the bobblehead fall into? Is there as much "distortion and careful manipulation of context" in the bobblehead medium as in the Mao print? How do you figure that out in any objective way? Poll art critics?

     I think the answer should be simple (again, see the article for more details): Prints and sculptures (whether in stone or in plastic) should be as constitutionally protected as movies and books, and people -- especially political leaders, but also others -- shouldn't be able to block others from producing such items any more than they can block others from producing parodies, jokes, biographies, or news stories. But, as I mentioned above, Schwarzenegger's claim is hardly unprecedented under current law, and may even be a winner. I don't fault him, but I do fault many courts' willingness to let the right of publicity trump the First Amendment.

     Thanks to Shannon Maders for the pointer.

John Locke vs. law reviews: Clayton Cramer writes:

I was reading through John D. Cushing, ed., The Earliest Printed Laws of North Carolina, 1669-1751, and I found [this item] at 2:146 from John Locke's 1669 Fundamental Constitution of Carolina. . . .

80th. Since multiplicity of comments, as well as of laws, have great inconveniences, and serve on to obscure and perplex: all manner of comments and expositions, on any part of these Fundamental Constitutions, or on any part of the common or statute laws of Carolina are absolutely prohibited.

Alleged mistreatment of prisoners: I'm with Glenn Reynolds on this.

We won't defend you, and neither can you: Knight-Ridder reports:

As the insurgency and violence in Iraq intensify, the Department of Defense has proposed a new rule for most of the estimated 70,000 civilian contractors working in the war-torn region: They can't carry guns.

At the same time, a top Defense Department official this week acknowledged publicly for the first time that the war effort was suffering a "brain drain" of civilian workers who were fleeing Iraq because they didn't feel safe. . . .

Now I realize that contractors' carrying guns can cause hazards as well as benefits:

Supporters of the new rule -- including the biggest contractor in the area, Halliburton's Kellogg Brown and Root -- said there are three big drawbacks in allowing contractors to carry weapons. Armed contractors would be more likely to be shot at or kidnapped. Also, as civilians, they don't follow the same strict rules of force as the military. And by picking up weapons, contractors could lose any death and accident insurance coverage they may have. . . .

But "Nick Sanders, who chairs the contract finance committee for the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade group for traditional defense contractors," has it right, I think, on the bottom line:

The problem with the rule is that it tells contractors that they're responsible for their security, but then says they can't be armed . . . .

So while I may well be mistaken -- the rules for survival in war zones are complex, and inexperienced civilians like me are hardly the best judges of them -- it seems to me the government's proposal is not the right approach. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.)

Conservatives and Republicans: Jonah Goldberg makes some good points on this. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.)

Witches: Reader Paul Forsyth points out that C.S. Lewis beat me to my witches observation by decades (not surprising -- my point was pretty obvious). Forsyth quotes Mere Christianity, p. 26:

But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did -- if we really thought that there were people going around who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbors or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did.

Indeed.

Europe or Asia? Where's the (necessarily arbitrary) dividing line between Europe and Asia? Setting aside the obvious water boundaries, I understood that Europe included all the USSR west of the Ural Mountains, so the Eastern and Southeastern boundary was the Urals, the Caspian, plus the Soviet-Turkish border. But now it appears that Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan are being treated as Asian (see, for instance, this Slate piece, which suggests that it's odd that Georgia is outside Europe, though I've seen this elsewhere as well).

     Who decides these things? Is there some Official Europe-Asia Boundary Commission? Is it just a consensus of geographers? Or does such a consensus even exist, at least as to the Caucasus? Yes, it might be better to speak just of Eurasia, but the fact is that people do speak about Europe and Asia.

D'oh!

A federal drug agent shot himself in the leg during a gun safety presentation to children and his bosses are investigating. . . .

"The kids screamed and started to cry," said Vivian Farmer, who attended the presentation with her 13-year-old nephew.

"Everyone was pretty shaken up," Farmer said. "But the point of gun safety hit home. . . ." . . .

Caveats and conditionals A reader writes, apropos this post:

"But part, I think, might be the tendency of some people -- at least in some circles -- "

In the spirit of light hearted Friday afternoon banter, I offer the following suggestion:

You might, under some circumstances, evaluate, consider, or at least entertain the possibility of limiting, restricting or cutting back on the use of caveats, conditionals, and stipulations in your personal writing. At least occasionally.

     I appreciate the feedback; and I agree that such conditionals and caveats may make writing less forceful and persuasive. I also suspect that I sometimes use more of them than necessary.

     And yet some of this is necessary, if I am to be accurate, and to be seen as accurate. For instance, the post to which the reader alludes (my first one today about white men who prefer Asian-American women) was based on my personal observations of such relationships, and of the people who criticize them. I'm well aware that my personal experience on such matters is quite limited. I can't speak to what all critics think, or even what most critics think, or even what many critics think in other social groups than mine.

     So to be careful and precise -- and I like to cultivate both the perception and the reality of care and precision -- I decided to include some suitable caveats. They may make my writing less persuasive because they distract and annoy some readers. But they may make it more persuasive, because readers won't be alienated by what they will see as claims that go beyond the evidence. And I'll feel better, because I'll know that I'm not making such claims.

More about Asian-American women: My friend Jim Lindgren, who is a law professor and a demographic researcher, writes:

In the 1972-2002 NORC General Social Surveys of the US public, approximately equal numbers of Asian women (23%) and non-Asian women (24%) think that "Women should take care of running their homes and leave running the country up to men" (FEHOME, n=22,538).

On a related question (FEWORK, n=24,401), 85% of Asian women approve of "a married woman earning money in business or industry if she has a husband capable of supporting her," compared to only 77% of non-Asian women (a statistically significant difference). The answer to this question suggests that Asian women in the US are somewhat less likely to view women's working outside the home as secondary to men's work.

There is an interesting contrast when one moves out of husband/wife relationships to this question of submission to the law (OBEYLAW, n=2,985): "In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law?" Here Asian women (55%) are not significantly different from non-Asian women (47%) in their submission to the authority of law, but Asian men (76%) express much more submissive views about legal authority than do non-Asian men (37%).

