Until now, I've purposely avoided blogging about l'affaire Plame, preferring to reserve judgment until I had more facts and less speculation with which to work. However, a disturbing new trend has emerged that has me scurrying to the keys to send out a heartfelt plea to the blogosphere: certain bloggers have been referring to the matter as leakgate, or Plamegate. People, the usage of the suffix -gate to denote a scandal is just so twenthieth century. Please, please, can we leave it there?

Please?

Tapped has now agreed to give bylines to its posts. This is a relief for those of us who just haven't been able to wade through the Tapped posts to find the gems by Matthew Yglesias. As a reward, Tapped is now going on the blogroll.

Today's the day of the Louisiana gubernatorial primary -- the top two vote-getters will face off in a few weeks. Don't forget to vote for Bobby Jindal. The Washington Post has a nice profile that's significantly better than the AP one earlier this week.

UPDATE:
Bobby Jindal took 32.6% of the vote (as of 11:30pm last night). He'll face Lt. Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat, who took 17.5%. Blanco said:

"This is a new day for Louisiana. You have a Cajun woman against an Asian man," she said. "This really speaks that Louisiana is really ready for a major change."

Reader "Armature" writes in, in reply to my post on "Throwing Your Vote Away":

Sure, and the chance that you'll bankrupt any big store by shoplifting is pretty much 0.000% too. The degree to which you personally will affect their profit margins probably rounds down to 0.000% as well. I take it from Will's position that he shoplifts whenever he thinks he can get away with it, because it makes so little practical difference.

Society depends on people to behave "irrationally" for the public good, because it's simply not possible to set up social incentives that comprehensively align every individual's self-interest with society's self-interest at all times. The voting paradox is merely one instance of this principle. If everybody ignored the "right thing" and did whatever pleased them at every turn, so long as they could get away with it, then society would fall apart.

Therefore, voting presents you with the following moral choice: you can free-ride on the good behavior of others, or you can contribute...

You can say that it makes you feel better --- voting for hedonistic purposes --- but that merely begs the question of why such an exercise in futility gives you pleasure. Why not stay home and watch TV?

Incidentally if we had approval voting, instead of our present system, you'd be able to tick off Libertarian and whatever else you felt like ticking off as well. To some extent the conflict between expressive and instrumental voting is an artifact of our voting system.

Helpful reader Beth Plocharczyk calls us "the venerable Crescat Sententia." Are we "venerable?"

Dictionary.com defines "venerable" as: "Commanding respect by virtue of age, dignity, character, or position." Well, the blog isn't particular aged (birthed less than a year ago-- well after blogs were a fad among the technorati). Nor is its position that exalted-- sure we're blogrolled on many of the blogs we greatly respect, but without a permalink from Volokh or Drezner, we can't really be "venerable," can we? That leaves character and dignity, two qualities that I'm not objective enough to assess. You be the judge. In any case, many thanks to Ms. Plocharczyk for the (possibly undeserved) ccompliment.

From Michael Ondaatje's The Cinnamon Peeler: Collected Poems, here is

Midnight dinner at the Vesta Launch

Here there is nothing
I have taken from you
so I begin with memory
as old songs do

in this cafe
against the night

in this villa refrain
where we collect the fragment
no longer near us
to make ourselves whole

your bright eyes
in a greek bar, the way
you wear your hat

*

I have always
been afflicted
by angular
small breasted
women
from the mid-west

knew this was true
the minute I met you

I'm blogging from a rather tiny internet cafe so I don't have time to read very many other blogs at the moment . . .

But I just thought I'd say that I'm here, that I'll be blogging sooner or later, although it seems my co-bloggers are keeping you in very capable hands. [I have an ethernet port in my room but there are a number of hoops to be jumped through. At the moment I don't have an Id card, which is necessary to get into the room with the computer guy. I also don't have a working phone because the one I have is in French, and needs to be unlocked by a fellow on Mill Road. I don't have his address but I have his phone number. But of couse, I don't have a working phone because . . . Anyway. These obstacles hopefully won't be insurmountable.]

The Blue Boar Court, my new home for the year, seems to have been designed with a malicious antipathy to the handicapped. Doorways and hallways are un-Americanly narrow, unnecessary steps, cavalades, and walks have been tossed about all over the place, and the automatic lights in the stairways are quite slow-- so you can easily see where you've been if not where you're going. The place is also a little deserted (only some grad students and a handful of internationals have moved in yet). Oh, and does anybody else think it's odd that my floor (like the other floors in my area, I believe) has one shower, one bath, and two kitchens? I'm not quite sure what this says about the students here. [Who uses communal bathtubs anyway? And I should add that by kitchen I mean a room with two hotplates, a small refrigerator, a sink, and (sometimes) a microwave.]

But enough about me. J.M.Coetzee has won Chicago another Nobel. I'm happy about this because I like it when Chicago wins things, and we haven't had a Lit Nobel in a while (wasn't Saul Bellow the last?). On the other hand, I'm a little sad about it because my major wishes Nobelwise include a literature Nobel for Sir Tom Stoppard, and every time a West-worlder wins one I worry it sort of uses up a bit more of our quota. [I'm also waiting for what seems like Steven Levitt's inevitable econ Nobel. Tyler Cowen once had a prize predicting it for Judge Richard Posner. That would be cool too. And maybe Richard Thaler while they're at it. The fact that all three of these people are also at Chicago is only mostly a coincidence.]

Oh, and one last linguistic observation in what is now a meandering entry. I was a little taken-aback by how readily perfectly normal people in polite company use the phrase "cock-up" (which appears to be the official term of art for what's happened to my email account and student id card) in ways that Americans wouldn't dare use our equivalent.

The armchair economist, Steven Landsburg, notes that "[i]n the United States, the parents of a girl are nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: The parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys." Although he scratches out several ideas for why this is the case -- boys handle divorce worse, boys improve the quality of family life more, boys can propagate the name -- in the end he declines to speculate why. He simply notes that this is what the numbers show, and that while it's a strong correlation in the US, it's even stronger elsewhere, places like China, Kenya and Vietnam.

