EclectEcon

George Bush is Wrong on Energy Policy

I have really been disappointed with the US Republicans; I had hoped they would support market solutions more than they seem to do. Here is some very good insight from John Lott, first on Ethanol:

Ethanol costs well over $100 per barrel. Oil costs about $50 per barrel. You are throwing out $50 for each barrel of ethanol you buy (actually it is even more than that since the energy produced by burning a barrel of ethanol is apparently less). Bush’s and the Democrat’s policy on this will just make us much poorer. I know the responses: that the price of ethanol is coming down. But that doesn’t justify a subsidy. Firms can take that into account just as they do with any other product. If they think that cost will come down enough that it will pay for them to produce the product, they will start producing the product.

Right. If ethanol is such a great product, why won't private enterprise bring it to market? And don't tell me about CO2 emissions -- they'll be at least as bad with ethanol, all things considered.



Next, here is John Lott on energy security:

If gas is risky because oil might get cut off in a war or if there is a boycott, that causes the current price to rise to reflex that future higher price. That higher price then will be taken into account to see whether because of that risk we should be relying on other energy sources. The only justification that I can make for this last claim is that the threat of price controls prevent gas companies from profiting from those higher future prices and thus eliminate their incentives to do things such as store more gas today. The problem here then is the threat of government intervention in the market that is then used to justify more government intervention. There is no reason to believe that the government is going to get anywhere near to picking the right levels of investments here.

If there is concern that we are using "too much" gasoline, as I have said before, let's just tax the snot out of it (and cut taxes somewhere else, keeping the tax revenue neutral).

14 Superfoods

There are 14 Superfoods, according th WebMD:

• Beans
• Blueberries
• Broccoli
• Oats
• Oranges
• Pumpkin
• Salmon
• Soy
• Spinach
• Tea (green or black)
• Tomatoes
• Turkey
• Walnuts
• Yogurt

I eat a lot of this crud. But I'd rather eat McDonald's burgers, pizza, and junk food.



[link via The Door]

The Regional Effects of the Oil Boom

Consider a simple quantity-theory-of-money model with modest growth in the money supply and no change in the income velocity of money. In this economy, with moderate economic growth, there will be little-to-no inflation.



Now shock this economy with a massive increase in demand in one sector and one geographic region (say, a big increase in the demand for oil in Alberta). In that part of the economy, wages will go up because labour mobility is costly and the adjustments are not instantaneous. Also, in that part of the economy, prices of fixed inputs will sky-rocket (e.g. housing and land).



If those prices go up by considerably more than the rate of growth in the money supply minus the rate of growth in real output (still assuming velocity is constant), then prices somewhere else have to fall. Where?



The primary candidate is housing and land elsewhere in the economy, but that's a difficult political move and could trigger bankruptcies in those areas, especially if consumers have used home equity to support their consumption; it also helps explain why premiers in the Maritimes are trying to stem the emigration of their residents (e.g. see this in the Globe and Mail).



There might also be lower wages in construction (and other occupations) in those areas for workers who don't move so easily to the areas where there is a growth in the derived demand for labour. But longer-term contracts and other rigidities make it next-to-impossible for these wages to fall. So instead, unemployment might rise. Or more likely people will be inclined to say "I can't get work here, so I'm moving out west" in response to the market signals. And this has clearly been happening. From the same G&M piece:

“Probably 20 per cent of the parents on my son's hockey team, the fathers travel back and forth to Alberta and work in place like Fort McMurray,” he [Nova Scotia Premier, Rodney MacDonald] said.



... A report released last month said nearly 13,000 people migrated to Alberta from the Atlantic provinces over a one year period ending July 1.

What should monetary policy makers do in this case? If they maintain a low, steady rate of overall, measured inflation, the average of the high rate of inflation in one sector will have to be offset by deflation elsewhere. But the downward rigidities in the slow or shrinking sectors mean that prices cannot fall there, leaving them to suffer from increased unemployment among those who are less mobile and/or lower growth rates. At the same time, though, implementing policies trying to avoid slumps in the declining sectors and regions of the economy will add fuel to the inflationary pressures in Alberta and the oil patch.



