EclectEcon

Rob Ford, Goldfinger

Rob Ford reminds me of Goldfinger:

Mark Steyn on Brandeis and Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Mark Steyn pulls no punches in a piece, "The Wretched Jelly-Spined Nothing Eunuchs of Brandeis". An excerpt from a conversation with Jamie Weinstein:

JAMIE WEINSTEIN: And people when they get honorary degrees, it's not like they only go to non-political people. Universities have awarded them in the recent past to people that want Israel to be wiped off the map and destroyed. Is that not right?

MS: Yeah, that's true. And that was Brandeis, a guy called Tony Kushner... I stand back and occasionally roll my eyes at the dreary left-wing hacks invited to give commencement speeches, garlanded with state honors, things that if you trend to the right side of the spectrum, you know you're going to be labeled 'controversial conservative', and you'll never get anywhere near. But this woman is a black, feminist atheist from Somalia. And so what we're learning here, which is fascinating, in the hierarchy of progressive-politics identity-group victimhood, Islam trumps everything. Islam trumps gender. The fact that she's a woman doesn't matter. It trumps race. The fact that she's black doesn't matter. It trumps secularism. The fact that she's an atheist doesn't matter. They wouldn't do this if it was a Christian group complaining about her, if it was a Jewish group complaining about her. But when the Islamic lobby group says oh, no, we're not putting up with this, as I said, these jelly-spined nothings at Brandeis just roll over for them.

I have sat through many, many convocation/graduation ceremonies. Steyn is right. Pronouncements from left wing, caring, elitist interventionists proclaiming moral superiority are common; among the most egregious at UWO was Maude Barlow. Only rarely are outspoken pundits from the right (e.g. Mark Steyn? or EclectEcon?) invited to such events.

Related articles

Brandeis University Defends Those Who Favour Total Subjugation of Women

Hey, Brandeis! This Is How You SHOULD Have Handled the Protests

Enforcing Islamic Law at Brandeis

Video: CAIR Reacts to Brandeis' Plan to Honor Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Rex Murphy on Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Here. Some excerpts:

Those who talk of “role models” for young women can search the globe, and will not find a more dignified, accomplished and courageous exemplar. In the Netherlands she was constantly under siege from radical Islamists and others, but courageously continued her public life speaking for the rights and dignity of women — especially, as she saw it, for the rights of women trapped in Islam. ...

And students at the university, deploying the other cant formulation for unacceptable ideas —  “hate speech” — collected 85 names from a 350-person faculty petitioning the offer be rescinded. Their petition carried the now-familiar prissy, hollow whines that some students would be “uncomfortable,” would “not feel welcome,” if Ali, with her learned views on Islam and women — derived mainly from her personal life experience, mind you — were to be honoured.

Is this what Western thought and philosophy at the university has come to —  setting up  intellectual quarantines lest the immature and frightened be made uncomfortable or to feel unwelcome? Is this university or daycare? Giving into such adolescent whimpering is despicable; giving in to in on a university campus is unforgivable. ...

Why in Aristotle’s name do institutions dedicated to higher learning tolerate these rags of verbal flannel — uncomfortable, unwelcome — from putative adults? Damn it, a university exists to unsettle, to throw down established attitudes, to shine the searchlight of reason on all ideas. Universities are supposed to be bold, confident, courageous institutions, whose biggest duty to their students is to expand the range and depth of their ideas, not confirm their prejudices.

Brandeis, on this account, is a failure. It cringed at the first criticism. It suggested Ali somehow offended its “core values” — and what would those be? Surrender at first fire, perhaps, and gaudy specious rationalizations afterwards? — and had the gall to talk of respecting debate....

Universities are losing their halo. They are now factories for reinforcing received opinions, what the market holds as right and true — so-called “progressive” ideas. They have a deep hostility to ideas and opinions that wander outside their small circle of acceptability. They choose which protests they endorse and which they deplore. Oprah can get 10 honourary degrees and a winsome reception for her third-rate psuedo-therapies. But a real warrior in the cause for woman’s rights — a woman who truly rose by virtue of her courage, intelligence and industry — must walk, shamed, away from the platform she was invited to.

Every other university on the continent should have something to say about Ali’s treatment, but very few will. Because they are all of the same timid herd: great trumpeters of intellectual freedom and courage, which when faced any real test of independent thought or challenge to comfortable assumptions are sheepish, intimidated, closed shops.

Man, Talk about Tight Bayesian Priors

A tight prior: I believe so strongly that the creation story of Genesis is chronologically and factually correct that no evidence to date embodying physics, biology, chemistry, whatever can possibly sway me from my beliefs. So I'm not even going to study the alternative hypothesis.

