Likelihood of Success

You’ve got yours. Where’s mine?

Posted by David M. Nieporent on March 9, 2007

I’m glad to see Ron has picked a candidate to support already; as for me, the fact that they’re making us discuss this issue two years before the election, a year before the first primaries, is enough to make we want to shoot all of them. (Note to Secret Service: Not a Threat. Just Hyperbole. I would never shoot anyone. Except a terrorist. Or a Yankee fan. (Oops. Rudy’s a Yankee fan, right? And so’s Hillary, supposedly, right? Okay, scratch that last.))

In any case, this is a rather depressing election for those of us on the libertarian end of the spectrum. Yes, there’s Ron Paul. Who has as much chance of getting elected as RuPaul does. Plus, he’s too isolationist for my tastes. Putting him aside, what’s left? As many commentators have noted, George Bush and the Tom Delay Congress have essentially destroyed the conservative-libertarian alliance, but the idea of “liberaltarians” is a joke; even when people like Markos Moulitsas were trying to make a case for a Democratic libertarian alliance, they couldn’t do it. (At least Republicans talk a good game, even if their follow-through is lousy to nonexistent.)

A candidate with a chance to win who believes in limited government? Where is the next Ronald Reagan, anyway? Sadly, I have two years to ponder this question. Makes me almost wish Anna Nicole Smith had some more children of disputed parentage.

Posted in Politics and Poker | 10 Comments »

It worked before it didn’t work

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 8, 2007

William Saletan explains that despite the spin, a recent study demonstrates that the Atkins Diet really does work.

What was the spin? That no one stays on it.

Saletan’s right: Okay, so it works until you go off it. You can’t blame the diet for that. Now, saying it works is not the same as saying, “Go ahead and do it.” Because the latter is an overall recommendation that includes a prediction of success… and….

The likelihood of success on Atkins is, I would say, not high. Because everyone I know who has ever been on it has lost a lot of weight — a lot. And gained it back. A lot more. They’ve done nothing to learn how to eat less which is, let’s face it, what it’s really all about, long-term. And now they’re not only fat, or fatter, they’re mean. But a jolly mean.

So yes, Atkins works. Until it doesn’t.

Posted in Sisyphus | 4 Comments »

See it here, get it over with

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 8, 2007

I like Rudy, always have. I think he saved New York City and I’d volunteer for his campaign if there were any way to do that besides volunteering to write him a check. (I guess there’s no such thing as volunteers any more — except volunteering to get people to volunteer to write a check.)

Of course his family history is a problem. I didn’t say I liked him as a son-in-law. Just as President.

Well, here’s the first of what will be many You Tube specials digging into Rudy’s political marketing past. This one smarts a little, but we may as well get it over with:

As Gawker says, “They came up with this ad (entitled “Gentle”) which featured then-wife Donna Hanover praising her husaband’s family values. As it turned out, he had so much love for family that he went and got a whole other one.” Okay, okay. It’s a strike against him. Are they shooting their wad too early? Probably. May as well help, then.

Posted in Politics and Poker | Leave a Comment »

Michael Godwin, call your office

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 8, 2007

Reuters:

The mayor of a small town in Germany on Thursday called on Google Earth to delete a reference to a nearby “Mount Hitler” from its geographic image service, saying it was misleading.

Andreas Wiedemann, mayor of Bad Toelz, south of Munich, said the peak near the Bavarian town had been known as Mount Hitler for a short time during the Third Reich but had been given back its original name of Heigelkopf after World War Two.

Yes, “Heigel Head” is a much better name than Mount Hitler, unless you want to attract a certain crowd. Considering that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a member of that crowd, however, I just wonder how this cuts.

Posted in Jocularity | Leave a Comment »

In vino, veritas

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 8, 2007

A fetchingly earnest explanation — in late-filed papers — for missing a legal filing deadline, complete with emoticon and allusions to excess imbibing. And it worked, too. I wouldn’t try that in New York, though.