So, as I said below, white men who seek Asian-American women because they think those women are likely to be especially submissive will probably be sorely disappointed. And if the men keep seeking out Asian-American women, then this suggests that they aren't really looking for submissive women after all.

Joseph Wilson says: Niger official thinks Hussein's Information Minister was trying to arrange uranium purchase. From the Washington Post:

It was Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as "Baghdad Bob," who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade -- an overture the official saw as a possible effort to buy uranium.

That's according to a new book Joseph C. Wilson IV . . . . Wilson wrote that he did not learn the identity of the Iraqi official until this January, when he talked again with his Niger source.

That knowledge has not altered Wilson's much-expressed view that the Bush administration distorted intelligence on Iraq's weapons capabilities to help make the case for going to war. . . .

Sahhaf's role casts more light on an aspect of Wilson's report to the CIA that was publicly disclosed last summer. . . . [CIA Director George J. Tenet's statement in 2003] noted that Wilson had reported back to the CIA that a former Niger official told him that "in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss 'expanding commercial relations' between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales."

In his book, Wilson recounts his encounter with the unnamed Niger official in 2002, saying, he "hesitated and looked up to the sky as if plumbing the depths of his memory, then offered that perhaps the Iraqi might have wanted to talk about uranium." Wilson did not get the Iraqi's name in 2002, but he writes that he talked to his source again four months ago, and that the former official said he saw Sahhaf on television before the start of the war and recognized him as the person he talked to in 1999. . . .

Thanks to Nikita Demosthenes for the pointer.

More about Communists: A reader writes:

I just wanted to write in and take you to task for the quote, "While I wouldn't have excluded Communists, past Communists, or Communist sympathizers from all federal jobs (not because I like them, but because of the First Amendment), I surely think it's perfectly constitutional and proper to exclude them from secret nuclear weapons research."

Does being a communist guarantee that state secrets will be passed on?

How about we change your statement to,

"While I wouldn't have excluded CHRISTIANS, past CHRISTIANS, or CHRISTIANS sympathizers from all federal jobs (not because I like them, but because of the First Amendment), I surely think it's perfectly constitutional and proper to exclude them from secret nuclear weapons research."

Because, well, they might pass state secrets on to the Vatican, or say a pastor in Korea. Just because one is "X" and a repressive regime claims to be "X", doesn't mean I will give secrets because we share "X" in common.

Someone else e-mailed me a similar question, pointing to Jews rather than to Christians.

     I think this analogy is misguided. First, in fact we were not in a Cold War against an evil regime whose main ideology, as opposed to ours, was Christian or Jewish. Nor does Christian or Jewish ideology these days generally call for the destruction by revolution of non-Christian or non-Jewish states (back when it did, the matter might well have been different). Standard Communist ideology in the 1930s through the 1950s did indeed call for that. Not everyone who was a Communist might have adhered to that ideology, but that was the official view, and many did adhere to it.

     Second, I don't think that the test for secret nuclear weapons research jobs should be "[Is it] guarantee[d] that state secrets will be passed on?" When the danger of secrets being passed on is so great, the government should be able to eliminate even modest risks. That someone has only recently belonged to a group whose official ideology calls for the triumph of our enemies and the destruction -- likely violent destruction -- of our system is pretty substantial evidence that he is not entirely trustworthy. The government may exclude him from such very dangerous, top secret jobs even without a "guarantee" that he will betray us.

     In 1942, the government need not have hired in military intelligence or weapons research former Nazi party members, or even people who joined groups that appeared to have strong Nazi sympathies. In 1950, it need not have hired former Communist party members. Today, it need not hire people who had been members of radical Muslim groups whose official ideologies called for the destruction of America, or even people who had expressed such sympathies. If thirty years from now, there was a militant Christian denomination against which we were fighting, I'd say the same about members of those groups. And there'd be no need, I think, to wait for evidence that "guarantee[s] that state secrets will be passed on" before those members are excluded from such jobs.

Witches: A reader writes:

I wonder if you really meant this:

If there were witches, in the standard sense of people who could use black magic to harm the rest of us, then of course we ought to hunt them.

The reason I ask is that you're suggesting hunting witches because they could harm us, not because they are or are planning to. This doesn't seem to me to be a defensible position. Replace black magic with guns and I think you'll see my point.

As I understand it, the conventional understanding of witches was that they got their powers through an alliance with satanic forces, and that they acquired those powers partly to use them against innocent people (or else why did they need the powers?). Punishing them is thus no different from punishing someone who got some very nasty weapons by dealing with the Mafia, or someone who has -- but has not yet used, and as to whom there is no firm evidence that he is about to use -- a radiological bomb that he got from a terrorist organization with which we are at war.

     What to do about magicians, who have powers that they acquired without the help of demons, and who can use those powers for good as well as for ill, is a tough call. Likewise with people who have superpowers that they've always had, and that they can't shed.

     Imagine we discovered that there were telepaths living among us, people who could undetectably read our minds, in a way that we couldn't block. Or imagine that there were people who could undetectably control into our minds, in a way that we couldn't block. Would we be justified in locking them up, or even killing them? A hard question that I don't think we can answer firmly using our current morality, which evolved based on certain assumptions about the physical world, and which might have to change if those assumptions proved false. Fortunately, we live (or appear to live!) in a world where we don't have to make such tough decisions.

     In any case, though, witches -- as conventionally seen by those who went on witch hunts -- are an easier case: They not only have dangerous tools, but they acquired them by conspiring with the Dark Side, and this acquisition shows evidence of malign intentions on their part, as well as a concrete act of dealing in dangerous munitions with the enemy. I have little trouble with punishing them for that.

White men who like Asian women: At The Right Coast, Thomas Smith is criticizing New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen for, among other things, "[advising] a man who finds himself exclusively attracted to Asian women [that] he get help for his racism." I haven't read that Cohen item, but if Smith is characterizing it correctly, Cohen's advice is indeed bunk. There's nothing racist -- expressing hostility, hatred, or dislike or even (shifting subtly away from racism) expressing stereotypical generalization based on race -- about being physically or erotically attracted to women who have a particular look. It is racially discriminatory, but choice of spouse or sexual partner is one place where we rightly don't condemn race discrimination (or for that matter sex discrimination).