And then there's ignorance in combination with tight priors, as in Oklahoma:

Much of the debate about evolution in public schools concerns the content of textbooks. But a new study points to another worrisome trend: teachers who have misconceptions about evolution might be passing those ideas along to their students.

Researchers surveyed Oklahoma high school biology teachers, and found that 23 percent of them misunderstand several key concepts.

Liquor in the Grocery Stores? in Ontario??

When I lived in California or Hawaii or Michigan, I could buy wine, beer, and liquor in the grocery store, off the shelf. It is convenient and inexpensive. Now, Ontario [I mean the province in Canada, not the city in California] is taking very small baby steps in that direction.

The Ontario government is pushing ahead with a plan to put liquor kiosks in grocery stores, a bid to shake up the way alcohol is sold in the province and head off the champions of privatization ahead of a possible spring election.

It won't be much of a "shake up", believe me. Many large grocers already have kiosks that sell Canadian wine. Having additional kiosks to sell liquor is a small step. But this is nowhere near the much freer markets in other jurisdictions.

• The kiosks would be required to use only LCBO [Liquor Control Board of Ontario] employees. It is their union which has led the fight against privatization of liquor sales in Ontario, and this is a back-handed sell-out to the union by the provincial liberal party. This connection between the gubmnt and the LCBO union is likely one of the reasons these kiosks have been approved but that we will nothave beer and wine sales at convenience stores in Ontario.
• The prices would still be set by the LCBO. The prices for liquor here in Ontario are high, but not as high as they are in Saskatchewan, where gubmnt control of liquor sales is even more serious.
• The kiosk sales would have to be separate from the grocery sales (and quite likely separate from the wine kiosks, whose employees do not receive the pay and benefits paid to LCBO employees). A shopper would not be able to put a bottle of wine, some scotch, and a six-pack in the shopping cart along with produce, meat, frozen foods, etc. and pay for them all at once at the checkout.
• The gubmnt would control how many kiosks could be created and in which stores. This plan should create considerable additional opportunity to extort bribes attract campaign contributions from grocery retailers.

The only benefit I see from the change (and it is not really a small one despite my scorn for the plan) is that people who are happy to buy the types and brands of liquor sold at the kiosks will be saved an extra trip to an LCBO outlet. I imagine, however, that the kiosks will be expected to favour Ontario and Canadian products primarily, if not exclusively, much as the wine kiosks already do.

And those of us like Ms Eclectic and me, who like single-malt scotches, will almost surely be out of luck.

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Details here.

A new battery than can recharge a cellphone in 30 seconds has just been shown off at a Microsoft conference in Tel Aviv.

The founder of StoreDot—the start-up that has a working prototype—told the BBC that he expects the company to have a viable product to market in 3 years.

Legal filing says Apple's exploring a new TV box

The bio materials that make up the new battery were discovered in the process of developing a cure for Alzheimer's disease, the BBC said.

Hey, Brandeis! This Is How You SHOULD Have Handled the Protests

From Wikipaedia, about Bo Burnham (about whom my granddaughter insisted I should learn):

Burnham's first experience with controversy regarding his music came on March 3, 2009, when fifteen Westminster College students (members of the campus' Gay-Straight Alliance, Black Students Association, International Club, and Cultural Diversity Organization) protested his concert there that evening. Of the controversy, he said, "It's so ironic because gay bashers were the ones labeling me in high school, [...] I try and write satire that's well-intentioned. But those intentions have to be hidden. It can't be completely clear and that's what makes it comedy." Despite the college's admission that they had booked Burnham while ignorant of his show's material, dean of students John Comerford praised the opportunities for discourse the controversy brought the school. [emphasis added]^[16][24]

Similar situation. In both instances, the admins claimed they were unaware of something others deemed worthy of protest.

In the Ayaan Hirsi Ali case, Brandeis University caved to the protesters. Here, the dean welcomed the opportunity to open up dialogue.

Addendum: Also see this, calling the Brandeis decision, "Rank Appeasement."

At Brandeis, of course, it’s fine to criticize Christianity and Judaism, and to savage America and Israel. Witness its presentation, in 2006, of an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner, who has repeatedly expressed contempt for the Jewish state. (Critics of Kushner’s award were brusquely informed that “the university does not select honorary degree recipients on the basis of their political beliefs or opinions.”) That’s not all: Brandeis, as it happens, hosts one of the most active chapters of the poisonously anti-Israeli group Students for Justice in Palestine, which, under the tolerant eye of the university administration, invites terrorist sympathizers to speak at the school and disrupts campus talks by members of the Knesset. Until recently, moreover, Brandeis even had a cozy “academic partnership” with Al Quds University, a hive of fanatical Jew-hatred. But criticism of Islam—even by someone with firsthand experience of its systematic and brutal oppression of women—is off-limits.