To the extent that this simplified analysis has some validity, it is easy to see why policy makers might favour allowing a bit more inflation when there are large sectoral upheavals in the economy. So far, the Bank of Canada has been doing a decent job of balancing these concerns:

Prices in Alberta rose 4.7 per cent in December from a year earlier: A much higher inflation rate than the national average of 1.6 per cent, and well above any other province. (British Columbia takes second place at 2.1 per cent.) And Alberta's inflation rate has been consistently higher than the rest of the country for about three years.

My guess is that The Bank will let the Alberta rate go wherever it goes, but will try to avoid deflation in any geographic region of the economy. If so, there might be good reason to expect Canadian inflation to move into and remain in the upper regions of the targeted band national inflation rate of 1 - 3%. But if oil prices continue to decline, it'll be another story for another posting.

$336,000 per job created

That's what the Province of Quebec is spending, explicitly and implicitly, to entice Alcan to build a smelting plant in the Saquenay-Lac St Jean region. That is one heck of a lot of money to spend on job creation, for jobs that probably would be created elsewhere in the economy anyway, especially if the province were to cut taxes instead.



I am skeptical, to say the least, of "job creation" statistics and arguments. If the long-run Phillips Curve and the long-run aggregate supply curves are vertical, we know that job-creation programmes do nothing more than rearrange jobs rather than create them.



As Stephen Gordon says, "Electric Boondoggle du jour".

Absolute and Relative Quality: The Bases for Competition in Sports

There are two types of quality or talent that provide the bases of competition and hence enhance the demand by fans to watch or attend sporting events. Phil Miller has a terrific discussion. Here's a summary:

1. Absolute quality. The better the players, the more fans want to watch them. To use Phil's example, people'd generally rather watch a Grand Slam tennis event than a high school championship because the players are better.
2. Relative quality. Fans seem to prefer close games.

Read the whole thing. It's good.

"Send Me to Syria to be Tortured"

That's what my friend Jack said when he read this.

Canada apologized to software engineer Maher Arar and his family on Friday and said it would pay him C$10.5 million ($8.9 million) in compensation after Canadian police falsely labeled him an Islamic extremist, which led to Arar being jailed in

Syria.



"On behalf of the government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you, Monia Mazigh (Arar's wife), and your family for any role Canadian officials may have played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced in 2002 and 2003," Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated [EE: He wasn't Prime Minister then; the Liberals controlled Parliament when this happened. I note with disgust that the MSM fail to point this out.].



Arar says he was repeatedly tortured during the year he spent in Damascus jails after he was deported to Syria by U.S. officials during a stopover in New York in 2002.



The apology and compensation were a part of settlement agreed to by Arar after he launched a suit against the Canadian government. He is also suing the United States.



Harper objected to the United States continuing to keep Arar on its security watch list. A Canadian judicial inquiry concluded last year that Arar had never been a security threat and it recommended compensation.



In addition to the C$10.5 million, the Canadian government will also pay Arar's legal bills, which a Harper aide estimated at C$1.5 million.

Jack's wife concurs: send him to Syria to be tortured!



Seriously, though, I once had a friend who taught in the law school here who had a standing offer that anyone could inflict all the pain and suffering they wanted on his right shoulder (he was right handed) for $5m. This was back in the days before E-Bay, so he didn't try to auction off the right. The point he was trying to make, I think, was that in most instances people do not think of what compensation they would accept ex ante when a tort is inflicted upon them.



There still are rumours floating around (see maybe this) that all is not as it seems with Arar, which is why the U.S. has not conceded that they made an error with him. If so, I hope he continues his suit and the U.S. clears the air. BenS wonders what if, in the end, the U.S. defends itself successfully? Should the Canadian gubmnt sue Arar to get its money back?

Al Pacino Is Not Dustin Hoffman

I was watching Al Pacino being interviewed on The Actor's Studio this afternoon. I recall the first time I saw Pacino. It was in The Godfather. I thought, "Why did they get this guy to play Michael? He looks like Dustin Hoffman, but he's not as good."