     But this brings up one point that I've observed: Whenever the topic of white men who prefer Asian women comes up, someone nearly always theorizes that this is because the men have a stereotype of Asian women as submissive and deferential. The man isn't so much being faulted for racism as for a desire to be the boss in the relationship. I've heard people say this time and again.

     And yet every man I know who is like this (I've known four fairly well) has ended up dating Asian women who are far from submissive or deferential. Likewise, the men I know who are married to Asian women (I put them in a separate category because I have no idea whether they generally prefer Asian women or just happened to marry an Asian woman) do not seem to be married to submissive or deferential women.

     Now perhaps this is just an artifact of my circle -- the men are mostly Los Angeles lawyers; I hardly have an unbiased sample. In fact, this is why I'm not relying on the fact that most of the Asian women I know aren't submissive or deferential; the women I know are an especially biased subsample. And I realize that in former generations, or especially in situations where American men married Asian women they met overseas, the matter might be quite different.

     Still, today, it seems to me that either (1) the men I know who prefer Asian women are repeatedly disappointed, since they seek submissive women but don't get them, and yet keep repeating their error, or (2) the men actually prefer Asian women for very different reasons -- chiefly their looks, since American Asian women (and especially those who are assimilated enough that they're willing to date white men) have very similar personalities to white women. As you might gather, I think item 2 is much more likely, at least for men of my circle, which is to say educated big-city men (though it might quite well apply to men of other circles; I just don't know enough to tell).

     Now I realize that preference for looks is itself complex, since looks can yield both a visceral physical response and what I call an "erotic" response rather than a physical -- a response that's triggered by psychological connections, such as a sense that this woman is exotic and different from most other women, something that some men may find attractive. Still, the preference seems to be for a woman's looks, and not for the woman's willingness to be dominated.

     If I'm right, then what's the reason for the "they just want submissive women" theory? Part of it might be that this was indeed once the preference for some men, for instance those bringing home war brides or mail-order brides -- I'm just purely hypothesizing here, since I have no reason to think that this is so, but at least I can't rule it out.

     But part, I think, might be the tendency of some people -- at least in some circles -- to like theories that place men, and especially white men, in a negative light, the "men are pigs" / "white men are oppressors" theories. Many people who like those theories don't actually hate white men (some might be white men, and some might sleep with white men). Rather, they adopt the theories because in certain circles those theories have a certain fashionable cachet, as signs of deep and power-structure-subversive understanding. And this is so even when the theory seems to have no empirical foundation.

     Or am I mistaken? Is there any real evidence that most white men, or even a substantial number of white men, today who prefer Asian women do so because they think that Asian women are more likely to be submissive?

     (Before people start speculating, no, I'm not saying this just to defend my own preference for Asian women. I've been involved with one Asian woman in the past, and naturally found her attractive, but I've been involved with considerably more non-Asian women, and found them attractive, too.)

UPDATE: Several readers e-mailed to agree with my perception here, based on their own experiences -- some men who marry Asian women they meet overseas are looking for the stereotypical submissive woman (and might be getting her), but it's a mistake to generalize from this to men who prefer Asian-American woman, who don't fit the stereotype, and who aren't sought because of this stereotype. And I should stress that I've heard the "white men who like Asian women must just be looking for submissive women" line about the latter category, as to which the line seems to be quite mistaken.

More on whether Oppenheimer was a Communist? In response to my "Was Oppenheimer Indeed a Communist?" post, historian Jerome Sternstein passed along the following:

I noticed you called attention to the piece in the SF Chronicle about Oppenheimer. You might want your readers to see this link where they can parse the new, fascinating documents uncovered by Gregg Herken and mentioned in the Chronicle article and now being debated. They could thus make up their own minds about the evidence of whether Oppenheimer was a member of the CPUSA. After reading them and other things, I've concluded he was.

I thought I'd pass it along, for those who are interested.

     A bit more on the broader point: I don't know much about who was a Communist and who wasn't, and I'm not terribly interested in the details. As best I can tell, the McCarthy era was filled with lots of abuses, including lies about who was a Communist, and restrictions that did indeed violate the First Amendment. It's good that we use that era as a cautionary tale, and the reminder of how even originally narrow restrictions end up spreading over time, from out-and-out Communist conspirators to Communist sympathizers to fellow travelers and on.

     At the same time, I balk at casual condemnations of McCarthyism as a "witch hunt." Witch hunts are unambiguously bad because we know there are no witches. If there were witches, in the standard sense of people who could use black magic to harm the rest of us, then of course we ought to hunt them.

     And in the McCarthy era, there were indeed Reds, not under every bed but in some important places. Consider, among others, Klaus Fuchs, a Communist physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and he passed some of the A-bomb secrets to the Soviets; in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, "His espionage is credited with saving the Soviets at least one year's work in their own program to develop the atomic bomb." He was arrested in 1950; he confessed, and served 9 years in prison.

     While I wouldn't have excluded Communists, past Communists, or Communist sympathizers from all federal jobs (not because I like them, but because of the First Amendment), I surely think it's perfectly constitutional and proper to exclude them from secret nuclear weapons research. If Oppenheimer, who is often painted as having been unfairly victimized by McCarthyism's excesses, had indeed been a Communist, then the Communist hunters may well have been quite right to have gone after him, even if they may have been quite wrong as to many others. And this is so even if he was quite loyal by 1950; in this field, the government is entitled to err on the side of caution.

"The Wrong Venue for Partisanship": That's what James Taranto (Best of the Web) says, and it seems to me he's right:

"Former US first lady Hillary Clinton said the "stubborn" policies of President George W. Bush's administration were endangering stability in the Middle East," Agence France-Presse reports:

The New York Democrat senator told the London-based Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat that the Bush administration had not been "frank" with the American people concerning the human and financial costs in Iraq.