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Brandeis University Defends Those Who Favour Total Subjugation of Women

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Dear Brandeis University: Invite me to be your commencement speaker

Dear Brandeis University:

Now that you have uninvited Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be your commencement speaker, invite me. I would be an excellent choice as a replacement. As I said nearly 7 years ago,

Here are some reasons you should invite me:

1. I have a cap and gown that have been described as cool or sexy (click here to see a photo). [apparently that link no longer works. see photo below]

2. I look very professional and academic with my gray beard and glasses.

3. I have considerable experience listening to bad commencement addresses, so I know what not to do or say.

4. I am an award-winning professor, with considerable acting and speaking experience.

5. I promise not to cuss (unless you want me to).

There are some additional points made in that original posting that do not apply in this case. For example, I would NOT promise to be silent about the Ayaan Hirsi Ali uninvitation. And I would seriously criticize those who favoured that uninvitation. But Brandeis, if you can live with this understanding, I'm your man.

Bubble Theory

One of the reasons speculative bubbles might exist transitorily is known as the bigger fool theory: I'm willing to pay more for something so long as I believe I can sell it to someone else soon for even more. I strongly suspect there was an element of this theory at work in the real estate bubble of 2002-6 and likely again in some parts of the UK today.

This theory is captured very well in this two-panel Hagar cartoon [via MA]:

The cartoon is applicable to any type of speculative bubble: tulips, real estate, mortgage-backed securities with liar loans, etc.

One thing for sure that has contributed to sky-rocketing housing prices and other recent bubbles related to real estate and housing finance is gubmnt programmes. They were major contributors in the naughts and they are again: People worry about affordable housing so they implement programmes designed to increase the demand for housing, driving prices even higher. Duh.

From the previous link,

Concerns have been mounting about property prices overheating in the South East amid ... the launch of Government mortgage support schemes such as Help to Buy, which have unleashed a flood of first-time buyers into the market.

I really wonder if voters and legislators understand this simple proposition. Worse, I wonder if they even care.

Brandeis University Defends Those Who Favour Total Subjugation of Women

Over the past year, Brandeis University worked on having Ayaan Hirsi Ali speak at the spring commencement and receive an honourary degree. Not surprisingly, given her outspoken criticism of fundamentalist religions that promote female genital mutilation, forced child marriages, wife-beating, and child-beating [notably Islam in many places], their decision was criticized.

Brandeis caved. What's worse nearly a quarter of their faculty members signed a letter asking that she be uninvited. I find that appalling, even unsettling.

In their most caring, open-mindedness, one person wrote,

...if I were a Muslim, I would be deeply offended by her comments against my entire religion. (Which I don't believe she has stepped away from.) Of course, she has the right to make those comments, but whether she deserves an honor like this in light of them is a different question."

Given what her former religion has done to her, I see no reason for her NOT to have made the comments she has made. And I would gladly cheer on any institution that has the, not strength or anything like that, the decency and the commitment to human rights and would invite her to be a commencement speaker. As others have responded,

 "Brandeis has honored Tony Kushner and Desmond Tutu, who made similar comments about Jews, and without the factual predicate of being a victim of FGM and subject to fatwas. It wouldn't be too hard to find honorees who've criticized Christianity, I imagine. I'm deeply offended that a critic of Islam is considered beyond the pale of Brandeis."

and,

"Would Brandeis shrink from offering an honorary degree to a prominent Western feminist who has used strong language to condemn Christianity's impact on Western society -- for instance decrying it as inherently patriarchal, racist, sexist, even fascist?"

Brandeis University, you are a bunch of illogical, disgusting, pandering, inconsistent, wimps. I hope this incident steers many good faculty members and students away from what otherwise could have been a fine institution.

As Ali herself says,

When Brandeis approached me with the offer of an honorary degree, I accepted partly because of the institution’s distinguished history; it was founded in 1948, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, as a co-educational, nonsectarian university at a time when many American universities still imposed rigid admission quotas on Jewish students. I assumed that Brandeis intended to honor me for my work as a defender of the rights of women against abuses that are often religious in origin. For over a decade, I have spoken out against such practices as female genital mutilation, so-called “honor killings,” and applications of Sharia Law that justify such forms of domestic abuse as wife beating or child beating. Part of my work has been to question the role of Islam in legitimizing such abhorrent practices. So I was not surprised when my usual critics, notably the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), protested against my being honored in this way.

What did surprise me was the behavior of Brandeis. Having spent many months planning for me to speak to its students at Commencement, the university yesterday announced that it could not “overlook certain of my past statements,” which it had not previously been aware of. Yet my critics have long specialized in selective quotation – lines from interviews taken out of context – designed to misrepresent me and my work. It is scarcely credible that Brandeis did not know this when they initially offered me the degree.