Now that I have watched them in numerous films roles, it is pretty clear to me they are different. Hoffman has much broader range than Pacino, and yet I cannot imagine Hoffman in Scent of a Woman, and I cannot imagine how The Godfather series would have played out with Hoffman instead of Pacino.



My understanding is that Hoffman is brilliant, works extremely hard, and that Pacino is... well... different.



No matter. I have enjoyed them both in their various roles.

Numb3rs: How Many Times Does Charlie Get to Update His Priors?(It's Good to be a Bayesian)

Despite my having had mixed reactions to the show initially (see this and this), Numb3rs is now one of my favourites. One reason (in addition to the enjoyable character development) is that Charlie Epps, the math genius, is almost always wrong. He goes through all sorts of machinations — bizarre search algorithms, location theory, or whatever — and then, when the FBI doesn't find the criminal, he has to revise his models, update his priors to come up with something else. And sometimes he has to revise his model or analysis several times before the FBI catches the criminal(s), usually just in the nick of time.



Isn't Bayesian inference wonderful?

Two Outa Ten Ain't Bad

I am, in most ways, a non-intellectual. Not really an anti-intellectual (despite chairing the Philistine Liberation Organization); just a non-intellectual. I'm pretty ignorant of lots of things, and I love to watch sports and shoot-'em-ups on television, and I am blissfully unaware of the content of many of the classics in literature. Here, via Craig Newmark and from the NYTimes, is a list of the top ten novels or books or something of all time:

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

7. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

10. Middlemarch by George Eliot

Yawn. I've read two of them and wasn't all that impressed by one of the two. I have a vague notion about maybe four more, but for those four I'm not about to rush out to buy the books, rent the movies, or scan the classic comics versions. And I don't really care if I never hear of the other four ever again.



As the NYTimes article says, there are always questions and challenges when a "top ten" anything list is compiled (just look at the NCAA BCS football arguments!), but I must say I didn't think I was as ignorant as this list makes me seem --- I haven't even heard of a couple of these books. If they're such good books, how come they're not more popular, huh?

How Long Until the End of the World?

Jack sent me this article, which roughly suggests maybe 5 billion years until the earth is swallowed up by the sun. Maybe.

The Sun is midway through its stable hydrogen burning phase known as the main sequence. But when the Sun enters the red giant phase in around 5 billion years things are going to get a lot rougher in the Earth-Moon system.



... If the Sun's photosphere reaches Earth, our planet too will experience drag and spiral into the Sun to be incinerated.



There are possible natural alternatives, however.



If the Sun as a red giant sloughs off enough material before Earth evaporates, our planet will be revealed from its stellar cocoon in a Moon-less guise. Earth, robbed of its companion, would undertake a lonely vigil as the Sun turns eventually into a stellar corpse called a white dwarf Sun, fading to black over the ensuing trillions of years.



Alternatively, if the swelling Sun loses 20 percent of its mass prior to it reaching our vicinity, both Earth and Moon could be spared incineration and remain together facing each other for eternity. The actual outcome remains a theoretical uncertainty because no red giant star has been observed during this crucial phase.

To all this, Chris asks,

The only question on my mind is how Al Gore is going to be able to connect it to cigarette smoking and anthropogenic climate change.

Mr. Eclectic Goes Curling

Yes, I do wear this hat every time I go curling.

Arbitrage

Tim Worstall has a truly bizarre (gruesome?) example of buying low and selling high.

Wal-Mart: Not a Monopoly

Over two years ago, I wrote the two rules of antitrust:

1. You must compete.
2. You must not win.

It never ceases to amaze me that so many people mistakenly equate competitive success with monopoly. Rebekah relates yet another example and smacks it hard:

Buddy went off on a Chomsky-ite tangent and said, "To the extent that Wal-Mart is a monopoly it impedes the free market."