Three daughters is so bad? Whoops... it's a bit late to change this, but I have two sisters, no brothers (also parents who passed their 25th anniversary a few year back). I didn't realized we three were such bad karma.

But perhaps I should have read my histories better. After all, the destructions three daughters can wreck on family certainly are well-documented. Although in this particular profile they did not manage to end their own parents' marriage (the mother was deceased when the study began), two fight over the same lover, concoct plans to kill a brother-in-law, start a war across the countryside, drive their father out of his own home and in madness into the wilderness, and set a course of events that lead to the third daughter's death. That never happened between brothers, did it?

Yup, it's happened -- U Chicago just won itself another Nobel Laureate (although that sounds like aggressive hiring practices, try...). J.M. Coetzee of the Committee on Social Thought is the 2003 Nobel Laureate for Literature. [I suppose I shouldn't say that I didn't really enjoy his Foe].

The press release is here and below:

UPDATE: Jacob Levy kindly emails to point out an error in the press release -- Peter Carey is also a two-time Booker Prize winner. He won it in 1988 for Oscar and Lucinda and in 2001 for The True History of the Kelly Gang (for superb use of "adjectival", no doubt), both of which I highly recommend.

John M. Coetzee, Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, has received the 2003 Nobel Memorial Prize in Literature. He was cited for his work which "in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider." He has taught at Chicago since 1996 and been a professor here since 2001.

A scholar of literature who has written on the language, ethics and politics of figures ranging from Erasmus to Tolstoy and Kafka, Coetzee is best known as the only writer to have twice won the Booker prize, Britain's highest honor for fiction. Both his fiction and nonfiction have provided insights into the problems of violence, censorship, and how people treat those different from themselves. Among Coetzee's academic writings are Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship, The Lives of Animals, and White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa. Among his recent literary writings are Disgrace and Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II.

Educated at the University of Cape Town, where he earned B.A.s with honors in English (1960) and Mathematics (1961), Coetzee was awarded an M.A. in English there in 1963. After travel to Britain, he completed Ph.D. work in English at the University of Texas, Austin in 1969. Coetzee has taught at the State University of New York and the University of Cape Town, as well as Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Coetzee has also been awarded the Jerusalem Prize, the Commonwealth Literary Award, and the rank of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in the Royal Society of Literature.

We currently do not expect Coetzee to be available for interviews but have arranged for colleagues to speak about him. Please contact Bill Harms or Seth Sanders for information.

Volokh Conspiracy's David Bernstein today attacks the "left-wing bias" in the publishing industry, which he ran across when seeking a publisher for his You Can't Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Anti-Discrimination Law. He does not name the press from which he recieved the posted rejection letter ("kill", as it would be called in-house), so it's not clear whether his "major publishing house" was academic or for-profit. While the kill cites politics as a significicant reason to decline publication, it would be quite irresponsible for a major publisher to refuse to acquire non-liberal titles. [I suppose at this point I should reveal that for the past two years, I had a job at the University of Chicago Press, working as a student assistant to the acquisitions editor for social sciences. Take from that what you may.]

Conservative political theory sells better than liberal political theory.
This is of no small concern to academic presses especially, which have fallen on hard times.

[I'm afraid that I have no numbers on this for Tyler Cowen.] U Chicago P is the only press in the nation that's expected to actually make a profit (the others are bankrolled by their university and try not to lose to much money). As Jacob Levy noted a while back, "The business of university publishing had entered into dangerous arithmetic. Production grew almost four times faster than the market. The total output of all university presses in 2000 was 31 million books" (from The Chronicle of Higher Ed). Conservative poli theory sells better because the field is less fractured. Liberal poli theory is inherently pluralistic, and the liberal who writes from the point of view of race probably won't be bought by the one who writes from the p.o.v. of gender, or of class. The larger the print run, the lower the cover price, the more will likely be sold; a conservative title implies a larger audience.

Presses seek not to be identified with a certain ideological slant (or even their affiliated university).
Unlike think-tank presses (ie, Cato), university presses in general seek to appear detached from any one perspective; to be tied to one school of thought can lead to the impression that staunch ideology can overcome flaws in the book (which the other side will quickly point out anyway). Presses prefer to be known for their series (content-, not viewpoint-discrimination). LSU Press has Voices of the South without Voices of the Yankees; U Illinois P has International Nietzsche without Wittgenstein or Kant; and Chicago publishes a lot in political science in general but just currently doesn't do much in comparative democritization. Asking what a press's slant is often a question that makes about as much sense as looking for legislative intent. Chicago publishes 15 books by Leo Strauss and several more on him. But there's liberal titles on the same list, such as Judith Sklar's Political Thought and Political Thinkers and Stephen Holmes's Passions and Constraint. I'd like to be at the dinner table conversation when all the authors on that list meet.

The other bias university presses try to avoid is that of appearing too insular. No, being a prof at Chicago doesn't mean that you can get your book published here; it does mean don't get the standard kurt rejection letter. Legal studies probably has the highest representation by our own faculty. That's not much of a problem, though -- they're good, and the school's conservative for a law school (ie, has more than one side to its political spectrum), so it avoids the taint of having one ideology.

All that being said, I am deeply curious to know which unnamed publishers declined the Conspiracy members, and in such detail.

Ampersand has been running a series of posts devoted to proving that the gender gap in wages is currently a Serious Problem. I was really going to let this one slide until I came to this part of today's entry:

This method of looking only at young women's wages is hopelessly flawed. Discrimination in the workforce is usually is a matter of "cumulative causation." Among other things, this means that the effects of discrimination add up over a lifetime. So, for example, losing a single job offer or promotion usually won't make a big difference; but dozens of such small losses over the course of women's careers eventually add up to a big wage gap.

