Phyllis writes:

Why isn't is a sham if it's ineffective (worthless). Would fraud be a better term? Roger: did you have this operation? Isn't it likely that I would have been advised to have it if I had consulted an MD about my knee pain?

The words sham and fraud suggest that the surgeon was tricking patients into having a phony operation. But the surgeons had every reason to believe that the surgery would be effective. The surgery repaired or removed bad tissue, and the patients reported positive results.

I've had several knee surgeries, and I have arthritis in my knees, but I never considered the knee surgery described in the NY Times article.

Andy writes:

Good point, about calling the knee surgery a "sham", as that it is a misuse of the term. But it was a quoted doctor who misused it.

The article is unclear on the most important point: did the operation help patients, or not? The study merely demonstrated that the operation helped patients no more than the placebo effect. Both were presumably positive in benefit.

You say "The placebo effect is controversial ..." Only to materialists, who likewise deny other all other phenomena which defy materialistic explanation. Medical studies, meanwhile, are designed to address the placebo effect, including the knee surgery study.

I once had a surgeon try to talk me into wrist surgery. He even suggested that the surgery could be worthwhile even if he failed to find the problem. He said the surgery gets people to rest their wrists for a couple of weeks, and then they are more like to follow instructions of physical therapy. I was not impressed by this argument. At least he had a materialistic explanation for why the surgery would work.

Andy writes:

The third notable front page story in yesterday's NY Times (in addition to the Guiliani and skull stories) was the brilliant study concluding that a common knee surgery, costing taxpayers billions, confers a benefit no greater than the placebo effect. It is perhaps the only time that someone has compared the effect of a surgery against the placebo effect.

Not sure how the materialists here will respond to that one. To many of them, the placebo effect itself is not really accepted. It lacks material explanation.

There are really 2 placebo effects -- how people who are deceived into thinking that they are getting effective treatment seem to improve, and how people with no treatment also seem to improve.

The latter can often be explained by the fact that people tend to seek treatment when conditions are worst. Last winter I got antibiotics for a sore throat. After taking the pills, my throat is much better. But I'll never know if the pills did anything or not.

Whether there is much a placebo effect in the first sense is debatable. A recent study says no. See this discussion.

The current Newsweek reports that prozac and other SSRI-antidepressants perform only slightly better than placebos.

I have a theory about prozac -- that a slightly different placebo effect is at work here. Prozac has very mild side effects. It was considered a breakthrough (in part) because earlier drugs had more serious side effects. It may be that those mild side effects are crucial to getting results because they remind the patients that they are getting medicine for their condition. The placebos don't have any side effects at all.

They should really test prozac by comparing it against a placebo that has mild side effects similar to prozac. Until they do that test, I will be skeptical about whether prozac is effective. The very slight advantage that prozac shows in tests might be entirely explainable by the failure of the placebos in the tests to have side effects.

Update: USA Today says, "An estimated 5 million to 6 million U.S. children are currently taking at least one psychiatric drug. ... About 1.5 million children currently take Prozac-type drugs". Seems like a lot to me. Most of these kids are on ritalin, which is controversial for other reasons.

Update: Here is the study. Haven't read it yet, but why does it take a Freedom Of Information Act request to get this data out of the FDA? The data should be published as it is submitted to the FDA.

It turns out that there are 2 new medical journal articles about antivaccination web sites. I wrote about one before. The other is in a BMJ journal and has an abstract here.

Both of the articles complain about the availability of so-called antivaccination web sites which present information that differs from what is presented by the official medical authorities. But ironically, neither article is freely available on the web! I think that if these folks want to compete with the medical info that is on the web, then they should put their papers freely on the web also.

At least the BMJ paper disclosed its list of 100 antivaccination web sites. (The JAMA article did not.) Both lists are here. Of the 100 sites, several are duplicated and about 20 are dead or have moved. Others are really just single essays that can be found elsewhere. I tried to fix most of the broken links.

The BMJ paper complains that the first 10 hits on Google for "vaccination" are all antivaccination web sites. But that's not true. Not any more, anyway. The first Google link is to this directory listing of 23 web sites with a balanced set of opinions. Furthermore, many of the antivaccination web sites are really not opposed to vaccination but merely provide information and advocate an informed choice.

It is amusing how the medical establishment has a low tolerance for criticism. Medical criticism does not just come from fringe web sites. Just in the last week, the NY Times called the 30-year AMA attack on the Dr. Atkins diet a big fat lie and called a popular knee surgery a sham. Most alternative medicine web sites do not even use such strong language.

A reader asks how the Federal Data Quality Act relates to the Shelby Amendment of a couple of years ago. John responds:

This 9-15-99 column credits Sen. Shelby for inserting a data disclosure provision
in the 1998 omnibus appropriation bill. The column accuses the Clinton administration of trying to gut the law through regulations in 1999.

The Bray column I quoted below doesn't mention Shelby. It says the Federal Data Quality Act was inserted in the 2000 appropriation bill by Rep. Jo Ann Emerson. It says the provision was drafted by the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, a group which specializes in this issue and has collected numerous articles and resources.

As I recall, the Shelby Amendment was prompted by some dubious high-profile academic studies that were being used to change public policy. One was a study that Joe Camel was more recognized among children than Mickey Mouse. The universities refused to release the raw data, even though the study was funded by the federal government.

Anti-gun historian and proven academic fraud Michael A. Bellesiles doesn't give up. He wrote a book about how Americans didn't have any guns 200 years ago, and it turned out that he faked his data. Now he has a new essay, and it is nonsense from beginning to end. He is fairly trashed by Rosenberg and Volokh. For example, Bellesiles praises proven liar David Brock, and says that the electoral college has outlasted its usefulness. (I think the 2000 election was good evidence for the electoral college. Gore won the popular vote, but only won majorities in the coastal areas.)

Bellesiles is a good example for John's point about how those trying to change public policy with academic studies should release their raw data. Bellesiles had a huge influence in the gun-control movement with his bogus statistics, until the NRA and others called him on it.

One of the main points of the Bellesiles article is to attack the idea that there was a consensus about the meaning of the US Constitution and the Bill Of Rights when they were adopted. It is indeed a historical fact that there were sharp political battles over many issues, and a lot people did not even have any political influence. But there was a consensus about the meaning of most of it.

A law that was passed by one vote has the same validity as the one that was passed unanimously. To apply the law, it is often useful to look at what people meant by the law at the time the law was passed. It is usually not relevant to note that the law was controversial. Bellesiles seems to want to argue that the Constitution and Bill Of Rights should be taken less seriously because they were controversial. The argument is nonsense.

Bellesiles cites Posner as saying historians do not know history and are useless in offering guidance on public policy. Bellesiles is the proof.

John writes the following about public disclosure of raw data.

This good column by Thomas Bray tells about the new Federal Data Quality Act which says that when studies are relied upon by govt agencies to make policy, the public has a right to see the raw data from which conclusions were drawn.

Now, if only the law applied to studies issued by private pressure groups instead of just govt agencies. E.g., the Anti-Defamation League released a "study" purporting to show that 17% of the American people harbor "strongly anti-Semitic" beliefs. But a writer (who is apparently Jewish) who looked at ADL's raw data, concluded that the study is bogus.

A more serious example of questionable data is the notorious 1998 book The Shape of the River, which claims that affirmative action in college admissions benefits both blacks and whites. The authors of that book have refused to allow their chief critics, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, to see the raw data on which the book's conclusions are based. Here are details.

More evidence that the Pledge case was a big sham. It turns out that the plaintiff Michael Newdow was never married to the mother of the 8-year-old child, the mother has custody of the child, the mother and child are practicing Christians, and the child does not object to saying the Pledge. So it is hard to see how Newdow even has standing to complain about his daughter saying the Pledge. See Wash. Post, How Appealing, law.com, or InstaPundit.