Clinton said the Bush administration did not have a plan for Iraq and did not have a full understanding of the situation there.

She said the United States was in trouble because it could not abandon Iraq, nor provide enough manpower to run the country, nor gather world allies willing to provide the necessary assistance for the gigantic task.

She described the Bush administration as "stubborn and arrogant" for refusing to admit its mistakes which were endangering US soldiers, Iraqis and stability in the Middle East.

Mrs. Clinton obviously has a perfect right to say whatever she wishes about the Bush administration, but is it really wise to advertise in the Arabic press her belief that the U.S. is in trouble?

     I realize that anything one says in any newspaper may get into the Arabic press. But when the readers in the Arab world, likely including Iraq, know the statement has been made to an Arab newspaper, it seems to me that the perceived force of the statement would be magnified: "The American opposition wants us to know that even they think that the U.S. is in trouble." (The interview was with a British Arabic language newspaper, but naturally the material would be reprinted in other publications in the Arab and Muslim world -- the quote in the Best of the Web story is from Brunei Online, with an Agence France Press dateline of Beirut -- and the readers will likely perceive the statement as having been made to the Arab community.)

     Seems to me that the very likely effect of statements such as this is to magnify the resolve of those who are trying to defeat us, to kill our soldiers, and to take over Iraq (despite the line about "could not abandon Iraq," which many Iraqis would assume could change if America's "trouble" only got big enough). It is especially likely to magnify their resolve to keep fighting until the election, rather than to surrender and be seen as giving Bush a victory. And the standard (and often quite persuasive) justification for such criticism even during wartime, which is that Americans need to hear all the arguments to decide whom to vote for, is at its least forceful with a statement such as this one.

UPDATE: Reader Steve Waldman suggests that Bill Clinton has done better on this score than Hillary, quoting a Jan. 2004 New York Post column by Ralph Peters:

Asked by an eager-to-Bush-bash delegate [at a conference in Qatar] if he, Bill Clinton, would have behaved differently after 9/11, our former president said he would have followed an identical course, pursuing our enemies into Afghanistan and beyond. Queried about his position on Iraq, he stated that any disagreements he might have would be most appropriately expressed at home in the U.S., not before a foreign audience. . . .

(I couldn't find the entire text of the original column, but I've seen it quoted in enough places that I think the quote is likely correct.)

No sex, please, we're astronauts:

Dr Rachel Armstrong, speaking yesterday at a British Interplanetary Society symposium on the Human Future and Space, said the US space agency Nasa was considering how to deal with the natural urges of astronauts travelling on long journeys such as a three-year trip to Mars, where the six-strong crew would be likely to include two women.

"Nasa is talking about the chemical sterilisation of astronauts on longer journeys," Dr Armstrong said, in a talk discussing the problems humanity may face in trying to reach the planets and, eventually, the stars. . . .

Douglas Powell, a psychology professor at Harvard University who was recruited in 1999 by Nasa to investigate the behavioural needs of long-term space trips, said: "Like anywhere, these are normal healthy people in their prime and they are sexually active so they are going to get involved with each other. So what's going to happen in space? It's a serious question and it needs to be confronted."

[S]cientists such as Professor Powell are concerned that the emotional fallout from having a crew where some are happier than others, or where relationships are made and then fall apart, could be disastrous. He noted the comments of one Russian cosmonaut about time spent cooped up in the Mir space station that "when you have two people locked up in a very small environment for months at a time, all the conditions for murder are met." Mix in sex, and you almost have the script of Othello in space. . . .

NASA seems to deny this, however:

Nasa was nonplussed by the suggestion yesterday. "I haven't heard anything about that," said a spokesman at Nasa's Johnson Space Centre, where the long-range trips announced by President George Bush in January are being planned. . . .

Thanks to Dan Gifford for the pointer.

Another Bushism, this one from the Financial Times, debunked, by my former student, Raffi Melkonian:

My favorite newspaper, the Financial Times, enjoys its forays into the land of Bush-isms . . . . Here's today's entirely misguided effort in the admittedly lighthearted "Observer" column:

Where's the beef?

George W. Bush is proud of his "No Child Left Behind Act". But one problem with the policy is it provides no help for children left behind years ago -- like Bush himself.

In Minnesota on Monday, Bush did his best to show off his knowledge of geography and science: "I shared a story the other day during a press conference where I talked about a dinner I had with Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan. And we're eating Kobe beef."

So far, so good . . . until: "I don't know whether it's grown here in Minnesota or not, but it's real good."

Hold on Mr President, Kobe beef grown in Minnesota? It's a good thing those Japanese cows can't vote.

Of course, if the "Observer" had stopped revelling in his or her own intellectual superiority for more than a second, he or she would have noticed that Kobe beef may not be produced in Minnesota, but it definitely is in Idaho, Nebraska, Oregon, and a whole host of other states throughout the country. Yes, of course -- true Wagyu Kobe is from Japan. But that's neither what the President said or meant . . . .

     Good point; but what's more, if you look at the transcript, it seems clear that the very reason Bush mentioned Kobe beef is that he knew that it's originally a Japanese dish. The line is an aside in a speech that has nothing to do with beef. It's obviously a little joke (not very funny, I realize) of the tie-the-story-to-this-occasion variety; there's just no other possible explanation. Given this, why would Bush mention that he doesn't know whether the beef is from Minnesota? Either it's also a gag (these days, you can have Kobe beef from Minnesota just like you can have Chryslers assembled in some foreign country), or it's another attempt to tie the story to the location. It's certainly not confusion about whether Kobe beef is or is not originally Japanese.

     So another failure of the "Bushism" genre -- a genre that's prone more to showing errors on its authors' part than on Bush's part.