This is important, because it means we should expect the pay gap between men and women at the start of their careers to be small. The effects of discrimination build up gradually over time, and only becomes sizable once women have been in the job market long enough for the impacts of dozens of individual instances of discrimination to add up. So when Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba look only at the pay gap among young workers, they've selected workers who have not yet been in the workforce long enough to have experienced the worse of the pay gap.

For an example of what I mean, consider the U.S. government's wage gap figures. Usually we see these presented for everyone in the labor force over the age of 16, but the numbers are also available broken down by age. What we find is that the wage gap gets larger as women get older - just as the theory of cumulative discrimination would predict. When we look only at workers age 16 to 24, the wage gap is 93% (that is, women are paid 93% of what men are paid, on average). But when we look at workers ages 45 to 54, the wage gap is 70%.

I absolutely do not doubt that workplace discrimination against women was at one point a major problem in this country. My mother has stories to share from her working days that absolutely make my blood boil. But I can happily report that I, in the four years in which I have held down various jobs, have yet to witness a single instance of workplace gender discrimination.

Obviously, this sort of anectodal evidence doesn't prove anything, but it does suggest a different interpretation for the numbers Ampersand cited. For women of my mother's generation, who entered the workplace at the dawn of the Sexual Revolution, gender discrimination was a real problem. But for women of my generation, a generation that grew up with the belief that women and men are equally capable of success in the most all workplaces, institutionalized gender discriminators are a dying breed. The good old boys have all gone gray and paunchy, and are planning to retire so they can spend more time with their grandchildren. The lunatic rightwing fringe may still think that we women should be home cleaning their house and cooking their supper, but they know that voicing this opinion will only earn them eye rolls and cold shoulders.

So yes, there is still a gender gap in wages. It should surprise no one that deeply entrenched social beliefs regarding proper gender roles did not simply evaporate overnight in the wake of an act of Congress. But the vast difference between the patronization and discrimination my mother faces, and the respect and encouragement I have encountered suggest that change is possible, and that it is occurring--slowly, to be sure--but still occurring. And if things continue as the have, well, I pity the men born thirty years from now.

My new laptop arrived today (!!!) and the instruction manual included the following paragraph:

California Residents/ WARNING: Handling the cord on this product, or cords associated with accessories sold with this product, will expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause birth defects and other reproductive harm. Wash your hands after handling the cord.

Because, of course, lead is only poisonous to California residents.

Well, I'm off now, and will be back posting. . . I'm not sure when. Many reports to come, I'm sure.

Lawrence Solum has an outstanding piece here on copynorms, and why peer-to-peer filesharing is different than web-based filesharing. Read it. For those too lazy to click the link, his argument is basically that while copynorms condemn public, for-profit distribution, they tolerate private, noncommercial exchanges--handing a mix tape to a friend, say. And most crucially, the public perceives p2p sharing as a private act, in a way that, say, putting 1000 songs on a web server just isn't. His advice to the RIAA, therefore, is to start a PR campaign that works this distinction--"Share with your friends, but don't just hand out CDs to strangers." Here's my take:

This strategy might have some chance of success. Afterall, p2p services depend, not on users, but on servers--users who are willing to share. I would guess, offhand, that 90% of p2p traffic is generated by the most generous 5% of servers. Targeting these people directly--making them think about whether what they're doing is equivalent to handing out thousands of CDs in the middle of the street, and whether that's really okay--may well make an impact.

But here's the problem. Maybe people think p2p is closer in spirit to handing your friend a mix tape than it is to dropping thousands of burned CDs in Times Square because, along the dimensions that matter most to the sharers, it is. Let's play with the analogy a bit. Rather than handing a mix tape to a friend, let's consider the case of a Deadhead who is on a bootleg-exchange list, where fans trade bootlegs with each other by mail. These people haven't met each other, and likely never will. They're not "friends" in any meaningful sense of the word. But they're both Deadheads, and this connection is enough, in their minds at least, to make it a personal act.

This phenomenon poses a bit of a problem for Solum's solution. Because the pyschology, if not the consequence, of p2p sharing is closer to the bootleg-exchange than it is to blanketing the streets with Ja Rule CDs. When you share a file on Kazaa and someone downloads it, you're participating in a ritual of camraderie in the same way that Deadheads, mailing their bootleg tapes, are affirming their status as Deadheads and their connection to all fellow Deadheads. It's your hard drive, it's you, the downloader is getting it from, not some web server in Toledo. This makes it personal, no matter how many times you end up uploading that Britney song to nameless users across the globe.

Given this, I'm ultimately skeptical of whether focusing on the public/private distinction will work. Especially among the most generous uploaders--people who, ceteris paribus, are the most likely to define themselves by the music they enjoy (and thus see similarity in tastes as representing a genuine sense of shared identity)--I suspect the belief that p2p is private along the dimensions that matter morally may hold.

My recent post on Throwing Your Vote away has attracted a lot of commentary, most of it in disagreement (or of the form, "Well, yes, but . . ."). Remember, I said:

Voting Libertarian in last election (or next election) is no more throwing your vote away than voting Democrat or Republican would have been. This is because the election did not come down to one vote (and, given the nature of the recount, may not have come down to any votes at all). The statistical chance of any single vote having an outcome on the presidential election is 0.000%. It simply doesn't matter.

And this is highly liberating for us Libertarian types, because people do vote, so it means that voting is expressive activity rather than instrumental activity. That is, we vote for Candidate A over Candidate B (or abstain altogether) because we feel like it, not because we have marshalled some careful analysis of whose positions are more likely to make the world a better place.

Half the Sins of Mankind simply misses the point. She writes:

we ain't rational individuals. We're human beings, social creatures who want to Do Our Duty and also Let Those Bastards Know What We Think of Them. We think our voting is important.

And in the aggregate, we are right. The individual vote doesn't matter, until the day when only five people show up to vote. The more of us who are willing to vote, the less our individual votes matter.