Newdow previously sued to get "In God We Trust" off the money. He is also trying to get 50% custody of the girl, said,
"I'm trying to overturn the whole family law system, because it's unconstitutional." It is amazing that the 9th Circuit paid any attention to his silly arguments at all.

I really don't agree with these criminal trials of parents just because of a lapse in child care judgment that resulted in a tragic accident. They suffer enough by having to live with the events. In Silicon Valley, a manslaughter trial is just beginning for a father who left his baby in a car. He faces four years if convicted. He could have avoid jail time with a plea bargain. The story is here.

Previously, a mother here was sentenced to four years in jail because she left her baby in the care of a boyfriend who scalded the baby with a hot bath, and because she delayed getting medical care while she looked for an emergency room that would not turn them into the police. The story is here.

I object because (1) I don't believe the parental behavior is criminal, (2) I think that the prosecutions are cruel, and (3) state interventions into family situations like this almost invariably make the situation worse for all parties involved.

The people who write these laws and prosecute these cases have one main purpose. They want to set a public example so that everyone will be in fear of the authorities in their child-rearing practices. They want social workers from Child Protective Services to be able to knock on a family door, and have the parents so totally intimidated that they will do whatever the social worker says. Well, I don't agree with it.

I also object to these prosecutions because of the way that they breed fear, distrust, and privacy invasions in our society.

Here is proof of NPR bias. In January, it accused a right-wing Christian group of being in on the anthrax letters to the US Senate. It now apologizes, after some Congressional embarrassment.

The Volokh brothers complain about the familiar idiom about comparing apples and oranges. But Sasha misstated (and then corrected) the definition of a well-ordered set. Here is a correct definition. The reals are ordered, but not well-ordered.

To an economist, all commodities can be compared by looking at their values in the marketplace. To a mathematician, any two elements of a set can be compared by using an ordering on the set. Comparing apples and oranges is ambiguous unless the ordering is specified. The people who say you just cannot compare apples and oranges are plainly wrong. But neither of the people the Volokhs are criticizing were saying that.

Being a mathematician, I side with the mathematician's view. If someone says that comparing vegetarian and meat-eating diets is like comparing apples and oranges, then that means that any comparison depends on which ordering is in use and there is no canonical ordering. Being a vegetarian often comes with lifestyle choices and moral worldviews that are not shared by most meat-eaters. Their belief that vegetarianism is superior is based on an ordering that the meat-eaters would not choose. So the comparison is not just a matter of objectively determining which diet is healthiest.

So I think that apples and oranges can be compared, but still it often makes sense to say that a comparison is like comparing apples and oranges. In mathematical terms, it means that the ordering is not defined. Or to an economist, it means that it depends on the utility function.

There is a lot of media excitement about the latest police brutality accusations. Having seen the videotapes on TV, I do not think that they are sufficient to convict those cops of anything. The police behavior is easily explainable, and may even be considered reasonable when all the facts are out.

The Inglewood teenager was apparently resisting arrest. The cops were a little rough with his, but he didn't look like he got hurt. If a suspect is being arrested and not following police instructions, then it is often necessary to use a little force. We don't know how much resistance the teenager was giving. He was handcuffed, but he could have been grabbing or pinching the cops with his hands, kicking with his feet, or refusing to bend down over the car. If he was doing any of those things, then I think that the cops were justified.

The NY Times published a wacky attack op-ed on this Antonin Scalia essay on Christianity and the death penalty. It is amazing how much people hate Scalia. It seems like they attack him without reading what he says, and assume the worst. Adequate rebuttals are on Volokh's blog and in letters to the editor.

Still, Scalia is the most respected member of the Supreme Court. Both right and left wingers say he is brilliant, and that he consistently and coherently applies legal doctrines. Hardly any of the others get much respect.

InstaPundit and Juan on Volokh's blog seem to endorse this column suggesting that a recent 5-4 Supreme Court decision shows that the judges voted principles over politics in Bush v. Gore. The trouble with the argument is that the same 5 judges who voted for Bush are the ones who sided with the Minnesota Republican party. Cynics will say that they were just voting party preference again.

It is really a distortion to say that Bush v. Gore "restricted how elections had to occur." Bush v. Gore did not restrict elections at all. It only restricted a state court when it tries to redo the counting procedure after the election is completed. The decision left Florida completely free to hold its elections and counting procedures as specified in its statutes, and as administered by its executive branch. It did not even limit post-election trials over counting disputes, and did not reverse any trial court action or action by election officers. If anything, Bush v. Gore upheld Florida's right to hold an election according to its constitutional and democratically determined procedures. It only knocked out a partial manual recount scheme that was unilaterally imposed by the Florida supreme court.

The more recent Minnesota case is more of a free speech case than an election case. My previous comments are here. If there is a common thread between these two cases, I'd say it is in the view of the judiciary. The conservatives believe that the judges should just follow the law, and be accountable to the public for doing so. The liberals have a more activist and elitist view of judges. They believe that judges should be able to use their superior wisdom to rewrite the law as they see fit, and not be subject to the political checks and balances that plague other branches of government. Remember, Souter is the one who said he'd allow cameras in the court "over my dead body", so it makes sense that he thinks that judicial candidates shouldn't have to answer to the public.

The baseball all-star game ended in a tie?! I thought that only soccer allowed such foolishness. Surely someone could have pitched a couple of more innings.

The list of 30 memorable baseball moments could have been better. The last one was Ichiro Suzuki winning the AL MVP last year, but he didn't deserve to win. Jason Giambi had a better season for the Oakland As. I had always heard about the great Willie Mays catch in the 1954 World Series, but had never seen it. It was on the list, and was shown as part of the all-star game broadcast. I've seen a lot of more impressive catches. It didn't look like any big deal to me.

Bill Wattenburg suggests solving the Pledge dilemma by Congress passing a law saying:

The word God shall mean that entity or force that created the universe in which the Earth resides.

Alternate version:
The word God used in any official or legal context in the US shall mean that entity and/or force that created the universe in which we exist..

Liza writes:

I just read the blog concerning the Calif. housing discrimination case. Do you mean to tell me that California doesn't allow a white woman to discriminate against a black man in her choice of roommate? You've got to be kidding! What kind of a roommate are we talking about?

In that case, as I understand it, it is legal to discriminate, but it is not legal to tell anyone you are doing that. Yes, its wacky. Someone should challenge it. It is hard to imagine the Supreme Court upholding a penalty for expressing an opinion in favor of lawful behavior in a private conversation.

Update: Here is the decision, thanks to Volokh.

Liza writes:

I just read the blog concerning the Calif. housing discrimination case. Do you mean to tell me that California doesn't allow a white woman to discriminate against a black man in her choice of roommate? You've got to be kidding! What kind of a roommate are we talking about?

In that case, as I understand it, it is legal to discriminate, but it is not legal to tell anyone you are doing that. Yes, its wacky. Someone should challenge it. It is hard to imagine the Supreme Court upholding a penalty for expressing an opinion in favor of lawful behavior in a private conversation.

Andy writes:

John's listing of the rising tide of liberal attacks on the Pledge is no surprise. This is a standard pattern: feigned outrage, complacency by moderates, and then the liberals by default. There's no middle ground on this or any other issue. Advocate or lose by default.

I'm convinced that many people are drawn to "moderate" philosophies because they don't want to accept that constant advocacy is essential, even on basic issues. Drive around New England sometime and look at all the old Protestant churches that are now empty due to lack of advocacy against liberal attacks.

All the legislation cited by John is utterly useless, some of it perhaps intentionally so. Only Akin's bill is meaningful. That's no surprise: Akin is one of the best Congressmen on our side.