What was initially intended as an honor has now devolved into a moment of shaming. Yet the slur on my reputation is not the worst aspect of this episode. More deplorable is that an institution set up on the basis of religious freedom should today so deeply betray its own founding principles.

Just in case there is any question, the shaming is all on the shoulders of Brandeis, which should be deeply ashamed of its wishy-washy-ness and for its backhanded implicit approval of the very things Ali has challenged.

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Canada Revenue Agency [CRA] Shut Down by Heartbleed Virus

This is not from The Onion or other similar sites. [via Jack]

Canada Revenue Agency has shut down public access to its tax-filing data amid reports of a major security flaw in a commonly used code for login services. ...

The lockdown of CRA login services comes just as news breaks of a newly-discovered, major security flaw in code commonly used for login services.

“We have received information concerning an Internet security vulnerability named the Heartbleed Bug,” the agency said in a statement posted on its website Wednesday morning.

“As a preventative measure, the CRA has temporarily shut down public access to our online services to safeguard the integrity of the information we hold.”

I can imagine many thoughts, feelings, comments. I'll abstain.

Further Thoughts on Israel

It looks as if the attempt to get the peace talks restarted will continue to be unsuccessful. I am not surprised.

... Abbas doesn’t have the legitimacy. With half of Palestine (namely Gaza) controlled by his rejectionist mortal enemy Hamas, he doesn’t have the authority. And he doesn’t have the intention. Abbas openly refuses to (a) recognize Israel as a Jewish state, (b) yield the so-called right of return (which would flood Israel with millions of Palestinians, destroying the state demographically), or (c) ever sign any agreement that ends the conflict once and for all. Any one of these refusals makes a final peace impossible. All three make the entire process ridiculous.

So here are some thoughts (edited) that I wrote to a friend last week about Israel and the Middle East:

---

As I may have written at one time, historical and biblical claims to the land mean nothing to me; it seems to me lots of people live on land that was taken from someone else at some point in time.

The Ottomans lost; the Brits got to decide what happened to the territories. The Brits buggered it up most places throughout the world but likely couldn't have done much different in Israel/Palestine.

Once Israel was created and acknowledged, and once it had successfully defended itself in the late 1940s, that is pretty much where I start from. It exists; it thrives; it champions freedom and human rights more than any of its neighbours. These points, not biblical history, are the main reasons I am an Israel-phile, I think.

The wars of 1967 and 1973 made it very clear that so long as Israel's arab neighbours were allowed to live next to the pre-1967 borders, Israelis would not be safe. Hence the need for a buffer zone ("need" being from the perspective of Israel, not from the arabs, of course). I saw this same thing, trivially, in my war against the geese last month. If I just drove them off the lawn, they came right back. I had to drive them out of the buffer zones as well.

Quite clearly, relinquishing control of Gaza and forcing Jews to leave the settlements there did nothing to further "the peace process", whatever that means. There has been a rain of thousands of rockets onto Israel from Gaza which has been menacing and murderous. It is intriguing that Egypt has many policies that isolate Gaza more than Israel does. And it is maddening that Palestinian refugees from the 1940s (most of whom left at the urging of the neighbouring gubmnts, not because they were forced out by the Jews) were not integrated into the neighbours' countries.

I know there are politically important groups in Israel who believe Israel should include the entire west bank. But their reasoning seems to me to be more historical and religious, not political in a real-politik sense. I don't buy it.

Friends who have visited the settlements on the west bank understand both the need for a buffer zone AND that the expansionism rampant in some settlements is troublesome. As a result, I am left confused. I recognize Israel's need for the buffer areas, the fences, and the checkpoints. At the same time it is not clear to me that there is much, if any, justification for further expansion of settlements into the West Bank areas.

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Lunar Eclipse Next Week

I may have to take a nap on April 14th. Here's hoping for nice warm weather that night.

For the Western Hemisphere, the eclipse will "officially" begin on April 15 at 12:53 a.m. EDT (0435 GMT), when the moon begins to enter Earth's outer, or penumbral shadow. But even in clear weather, skywatchers will not notice any changes in the moon's appearance until about 50 minutes later, when a slight "smudge" or shading starts becoming evident on the left portion of the moon’s disk. ...

The first definitive change in the moon's appearance will come on its upper left edge. At 1:58 a.m. EDT (0558 GMT), the partial phase of the eclipse will begin as the Earth’s dark shadow, called the umbra, starts to slowly creep over the face of the full moon.