... Precisely how is Wal-Mart a monopoly, when, even in my relatively rural district — in flyover country — we have within just a half-mile of the Wal-Mart, a Target, a K-Mart, a Sears, a J.C. Penney, a farm-and-tractor supply chain, a home and garden center, two book stores, a video store, and at least two dozen small family-operated businesses, all marketing similar items to those at the eeeeevil monopoly, and they have all been doing well for at least the decade the Wal-Mart has been there? That's a funny-looking monopoly, in my eyes. Of course, if you are willing to use Chomsky's methods to redefine words to suit your immediate want, then, perhaps he has a point.



... The communities which have suffered are those which have not allowed for lower-priced merchandise for the working classes. If I earn a paycheck every week and have no place convenient at which to buy affordable clothes, shoes, toys for my kids, and so on, I'm going to look for a job closer to an affordable neighborhood.

Yup. These are precisely the people the elitist snobs of Stratford, Ontario, don't want living and shopping in their snotty, snooty town, which is proud (not sad) not to have a Wal-Mart.

Moral Hazard and Hurricane Insurance in Florida

Moral hazard: I take more chances that I might suffer a loss if I know the loss will be covered by insurance (or by some gubmnt programme). Here is a great example, courtesy of Professor Brian Ferguson at A Canadian Econoview:

''I didn't have shutters until two years ago,'' Sen. [Bill Posey, a Republican from Rockledge who leads the Florida state Senate's Banking and Insurance Committee] said. ``I would say that's what I have insurance for. But those days are over.'' [quoted from the Miami Herald]

For teaching purposes, I've always had trouble coming up with a really satisfactory illustration of moral hazard - the notion that the fact of having insurance against a certain type of loss might cause you to take less care to avoid that loss. Since I've started taking an interest in the weather in the Miami area, examples have ceased to be a problem.

Brian goes on to discuss a re-insurance plan that would require Florida taxpayers to create a fund to cover the re-insurance costs for serious hurricane-loss years.

Critics say that this approach could turn hurricane insurance into a tax increase. On the other hand, if you look at long term data on hurricane paths across Florida, you'd be hard pressed to say that there was any part of the state that was free of the risk of a catastrophic year. This proposal essentially spreads the risk across the entire population...

It's an interesting concept, but perhaps it should be funded via property taxes instead of sales taxes.

Shattered Fantasies

I have had this fantasy all winter that I would not have to snowblow at all this winter. It has been quite warm here, and we missed the horrendous snow storm in early December (and most of that snow had disappeared by the time we returned from Edmonton - see this).



We had had some snow now and then, but it wasn't much, and the temperature always rose again melting what little snow we'd had.



It all came to an end on the weekend. I put it off as long as possible, but finally on Sunday I had to get out the snowblower and chip the ice off the gas can. So much for that fantasy.

Iran and the Nuclear Age

Let's face it. The U.S. isn't going to launch a pre-emptive strike to prevent Iran's acquisition/development of nuclear Weapons. Neither is Israel. And neither are the two, together. Iran is going to have nuclear weapons within the next few years. Even a threatened oil price war from the Saudis will not deter them.



Let's accept that as a given.



What will Iran's leaders do once they have nuclear weapons and missiles with sufficient range to reach Tel-Aviv and Riyadh (besides swagger and threaten)? Here is one piece that raises the spectre of a second holocaust [h/t to Eric]. Whether that actually happens will depend on two things:



1. The attitude of Iran's leaders toward self-destruction. If they really believe that there is a higher purpose for their actions, then they will launch the missiles with nuclear warheads at numerous Israeli (and perhaps other Middle Eastern non-Shiite) targets. So what if they and their people "suffer" massive retaliation? They will have carried out their tasks in pursuit of these higher goals.



2. If their leaders do not have that attitude toward self-destruction/self-sacrifice then it must be made abundantly clear to them that they will be annihilated if they launch such an attack, no matter what they threaten. In this instance, we must remain resolute that no appeasement out of fear is possible.



After discussing this with my friend, Eric, it has become clear to me (for now — I'm always willing to update my priors) that either way, Israel should be working furiously to develop the best possible anti-missile system, and the U.S. should be helping them do so.

The Forces of Competition in the Marketplace

Several recent postings highlight the phenomenal strength of market forces and consumer sovereignty.