Roger's response. Yes, I would vote against any of those bills. What could be sillier than hardwiring the Pledge into the Constitution?

The bills do not address the heart of the problem. Is the Lemon Test a correct interpretation of the Constitution? Does the Pledge fail the Lemon Test? If the answers are yes, then the Pledge is still unconstitutional under the jurisdiction limit. State judges, teachers, and others could reasonably still come to the conclusion that the Pledge is illegal.

I would suggest a broader jurisdictional exclusion:
No federal court shall have jurisdiction to hear or determine any claim that a nonsectarian reference to a deity violates the Constitution of the United States.

John writes:

Since the Newdow decision, there has been a slew of liberal commentary ridiculing the Pledge of Allegiance.

In an effort to defuse public support for the Pledge, they claim the Pledge was promoted by a socialist (Francis Bellamy), the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of Columbus, Joe McCarthy, etc.

Here are two of many such recent examples. NY Times and New Yorker.

However, not one of these articles has seen fit to mention where the phrase "nation under God" actually came from - the Gettysburg address!

Andy says the solution to the Newdow decision is a constitutional amendment. So far, the following proposed amendments have been introduced:

S.J.Res. 39 (Landrieu) `Article--

`SECTION 1. A reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance or on United States currency shall not be construed as affecting the establishment of religion under first article of this Constitution.

`SECTION 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.'.

H.J.Res. 102 (Pickering) `Article --

`SECTION 1. The first article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States shall not be construed to prohibit the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.'.

H.J. Res. 103 (Green of TX) `Article --

`Nothing in the first amendment to this Constitution shall be construed to prohibit the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, as follows: `I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all'.'.

H.J. Res. 103 (Lucas of OK) `Article --

`It is not an establishment of religion for teachers in a public school to recite, or to lead willing students in the recitation of, the following pledge : `I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.'.'.

H.R. 5064, a bill introduced by Todd Akin, would insert the following new statute into the Judiciary Act (Title 28 of U.S. Code):

`Sec. 1632. Jurisdiction limitation `No court established by Act of Congress shall have jurisdiction to hear or determine any claim that the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, as set forth in section 4 of title 4, violates the first article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States.'.

Vijay on usenet:sci.med says:

I have been looking for an answer to the question, "Do the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks?" for almost a decade now. Over the past eight years I have reviewed close to 2,000 peer review articles on the issue. I have reviewed journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Journal of Epidemiology, Journal of the American Medicine Association, British Medical Journal, and the Annals of Neurology, to name a few. From a purely scientific standpoint, a review of the scientific data reveals that the evidence for vaccine safety and efficacy is just not there.

The answer is not easy to find. I have looked myself. To the best of my knowledge, there is no scientific publication that makes the case that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.

A recent JAMA article wanted to say that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks, but the strongest statement that it could document was:

Vaccination is not risk free, but most in mainstream medicine agree that the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks.

The cited support for this was a Mayo Clinic editorial that said:

Despite such irreducible uncertainties, the modern use of vaccines has clearly benefited more than harmed.

But Vijay wanted something a little more rigorous, I am sure. This is just opinion, without any definition of benefit or harm. I don't think that he will find it. For more info, see the Vaccine Policy FAQ.

John writes to clarify the powers of the US Supreme Court, and gives some excellent examples:

I see that Roger has been conducting a debate with somebody named "George" who says Marbury v. Madison means that "the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the Constitution. The president is not allowed to interpret the Constitution."

Of course, that is a grossly misleading overstatement. The Supreme Court is only final with regard to the cases, controversies and parties that are (properly) before it. What is final is a Supreme Court decision - NOT ITS OPINION.

The decision is final (binding on the parties) simply because there is no further appeal. But everyone is free to disagree with the opinions of the justices and to act accordingly. The fact that US v. Nixon forced Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes does not prevent a later president from asserting executive privilege.

In McCullough v. Maryland (1819) the Supreme Court said it was constitutional for Congress to create a national bank. Andrew Jackson believed it was unconstitutional. In his veto message of 1832, Jackson explained why he was not bound by John Marshall's opinion on this.
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/veto/ajveto01.htm

In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional for Congress to ban slavery in the Western territories the U.S. had purchased from France and Mexico. Lincoln believed it was constitutional and, indeed, his goal was to do exactly that. In these speeches, Lincoln argued that the finality of the Dred Scott decision applied only to the parties to the case. Everyone else was free to reject the "rule" or "principles" of the decision and act accordingly.
http://www.bartleby.com/251/1003.html
http://www.bartleby.com/251/1006.html
http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html

Slate has a good article on how death penalty opponents (such as the NY Times) use contradictory arguments in order to reduce executions.

According to Volokh's blog, it is illegal in California to make a private racist comment to a roommate. He says:

On May 7, the California Fair Employment & Housing Commission penalized Melissa DeSantis $500 for inflicting "emotional distress" on a would-be roommate by allegedly telling him that "I don't really like black guys. I try to be fair and all, but they scare me." It also required her to pay him $240 in expenses -- and take "four hours of training on housing discrimination."

I agree with Volokh that this is contrary to basic rights to free speech and freedom of association.

The NY Times Magazine had an amazing story about the Dr. Atkins diet. This is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet that was promoted in some popular books about 30 years ago. The American Medical Assn. (AMA) has been vigorously denouncing it ever since.

The trouble is that the AMA opposition is based more on its own prejudices than on science. So far, the medical establishment has refused to even test whether the diet works. Meanwhile, a lot of people report that the diet works, while other diets don't.

Update: Monday's CNN Crossfire had a debate on this. The right-winger took the side of eating fatty foods and following empirical scientific evidence. The left-winger took the side of telling people to eat what nutritionists think people ought to be eating. I think that the right-winger got the best of the argument.

George writes:

You're wrong about Marbury v. Madison. It said, "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." That means that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the Constitution. The president is not allowed to interpret the Constitution. US v. Nixon proved that. Nixon was ordered to turn over the Watergate tapes. It didn't matter if Nixon had his own constitutional interpretation.

Of course judges have to interpret laws. They have to, in order to decide cases. But so does everyone else. When the President is sworn in, he takes an Oath to the Constitution, not to the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution.

Every day the President makes decisions based on his understanding of his presidential powers under the Constitution, and most of those understanding have never been tested in court. It is absolutely the responsibility of the President to interpret the Constitution.

Dumb quote of the day. This is about President G.W. Bush's refusal to join the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale law professor and a former assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, said the retraction of the signature on the treaty would be a profound error.

"The result is that the administration is losing a major opportunity to shape the court so it could be useful to the United States," Mr. Koh said. "Now that the court exists, it's important to deal with it. If the administration leaves it unmanaged, it may create difficulties for us and nations like Israel."

He described the opportunity as similar to the United States Supreme Court's 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison that courts could subject the other branches of government to its jurisdiction, decisively defining its role in the new nation.

"This is an international Marbury versus Madison moment," he said. [NY Times, May 5, 2002]

Apparently Koh thinks that the US Supreme Court seized authority over the other branches of government in the 1803 case Marbury v. Madison, and that the ICC should similarly declare its superiority over sovreign nations.

Koh is misreading Marbury v. Madison.

In Marbury v. Madison, the Court was asked to do something that it believed to be contrary to the US Constitution. The Court pointed out that its judges take an oath to the Constitution, and it declared that it did not have the power to do what it was asked.

The ICC would take away rights that Americans currently enjoy. If President Bush respects his oath to the Constitution and follows the logic of Marbury v. Madison, then he will continue to keep the US out of the ICC.