UPDATE: Two readers pointed out that the italicized "grown," and the reference to "knowledge of . . . science" suggest that the Financial Times is making another point besides Kobe beef being Japanese -- that beef isn't grown but rather (presumably) raised. On reflection, I agree that the article must be making that point; but I missed it because it's such a stretch. My New Shorter Oxford defines "grow" as, among other things, "produce (plants, fruit, wool, etc.) by cultivation," which clearly covers animal products, and beef presumably as much as wool. The American Heritage defines "to raise" as one definition of "to grow." A LEXIS search found a bunch of examples of "grow beef" (in Bush's sense of raising cows, not just in the narrower sense of making cows bigger). There's just nothing wrong with Bush's statement.

FURTHER UPDATE: Reader Bruce Holder wisely suggests a google search for "beef growers," which finds references to the the Natural Beef Grower's Network, the Southern Beef Growers Cooperative, a headline in Iowa Farmer Today (it's attached to an AP story, but I believe the headlines are typically written by the newspaper, not the wire service), and more.

Michael Kinsley will head L.A. Times opinion and editorial section: So says Editor & Publisher. I think Kinsley did a very good job as founding editor of Slate -- and, in particular, welcomed a wide mix of political perspectives, including the unorthodox -- so I'm quite pleased by this move.

Debra Saunders on the New York Times and Jose Padilla: Here's an excerpt from her piece in the San Francisco Chronicle (thanks to How Appealing for the pointer):

[H]ere's the paragraph in the story by [New York Times] reporter Deborah Sontag that truly baffles me: Padilla's "journey covered significant territory, geographically, emotionally and spiritually, and family and friends paint a vivid picture of Jose Padilla. If he lived a double life, they were unaware of it. And the American government has said so little beyond its initial, startling allegations about Mr. Padilla that it is difficult to reconcile the two portrayals -- the man his relatives thought they knew and the man the government calls an enemy of his homeland."

What's difficult to reconcile? Where is the good Jose Padilla that is supposed to balance the bad? When he was young, Padilla was a thug [committing a brutal armed robbery, brandishing a gun in a fit of road rage, and attacking a prison guard]. After he found God as an adult, he was a heel [getting engaged to an Arab woman while he was still married to his American wife, who only learned of the betrothal through a friend]. Whether he's guilty of plotting to set off a dirty bomb, I don't know, but Padilla's biography certainly raises questions that beg for answers. . . .

Other errors by Washington Gov. Locke: The same story contains the following:

Locke delivered a free-ranging speech that also . . . said the federal Patriot Act reminded him of the internment of the Japanese during World War II. . . .

Locke also criticized the Patriot Act approved in the aftermath of Sept. 11. Apparently referring to detainment of suspected enemy combatants, he said the law reminds him of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

     Well, if the reporter interpreted Locke correctly, then Locke is badly wrong. First, the detention of suspected enemy combatants, whether the Guantanamo detainees or Padilla and Hamdi, is pursuant to other authority, not the Patriot Act, which says nothing about such military detention.

     But second, and much more importantly, even if Locke used "Patriot Act" as highly imprecise (though recently quite common) shorthand for "the Bush administration's policies," the military detention is vastly different from the internment of Japanese-Americans. The Japanese-Americans were interned because of their race (some of them were Japanese citizens and thus enemy aliens even if they lived here a long time, but the policy applied even to nativeborn citizens of Japanese descent). The military detainees are being interned because the government has specific reason, quite unrelated to their race (Padilla is Hispanic, not Arab) to believe that they are enemy soldiers.

     It is conceivable that the reporter misunderstood Locke, and that Locke was referring to sec. 412 of the Patriot Act, which makes it easier for the government to detain, before deporting them, noncitizens who are suspected of terrorist activity or other illegal or dangerous conduct. (I think it's less likely that this is what Locke meant, given the newspaper account, and given that the section has gotten much less publicity than the military detentions have -- if Locke had been referring to that section, then I suspect he would have realized that he had to more specifically explain what he was talking about.) But again this is very different from the detentions of Japanese-Americans: It applies to citizens as well as noncitizens, and it's triggered by specific suspicion of misconduct.

     One can criticize the government's detention policies on various grounds; as blog readers are aware, I think the government's position in the Padilla case, for instance, is probably mistaken. But the analogy to the Japanese-American internments is just wrong.

Washington governor urges judges not to drink in public:

Gov. Gary Locke, in a valedictory to the judiciary, on Monday urged judges to take the pledge against drinking in public -- or at least to hold themselves to a single drink.

Locke advocated a "stringent and even harsh standard of conduct," which he said could apply to all elected officials, as part of his prescription for building public confidence in the courts. . . .

Locke said public drinking undermines public confidence in judges. . . .

Even a single drink at a cocktail party or restaurant can set tongues wagging, so it's best to not drink in public at all, or "adopt a rigid one-drink rule," said Locke, a teetotaler.

Locke said later he was also thinking of the numerous legislators who have gotten nailed for drunken driving.

"It hurts everybody" when a judge, lawmaker or any public official is nabbed, he said. . . .

     "Even a single drink at a cocktail party can set tongues wagging"? Well, maybe a single drink followed by dancing with a lampshade on one's head -- but I find it hard to believe that a single drink alone will do it.

     I'm fully aware of the harms that drunken driving, and drunkenness generally, causes. But setting up these sorts of rules -- which will then naturally lead to all sorts of tangential complaints about supposed "appearances of impropriety" -- are hardly the way to solve it. Most adults can handle drinking at social functions, and even drinking more than one drink. Those that can't handle it shouldn't drink. But the existence of that minority shouldn't require the responsible majority to become public teetotalers, whether they're judges or not.

     Thanks to How Appealing for the pointer.

Contagiousness: Responding to my "how contagious am I?" post, reader Bob Woolley writes that what I hoped for -- a home test that would "somehow objectively measure just how contagious one is likely to be -- perhaps some sort of quickie home saliva test or some such" is unlikely to be available soon. But here's what he suggests:

But you have a pretty good qualitative assessment built in: your level of contagion (for ordinary colds, anyway) is proportionate to the amount of (pardon me) goo you're producing. The virus wants nothing other than to reproduce and spread itself. It does this by stimulating the formation of respiratory mucus loaded with copies of the virus, and by stimulating coughing and sneezing, to disperse droplets of that mucus. You could probably make a decent gauge of a person's infectiousness by weighing the used tissues produced in an hour. . . .