At 3:06 a.m. EDT, the eclipse will reach totality, but sunlight bent by our atmosphere around the curvature of the Earth should produce a coppery glow on the moon. At this time, the moon, if viewed with binoculars or asmall telescope, will present the illusion of seemingly glowing from within by its own light. 

At 3:46 a.m. EDT, the sun, Earth and moon will be almost exactly in line and the light of the moon will appear at its dimmest. "Totality" ends at 4:24 a.m. EDT, and the moon will completely emerge from the umbra at 5:33 a.m. About 20 minutes later, the last vestige of the fainter penumbral shadow will disappear from the moon’s upper right edge, and the body will return to its normal brilliance.

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Tyrannophilia and Other Elected Monarchies

Frank Buckley has recently published (today?) The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America. It explores the trend in modern democracies toward increasing monarchization of gubmnt. We elect leaders and gubmnts, but increasingly, with the use of "executive orders" [in the US] and the dominance of a Prime Minister in parliamentary gubmnts, we treat the head of gubmnt as a monarch. We grant the leader rights, powers, and privileges that go well beyond the civics-class types of checks and balances or separation of powers.

From his chapter, titled  "Tyannophilia":

Tyrants have gotten a bum rap. Oedipus... wasn't a bad ruler. Marrying his mother and killing his father was simply bad luck (Really bad luck.) In Greece's classical period, a tyrant was often a benign ruler who had risen to power with the support of the middle and lower classes, whom he thereafter protected against the aristocracy.

As little people, we love having a protector and benefactor. We cheer for someone who comes along and delivers us from the evils of the power-mongers who have oppressed us. And we happily bestow equal or more power on the newcomers, expecting them to look after us. And so we're willing to tolerate tyranny. Or, to be more precise, we are willing to create the conditions that lead to tyranny and centralized control.

George III did not hold all the cards. He could not ignore Parliament, and over time power shifted from him to the House of Commons, and to Bagehot's cabinet government. More recently, this has been overtaken by what I have labeled Crown government, with a much more powerful prime minister. So too, the former American Constitution, of a balanced separation of powers, has been overtaken by a Constitution of strong executive power, which I also see as a form of Crown government.

I have known Frank Buckley for several decades. We first met at the Canadian Law and Economics Association meetings. He was born in Canada and understands the parliamentary system. He now teaches law at George Mason University and understands the US-Congressional system.

His book is chock full of insight, along with considerable back-up data and references to substantiate his observations and insights. I was delighted that he asked me to look at an advance copy of the book.

 

 

I understand it, but too bad Frank misspelled "gubmnt".

The Continuing War on the "War on Drugs"

Wouldn't you think we had learned enough during prohibition? Like this person, I'm a bit of a prude regarding drug use and alcohol abuse, but also like this person I favour dismantling the so-called "war on drugs" as expeditiously as possible.

 Even though I’m personally a prude on the issue of drugs, that doesn’t stop me from opposing the Drug War, both for moral and practical reasons. After all, how can any sensible and decent person want laws that produce these outrageous results?

The DEA trying to confiscate a commercial building because a tenant sold some marijuana.

The government seeking to steal a hotel because some guests sold some marijuana.

Cops raiding an organic nursery and seizing blackberry bushes.

The feds grabbing cash from innocent bystanders in legal cases.

The government arresting a grandmother for buying cold medicine.

Cops entrapping an autistic teen to boost their arrest numbers.

And don’t forget the misguided War on Drugs is also why we have costly, intrusive, and ineffectiveanti-money laundering laws, which result in other outrages, such as the government arbitrarily stealing money from small business owners.

Though not every enforcement action leads to grotesque abuse of human rights, sometimes the Drug War merely exposes the stupidity of government.

Economists have long been critical of the "War on Drugs", both on ethical grounds and on expediancy grounds. Over 40 years ago, Milton Friedman argued against the so-called war soon after it was announced. And he made his case very clearly in this 1998 piece that appeared in the NYTimes. His conclusion:

Can any policy, however high-minded, be moral if it leads to widespread corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist an effect, destroys our inner cities, wreaks havoc on misguided and vulnerable individuals and brings death and destruction to foreign countries?

Consumer Surplus? or Just an "Endowment Effect"?

Today we received a note at our condo door from someone asking if we would be interested in selling our unit. Upon quick reflection, I realized they would have to offer us a LOT more than the going market price for units like ours before we would even consider moving. We quite like the place.

This example seems like a classic example of "consumer surplus" in economics. But read this definition from Wikipaedia carefully:

Consumer surplus is the difference between the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay and the actual price he does pay. If a consumer would be willing to pay more than the current asking price, then they are getting more benefit from the purchased product than they spent to buy it. An example of a good with generally high consumer surplus is drinking water. People would pay very high prices for drinking water, as they need it to survive. The difference in the price that they would pay, if they had to, and the amount that they pay now is their consumer surplus.