Stephen Wolfram (of Mathematica fame) must have some amazing publicists. His new self-published book A New Kind Of Science has a wealth of examples of how simple computer programs can have complex outputs. Entertaining, but not a big deal.

The NY Times has already reviewed it 3 times in the last month. Here's the first. And today it has a fourth article about the book -- an interview with Wolfram about it.

Here are some more reviews. It is hard to take the book seriously when it has such an egotistical style, has so many wildly exaggerated claims, and has such a stubborn refusal to put his work in the context of the work of others. But I guess that's what you have to do to get 4 reviews in the NY Times.

George writes:

Why shouldn't the JAMA article be considered academic fraud? The data was concealed and misrepresented. Honest researchers try to publish articles that accurately reflect their findings. The whole point of the article was to describe 22 web sites that fit a certain definition. If none of those web sites met the definition, and the authors withheld the necessary evidence, then the article is a fraud.

I discussed this JAMA article on antivaccination web sites here and here.

I try to give the authors the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the authors are so brainwashed by the medical establishment that they think that anyone who is not endorsing the official vaccine recommendations must be an enemy of medicine.

Still, the JAMA article is misleading and irresponsible. The main point is that so-called anti-vaccination web sites often "rely heavily on emotional appeal to convey their message". But so do many pro-vaccination web sites, such as this.

Politically correct liberals uniformly denounce IQ tests or even any mention of intelligence. Even the SAT test (for college admissions) is being changed to be less like an IQ test, because of pressure from liberal college deans trying to fill affirmative action quotas. But now, the US Supreme Court wants to use IQ tests to determine who gets executed and who does not! [Ring v. Arizona, 2002]

This may be the biggest judicial abuse of IQ tests since the Supreme Court declared "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." [Buck v. Bell, 1927] There it endorsed sterilizing women of low IQ.

Mainstream liberals praised Holmes's judicial philosophy, and they praise the current decision. I guess measuring IQ is ok when it suits their political agenda, and not otherwise.

Ted Williams died. He was the best hitter in baseball. Not everyone liked him. One year he batted .406 but failed to win the MVP award. Another year he led the league in batting average, home runs, and RBIs and failed to win the MVP award again because of vindictive sportswriters.

Today, Barry Bonds is similarly disliked. Even the home town newspapers trash him on a regular basis. But he is the most feared hitter in baseball today, and he has won more MVP awards than anyone else.

New York City has cut back on uneconomical recycling in order to save money, and this brainwashed Queens student wrote the following letter to the NY Times to complain.

When we take the time and trouble to sort garbage for recycling, we feel that we're doing our part. When stores set aside space for bottles and cans so that they can be recycled, they are doing their part. People are used to going through the steps required in order to make recycling work.

I am 13, and the middle school curriculum constantly features material about pollution, species extinction, rain-forest elimination and global warming. You can hardly complete a book report without covering those subjects. Everyone knows that we are running out of landfill space and are damaging our environment.

We want to cooperate with recycling, but the government won't let us. The government must do its part so that we can do ours.

Apparently NY schools are overrun with left-wing propaganda. My brother is going to reconsider homeschooling if he finds out that his kid's school is teaching this crap. Volokh is another recycling skeptic.

We are not running out of landfill space. The environment is improving, not getting worse. Global warming may ultimately turn out to be a good thing. If recycling really made sense, then the recyclers could separate the materials at the dump.

My blogs are not being posted correctly. I may have to check out alternatives. Today's blogs didn't post for many hours.

Charlie objects to some of my soccer comments:

Your suggestions for improving soccer:

 

Stop the clock when play stops, and show the time remaining on the
scoreboard.

Soccer is a little like baseball in that it doesn't play out in short bursts of action followed by 30-120 seconds of restarting tedium.  This is a feature, not a bug.  A viewer can get pleasantly lost in the ebb and flow of the game without constantly being pulled down to earth to watch 4 or 8 thirty second commercials. 

Have commercial breaks to suit US TV.

I don't know all the reasons for soccer's failure on American TV, but I'm pretty sure that being commercial-free isn't one of them. Commercials are a bug, not a feature of American sports.  See above.

Fix the off-sides rule, so no goals are called back and so that the average viewer can understand it.

How?

Allow substitutions on-the-fly.

 

I'd support this if it was completely unobtrusive and didn't result in stoppage of play. Having rested players out there
might result in more scoring.

Allow players to use their hands, provided that they do not run with the ball or throw a goal.

No way!  This is soccer.  You don't use your hands, period.  It's the core concept of the
game.

Double the penalty kick distance. It is just too easy to score on a penalty kick

 

This would be worth trying.

If there is a tie, play sudden-death overtime until there is a goal.

 

I agree with this one, but you can't play forever.  Maybe 60 minutes of sudden-death ("golden goal") overtime, then penalty kicks after that.

Fix the out-of-bounds rules so that no one has an incentive to deliberately let the ball go out of bounds.

I don't see a problem with the game's existing out-of-bounds rules.

Make the goal bigger, so that games have higher scores.

 

        Yeah, a hair bigger, maybe moving to metric: 3 meters by 10 meters.

 

Get better referees.

The only world-wide, year to year constant in sports: People bitch about the referees.  Soccer's officials don't seem any worse than football or basketball officials.

 

Roger's response. Some of my opinions are based on what works in hockey. Ice hockey has continous substitutions and it works ok. Off-sides in hockey is based on a couple of lines in the ice, and it is usually a clear-cut call. Sometimes the refs blow it, but it never results in a goal being called back. (Hockey did have a stupid man-in-the-crease rule that resulted in a lot of goals being called back, but that rule has been abolished.)

In soccer, the off-sides rule is based on the relative position of the players. A team could execute a pre-planned play perfectly and score a goal, but then the goal could be called back because a defensive player on the other team was slow to drop back and try to cover the scorer! A player should not be penalized just because he can run faster than someone on the other team, and the fans should not get the disappointment of a big goal being disallowed.

The soccer off-sides rule is particular hard to call because it is based on the position of the offensive player receiving a pass (relative to the defensive players) at the time the pass was kicked. So the ref has to watch at least 3 players at the same time in order to make the call. Watching a game on TV, I could only tell if a play was off-sides by rewinding the recording to the time of the pass being kicked, and checking the positions of the other players. Frequently, the refs were wrong.

I suppose the soccer off-sides rule makes sense for third world playgrounds with unmarked fields. But if they don't want offensive players going to far upfield, then could paint a line on the field and say offensive player can't cross the line until the ball crosses the line.

Commercial breaks may be annoying, but the economics of American pro sports is completely dependent on them. How else is soccer ever going to get a major television network contract?

NY Times and others complain about a right-wing shift on the Supreme Court. But the most dramatic shifts from precedent this year were in the left-wing direction. The Court completely reversed a 10-year-old precedent on the death penalty and created a new legal principle that resulted in releasing hundreds of prisoners from death row. The principle was grounded more in opinion polls than in any law. Here are some other silly statements from the NY Times editorial.

The voucher case was undeniably the bombshell of the court's 2001-2002 term.

The decision was a logical consequence of prior decisions, and was expected. The Cleveland voucher plan survived the strictest tests for religious neutrality.

The court also struck a blow for another cherished conservative cause, states' rights.

State's rights is not a conservative cause. At issue was the 11th Amendment, and the binding precedent was from 1890. Ruling the other way would have completely eviscerated the 11th Amendment. If the NY Times doesn't like the 11th Amendment, then it should lobby for an amendment to repeal it.

The court was at its most progressive this term in First Amendment cases, in which even conservative justices often sided with free-speech plaintiffs.

And all the liberal justices voted against free speech in the Minnesota election case. (See prior comments on this case.) The NY Times just doesn't want to admit that the conservatives want more free speech than the liberals.