Posted in Jocularity, Lex scripta | Leave a Comment »

Lose-lose situation

Posted by David M. Nieporent on March 8, 2007

So, with the Scooter Libby verdict in, everyone is talking about it as a blow to Bush. But from a broader perspective, were there any winners in this case? Let’s break it down:

Scooter Libby is obviously the big loser. Even if he does get a pardon from Bush. He’s no Ollie North; he’s not going to be able to parlay this prosecution into a prominent public career.
In the narrow view, Patrick Fitzgerald secured a conviction on 4 of 5 charges, which was a success. But the only person he convicted was Scooter Libby — hardly what everyone was expecting when this non-scandal began — and he convicted him only for perjury, not for the underlying leaking offense. What he mainly succeeded in doing is demonstrating once again that ‘special prosecutors’ are a really bad concept.
For those same reasons (the identity of the defendant and the nature of the charge), it’s anti-climactic for Democrats, who were hoping this would bring down the administration, or at least a big name like Karl Rove or Dick Cheney. Nope.
Ditto for Joseph Wilson, who famously ranted that he wanted Karl Rove “frog marched out of the White House in handcuffs,” and his wife, Valerie Plame, about whom all we proved is that she really wasn’t as important as her supporters had portrayed her as being.
The media crying for the investigation — I’m looking at you, Mr. New York Times — ended up getting several reporters in trouble, weakening the reporter-source non-privilege, and still not getting the big game that they wanted.
Since Libby was the only one convicted, and only for perjury, it’s not a big blow to the administration — but it’s not exactly a shining moment, either.
For the same reason, it’s hardly good for Republicans, generally.

Did I leave anyone out? (Some blogger, maybe?) I guess I’m trying to draw some broader lessons from this case, because as a purely legal matter, it turned out to be pretty darn trivial. I don’t subscribe to the view — I didn’t when Bill Clinton was in trouble, and I don’t now — that it’s no big deal to obstruct justice just because the underlying conduct wasn’t criminal. Whether the underlying conduct is criminal something which has to be determined after the fact, not something for witnesses or defendants to unilaterally decide. At the same time, if there was no crime, then the obstruction becomes mostly a technical violation — something we need to punish, but not something we need to dwell upon.

I mean, ultimately, what do we have? Scooter Libby either honestly forgetting when he told something to Matt Cooper and Tim Russert, or lying about it. Something it was legal for him to tell them. Whoopee. I miss the days when we had really important legal issues to discuss, like whether John Kerry deserved his medals from 30 years ago or whether George Bush was AWOL at the time.

Posted in Lex scripta, Politics and Poker | 11 Comments »

Oil’s well

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 7, 2007

TigerHawk is impressed that even the New York Times admits that the oft-repeated, largely political trope that “oil production has already peaked” is certainly baloney. Tim Blair calls its adherents “abundance denialists” (cleverly paralleling Ellen Goodman).

All you had to do was read anything by Julian Simon back when we were in college to know what rubbish all the “we’re running out! we’re running out” business is. It was guys like Simon who inspired me to major in economics — a discipline founded on dismally mistaken premises about scarcity, but which overcame its humble beginnings and became remarkably good at modeling, understanding and predicting how stuff we need comes to the market and why.

But TigerHawk and Blair are on the money about the cultural point: When even the Times writes the obituary of an exercise in sloppy liberal economics, that well has for sure run dry.

Posted in Gelt, Medialites | 3 Comments »

I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man and so is Mullah

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 7, 2007

A prominent Taliban cross-dresser got picked up. By NATO, that is:

Mullah Mahmood, who is accused of helping the Taliban detonate suicide bombs, was caught Tuesday in Kandahar province while wearing [a burqa,] the all-encompassing Islamic veil worn here by women, NATO said.

Posted in Jocularity, Orient | 11 Comments »

Memory hole

Posted by Ron Coleman on March 7, 2007

I wrote last month about the opening of the definitive archive of the Holocaust in Germany, called the International Tracing Service, which was featured in this extraordinary report on 60 Minutes. That segment said that the archive was finally, after years of being — for no particularly good reason — closed to the public, going to be opened. But Anne Applebaum, writing in Slate, says that “although commission members are meeting in Holland this week, supposedly to make final arrangements, it’s still far from clear that they will finish the process soon.” She’s naturally upset about that, and rightly so.

There is sense in this world, even when the Hand of God is not so evident, as Jews were reminded last Sunday in celebrating the holiday of Purim. The Book of Esther commemorates that Hidden Hand, describing how a seemingly unconnected series of events and “coincidences” in ancient Persia resulted in salvation of the Jews from yet another plot to destroy them all. To the Jews it is elementary that, through all the Purims of history, Providence directs the events. Sometimes we need the perspective of many years to understand why awful things are perpetrated in this world.

So once again, in Persia — not ancient Persia, but one which resists modernity with a vengeance — awful events, such as the threat by the national leadership to annihilate the Jews of the region, the staging of a neo-Nazi “Holocaust Conference,” and a bizarre obsession with The Jews — may perhaps act as something of an historical spur to the urgent need to unlock the archives. The purpose is not to bask in Holocaustism (one of the worst religion-replacements Western Jews have yet invented) but to take the cap off the memory hole so truth and horror may be seen, and learned from. If learning is still at all possible.