Arguably that's a defensible attitude for any particular person to take. However beware the salami swindle. It's not a defensible bit of advice for any particular public advocate such as yourself to give, because the probability of it being an unnecessarily self-fulfilling prophecy is the above number times the size of the audience, which is by no means automatically trivial.

This is technically true, but I don't think the reasoning is correct. While individually no one can sway an election by voting, the same is not true if one considers these individuals as a group. Consider the last election, when Republican John Thune lost by 500 or so votes to Democrat Tim Johnson, with the Libertarian candidate getting many more votes than the difference. Even though the Libertarian dropped out of the race to endorse Thune days before the election, many still voted for the Libertarian. While it is true that each of these Libertarian voters individually would not have made a difference, if a small proportion of these voters had voted for the Republican, he definitely would have won. Or consider the more famous case: Florida. Again, the third-party vote (this case the Greens) was much bigger than the difference between the winner and the runner-up. Gore only needed a little more than 1% of the Greens to switch their vote to win.

So the thing to do for third-party supporters might be: vote for the third-party candidate only when the election is not close.

Actually, the above suggests a strategy of speaking in public as if you were a swing voter who could be persuaded by the right policies in order to sway the candidates towards ones you favor, while secretly voting for whoever you damn well please. Against that you would would have to weigh the cost to your favorite party (assuming you have one) in apparent legitimacy and basking in the association of the like-minded (which seems to me to be one of the chief motivators for political activity)

...even in Florida it didn't come down to a single vote, and in a national election it never will. (In fact, if it did, it would be swamped by error. One of the points that I don't think has ever been emphasized enough in the discussion of Florida is that when the result is within the margin of error there is no determinate answer.)

So, I just want to echo Will's sentiments on the voting issue. As a Green, I'm constantly told about how voting for a third party is a waste of a vote. I disagree completely, even in Presidential elections.

In Maine, party status was, until recently, defined by whether or not a party had received 5% of the vote in the last 'most important election' (presidential or gubernatorial). Thus, the Maine Greens achieved state-level ballot access by reaching the 5% plateau for Governor in 1994 when Jonathan Carter won 7%. However, the Maine Greens lost their state-level access when Nader failed to reach 5% in his Presidential bid in 1996.

These sorts of requirements are unfortunate, but they do exist. Giving support to third-parties, even at the highest levels, can have a great impact. Due to the fact that ballot access and federal funds (perhaps some state funding) are tied to electoral results, you're more likely to impact the political environment in your state by voting for a third-party candidate.

As it happens, the practice of requiring presidential returns for state-level ballot access has been heard by certain district courts. Maine Greens challenged the law in '99, and the Libertarians challenged North Carolina's similar law (with the higher threshold of 10% in each election). Both challenges failed.

The Libertarians tried to appeal to a higher authority, but no dice:

In North Carolina, the state party received a stunning brush-off in late March from the nation's highest court.

Filed in late January, the appeal of the case of McLaughlin vs. N.C. Election Board argued that North Carolina's requirement that a party must poll 10 percent for governor or president to stay on the ballot is unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

"It's just bizarre that you've asked them 15 times [to review a lower court ballot access decision] and they've never taken you," said Ballot Access News publisher Richard Winger.

Incidentally, Maine's law was eventually altered. Party status is now reevaluated on a 4 year cycle. A party must receive 5% in a gubernatorial or a presidential race. Word is the Democrats were scared after their gubernatorial candidate only polled 50,000 votes (12%) in 1998 against the ever popular Angus King.

Tyler Cowen has pointed out an ongoing dispute over whether or not a choreographer employed by a foundation holds the copyright to his or her works. He concludes:

The dilemma again shows how far copyright law is behind the times. An economic approach would suggest rewarding the rights to the parties whose contributions create the most value at the margin. If dance geniuses are especially scarce, and responsive to monetary incentives, this would argue for granting the rights to the dance creator.

First off, one of the important points both Tyler and the New York Times article he links to miss is that the main reason there is not an established method for handling dance copyrights is that until the advent of film (a scant century ago) there was no way, other than the memories of the choreographer and dancers, to preserve a choreographic work. (Dance does have several competing systems of notation, but they are all extremely cumbersome, known only to a few specialists, and were not standardized until the twentieth century.) Seventy-five years ago, a work could not be restaged without the cooperation of either the choreographer or one of the original dancers to teach the work to a new company. Major works, such as Nijinksy's choreography for The Rite of Spring (the piece whose premiere sparked a riot), were lost to posterity when disagreements between choreographers and benefactors prevented them from being restaged.

Even now, reconstructing a dance from film is a dicey, frustrating business. It isn't enough simply to film the work from start to finish. A camera far enough away to capture the patterns of an ensemble piece will be too far to capture the subtleties of the footwork, and the jumping back and forth between views to which most films resorts often creates gaps in which it is impossible to decipher any movement. Such resconstructions can be done, but they require the efforts of a choreographer talented in his or her own right who can weave the main ideas the film captures into a seamless work. The result is like the original in the way that the recent ensemble cover of "Lady Marmelade" is like the original rather than the way the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's performance of Beethoven's Fifth is like that of the New York Philharmonic.

Furthermore, the history of dance suggests that choreographic geniuses are not the group most in need of incentives. If the world of classical music were like the world of classical ballet, performances of Beethoven's fifth would feature generally similar versions of the famous first movement, but the less distinctive second, third, and fourth would very wildly, with each orchestra having their preferred version, and violinists would throw their own special virtuosic tricks into the middle of Tchaikovsky's violin concerto. Furthermore, no one would complain about this because each orchestra would have their own peculiar combination of instruments to which the work would need to be adapted, and everyone would recognize that while the great composers certainly had some catchy tunes, most of what they produced was hack work that simply gave musicians a chance to play their instruments.