Update: Law professor and blogger Volokh has rated the Supreme Court judges on free speech issues. Kennedy is in favor of free speech the most, and Breyer the least.

JAMA update. I previously commented on a strange article in a leading medical journal that attacked unofficial vaccination web sites. The article claimed to study web sites that "specifically oppose vaccination for human infants or children". I contacted the lead author and asked him to give me an example of how they came to this conclusion for any of the sites. No response.

I suppose that no one will consider this academic fraud, but I think that JAMA has really deliberately misrepresented these sites in a biased and misleading manner. The fundamental factual assertion in the article is completely false, and the authors deliberately omitted the references that would have allowed readers to learn the truth.

Calling these web sites "antivaccination" is like calling Ralph Nader anti-car. In a way, he is anti-car, but he does not favor abolishing the automobile. He wants cars to be safer for people and the environment. And likewise these web sites do not favor abolishing vaccination. They want safer vaccines, and informed choices.

Some people think that it is racist that Elizabeth Smart has gotten 10 times the publicity as Alexis Patterson. Eg, see the SJ Mercury News, Singapore Straits Times, and Slashdot. I don't.

Smart was kidnapped at gunpoint in a $2M home while the family was sleeping. The family publicized the incident to the maximum in order to enlist public support, including supplying pictures and videotapes to the media, hiring a PR firm, and giving press conferences. Tantalizing details of the crime were released. The story has stayed in the news because puzzling information about suspects keeps getting announced. And yes, the girl is cute.

The Patterson story is also strange and tragic, but it just doesn't have enough of a story to maintain public interest. 90% of what makes the Smart story interesting to the public is missing in the Patterson story.

The US Supreme Court ruled that school vouchers are constitutional, even if nearly all the tax money ends up going to Catholic schools. Now even the left-wing Washington Post published an editorial in favor of school vouchers:

Vouchers may offer answers for some children. The Constitution should not be read to forbid policymakers from finding out. In fact, our quarrel with the Cleveland program would be that the vouchers are too small. Imagine how much competition might be generated, and with what respect poor parents might be treated, if they were given an $8,000 voucher for each child, and public schools really had to prove they were worth what society now spends on them.

G.W. Bush continues to support vouchers. Others prefer to say they are in favor of school choice instead. Despite voucher election losses in California in Michigan, this issue isn't going away.

Update: Good NY Times op-ed on vouchers by Milton Friedman.

Some people believe that the Great Depression (in the US in the 1930s) proved that capitalism was broken; that our constitutional government was unsuited for dealing with the crisis; that it was necessary for FDR to abolish constitutional limits on federalism; and that FDR saved the day with his various 3-letter agencies.

In fact all of this is nonsense. FDR's actions only made the Depression worse, and the economy only started getting back to normal after FDR left office. The New Deal did not help the economy.

Nevertheless, many liberals persist in the notion that FDR proved the necessity of a strong and unconstrained federal government. A good example is Judge Breyer on the US Supreme Court, whose recent dissenting opinion said:

the majority ignores a historical lesson, reflected in a constitutional understanding that the Court adopted long ago: An overly restrictive judicial interpretation of the Constitution’s structural constraints (unlike its protections of certain basic liberties) will undermine the Constitution’s own efforts to achieve its far more basic structural aim, the creation of a representative form of government capable of translating the people’s will into effective public action.

This understanding, underlying constitutional interpretation since the New Deal, reflects the Constitution’s demands for structural flexibility sufficient to adapt substantive laws and institutions to rapidly changing social, economic, and technological conditions.

FEDERAL MARITIME COMMISSION v. SOUTH CAROLINA STATE PORTS

Fortunately, Judge Thomas's majority opinion thoroughly rebuts Breyer. Representative government works just fine under the Constitution the way it was written. Did Breyer learn his New Deal nonsense in his classes at Harvard or Oxford?

California Gov. Gray Davis refuses to give up his emergency powers. He only used the emergency powers to feed his Napolean complex, and to buy long term electricity contracts at twice the market rate. He should have either fixed the regulatory problems, or left them alone. All he did was make it worse, and waste more money than any governor in history.

The feds have publicly announced a secret warning that it has issued about a terrorist threat. It doesn't make much sense to me.

New York city decided to save $40M a year by abolishing the recycling of glass and plastic. Recycling is a bad idea if it is not economical.

Dumb legal claim of the day: According to this, a silent music track on a new album potentially infringes the rights of the composer of 4'33", another silent track.

Dumb judge of the day: A judge declared the federal death penalty unconstitutional Monday, saying too many innocent people have been sentenced to death.

The problem with his theory is there is not one single example of someone who has been falsely executed since the death penalty was reinstated about 30 years. No one on federal death row has gotten off. The US Constitution endorses the death penalty in several places, and the death penalty was probably more fallible back then.

Andy writes:

Roger's praising the Minority Report on his blogspot, a movie that is presumably another drippy, stereotypical Spielberg job. Comic books have more substance to them. Despite the fawning press claiming this to the best movie in years, a comedy just passed it up at the box office.

Spielberg has made a number of great movies. Eg: E.T., Close Encounters, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, Duel, Jurassic Park, etc.

He then got much greater critical acclaim for The Color Purple, Schindlers List, Amistad, and A.I. I hated those movies. Minority Report is a sign he's getting back to his previous form. Hope so, anyway.

Why is NASA so opposed to capitalism? If you want to pay to put a satellite in orbit economically, you have to goto China or elsewhere. If you want to be a space tourist, you have to goto Russia. And if you buy a moon rock on the open market, NASA will have you prosecuted.

I think NASA is worried that if it develops its own sources of income, then Congress will give it less money. The same disease inflicts PBS, NPR, Amtrak, and other socialistic government enterprises. Congress should cut off all their money, at least until their attitude changes.

Glad the World Cup is over. If they want to appeal to Americans, they need to change the rules. I suggest:

Stop the clock when play stops, and show the time remaining on the scoreboard.

Have commercial breaks to suit US TV.

Fix the off-sides rule, so no goals are called back and so that the average viewer can understand it.

Allow substitutions on-the-fly.

Allow players to use their hands, provided that they do not run with the ball or throw a goal.

Double the penalty kick distance. It is just too easy to score on a penalty kick.

Figure out some penalty system that is better than giving out yellow cards.

Give each referee a whistle.

If there is a tie, play sudden-death overtime until there is a goal.

Fix the out-of-bounds rules so that no one has an incentive to deliberately let the ball go out of bounds.

Make the goal bigger, so that games have higher scores.

Get better referees.

Stories about Microsoft's Palladium project by Steve Levy and R.X. Cringely. A hint of what is to come may be found in Microsoft's license agreements. Too bad the feds didn't penalize Microsoft for its antitrust violations.

Just saw Minority Report. Best Steven Spielberg movie in many years. But it does have a number of plot holes. Eg, how were they going to go national with Pre-Crime if they only had one reliable psychic and she could only see the Washington DC area? If the Tom Cruise character didn't want to get convicted of a crime that he was predicted to committ, why didn't he just hide for 36 hours? You can find other movie mistakes here. In the end, the movie leaves some loose ends, and then ties up some loose ends that didn't need to be tied up. But still, the movie is vastly superior to A.I.

The SJ Mercury news is reporting that the big music label are now spoofing popular songs in an effort to sabotage P2P networks.

Those countermeasures could cross ``into a gray area as far as legality,'' admits another record executive who asked not to be named. He said frustrated record label employees could resort to such measures as propagating viruses, rationalizing `` `Hey, if you don't mind stealing my career and livelihood, I'm sure you don't mind if I destroy your hard drive.' ''

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/3560365.htm

See also this related story.