He also wrote that this still holds true even when one's goo output is reduced by taking cold remedies:

To whatever extent they reduce goo production and expelling, they reduce your contagiousness. . . .

More on anti-Americanism in the Middle East: Jeff Jacoby has a good column on this.

A sobering data point on actuarial projections: The tables I mention below are fascinating, and I suspect generally highly reliable. Still, check out this table, and explain to me how anyone could possibly make remotely plausible projections about future rates of death. The projections about changing rates of death due to violence are particularly laughable -- though we can probably predict that trauma care will keep improving, we have no idea how homicide will fluctuate. But even projections about death due to heart disease, cancer, and the like can't possibly be right for more than a few years out; who knows what sort of medical care improvements we'll see in the coming century? If anyone is relying on these projections, especially out to 2040 and the like, they're living in a fantasy.

Cool data on life expectancy: Mary Campbell also points to some cool tables available from the Social Security Administration. Check out the data here and here, for instance, to observe how infant mortality has plummeted.

UPDATE: Some helpful details, again from Mary Campbell:

In the blog item linking the SSA tables, you might want to indicate which column to look at, and what each column means.

q_x = one-year probability of death at age x
l_x = expected # of people alive at age x, given starting 100K people at birth
d_x = expected # of people dying from age x to x+1, in the population starting with 100K people at birth (obviously, l_(x+1) = l_x - d_x and d_x = q_x * l_x -- there's a lot of redundancy in the mortality tables. These might not work out exactly on this table because of rounding.)

L_x and T_x are somewhat complicated, and I'd rather not explain them.

e-circle_x = average number of years left to live from age x

In any case, you see that 737 babies dying in 2000 vs 14,596 dying in 1900 before their first birthdays for boys, and a similar drop in mortality for girls.

By the way, you can't simply average the rates for boys and girls, or the life expectancies, because naturally (without sex-selecting abortions) more boys are born than girls. I think the natural ratio is 104 boys to 100 girls, or something like that. I don't have those stats at hand. Once I found an article about how the ratio has changed in places like China... in some areas, where the one-child doctrine is strictly enforced, the ratio can get up to 1.3 to 1, I think. Not very pleasant to think about. Especially as Americans and others are adopting abandoned Chinese girls... But that's an entirely different issue.

More on life expectancy: Reader Mary Campbell, an actuarial assistant in New York writes, based on Social Security Administration tables:

There are two types of mortality tables available -- cohort and calendar year. Using the 1900 cohort tables, I find the following probabilities (and life expectancies) (my table does not include mortality before age 5, as early childhood mortality is difficult to get accurate reports on -- this is true even today, as many babies are reported as stillborn in other countries who would be counted as born alive here, as we've got neonatal intensive care units to try to help these children survive...):

We usually report life expectancy as additional years to live, but to make it simpler, I will report on total lifespan.

For a 10-year-old girl born in 1900:
The lifespan expectancy is 71.5 years
Median lifespan is 77 years.
She has a 25% probability of reaching age 87.

For a 10-year-old boy born in 1900:
The lifespan expectancy is 65.5 years
Median lifespan is 69 years.
He has a 25% probability of reaching age 80.

---

For a 10-year-old girl born in 1950:
The lifespan expectancy is 81.3 years
Median lifespan is 85 years.
She has a 25% probability of reaching age 92.

For a 10-year-old boy born in 1950:
The lifespan expectancy is 75.3 years
Median lifespan is 79 years.
He has a 25% probability of reaching age 87.

----
For a 10-year-old girl born in 2000:
The lifespan expectancy is 85.3 years
Median lifespan is 88 years.
She has a 25% probability of reaching age 95.

For a 10-year-old boy born in 2000:
The lifespan expectancy is 80.4 years
Median lifespan is 84 years.
He has a 25% probability of reaching age 91.

Now, there are some things being captured here and some things not. Improvements in women not dying from childbirth, improved nutrition, better medicine, and less cigarette smoking may all be involved. The Society of Actuaries does general mortality studies often, to see which factors have had the largest effect -- the 1900 cohort would have been impacted by WWI and the Spanish flu outbreak and infectious diseases in general. We pretty much have the complete mortality table for the 1900 cohort now (excepting a few stragglers). The 1950 and 2000 cohort tables are obviously made on model projections for ages past 53 for the 1950 cohort, and for almost all of the 2000 cohort. Time will tell if obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and what have you will have a large mortality effect. The main difference is that unlike infectious disease, these conditions do not kill the young as often. Then there is the issue of improved medicines for counteracting horrible lifestyles.

Notice the gender gap is closing for mortality, and some of it may be due to "stupid stuff" guys do in early adulthood, as well as the "protection" -- whether hormonal or otherwise -- pre-menopausal women get. If you look at age 65 men and women, the life expectancy gap narrows from about 5 years seen above to about 3 years.

I've also got those "calendar year" mortality tables you were wondering about, and those are what give the horrible life expectancies. These are harder to interpret, because they just capture the mortality for each age for the year 1900. That mortality structure does not persist past that year (okay, maybe for a few more years). So if I plug in a 10-year-old girl to the 1900 calendar year table, I get a lifespan expectancy of 61.1 years! Ten years less than the cohort table! But that's assuming it will be 1900 every year.

In the lifetime of that 10-year-old girl (should she survive the Spanish Flu in adulthood), sulfa drugs will be discovered, as will antibiotics. The Pure Food and Drug Act will be passed. With manure-spread roads going away with the advent of cars, the water actually becomes cleaner -- less cholera or dysentery, which killed quite a few of the young and elderly. Vaccination becomes widespread. Public sanitation improves.

So the life expectancies reported are much more pessimistic than actuality, even if you skip over the huge childhood mortality period, which greatly drops around age 10. . . .

I got the tables to do the above calculations from the Office of the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration (he's got a website, with all sorts of studies and projections). The Society of Actuaries also has tables (soa.org) as does the American Academy of Actuaries (actuary.org).