In short, the individuality of the human body as an instrument, the difficulties involved in capturing three-dimension movement through space adequately in any two-dimensional format, and the way in which dance works are largely passed down dancer to dancer all seem to me to present strong limits to the protability of any work, even in the era of digital video. This means that the creator of the work already has a strong degree of protection--it is discouragingly difficult even with no copyright protection--to present his or her work without consent. Moreover, the best ballet performances are not necessarily generated when a company sticks to the strict vision of a choreographic auteur, but when one talented choreographyer, like a talented jazz musician, riffs off the themes of another in a way that particularly suits the strengths of the company performing.

Thanks to all who have recognized the new site. You're too numerous to recount here, but all quite appreciated. Links from The Volokh Conspiracy and Daniel Drezner have pushed things over the top (oh if we could only get permalinks from them) to make today our highest-traffic day ever. (Incidentally, if you want to go get your 51 closest friends to push us up over for 1000 for the day, I'd be tickled pink.)

Now if only we could attract this much attention to a post of substance.

UPDATE: We've hit 1000 for the day.

An email from reader Beth Plocharczyk about why drinking lots of milk makes you throw up:

Your small intestine produces an enzyme called lactase to digest the sugar in milk, lactose. Lactase production is greatest during infancy when the majority of nutrition comes from a mother's milk. Most mammals stop producing lactase after infancy. However, you and most of your white friends can drink milk long after infancy because lactase production persists in humans descended from dairying cultures. This is the case because way back when in Europe, people discovered that cow milk is an excellent source of nutrition and those whose genes by some fluke didn't quit producing lactase after infancy had a survival advantage compared to the regular folk who couldn't digest bovine nectar. Therefore, people who could digest milk lived to propagate their milk-loving genes and those couldn't, didn't. This is why most Asian and African descended people cannot drink milk. As for your question, your body can only produce so much of the enzyme lactase. Think of it as a puzzle piece: lactase connects to the sugar lactose converting the lactose into something your body can digest. If all your lactase is bound up in lactose (usually once you hit glass two or three in a sitting), the rest of the lactose you chug just sits in your large intestine and ferments. Byproducts of fermentation are gas and acids, which can be painful and irritating to your bowels and can cause diarrhea. To answer the second part of your question, it doesn't matter whether you chug skim, 1%, 2%, or whole: fat content is not related to lactose content, as lactose is a sugar. Hope this helps and happy chugging.

I've recently heard a comment to the tune that Libertarians who vote for a Libertarian presidential candidate are "throwing their vote away," or hurting the major party that they consider to be the lesser evil. This isn't so.

Voting Libertarian in last election (or next election) is no more throwing your vote away than voting Democrat or Republican would have been. This is because the election did not come down to one vote (and, given the nature of the recount, may not have come down to any votes at all). The statistical chance of any single vote having an outcome on the presidential election is 0.000%. It simply doesn't matter.

And this is highly liberating for us Libertarian types, because people do vote, so it means that voting is expressive activity rather than instrumental activity. That is, we vote for Candidate A over Candidate B (or abstain altogether) because we feel like it, not because we have marshalled some careful analysis of whose positions are more likely to make the world a better place.

[Of course, for a lot of us the latter strongly influences the former, but not always. For example, I would vote for any even vaguely reasonable candidate who publicly announced that his or her favorite book was Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or who promised to pick Sir Tom Stoppard as poet laureate (if he's even eligible). Similarly, there are certain vices that could induce me to never vote for a particular person, no matter what. We vote because it makes us feel good to do so, not because we have any chance of reshaping the country by it.]

(Note, of course, that this analysis doesn't apply for more active involvement, like party volunteering or running for elected office. One person can make a difference (and probably has) in those areas. It's just the act of the presidential vote which is totally ineffectual.)

UPDATE: Many more comments and responses.

Last week, Steve Dunn at Begging to Differ made a case (using a dubious anatomical metaphor) against political mavericks:

I am frequently confronted with a person who claims to be neither liberal nor conservative. While I understand the reluctance to take on a label that does not fit, I think the American political class divides itself into two large factions loosely representing "left" and "right." Regardless of the labels you prefer, when push comes to shove, most of us take a side. This is as it should be. As Mason said to Dixon, "You gotta draw the line somewhere." You can't just hang there in the middle like a philosophical scrotum.

He writes:

But I am still right. Ultimately in this country you do take a side.

It's all because of our Single Member District Plurality electoral system, or "first past the post" voting. In virtually all American elections, each voter selects one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins... In the USA we chose first past the post, which according to Duverger's Law tends to produce a two-party system. Our incentive is to build "big tent" political parties in this country - because if you don't, you will always always always... every... single... time... lose to a bigger tent....

The practical effect of all this is that in America, two large parties perpetually do battle for the hearts and minds of the centrist voters who tip the scale, ever so slightly, one way or the other. These two parties loosely represent the "left" and the "right" (whatever those arbitrary terms happen to mean at the time) and together they occupy all positions of power. Ultimately, whether we like it or not, every act of political participation matters only insofar as it helps or hurts the two major parties....

Indulge me in this thought experiment...

Think back to late November, 2000. Bush and Gore are arguing about hand counts and hanging chads. Lawsuits are pending. Nothing is decided. One of these men is going to be president, but no one knows which it will be. You had a preference, didn't you? Maybe you didn't vote for either of them, or maybe you didn't vote at all, but you knew who you wanted to win. And in knowing, you made a choice. You may not have been enthusiastic, but you were not neutral. You envisioned an ideal future achieved through incremental gains. Welcome to America.

Okay, so I'd really like to know who came to our site through the google search "jurisprudence 'toy story'."

Now that I've finished (at least temporarily) sprucing up our new digs (and thanks to everyone who sent in their compliments), I promise the return of regular posting. In the meantime, interested parties can read a speech by Tom McClintock that caputures quite succinctly why I think any solution to the California budget crisis must be based primarily on spending cuts rather than tax increases. (Note: this should in no way be construed as an endorsement of McClintock's candidacy for governer.)