I thought that people went to jail for deliberately sabotaging networks. Meanwhile, the feds just set the royalty rate for streaming music on the internet, and it seems artificially high. Now it turns out that the rate was based on a Yahoo/RIAA contract that was intended to squeeze out small operators, according to the Yahoo exec who negotiated the deal.

See also Why Napster was a Good Thing.

Michael Newbow's lawsuit against the Pledge of Allegiance was just his latest attempt. He has also sued to remove "In God We Trust" from the money and has filed other similar lawsuits to promote his atheist cause. Here is a typical story.

The name Michael is Biblical and means Who is Like God. I think that if Michael Newbow is really so eager to get God out of his life, then he ought to start by changing his own name.

The American Psychological Assn just published a new study on spanking. The press release has a link to the article and some responses.

The author, Gershoff, does a review of previous spanking studies. A meta-analysis (summary of previous studies) says that spanking is correlated with aggressive and antisocial kids. It doesn't say whether the kids were spanked because they mishaved, or if they misbehaved because they were spanked. It didn't say whether mild to moderate spanking is good or bad. But it did say that spanked kids were more likely to do what they were told.

From this, she concludes that psychologists should recommend against spanking.

Some of the criticisms are:

Gershoff combines mild corporal punishment with criminal child abuse, so no conclusions about ordinary corporal punishment are possible.

Gershoff arbitrarily assumes that punishment causes the child aggression, rather than the other way around.

Gershoff concedes the gist of these criticisms, and defends her work. IMO, these criticisms are devastating. Her data can be used to support spanking as much as it can be used to criticize spanking. Her data show that kids who misbehave get punished, and getting punished results in better behavior. Only those severe child abuse has adverse consequences.

Gershoff's work just seems like ideology masquerading as science. Some people are ideologically opposed to spanking out of a belief that abolishing spanking will promote a nonviolent society. So they want to claim that spanking is harmful. But that cannot find any evidence that spanking is harmful, so they combine spankers with child abusers and then look for evidence that child abusers are causing harm. The whole analysis is bogus.

While the 9th Circuit was saying that the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional, the US Supreme Court heard a case on whether judges running for elected office in Minnesota can announce their opinions to the public. The Court said that it was free speech, but the vote was only 5-4. How could anyone be against a candidate for public office expressing his views?

The answer lies in the identities of the dissenting votes. Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer have liberal judicial philosophies that are incoherent, irrational, and out-of-step with the public. They would not have been appointed or confirmed if the public had a good understanding of their judicial views and the people were actively involved in the process. These four are ideologically opposed to judicial scrutiny because they know that their own jurisprudence would never hold up.

JAMA published an article about anti-vaccination web sites.

[Reuters story]
Many Web sites that oppose childhood vaccinations appeal to readers' emotions when trying to convey their message, and include claims about vaccination that are not supported by studies from peer-reviewed medical journals, according to researchers.

None of this is surprising. Most of the pro-vaccination web sites also use appeals to emotion and use unsupported claims. But the article oddly omitted listing the 22 web sites. So I wrote to the author and got the list.

The list and JAMA articles are here.

The JAMA article says that the 22 web sites were selected because they "specifically oppose vaccination for human infants or children". But a spot check of several of the web sites showed that some of them make no recommendation at all. They merely provide information and advocate informed consent. Some have links to the CDC for pro-vaccine information.

This is a simple example of how medical journals conceal data in order to promote an agenda. If JAMA had just published the list of web sites, then any reader would be able to check the results for himself, and see how inaccurate the article is.

The JAMA authors failed to find anything damning about these so-called anti-vaccination web sites, but there is a general sense of alarm that people would get medical information from these alternative sites on the internet, and develop a sense of distrust about official source of vaccine information. The vaccine establishment depends on most people blindly doing what the authorities say, and the internet is a threat. Maybe if the authorities were more open about vaccine information, these alternative sites would not be needed.

Dumb quote: Representative Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) took issue with the Republicans’ proposed tax cuts, saying: “It’s not ‘spic’ or ‘nigger’ anymore. They say, ‘Let’s cut taxes.’ ” (From Ann Coulter)

This Reason article gives some history about the Pledge of Allegiance, including that it was written by a socialist. Maybe someone should add a phrase about property or money.

Dumb lawsuit of the day: Two guys got their foreheads tatooed for a disc-jockey reward, but never got it.

Dumb quote of the day. Czech-born Martina Navratilova came to the US for tennis, riches, and lesbianism, and now says:

“The most absurd part of my escape from [an] unjust system [e.g., Communist Eastern Europe] is that I have exchanged one system that suppresses free opinion for another.” She continued, “The Republicans in the United States manipulate public opinion and sweep any controversial issues under the table.” And, “It’s depressing. Decisions in America are based solely on the question of ‘how much money will come out of it’ and not on the questions of how much health, morals or the environment suffer as a result.”

From National Review

The 9th Circuit Pledge of Allegiance decision is contrary to the plain meaning of the US Constitution.

The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; ..." The Pledge does not respect any establishment of religion. If it did, what establishment is it? The Roman Catholics? The Presbyterians? The Jews? The Pledge was purely optional and voluntary. If the Pledge is religious (and I don't think it is), then voluntarily saying it is the free exercise of religion.

The word God in the Pledge, on US coins and currency, and in the Declaration of Independence is a term of art. It refers to a political philosophy held by the US Founders that rights under the law were based on natural principles, and not derived from the grant of a king or from simple majority rule. Apparently the US Congress wanted to emphasize this point when it inserted "under God" in 1954, so as to distinguish our form of government from the ideologies that underlie Communism.

The 9th Circuit compares “under God” to “under Jesus”, and says that the Pledge is an endorsement of monotheism. It is not. Most of those who say it are Christians who believe in the three Gods of the Holy Trinity. Many are Catholics who believe in the Virgin Mary as well. Many of the Founders, such as Thomas Jefferson, were deists who did not even believe in a Christian God.

President Bush often ends his speeches with “God bless America.” Eg, he says it in this letter to children. If the Pledge is unconstitutional, then so is listening to the President. The vast majority of atheists do not take any offense to this, because it is a nondenominational and innocuous statement.

Even physicists, who are mostly atheists, often use the word God to refer to the laws of nature and similar concepts. Eg, people like Stephen Hawking use the word God, and no one is offended or thinks that he is making a religious statement. It is just a figure of speech.

The US Supreme Court will surely overrule Reinhardt and the 9th Circuit, as it usually does.

The press is ganging up on Anna Kournikova. She was ranked in the top 10 in women's tennis, but she has had injuries and has dropped to 55th place. She just lost a close match at Wimbledon to a higher-seeded player. After her loss, the BBC interviewed her and suggested that she play in easier tournaments instead! She got upset, and asked the BBC to restart the interview. The BBC agreed, but then broadcast both segments. Read about it here or here. The San Jose TV news compared Kournikova to Pamela Anderson with a tennis racket.

There is no excuse for this rudeness. A BBC spokesman admitted that no other interview subject has ever been mistreated in this way. Kournikova played a good match (score was 6-1,4-6,6-4), and is still in the running in the doubles tournament. She can't beat the Williams sisters, but no one else can either. I think people are just jealous that she has a second career and can make money off the tennis court.

Update: Anna won a couple of matches in her latest tournament. Ok, she is still going to lose to a Williams sister. McEnroe and Evert defend her.

Breyer's opinion in the death penalty case today is particularly bad. He agrees that the judge should not impose the death penalty, but he refuses to accept the argument of the others that the defendent has a 6A right to a jury trial. Instead, he hangs his opinion entirely on the 8A ("cruel and unusual"), and just gives a bunch of lame arguments against the death penalty!