Canadian lawsuit seeks coordinates of Weblog comment authors: CalBlog reports:

Ted Franks has filed a petition in Montreal, Quebec, seeking the identity of various commenters on the Infotel thread. I was served by registered mail. I got the slip last night and picked it up this morning. The hearing is Friday. Did I mention in Montreal, Quebec?

The full petition is attached. I don't know if there's jurisdiction over me in Canada but my litigator's basic instinct says that I lose any right to complain of jurisdiction if I respond in substance. Plus, they want names addresses and phone numbers, none of which I have. So my immediate reaction is to not respond. . . .

The post includes the text of the Canadian motion to compel the production of the posters' names. Note that, despite the similarities in the names, La Canada is pretty far from Le Canada.

Names: Those who think that it is only in recent years that people have started giving their children unfortunate names (such as Latrina) -- and those who have complained that their own names are unpleasant -- should check out this record from the 1880 Census. If you search here for the same first name, you'll find 20 more Americans with such a first name, plus one Canadian and one Briton.

     And of course think of how much more fun you can have with that search engine.

In Jesse Jackson's world, Yasser Arafat deserves to be embraced -- but the invasion of Iraq is a "crime against humanity," and "murder." The one thing that finally gave the Iraqi people the opportunity (we'll see if they can take advantage of it, but at least they have a chance) to have some semblance of democracy, human rights, rule of law, and freedom from ethnic and religious mass killing -- and this supposed "civil rights leader," and President Clinton's special envoy to Africa, thinks it's a "crime against humanity."

Exceptions for making fun of dictators: Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine) writes:

Among all the absurd, meddling, and stupid rulings from the FCC lately, this one really takes the Twinkie: The FCC fined a station for making a phony phone call to the real Fidel Castro -- and getting him on the line -- but not following commission rules about getting permission to put the person on the air.

InstaPundit seems to agree, suggesting that "There should be an exception for making fun of dictators" (though I'm not sure how serious he is).

     The FCC, though, is in a difficult position here. Though the government has (rightly or wrongly) broader authority to regulate over-the-air radio and television broadcasts than it has over newspapers, books, the Internet, and other media -- it may, for instance, restrict profanity, and require broadcasters to carry opposing views -- it probably does not have the power to impose viewpoint-based restrictions. I doubt that the government is constitutionally entitled, for instance, to ban songs that glorify illegal drugs (though in fact the FCC did do this in the early 1970s), or to require broadcasters to provide equal time for opponents of racist views but not for opponents of egalitarian views.

     Likewise, much as I sympathize with criticism of Castro, I don't think the FCC's broadcast speech regulations can discriminate in favor of this viewpoint any more than they can discriminate in favor of other viewpoints. So if one thinks that the FCC's general rule -- a broadcaster can't just call you and then unbeknownst to you publicly broadcast the conversation -- is generally sound, then the FCC can't make any Castro exception or dictator exception to that. (They might conceivably create a viewpoint-neutral exception for political humor, but that would be a pretty broad exception, probably broad enough to swallow a huge chunk of the rule.)

UPDATE: A couple of people suggested that the FCC could create a viewpoint-neutral exception for unauthorized broadcast of conversations with public figures. I think such an exception would be constitutional, but again I suspect that many supporters of the basic rule would oppose it. If you think that it's dishonest to surreptitiously broadcast your phone conversations with people, then I suspect you'd think it's dishonest even when it's done to, say, a local politician, a prominent scholar, a well-known movie star, and the like. That the person is a public figure might make something of a difference, but I doubt that it would make enough of a difference to change the proper outcome. I can certainly understand why the FCC would be hesitant to create such an exception.

"Religious Fanatics, Out To Impose Their Morals On The American Public": Clayton Cramer has the details:

Since 1983, with the formation of Eco-Justice Working Group, the National Council of Churches has been providing an opportunity for the national bodies of member Protestant and Orthodox denominations to work together to protect and restore God's Creation. A major task of our environmental ministry is to provide program ideas and resources to help congregations as they engage in environmental justice. . . .

Christian Leaders call on Bush to protect God's gift of Air

In a letter to President Bush released on Earth Day, more than 100 national and state leaders of the National Council of Churches expressed moral concern over the President's stewarship of the environment -- particularly on the Administration's "clean air" policies and its implications on public health. . . .

     I rather doubt that many people who regularly criticize conservative religious groups for "mixing religion and politics" will criticize these religious groups for doing so. Most people would, I think, conclude that it's generally quite proper for religious people and organizations to seek bans on conduct that they see as immoral and harmful to people and to the Earth, just as it's proper for secular people and organizations to do the same.

     Now naturally one can still disagree with the specific agenda of the groups: One might, for instance, think that the environmentalists' claims are morally unsound, just as one can think that pro-life forces' arguments that fetuses should generally have the right not to be killed are morally unsound. And one can also believe that these sorts of religious arguments might be unpersuasive.

     But I doubt that one would say that there's something per se improper with the National Council of Churches -- as opposed to the Sierra Club -- urging that its views on the environment be implemented in government action. And if that's so, then the same would, I think, apply when churches urge that their views on fetal rights be implemented in government action.

Blogging, the academy, and adjuncts: The Chronicle of Higher Education has a good piece on the late Invisible Adjunct blog, its anonymous author, blogging, the academy, adjuncts, and more. Thanks to Ralph Luker for the pointer. (I'm told that the Chronicle piece should be available for free for five days.)

Life expectancy: As I mention in the post immediately below this one, I much liked Radley Balko's TechCentralStation piece. I do think, though, that this line falls into a common error:

But I doubt that Easterbrook longs for the early 20th century, when 45% of American laborers toiled in the fields -- and most of them could expect to live all of 47 years.

If life expectancy is 47 years, this does not mean that most American laborers could expect to live "all of 47" years. First, it means that the average lifespan of Americans born in 1900 was 47 years. If the 47 years were the median lifespan, then half of Americans could expect to live 47 or more years, or alternatively half of them could expect to die by age 47 (setting aside the tiny fraction that would live exactly 47 years, on the dot). This is already not quite the same as "most of [Americans] could expect to live all of 47 years."