1. The Emirates Economist links to an article showing that consumers are getting (choosing?) more nicotine in their cigarettes. His point is that the market conveys information about a product, even if the suppliers might not want a big fanfare about that information.
   
   

   Those who don't understand how markets work often worry that firms routinely cheat their customers. Certainly there are cases where that can happen, but most often firms are disciplined by a simple mechanism: consumers quickly learn the quality of the product and adjust their demand accordingly.

2. In a second posting, EmEc reiterates the concern so many economists have about the minimum wage:
   
   

   [T]he majority of Americans (and other peoples for that matter) believe the minimum wage benefits the intended beneficiaries. It benefits only the lucky ones who don't lose work.
   
   
   
   The "power" to the buyer that exists here, exists purely because of the minimum wage. The owner/manager is going to cut the hours because the incentive to hire labor has changed (not to make a political statement). And those whose hours get cut are the ones the manager likes least -- something that's possible to do with profit consequences because the minimum wage has created excess supply.

   In that posting, EmEc raises a serious issue, namely that decisions makers have a much stronger incentive to discriminate against unfavoured groups when there are price controls.
   
   
3. The third item is a nice, succinct piece by Cafe Hayek pointing out that if credit card interest rates are "too high" (whatever that means), then market forces will drive them down:
   
   

   If there are government-imposed restrictions on the ability of banks and other firms to compete to offer consumer credit, then credit-card rates would then likely be too high. But absent such restrictions -- and I know of none -- then our best guess is that rates are appropriate. If rates were too high, then the greedy quest for profit would prompt one or several firms to lower rates or offer better terms to consumers.

   Boudreaux also makes the telling point that the market is generally a better regulator than are politicians:
   
   

   Am I naive? Certainly no more naive that is Mr. Mintz and others who suppose that an investigation by Congress into credit-card rates will uncover trustworthy information and use this information as the basis for sound corrective actions.

Pictures from the Hubble Telescope:a pure public good?

These photos are exquisite. I find it difficult to believe that if we could vertically sum across people's preferences, we would not come up with a sum that would be more than enough to renovate the Hubble and send up another space telescope as well. Of course identifying and collecting the sums would be no easy task. And it's easy for me to say all this since the contributions of Canadian taxpayers to the Hubble are likely to be miniscule.



I think my favourite of the images is the "hour glass nebula".

[h/t to Jack]

The SuperBowl Mumble

I didn't much mind the SuperBowl Shuffle of 1985, but it does seem awfully tacky to keep bringing it out nowadays. If you're tired of it, try this:

[h/t to Rebekah]



Update #1: It looks as if this video is no longer available. Too bad. I thought it was funny, but Ms. Eclectic thought it was pretty stupid.



Update #2: Check the comments for a link to a site that still has/had the video.

Opportunity Costs and University Sports

Stephen Karlson at Cold Springs Shops has some good examples of the trade-offs that many universities are forced to make:

Students are affected by poor resource allocation in other ways. Class sizes have grown since 2000 because of a 20 percent increase in undergraduate enrollment, without an equivalent increase in full-time faculty. Students are closed out of classes because there are not enough faculty to teach them. Graduate students, the life-blood of a research university, have dropped by 10 percent since 1970. Instead of hiring new faculty and attracting new graduate students, the university has devoted scarce resources to boosting the number of athletic coaches and staff by 25 percent since 1994. What's more important at the university, better education or better games?



(We continue to manage with half the faculty we had in the late 1980s, and I have now counted 10 or 11 requests to get into my closed classes, which sold out during November early registration. If there were some way I could run my classes as an independent contractor ...)



... Ask a professor to meet more classes or larger classes, see if he hits the top journals as frequently. Hire adjuncts to meet multiple sections of introductory classes: the remaining tenured faculty who were hired to direct dissertations will get the message. Devote some of your capacity to chasing the excess demand for prestige degrees, listen to the discontent from in-state parents and students.

I realize that some universities claim that having a top-ranked athletic programme will attract better scholars, better students, and more donations for academic programmes. I have yet to see any evidence supporting this argument.

Mark Steyn: "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obama?"