Senator Tom McClintock, January 2, 2003

Three numbers tell the entire story of California’s fiscal meltdown: 21, 28 and 36. Understand them and you will have transformed the Byzantine mysteries of the state budget into precise mathematical order.

In the last four years, population and inflation have grown at a combined rate of 21 percent. California general fund revenues have grown 28 percent. General fund spending has grown 36 percent.

The spending lobby insists that California got into its budget mess by irresponsibly slashing car taxes, thus leaving the treasury dangerously vulnerable when the recession struck and state revenues plummeted.

The facts paint a quite different picture. AFTER taxes were cut and AFTER the economic bubble burst, general fund revenues have still outpaced combined population and inflation growth by fully one third during this administration. Obviously, California isn’t suffering a revenue problem.

What it has suffered is a monumental spending problem: growing 36 percent in four years.

Not that we’ve seen a 36 percent increase in highway construction or school construction or water storage or electricity generation or anything else that government is responsible for providing. We’ve paid for it. We just haven’t gotten it.

What we have gotten is a 38 percent increase in state payroll costs, a 38 percent increase in health and welfare spending (even though welfare caseload is down 20 percent), and a 16 percent increase in prison costs (even though the prison population is down 0.6 percent).

In fairness, local government assistance has increased to replace lost VLF revenues (even while local property tax collections have ballooned). Yet even ignoring these subventions, state spending has still streaked nine points ahead of inflation and population.

According to Democratic Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, “If we fired every state employee – I mean every Highway Patrol officer, every UC professor, every parks patrol officer – we would still be more than $6 billion short.”

That’s one way to look at it.

Here’s another: if spending had merely kept pace with combined inflation and population growth, today’s budget would still be a hefty 21 percent bigger than it was four years ago. But instead of an expected $30 billion deficit, we would today have a $5 billion surplus.

Or another: if the current year’s budget was reduced just 9.5 percent across the board starting January 1st and held there for 18 months, the entire deficit would disappear.

That would require deferring some pay raises, postponing some projects, eliminating duplication, (combining the Franchise Tax Board with the Board of Equalization, for example), selling surplus property -- the same sort of things that any family would do in similar circumstances.

But of course, most families wouldn’t have gotten themselves into this fix in the first place. Most families would have told you that if you spend every dime that comes in during the good years, you’re going to be in big trouble in a bad year.

And that’s where California is today. But instead of dealing forthrightly with the problem, California’s officials will raise taxes. We already hear the ransom demand: a dollar of taxes for a dollar of cuts. If that happens, an average California family doing its best to cope with a serious recession will feel its tax bill hiked $1,800 to continue the state’s spending binge.

The next time you hear that California’s fiscal problems were unavoidable, or that it has already cut to the bone, or that it can’t deal with the problem without some “revenue enhancements,” remember how to measure a prodigal state: 21 percent increase in inflation and population; 28 percent increase in revenues; 36 percent increase in spending.

Ronald Reagan often reminded audiences that “facts are stubborn things.” And those are the stubborn facts.

There were rumors about a certain one of my former employers that instead of taking his access pass out of his wallet every day he used to wave his rear end toward the card-reader to pass through. Being reminded of this made me laugh out loud when I read the latest Miss Manners query and reply:

Dear Miss Manners:

Like many office buildings, the one in which I work uses an access-card entry system. I keep my card in my wallet. Often, instead of taking out the wallet to run it by the sensor, I merely swivel my hip slightly to allow the card to be "read."

Is this move considered rude if (1) no one is in the vicinity? (2) I believe no one is seeing this? and (3) I'm only with close colleagues?

Rude? Actually, it sounds exciting. Miss Manners lives in a city with hardly a building standing that doesn't require an access pass or at least a show of identification, and none of them features a folk dance. Would you care to come to Washington, D.C., and teach it to us?

The Associated Press ran a short profile on this blog's favorite candidate in the Louisiana gubernatorial election five days from today. However, they didn't manage to mention that the candidate is the Republican and overall forerunner. Current polls have him at 22%, with no other Republican in the top five (the incumbent, Mike Foster, is Republican). I also wouldn't call him a "hard-right conservati[ve]." But that's the impression given by this, which makes him sound like the dark horse doomed to be a footnote:

Indian American candidate soars
By Adam Nossiter
Baton Rouge, LA
Louisiana goes its own way in politics, veering forward, backward or crawfish-wise.
Now, the state of the populist Longs -- Huey and Earl -- of flamboyant and now jailed Edwin Edwards and of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke is cracking the political mold again.
A son of immigrants from India, a Republican whose given name was Piyush but who calls himself Bobby, is topping polls in the governor's race and astonishing political connoisseurs.
''Louisiana is still a racist state,'' veteran political consultant Raymond Strother said recently, explaining why he thought it unlikely Bobby Jindal could be elected.
That was the conventional wisdom when Jindal, a 32-year-old Rhodes scholar with a reputation as a health care policy whiz kid, left the Bush administration seven months ago to run for governor.
But Jindal's resume, combined with an in-your-face, hard-right conservatism, has neutralized race as an issue.
The Oct. 4 election is an 18-candidate open primary, a free-for-all unique to Louisiana. To win the election, a candidate must draw more than 50 percent of the vote. If no one gets that majority, a runoff election will be held Nov. 15.
Playing well in Louisiana is that this immigrant's son is imbued with a fervent belief in the American dream.
''I'm against all quotas, all set-asides,'' he said at a recent forum. ''America is the greatest. We got ahead by hard work. We shouldn't respond to every problem with a government program.''

This is fascinating stuff:

In a move that could complicate the RIAA's pursuit of peer-to-peer pirates, the American Civil Liberties Union said Monday it had filed court documents accusing the trade association of illegally using thousands of subpoenas to unmask alleged copyright infringers.