We did indeed receive consumer surplus when we bought our condo unit. We paid less for it than the maximum we'd have been willing to pay.

The case of valuing our condo more than the market price is not quite the same, though, is it. Consumer surplus refers to the difference between what we would have been willing to pay and what we did pay for our unit. It does not refer to the difference between what we would be willing to sell it for and the market price.

In other words, what we were willing to pay for the unit before we owned the unit was much less than what it would take to get us to move now that we are here. Maybe it's inertia; maybe it's irrationality; maybe it's transaction costs (lawyers, movers, redecorators, etc.). For sure, it is in part dread at the thought of moving again.

But it is in part the endowment effect:

In behavioral economics, the endowment effect (also known as divestiture aversion) is the hypothesis that people ascribe more value to things merely because they own them.^[1]This is illustrated by the observation that people will tend to pay more to retain something they own than to obtain something owned by someone else—even when there is no cause for attachment, or even if the item was only obtained minutes ago.

Offer us maybe $150K over the market price, and we might give the offer serious consideration. That's enough to overcome even one heck of an endowment effect!

Hidden Menus from Popular Restaurants

Waaayyyy back in the very early 1960s, I was a windowman at McDonalds;  the early McDonalds had no seats (all walk-up service) and sold 15-cent burgers, 10-cent fries, and 20-cent shakes. In those days, McDonalds had a very simple menu, but if someone asked, we could make them a grilled cheese sandwich or double-meat burger.

Things have changed... and they haven't. There are many popular fast-food restaurants, and most of them will sell products that are not specifically shown on their menus. A link to the hidden menus is here: Hack the Menu. An indication of what might be available is in this article in the Daily Mail [via MA].

One of my favourites, which isn't on the list but which I construct myself (less often than once a year, to be sure), is the quad quarter-pounder from McDonalds: order two double quarter pounders and put 'em together (without the extra bun). Now that I've seen it, though, I may soon want to try the Mc10:35.

However, as much as I love these items, there is nothing that tops a Skor Blizzard from DQ, and that's on their regular menu.

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Similar to The Onion???

Below is a copy-and-paste from below someone's Facebook link to an article in The Onion.

SIMILAR TO THE ONION

The Scientist

1,153,940 likes

Like

Publishers Weekly

44,798 likes

Like

New York Post

1,076,853 likes

Like

The Economist

3,435,338 likes

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is Facebook saying that The Scientist, Publishers Weekly, The New York Post, and The Economist are all satire, full of made-up stories? I might believe it about some of the articles in The Post ;-)

A Little Too Close to the Truth

[via MA]

A Classic Example of Political Hubris... and more?

There is a lovely area in London, Ontario, that used to house a large hospital and many ancillary buildings and operations. It is near downtown and abuts the south branch of the Thames River. In keeping with our adaptation and adoption of Brit names, the area is referred to as "SOHO", in part because the hospital was on South Street and was often referred to as SOuth HOspital.

The hospital has moved, as have the ancillary operations. The space and real estate could likely be a prime development area. Enter the local politicians, dreamers, possibly shady dealings, and perhaps even undetailed and undefined cronyism.

Mayor Joe Fontana’s dream of reaping political bang from a $300-million mega-project he touted as a huge boost for London’s core may be going bust.

More than two years after the mayor unveiled the downtown gateway project, it appears developer Fincore Canada might have difficulty pulling it off, given apparent troubles at a much smaller project outside the city.

Fincore isn’t talking about the status of the twin-towered project Fontana announced in his “state of the city” address two years ago. Neither is Fontana...

Repeated calls for an update from Fincore principal Loredana Onesan, once a fellow board member with Fontana for a charity whose charitable status was yanked, have gone unanswered.

The massive anti-aging and wellness development was announced for the north bank of the Thames River, east of Wellington St. Its design features towers of 26 and 18 storeys, linked by medical, commercial and residential components and even a church.Fincore rezoned some land it doesn’t yet own for the development, prompting landowners to appeal to the Ontario Municipal Board. Those issues were resolved and there’s no legal barrier to the project’s first phase on land Fincore owns or controls.

The Free Press has learned the company has a troubled history as a developer, raising questions about its SoHo development.

 The confused and confusing layers of intricacies of entwined dealings in this city make me wonder how any municipal politician can keep track of what goes on here (or in any large city).

Irrelevant Digression: I met the current mayor once. He was at a mystery dinner theatre show I did a year or two ago.

Internet Dating

I Really, Really Want to Believe This

I love marshmallows. I especially like them after I've opened the bag to let them sit and get hard and stale for 4-6 months. They are a special treat then.