Mark Steyn has some interestingly insultingly amusing things to say about Barack Obama:

• According to the new rules from the American Media Practitioners Association, we're obliged to make at least one flattering reference to Barack Obama per column, preferably accompanied by that picture USA Today used with his head framed by a kind of luminous halo thing.
• He's young, gifted and black, and white, and Hawaiian, and Kansan, and charismatic, and Congregationalist, and Muslim. He rejects the way "politics has become so bitter and partisan,'' he represents "a different kind of politics."
• Some commentators say he's a blank slate. And how long is it since we've seen one of those? They used to have 'em in the schoolhouses back when the kids still learnt stuff instead of just discussing their sexuality with the guidance counselor all week long. I'll bet in those radical madrassahs they're still using blank slates.
• To be sure, the imams always knew young Barack was not your typical novitiate. No doubt when he was late for Friday prayers they stood around singing "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obama?" How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? Who knows?
• The madrassah stuff was supposedly leaked to Insight Magazine by some oppo-research heavies on Hillary Rodham Clinton's team. Which if true suggests that Hillary's losing her touch.

Should You Short Aluminum?

That seems to be the implication of this posting by James Hamilton at Econobrowswer.

Aluminum prices and volatility may surge further over coming weeks as a fund with an already large exposure slowly tightens its grip via the options market.



Data have shown one player controlling more than 90 percent of available or on warrant stocks of aluminum-- about 600,000 tonnes worth about $1.6 billion-- in London Metal Exchange warehouses.



Analysts and traders think that player is a U.S. hedge fund, but would not name it. The large holding has made the market nervous and pushed up volatility.

... Commodity speculation will help the economy allocate resources more efficiently when speculators earn their profits by correctly anticipating movements in fundamentals. But if instead speculators buy high and sell low, they are creating problems for themselves and all the rest of us. The above reports suggest to me that we may have another case like the Amaranth Hedge Fund-- somebody foolishly thinking they can manipulate the market, and then getting so deeply into trouble that they keep doubling up the bet in hopes of bailing themselves out.

Deterrent Effect of the Death Penalty

Back Talk has a lengthy, fascinating discussion of the deterrence effects of capital punishment. The article discusses the uses and misuses of data from the U.S. and Canada. His conclusion, which doesn't surprise me, is somewhat ambiguous:

One possibility is that you need about that many [40] executions per year to influence the murder rate in this country [the U.S.].



... I do not mean to suggest that this evidence proves that executions serve as a deterrent to murder.



... [A] potenital murderer does not think to himself "gee, the state legislature just passed a temporary moratorium on executions, so I think I'll run out and kill Joe Blow before that changes." That kind of cognitive computation is not (in my view) how executions would deter murder.

My own view, as I have argued before, is that there are many fates worse than death, and I can't imagine that capital punishment is much, if any, more of a deterrent than really bad prison conditions might be.

The Nature of the Firm

Thom Lambert at Truth on the Market has an excellent summary of the economics of the firm. Here is a very brief excerpt:

The bottom line for Hayek, then, is that resources are most efficiently allocated not by centralized planners but by the “man on the spot” responding to the information inherent in market prices.



Enter Professor Coase. In The Nature of the Firm, he observed that this is absolutely not what we see in business organizations: “Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is coordinated through a series of exchange transactions on the market. Within a firm, these market transactions are eliminated and in place of the complicated market structure with exchange transactions is substituted the entrepreneur/coordinator, who directs production.” Thus, “the distinguishing mark of the firm is the supersession of the price mechanism.” Business organizations are, in short, little islands of socialism in which Hayek’s beloved price mechanism is “superseded.”



So why do these “islands of conscious power” emerge? Because there are costs to using the market to allocate resources — most notably, transactions costs.



... If the nature of the firm is as Coase describes, then the law should treat business organizations as no more than cost-minimizing nexuses of contracts between the suppliers of capital, managerial talent, and labor. This suggests (1) that the law should provide some “off-the-rack” nexuses of contracts that would appear to reflect the needs of large classes of business entities, and (2) that these various off-the-rack collections of contracts should be freely tailorable by business planners. Transactional lawyers can add value, then, by tailoring these off-the-rack contracts to meet their clients’ specific needs.