He says in the opinion:

death is not reversible

potentially arbitrary application of the death penalty

death sentences almost five times more likely when victim is of a high socio-economic status

the suffering inherent in a prolonged wait for execution.

inadequacy of representation in capital cases, a fact that aggravates the other failings

other nations have increasingly abandoned capital punishment

only 3% of the Nation's counties account for 50% of the Nation's death sentences

Some of these arguments might persuade someone that the death penalty should be abolished, but do nothing for Breyer's legal argument. Eg, a judge could compensate for lousy lawyering better than a jury. Other nations don't even have a right to a jury trial. The prolonged wait is caused by judges like Breyer who don't believe in the death penalty anyway. And the last statistic is almost completely meaningless. It might also be true that 3% of the counties have 50% of the nation's murders. Much of US crime is concentrate in a few urban counties. It is a textbook example of lying with statistics because it is intended to show that the death penalty is applied inequitably in the US, but it actually doesn't show that at all.

Volokh's warblog has some additional statistics related to this point.

Scientific American is on the ideological warpath again. Last time, it published several attacks on The Skeptical Environmentalist. This month, its editor-in-chief attacks creationism.

Bjorn Lomborg was able to rebut the attack on him, but the creationist attack is on an unreferenced straw man, so there will be no rebuttal. Most of the arguments are silly, such as saying evolution is not just a theory but also a fact. I don't think that anyone denies evolution as the textbooks define it today. Eg, one textbook says, "In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve." This and other definitions can be found here.

Scientific American is particularly annoyed that evolution skeptics are willing to quote evolutionists like Stephen Jay Gould in order to punch holes in the prevailing theory. Gould was a favorite among academic leftists and has led the attack against creationists. (He just died.) So I guess critics are not supposed to quote him. At least the creationists are citing someone by name. The Sci. Am. article doesn't mention any creationists by name, except for a law professor who is attacked in the introduction for wanting to promote a discussion of God.

Just last week, the NY Times had a story about how the the peppered moth experiment has been one of the standard proofs of evolution in the biology textbooks, but much of the evidence has been faked. Creationists and other evolutionary critics have been pointing this out for years, but the faked pictures still show up in the textbooks.

I think evolution needs more critics, not fewer. If the subject is so scientific and has such overwhelming evidence, then the scientists wouldn't have to legislate against teaching alternative theories in the schools.

Here is an example of foolish arguments in the Sci. Am. article. In item no. 8 he argues that it is plausible that complex life has evolved because a computer simulation generating random phrases has reconstructed Shakespeare's Hamlet in 4.5 days. This is nonsense. No computer has reconstructed Hamlet unless it knew Hamlet in advance.

According to the Wash. Post, the same FBI lawyer who tried to stonewall the Waco investigation is now in charge of a 9-11 investigation of the FBI.

A robot in London has run away and wants its freedom! Read about it here.

Bill Clinton doesn't want to pay Bob Bennett's entire $1 million legal bill. I don't blame him. Bennett botched the case as much as any lawyer has ever botched a civil case. He took a nearly frivolous lawsuit with nominal damages, and managed to let the case blow up to the point where it caused the impeachment of the president. If Bennett had completely neglected the case, and never bothered to even show up in court, then Clinton would have been vastly better off.

Here is dumb law prof opinion about the recent Supreme Court death penalty opinion.

Claims of cruel and unusual punishment have long been evaluated according to "evolving standards of decency." In such cases, the court must ask what those standards are and, as it acknowledged in its decision Thursday, the ongoing public debate "informs our answer."

This kind of analysis by its very nature calls on the court to consider broadly held public views. If in the future public opinion evolves in favor of executing retarded people, states will likely adopt definitions of mental retardation that are more restrictive, encompassing fewer and fewer defendants. It would not be surprising then to see the court approve those restrictions until the principle stated in this week's case gets narrowed, perhaps into irrelevance.

IOW, if it looks like there is a trend in a small number of states that this guy agrees with, then the US Supreme Court should abruptly invent some new interpretation of the Constitution to force the rest of the states to conform to the states he likes. But if the trend reverses, then it is up to the states to slyly and gradually whittle away at the court precedent and hope the courts let it slide.

Scalia's dissent explains what's wrong with the majority opinion.

Dumb quote of the day:
New York Times writer Anthony Lewis' farewell column said that "certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft". [From Slate]

Paul Cox writes that Piracy is NOT to Blame for the CD Slump. My own arguments in favor of music-sharing protocols are here.

Bad math in the US Supreme Court.

In Utah v. Evans, the majority decided that the US Census can use statistical estimation to count households that cannot be easily reached. The Census Bureau uses the euphemism imputation instead of estimation or extrapolation.

Judge Breyer writes that the Census Bureau is not bound by the term "actual Enumeration" in the US Constitution. Here are his stated reasons:

The term was omitted in a rough draft of the Consitution.

"Contemporaneous legal documents do not use the term enumeration in any specialized way."

The Founders didn't know about automobiles and computers, but they might have realized that 120 million households might be too many to count.

The estimate involves a "tiny percent of the population", but fixing it would give a "far less accurate assessment of the population".

The argument in incoherent and innumerate. The term "actual Enumeration" is there for its obvious meaning. Removing the "imputation" would make the result more accurate, not less, because it would make the count closer to the "actual Enumeration" that the Constitution requires.

As usual, it is Judge Thomas whose stinging dissent is dead-on correct.

The NY Times starts an article with this remarkable statement:
"in Alaska ... the average temperature has risen about seven degrees over the last 30 years".

But you can find contrary data here and here.

The Miami Herald has a sensible story on Watergate's Deep Throat. Apparently John Dean was supposed to name Jonathan C. Rose in a book this week, but he chickened out when Rose threatened to sue. Dean has published many other contradictory Deep Throat theories, and no one believes him anymore.

The Miami Herald explains that Deep Throat was probably a big lie:

The idea that Deep Throat is a fake -- or, at least, a composite constructed from several different sources -- is probably the single most widely held theory. Even Woodward's former literary agent, David Obst, has said the shadowy supersource was invented for the sake of showbiz: ''Without Deep Throat in All The President's Men, there's no book or movie,'' he wrote in his memoirs, adding that Deep Throat showed up in the manuscript only after the publisher rejected the first draft as too dull.

And if anyone was Deep Throat, it was likely to be Al Haig. Woodward was his buddy, and some of the leaks could have only come from Haig.

Wacky court ruling of the day:
U.S. District Judge William Young, who on June 11 dropped one of nine charges in the indictment against the alleged shoe bomber Richard Reid—"attempted wrecking of a mass transportation vehicle"—on the grounds that an airplane, though clearly involved in "mass transportation," is not a "vehicle."

http://slate.msn.com//?id=2066958

Here is an example of a slimy lawyer letter. He threatens to personally embarrass a teacher in a effort to get a passing grade for some goof-off student.

Of course, all information regarding your background, your employment records, all of your class records, past and present, dealings with this and other students become relevant, should litigation be necessary.

This Reason article debunks Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. DDT has done much more good than harm, and her ramblings about cancer threats were unduly alarmist. Maybe it wasn't such a great book after all.

Compare the police sketch of John Doe No. 2 from the McVegh trial to Jose Padilla (the guy the feds just arrested in the dirty bomb plot).

This blog suggests they might be the same guy!

Here is another story making the link.

For an amusing conspiracy theory, check out this page that shows that the burning WTC can be seen in a $20 bill!

I keep hearing people say that the US is not in a state of declared war. I don't know why they say this.

Congress did declare war. It just didn't use the word "war".
The Sept. 14 resolution said:

"The President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

http://www.thenation.com/capitalgames/index.mhtml?bid=3&pid=19

This is quoted from The Nation, which of course views Bush as a
right-wing imperialist warmonger. But even The Nation concedes that
most of the bombing was authorized by a lawful declaration of war.