But I'm really skeptical about this:

Update: However, be sure to see the comment and check out the link there. And see this from Wikipaedia. Thanks to MA for the additional info:

Marshmallow probably came first into being as a medicinal substance, since the mucilaginous extracts come from the root of the marshmallow plant, Althaea officinalis, which were used as a remedy for sore throats. Concoctions of other parts of the marshmallow plant had medical purposes as well.^[2] The root has been used since Egyptian antiquity in a honey-sweetened confection useful in the treatment of sore throat.^[1] The later French version of the recipe, called pâte de guimauve (or "guimauve" for short), included an egg whitemeringue and was often flavored with rose water.

The use of marshmallow to make a sweet dates back to ancient Egypt, where the recipe called for extracting sap from the plant and mixing it with nuts and honey. Another pre-modern recipe uses the pith of the marshmallow plant, rather than the sap. The stem was peeled back to reveal the soft and spongy pith, which was boiled in sugar syrup and dried to produce a soft, chewy confection.^[2] Confectioners in early 19th century France made the innovation of whipping up the marshmallow sap and sweetening it, to make a confection similar to modern marshmallow. The confection was made locally, however, by the owners of small sweet shops. They would extract the sap from the mallow plant's root, and whip it themselves. The candy was very popular, but its manufacture was labour-intensive. In the late 19th century, French manufacturers thought of using egg whites or gelatin, combined with modified corn starch, to create the chewy base. This avoided the labour-intensive extraction process, but it did require industrial methods to combine the gelatin and corn starch in the right way.^[2][3]

The Strike Zone is a Probability Density Function

Several days go, while watching some very erratic home-plate umpiring, I posted a short item to Facebook quoting myself, "The strike zone is a probability density function." I had originally made the statement during a play-by-play radio broadcast of a London Tigers baseball game over 20 years ago. The Tigers were a AA minor league team. The radio station manager asked me not to do that again and not to try to explain it on air.

What does it mean to say the strike zone is a probability density function? Basically, the closer a pitch is to the centre of the strike zone, the more likely is the umpire to call it a strike.

It turns out I was even more right than I thought (if that makes sense). Consider this piece [via John Henderson, former student, colleague, and co-author]. Sure as shootin', pitches on or near the edge of the strike zone (but still inside it) are less likely to be called strikes than pitches near the centre. And pitches outside the zone still have a probability of being called strikes [as was often said about pitches from Greg Maddux].

Here is a graph from the article:

Probability a Pitch Is Called a Strike

The strike zone is indicated by the red bars along the axes. The height of the "mesh" indicates the percentage of times that a pitch in that location was called a strike.

The article then continues, presenting evidence that probably shouldn't surprise me, but it does. If a batter has two strikes, there's a lower probability that the umpire will call the next pitch a strike even if it is in the strike zone. And if the batter has three balls [delete old joke here], there is a greater chance the umpire will call a strike.

To the extent this is true, it affects a batter's (and a pitcher's) strategies. As John wrote,

You are on the mound and have me 0-2 on two 109 mph fastballs. I'm worried about my team but also my .300 average and its associated $2m bonus. The data say I should let the next pitch go by if it's close, in clear contradiction to the conventional wisdom that I "protect the plate".

My, oh my: A multivariate endogenous strike zone with serial correlation and simultaneity bias. That should keep the sabremetricians happy for awhile.

More Insights from Bjørn Lomborg about Global Warming and Poverty

He writes,

What's the better way to help the world's poor? Cutting carbon emissions, or giving them access to cheap energy?

In the West, we take our supply of electricity for granted. After a century, we’ve forgotten that plentiful, affordable and dependable energy is the lifeblood of modern civilisation and prosperity. Discussions about saving the world seldom acknowledge the 1.3 billion people living without any electricity whatsoever. Their problems seem otherworldly to us — and weneglect the fact that the same sort of access to cheap electricity would substantially improve their lives. When it comes to helping the world’s poor, a topic like climate change seems to interest the West far more than such mundane matters as helping them power their houses.

A link to his most recent piece is here. Nice title: Let Them Eat Carbon Credits.

He adds,

Dr Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote in theSunday Telegraph last weekend about how the industrialised economies’ greenhouse emissions have wrecked the world. He urges us to cut fossil fuel-based pollution, to help the world’s poor. Sadly, it does not seem to occur to the well-meaning Dr Williams to ask whether we best help the poor by cutting carbon emissions — or by focusing on the provision of affordable food, medicine or energy. It seems not to occur to him that there is a trade-off.

So yes, climate change is an important problem. But presenting people with a one-sided, ineffective message helps no one.

Boycotts. Again.