NFL Championships #2: Colts Edge Patriots, 38-34

Well, it sure was close. The oddsmakers set the spread at Indianapolis to win by 3.5; I picked the New England Patriots to win by 3. The Patriots were up by 3 with a minute to go, and then the Colts scored, putting them up by 4.



But two things emerged from this game:

1. the Colts staged a VERY impressive comeback after being down by 18 points in the second quarter.
2. the Colts looked maybe good enough to give the Bears a good game. The line spread on Superbowl 41 should be pretty small.

After having picked both games wrong this week I'll plunge on ahead. I was prepared to pick the Bears, given their performance against the Saints this afternoon, but after seeing the performance of the Colts, I'm not so sure now. Ms. Eclectic says the Bears will win the Superbowl, so I'll pick the Colts. Colts by 4.



[Hint: given my record at handicapping, bet on the Bears! 8-)]

NFL Championships #1: Chicago Bears Trounce the N.Orleans Saints 39-14

I missed the first half of the game because of this, but man did I ever assess these teams incorrectly! The Bears defence was phenomenal, as was their running game. And Grossman didn't really suck. If the Bears play this well next week, I don't really see how either the Patriots or the Colts can beat them.

Jimmy Carter Interceded on Behalf of Nazi War Criminal

That's right, and it happened back in 1987. Here's the story (link via Netscape News).

The letter, written and signed by Carter, asked that Sher show “special consideration” for a man proven to have murdered Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.



Update: A copy of the letter has been posted on the web by the New York Sun. Click here to view it.



Bartesch, who had immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Chicago, admitted to Sher’s office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had served in the notorious SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. He also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from U.S. immigration officials.



“We had an extraordinary piece of evidence against him – a book that was kept by the SS and captured by the American armed forces when they liberated Mauthausen,” Sher said. “We called it the death book. It was a roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.”



... The family approached several members of Congress. “The congressmen would, very understandably, forward their claims over to our office and when they learned the facts they would invariably drop the case,” Sher recalled.



But there was one politician who accepted the claims without asking for any further information.



“One day, in the fall of ’87, my secretary walks in and gives me a letter with a Georgia return address reading ‘Jimmy Carter.’ I assumed it was a prank from some old college buddies, but it wasn’t. It was the original copy of the letter Bartesch’s daughter sent to Carter, after Bartesch had already been deported.



“In the letter, she claimed we were un-American, only after vengeance, and persecuting a man for what he did when he was only 17 and 18 years old.



“I couldn’t help thinking of my own father who returned home with shrapnel wounds after he joined the U.S. Army as a teenager to fight the Nazis and hit the beaches at Normandy at that same age on D-day.



“On the upper corner of the letter was a note signed by Jimmy Carter saying that in cases such as this, he wanted ‘special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons.’

Where is that man's humanitarian concern for the victims of Nazi violence? How can there be any doubt about his biases against Jews and against Israel?

Was Saddam Hussein a Martyr?

Not in my mind, but someone thinks so. Screaming match from Al Jazeera, via MEMRI, courtesy of Judith.

Orillia vs. Clinton

Stephen Gordon posted a link to a YouTube video that had been made about his hometown of Orillia, Ontario.



My reaction: at least Orillia has a Taco Bell, which is one of my all-time favourite restaurants (Clinton does not have one). And you should have seen the dancing in the streets in Clinton when we got a Tim Horton's here.

I Cannot Believe I Am Giving Up the NFL for This

I love watching the NFL on TV. So much so that there are rumours my first marriage ended because I was glued to the TV to watch the NFL more than might have been deemed reasonable by some people.



So what is this? I am actually going to miss tomorrow's first game, the NFC championship between the Bears and Saints (or at least the first half of it)? That's right. Here's why.



I have been asked to play 2nd horn with the Blyth Festival Orchestra in their performances of Mozart's 23rd Piano Concerto and Haydn's Symphony 83 (listen for that low B-flat below the staff in the bass clef!).



2:30pm

St. George's Anglican Church

Goderich, Ontario