The recording industry's subpoenas, filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), violated due process and constitutional rights shielding Internet users' anonymity, the ACLU claims.

It's something between conventional wisdom and urban legend that if you drink a whole lot of milk in a short period of time, you get sick. I know several people who have undergone the "milk challenge" and attempted to drink a gallon of milk in an hour (all of them, incidentally, have failed). Does anybody know why this is so? What is it about milk? Does it matter whether the milk is whole, skim, 2%, or 1% (my intuition is that skim milk is easier to digest than whole)? What other beverages is this true for? Vodka, obviously, but not water. What biological princicple is at work here? I'll post any convincing explanations.

UPDATE: Beth Plocharczyk replies.

So, like Eugene Volokh, I lack the time, and more importantly, the institutional capacity, to get to the bottom of the Valerie Plame affair by myself. Follow Dan Drezner's post for roundups, thoughts, and the like. That said, here are a few thoughts:

1: Robert Novak shouldn't get in trouble for this-- it's important to draw a distinction in situations like this between private actors and public ones. When journalists decide to reveal information they know, that's freedom of the press.

2: But government officials, who contract away some (but not all) of their right to speak freely in exchange for access to official secrets don't have the same sorts of rights, so if any government officials revealed Plame's name to Novak, that's very bad, and should be harshly punished.

3: The consequence of 1 and 2 is that this seems like the right place to use an independent counsel, or some similar mechanism (I don't follow the specifics of what sort of board composed of whom should investigate; it should be independent and bipartisan (ha, shouldn't they all?)). The goal is to be very harsh to the "senior officials" without punishing the journalists.

4: Obviously, this whole scandal is made worse if it's the case that the "senior officials" who did the leaking did so in order to punish Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson. Illegally endangering U.S. intelligence agents out of ignorance or personal spite is one thing, doing so by using them as pawns in a campaign to suppress ideas is even worse.

5: This (#4) is a costly program in the long run, even if the Bush officials get off scot-free. The costs of having a family with its feet in both administrations rises dramatically if one of those administrations is likely to pursue a program of punishment against the families of dissidents.

6: Come to think of it, #4 sounds eerily like the sorts of punishments used in pre-war Iraq.

7: I want to emphasize that I have no idea what is actually the case here. Novak claims that the Bush administration didn't call him-- he called them. We don't know yet who these alleged officials are or what precisely they are supposed to have said to whom, let alone why. An investigation seems appropriate, and maybe some modest jumping-to-conclusions, but I don't want to put a horse in that race myself. I'm glad that large portions of the media think they know enough already to be calling for Karl Rove in an orange jumpsuit. I don't, but I do think it's time for him (and some others) to start answering a lot of questions.

If you're in Hyde Park this year (sigh), be sure you notice that your ability to get downtown has expanded. Firstly, the #6 (formerly called the Jeffery express, now the Jackson Park express), the bus of choice for those in the know, no longer uns south of 79th Street. This doesn't directly affect Hyde Park, but ought to clear up the buses to be able to run more often, or at least more punctually (hah!). Further, (and here's the big news) the #28 Stony Island will also go downtown from now on. Catch both of these wonderful buses at the corner of 57th and Stony Island, right next to my former apartment. [Incidentally, here's the CTA Website].

I've gotten a lot of mail from people who like the look of the new site. This is good, and I'm really glad people like it. But I just wanted to make something clear-- I did approximately none of the work in making the current site look as it did (that is, I spent a lot of time looking at the site and deciding whether or not I liked how it looked). This is all the product of the hard work of my co-blogger, Amy Lamboley. So thanks on her behalf, and do pass your praise on to her.

A post from Jennifer's History and Stuff

What's in a name? A lot, when it's associated with someone who broke your heart. I read something several moons ago somewhere that polled guys on which female name they most associated with heartbreak..."Jennifer" was the winner. Statistically speaking, who woulda thunk it?

My favorite play, Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, prominently features the radio show Desert Island Discs. On DID, guests must pick which 8 albums they'd bring with them on a desert island. In preparation for my upcoming travel, I had to decide what books to take with me. Since books are rather heavy and can also be readily acquired at Trinity, I decided to limit myself to ten (which some say is still too many). Here they are (Incidentally, this isn't at all a reflection of my ten favorites; books were chosen based on a number of criteria, including how hard I thought they'd be to acquire in England, whether I had my own annotations in them, whether I wanted to read them on the airplane, whether I would feel silly buying a second (or third or fourth) copy in England, how bulky they were, how often I re-read them, what they said about me as a person, and so on):
Darlington's Fall, by Brad Leithauser
Hence, by Brad Leithauser
The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber
The Captain's Verses, by Pablo Neruda
Dragons of a Fallen Sun, by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman
The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard
Ada, by Vladimir Nabokov
The Island of the Day Before, by Umberto Eco
The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy and Vice, by Phineas Mollod, Jason Tesauro

I suppose this will be obvious to anybody who cares, but I just thought I'd mention it anyway. I recently received an email from a reader titled: "OK, you hate comments. But why do you avoid XML?" asking why there was no RSS feed on our blog. The simple answer was because I had no idea how to create one. But our new digs and the hard work of my co-blogger have brought XML with them. You'll see the link at the bottom of our sidebar, or here.

Continuing in his role as internal Volokh gadfly, Jacob Levy has a post taking on his co-blogger Juan Non-Volokh. Non-Volokh (who implies, incidentally, that he himself blogs anonymously because he's an untenured faculty member who fears reprisal) writes:

Jacob Levy is quoted in the Brooks piece, suggesting that much of academia is more tolerant than many conservatives might suggest. At some places, such as Chicago, that is clearly true. At others, well . . .

The implication here is a tough one to argue with, since, of course, I am at Chicago. I'm going to argue anyways, not least since I've believed since long before I came to Chicago that the "bias against conservatives in academia" claim is a) overstated and b) self-destructive.

People argued with me. I argued back. That's what we do.