     But the 47 years is the average, and since there are many more people dying on the far left end of the age distribution curve (near age 0) than on the far right (near age 94), the average is biased downwards from the median, and thus the median is likely to be considerably higher than the average. (Simple, because oversimplified, example: If in a group of 10 people, 3 die at age 1, 4 die at age 50, and 2 die at age 60, and 1 dies at age 90, the average lifespan is 41.3 years, even though the median is 50 -- because more people die on the far left of the curve than on the far right, the average [41.3] is less than the median [50], and considerably more than half the people live to the average [41.3] age.) Thus, considerably more than half of all Americans born in 1900 would have lived to be over 47.

     (Note also that the 47-year figure, like most life expectancy figures, asks how long people born in 1900 would have been expected to live on average. It doesn't address what the quote literally refers to, which is how long people alive in 1900 would have been expected to live; I don't know of any sources for such a number.)

     Second, the life expectancy figures include the deaths of infants and children. Such deaths are tragic, of course, but infants and children aren't literally "American laborers toil[ing] in the fields." And even going beyond the literal, I think it paints a misleading picture to just cite a life expectancy of 47 picture when in reality we have very many children dying before age 10, but the survivors living on average until 60 or so.

     In fact, according to this data, Americans who survived until age 10 in 1900 did have an average lifespan of about 60 years (the data is broken down by sex and race, so I don't have the precise numbers, but 60 is likely the rough average). Not great for those who survived childhood, and awful for the children who died young and for those children's parents -- but not quite as grim as having most of American laborers being expected to live all of 47 years. (I have no evidence on the lifespan of American laborers who toiled in the fields, but I imagine that the data there was probably not that much different from the data for the country at large.)

     In any case, this doesn't materially undermine Balko's piece, which I much like. But it is an important thing to remember whenever one hears life expectancy numbers.

UPDATE: D'oh! My original post had an error in the portion labeled "First," because I foolishly characterized the life expectancy as a median rather than a mean. I've corrected that portion; thanks to reader Brock Sides for pointing this out to me.

FURTHER UPDATE: Mike Anderson (Mere Dicta) has some more on this.

Why prosperity really is pretty good: 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 engines of capitalism down, we need to ratchet them up, so their drippings reach places like Chad, Nigeria and Cambodia. It would be awfully selfish of us to deny the third world the fruits of our development simply because we're bored with the excesses of comfort. We need more production, coupled with wide-open trade, to bring the burdens of wealth articulated by the free market's wet blankets to the people who long to bear them.

We should strive to saddle women who scavenge city dumps in Cambodia and fistulas sufferers abandoned for coyotes in Niger with the tyranny of mustard, the frustration of rush hour gridlock, and the aggravation of spam email. We ought to work to make Bangladeshi parents agonize over putting their hyperactive sons on Ritalin. We ought to see how many Malaysians we can get addicted to Paxil, and Papua New Guinean housewives to Valium.

When the critics of capitalism are reduced to mining the suburbs for languor and tedium, when consumers in market economies gripe not about scarcity or pollution, but about too many ketchups and self-check grocery aisles, perhaps it's safe to say that free-marketeers may finally have the central planners on the ropes.

Let's see how long we can keep them there, and how many of the world's poor we can infect with the afflictions of prosperity while we're at it.

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 the anti-Semitic bilge that often comes out of the Arab press. Second, I think you are incorrect to suggest that these articles contribute to the Arab hatred of America and Jews. As you note in your post Al-Gumhouriyya is a government run newspaper. For this reason a lot of Egyptians mock this particular periodical for the farcical nonsense it produces. It is the mouthpiece of a corrupt and authoritarian regime and as a consequence it has a substantial credibility problem. I do not mean to downplay the animus that exists in the Arab world toward Israel and American policy, and to somewhat lesser extent toward Jews and Americans. There clearly is problem here -- I just don't think that government propaganda is the source of that problem. I have many more thoughts on these issues, but I also have a dissertation to finish in the next month so I'll have to stop here. . . .

I agree that we shouldn't assume that all of the anti-American and anti-Semitic feelings in the Middle East are caused by propaganda from government newspapers. But I suspect that they do indeed have something of an effect, certainly not on everyone, but on quite a few. Even if a lot of Egyptians mock Al-Gumhouriyya, quite a few others might be more open to its message. I of course can't be sure, since I'm not remotely an expert on Arab public opinion; and my correspondent might be much more knowledgeable about this. Still, it seems to me that these sorts of attacks are indeed likely to have an aggregate effect.

"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 tribal cultures and seeking to eliminate the use of the baby diapers altogether. . . .

I'm hardly an expert on this, but my guess is that the presence of extra human fecal matter -- which seems likely to happen notwithstanding the claim that "[i]nfants give recognizable signs of imminent peeing and pooping [and] it's possible to learn your infant's signs" -- is more of an environmental burden, both from a quality-of-life perspective and a public health perspective -- than extra space being consumed in landfills. As with many things, I doubt that "tribal cultures" have much to teach us on this score.

Most dangerous jobs: 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 25

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics; survey of occupations with minimum 30 fatalities and 45,000 workers in 2002

Of course, the Presidency would fall below the Bureau's thresholds.

Dangerous jobs: 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 categories in the pharmaceutical distribution and urban social club sector. But focusing on legal civilian occupations, I doubt that there are any -- other than the President of the United States, of course. As my friend Raquelle de la Rocha pointed out, imagine what this must do to his worker's comp premiums.

UPDATE: Some people dismiss the historical examples on the grounds that they were before modern Secret Service protection, and that these days the risk of assassination is much less. Of course, Secret Service protection may well make a difference, and it's impossible to predict such risks with any accuracy. But given that Presidents Ford and Reagan avoided being killed largely by chance -- even though, as best I can tell, they had a roughly comparable degree of Secret Service protection to what is available now -- I suspect that assassination will continue to be a serious threat to Presidents, at least unless they drastically cut back on their public appearances (which would be unfortunate, and right now seems unlikely).