Sen. Joe Biden, who says he wrote the war resolution, confirms here that
it was a declaration of war:

M: (Inaudible) Talbot(?). Senator, thank you for this broad gauged approach to the problems we face. My question is this, do you foresee the need or the expectation of a Congressional declaration of war, which the Constitution calls for, and if so, against whom? (Scattered Laughter)
JB: The answer is yes, and we did it. I happen to be a professor of Constitutional law. I'm the guy that drafted the Use of Force proposal that we passed. It was in conflict between the President and the House. I was the guy who finally drafted what we did pass. Under the Constitution, there is simply no distinction ... Louis Fisher(?) and others can tell you, there is no distinction between a formal declaration of war, and an authorization of use of force. There is none for Constitutional purposes. None whatsoever. And we defined in that Use of Force Act that we passed, what ... against whom we were moving, and what authority was granted to the President.

http://biden.senate.gov/~biden/press/release/01/10/2001A24C02.html

Stupid quote of the day:

Mr. Mineta and his Japanese-American family were sent to an interment camp.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110001808

It was an INTERNMENT camp, not a cemetery!
Funny copy editor error.

The NY Times has an article on how physicians don't use email. The article skips the real reason -- physicians get paid for office visits, but not email. Most physicians avoid telephone calls for the same reason.

Volokh comments on the library internet filtering case:

In my view, the court is at its strongest when it argues that library filtering is unconstitutional simply because it blocks too much material.
http://techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-060602A

I agree with most of what he says, but IMO this part of the court's opinion
is weak also. First, there is an escape clause for adults:

“[a]n administrator, supervisor, or other person authorized by the certifying authority . . . may disable the technology protection measure concerned, during use by an adult, to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purpose.” CIPA § 1721(b) (codified at 47 U.S.C. § 254(h)(6)(D)).

Libraries could easily give an access code to turn off the filtering to
any adult who requests one.

Second, the argument hinges on the filters not working very well.
I don't believe that filters are necessarily so bad. Google has a
porn filter, and it seems to work ok. (You can turn it on or off.)

Third, the court is willing to separate the funding from the filtering
(and let the libraries keep the money), but not willing to separate
the issue of filtering for minors.

Filtering for various purposes is increasingly popular. Eg, blocking
spam, pop-up ads, P2P protocols, potential hacker attacks.
If a library runs a simple firewall, then probably some constitutionally
protected speech will be blocked. Is it now illegal for a library
to use a firewall?

The American Library Association is celebrating the unconstitutionality of the Children's Internet Protection Act.
http://library.northernlight.com/FD20020531750000051.html?cb=0&dx=1006&sc=0#doc

The libraries are happy to get the federal funds with no strings attached, but it appears to me that the reasoning of the opinion actually forbids the public libraries from doing internet filtering (regardless of federal funding). Libraries have pragmatic reasons for filtering, and they will be unhappy if they cannot do it.

You can find the court opinion here, and a comment by Volokh here.

The core of the court's opinion is that it is impossible for a porn filter to be effective. The argument doesn't make much sense to me. No spam filter is perfect, and yet people use spam filters all the time. Millions of people also use porn filters of various sorts. For example, the default settings on Google searches use a porn filter.

The opinion gives some examples of pages that were blocked by commercial filters that perhaps should not have been blocked. But there is no explanation as to why the sites were blocked. It might have been a bug in the software, or the site might have previously had some offensive material, or there might have been some subtle double entendres on the page. Some of the pages I could not get to even without filtering software.

Similar reasoning would conclude that judges are ineffective and useless. Judges make bad decisions much more often than the filtering software!

This case is headed for the Supreme Court, but they may just make more of a mess of it. The core problems here are that the feds should not be funding libraries, the money should not have weird strings attached, Congress and the President should seriously the constitutionality of a law when they pass it (instead of passing the buck to the courts), the courts should not decide hypothetical questions, etc. While I think that the CIPA was a lousy law, this court decision isn't any better.

The San Jose Mercury News printed my letter to the editor today:

ROBERT Holleyman warns that new copyrighted content might disappear without protection from the DMCA law.

The pro-copyright lobby has been telling us for years about how copying technology such as Xerox, VCRS and computers are going to ruin book publishers, movie makers and software companies. And yet every new technology has increased the amount of content available to the consumer.

The DMCA is based on a concept that copyright owners should have absolute control over what the consumer can do with the product. Copyright holders have never had such control in the past, and there is no reason to think that such control is desirable in the future.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/opinion/3336052.htm

Meanwhile, the cockpit gun decision is amazingly stupid. Even if
Mineta/Ridge really think that pilots with guns are dangerous, it
would have made more sense to announce that a limited set of
pilots would be allowed to carry guns. Then a hijacker would at
least have some uncertainty about whether the pilot is armed.
Just like they don't say which flight have air marshals.

I'd rather trust the pilots with guns than the air marshals. Most
of the air marshals are new hires with little training and experience.
The pilots are well-trained to act calmly, rationally, and decisively
in case of emergency. That is far more important than the marksmanship
or whatever other training the air marshals receive.

Many stewardesses are opposed to pilots with guns, but that is because
they are interested in their own self-defense. They figure that they
would never be allowed access to guns, but they might be allowed
to use stun guns or other self-defense weapons. If the pilots have
real guns, then the stewardesses are not likely to get any weapons.

May 22 SJ Mercury News:

Oracle sent a testy letter to Florez on Monday complaining that forcing its sales representatives to testify would not allow the firm to make the point that the contract will still save taxpayers more than $100 million over the next decade.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/3312717.htm

IOW, Oracle will not make the same claim under oath.

The NY Times published 5 letters on the 2nd Amendment, in response to an anti-gun op-ed. 2 for and 2 against.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/16/opinion/L16GUNS.html

One anti-gun letter takes a position contradicting the op-ed. The op-ed argued that the militia is not the body of the people, because an earlier draft of the 2nd Amendment had that definition and dropped it. I don't know what he thinks the militia is, because all the laws and dictionaries define it that way.

The letter argues that the gun rights belong to the militia because The Virginia Declaration of Rights says so. But that document defines the militia as the body of the people. So again, it's the people who have the gun rights.

These anti-gun folks cannot seem to tell us what right the 2nd Amendment does guarantee, if not the individual right to keep and bear arms.

I've always suspected the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is just another bunch of hate mongers. This report seems to confirm it.

Even US Senator Chuck Schumer now agrees that the Second Amendment protects "an individual right to bear arms", although he isn't happy about the DoJ defending it.

The latest SC controversy is that the UCSC chief rape counselor
has trimmed all her trees to look like penises.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/3243827.htm

Dumb quote of the day:
This, a lawyer representing the antigun Violence Policy Center opined, is a departure from what was "the government's position for more than 60 years"--and an illegitimate one, because "people who happen to be in office temporarily shouldn't use the office to promote their personal views."
http://instapundit.blogspot.com/?/2002_05_05_instapundit_archive.html

Here is the phony email about car company 9/11 donations.
http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/cars.htm

Here is someone who is actually looking at a long-term effect of
a vaccine. The CDC doesn't do that when it recommends a vaccine.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/020502/80/cy5c0.html

From an interview of JK, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting.

JK: I'm a big believer we have to make television more convenient or we will drive the penetration of PVRs and things like that, which I'm not sure is good for the cable industry or the broadcast industry or the networks.
CW: Why not?
JK: Because of the ad skips.... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming.
CW: What if you have to go to the bathroom or get up to get a Coke?
JK: I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom.
http://www.inside.com/product/product.asp?entity=CableWorld&pf_ID=7A2ACA71-FAAD-41FC-A100-0B8A11C30373