As most readers know, I am a gentile who strongly supports the continuing existence of Israel. And as many readers know, it can be difficult to distinguish anti-Israel arguments from anti-semitic statements. Robert Fine does a superb job of helping to distinguish the two here [via MA]. One of his key arguments, for me, is this:

The academic boycott fails to make a distinction crucial to all radical political thought: that between civil society and the state. The academic boycott punishes a segment of civil society, in this case Israeli universities and their members, for the deeds and misdeeds of the state. The occupation of Palestine [EE: the Palestine of the pre-1967 borders, I presume] and the human rights abuses that flow from the occupation are to my mind simply wrong, but there is something very troubling in holding Israeli universities and academics responsible for this wrong. Israeli academics doubtless hold many different political views, just as we academics do in the UK, but the principle of collective responsibility applied to Israeli academe as a whole sends us down a slippery path. ...

 A selective academic boycott aimed only at Israeli academic institutions and not at universities and research institutes belonging to other countries with equally bad or far worse records of human rights abuse, is also discriminatory. I admit that the wrongs done by ‘my own people’, in this case fellow Jews, grieve me more than the wrongs done by other peoples, but this is a confession, not a principle of political action. An academic boycott directed exclusively at Israeli academic institutions generates a quite realistic sense that Israel is being picked on – not because it is different from other countries but because it is the same. Given the slaughter currently occurring in Syria, including that of Palestinian refugees, given the repression currently imposed by the military government in Egypt, given the slave-like conditions currently endured by migrant workers in Qatar, it is increasingly eccentric to select Israel alone for boycott.[EE: emphasis added]

Eccentric? Try anti-semitic.

Charter Schools, Testing, Selecting, and Targeting

I have a pretty strong a priori leaning in favour of charter schools. They increase choice for parents and students, and by providing alternatives, they increase the odds that at least some schools will creatively increase learning by students. Those that do not do this will (and often do) eventually fail, something that happens rarely (if ever) in the gubmnt-controlled public school system.

Marilyn sent me this posting from the Wall Street Journal yesterday. It provides a very good, intuitive summary of the evidence that people use both to attack and to defend the achievements of one particular charter school in New York City. Of course since it is written by a person who teaches at a charter school, it may not fully or fairly represent the views of education bureaucrats and teachers' unions, the strongest opponents to charter schools. But it seems to do a pretty decent job.

I'm sure there are more systematic studies of the value-added by charter schools vs public schools. I can imagine cross-sectional and time-series studies that include variables such as family income, family structure, parental education and IQ, and the student's IQ, et cetera, all to try to correct for what otherwise might be thought of as confounding variables that would also help to explain why some students do better than others.  Here's a start with the Wikipaedia entry and the lengthy list of references included there.

A national evaluation by Stanford University found that 83% of charter schools perform the same or worse than public schools (see earlier in this article). If the goal is increased competition, parents can examine the data and avoid the failing charters, while favoring the successful charters, and chartering institutions can decline to continue to support charters with mediocre performance.^[104]

And that is the key to supporting charter schools. If they don't do the job, they don't succeed.

Milk Baths, Russian-Style

Good grief.

And the lesson many people will learn is, "Don't post videos and pictures of yourself doing stupid things to social media," with which I agree, of course; but I hope at least some people will think twice before even doing them.

According to the LA Times, a Russian consumer oversight agency reported that Trade House Cheese, a Siberian dairy plant about 1,600 miles east of Moscow, was temporarily shuttered Friday after it was found some of the employees had bathed in the milk.

The plant was closed by regional authorities for 90 days for an urgent inspection due to complaints after photos and a video of the pasteurized party were uploaded to a Russian social network.

The herd of adult males are seen ringing in the new year, undressed and relaxing in a giant container of milk. There’s also a video of the guys, again in their skivvies, making cheese. Trade House Cheese’s secret ingredient? Russian man-sweat. It gives it a very distinct flavor.

 

The Sad Chronology of Too Many Price-Control Programmes

Elitist interventionists are convinced they can amend the workings of the market to make lives better for at least a targetted segment of the population. They are almost always wrong. From Cafe Hayek,

... from page 268 of Armen Alchian’s profound 1976 essay “Problems of Rising Prices,” as it is reprinted in Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian(2006) (original emphasis):

The so-called shortage of gasoline and energy in the United States [during the 1970s] was precisely and only such a political attack.  It could not have been brought about more cleverly and deceitfully even if the politically ambitious had explicitly written the script.  Inflate the money stock; when prices rise, impose price controls to correct the situation.  These controls lead to shortages which “require” government intervention to assure appropriate use of the limited supply and to allocate it and even to control and nationalize the production of energy.  The powers of political authorities are increased; the open society is suppressed.

Brilliant. And it should be a fair warning for today and the future.