(Link via Howard Bashman) This New Yorker review of the Chicago Manual of Style is a must-read for the grammar- and style- obsessed. And it mentions Indiana University:

There is no such thing as the University of Mississippi Press. It is the University Press of Mississippi (just as Indiana University must never be called the University of Indiana, even though that, in fact, is what it is).

“I think to drink creme de menthe in a pale blue cravat would be the abandonment of everything I stand for.”
“What do you stand for?” asked Moon. . .
“Style, dear boy,” Said the ninth earl. “Style. There is nothing else.”

I suppose this is also the appropriate time to note that my snail-mail address for the upcoming year will be different. I'll be studying in England for a year, and anybody who wants to send me a postcard will earn great appreciation. So I should be reachable at:

Will Baude
Trinity College, Cambridge
CB2 1TQ
United Kingdom

Via Overlawyered (my brief guest home), and The Curmudgeonly Clerk, I see this news on blaming video games for violence. (sigh)

So I thought I'd take this chance to promote (again) Judge Richard Posner's opinion in American Amusement Machine Association v. Teri Kendrick, dealing with Indianapolis's video game ordinance. It's short, sweet, and just a little bit moving (at least for us mushy civil-liberties types). An (extended) excerpt:

The issue in this case is not violence as such, or directly; it is violent images; and here the symmetry with obscenity breaks down. Classic literature and art, and not merely today's popular culture, are saturated with graphic scenes of violence, whether narrated or pictorial. The notion of forbidding not violence itself, but pictures of violence, is a novelty, whereas concern with pictures of graphic sexual conduct is of the essence of the traditional concern with obscenity...
Children have First Amendment rights. This is not merely a matter of pressing the First Amendment to a dryly logical extreme. The murderous fanaticism displayed by young German soldiers in World War II, alumni of the Hitler Jugend, illustrates the danger of allowing government to control the access of children to information and opinion. Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old's right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well- functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.
No doubt the City would concede this point if the question were whether to forbid children to read without the presence of an adult the Odyssey, with its graphic descriptions of Odysseus's grinding out the eye of Polyphemus with a heated, sharpened stake, killing the suitors, and hanging the treacherous maidservants; or The Divine Comedy with its graphic descriptions of the tortures of the damned; or War and Peace with its graphic descriptions of execution by firing squad, death in childbirth, and death from war wounds. Or if the question were whether to ban the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, or the famous horror movies made from the classic novels of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein) and Bram Stoker (Dracula). Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.
Maybe video games are different. They are, after all, interactive. But this point is superficial, in fact erroneous. All literature (here broadly defined to include movies, television, and the other photographic media, and popular as well as highbrow literature) is interactive; the better it is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader's own. Protests from readers caused Dickens to revise Great Expectations to give it a happy ending, and tourists visit sites in Dublin and its environs in which the fictitious events of Ulysses are imagined to have occurred. The cult of Sherlock Holmes is well known...
Self-defense, protection of others, dread of the "undead," fighting against overwhelming odds-- these are all age-old themes of literature, and ones particularly appealing to the young. [The video game] "The House of the Dead" is not distinguished literature. Neither, perhaps, is "The Night of the Living Dead," George A. Romero's famous zombie movie that was doubtless the inspiration for "The House of the Dead." Some games, such as "Dungeons and Dragons," have achieved cult status; although it seems unlikely, some of these games, perhaps including some that are as violent as those in the record, will become cultural icons. We are in the world of kids' popular culture. But it is not lightly to be suppressed.

Yesterday's New York Times contains an interview with a Spam King. If you care about this stuff, read it. The article also contains some interesting suggestions for intelligent Spam reform-- ways to separate out the annoying and harmful and highly costly spam from the stuff that actually has some sort of legitimate purpose. It's refreshing to see somebody recognizing the upsides of Spam without being doctrinaire about it.

Ever since the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year held a spam conference -- which brought together spam recipients, Congress, antispammers and the spammers themselves -- a metaphysical question has emerged: Is there such a thing as good spam versus bad?

So a while back I did a 20 Questions interview with Steve Dillard (fka Feddie) at Southern Appeal. One of my questions to him was about bourbon ("sipping whiskey") and why Jefferson's Reserve was his favorite. This caused my father and me to begin a taste-testing run through a number of bourbons, and now that I have sampled some Jefferson's Reserve myself, I can finally post my own thoughts.

I wouldn't have thought I was going to like the stuff, I have to say, but I was very surprised. Bourbon, incidentally, should always be drunk on the rocks. Take a sip or two before the ice melts much at all. If it's too strong for you (and it might well be) then sip it as the ice melts, and notice the changes in flavor-- by the time you're done you may think you're having a different drink. So I've now tried two different Maker's Marks, Bookers, Blanton's, Wild Turkey, Jack Daniels, Woodford Reserve, Knob Creek, and Jefferson's Reserve.

Now, all of these had their own various appeals, but in my opinion, the ones worth coming back to were the Maker's Mark, the Bookers, the Blanton's, and the Jefferson's Reserve. I still don't have very well-thought-out thoughts about the last of these, as I only had it last night. The other three form a sort of continuum. Bookers is perhaps 50% more alcoholic than the others (something like 120 proof instead of 90 or so), so it almost requires that you let your ice melt a little before really tucking in. Also, I highly suggest a rule that when drinking Bookers before dinner, one is allowed only one glass. This rule applies doubly if you have anything important to do the next morning. The Blanton's occupies the other side of the scale-- it's mellow and delicious and somehow the faint alcoholic sting (which isn't always unpleasant) of other bourbon's is entirely gone. It also smells the best of them all, though all bourbon smells great. This mellowness, of course, makes Blanton's a little bit deceptive, but also makes it yummy; highly recommended for bourbon beginners or those with slightly more delicate tastes. Maker's Mark occupies some sort of delicious fugue state. It's a little more forceful than the Blanto