I’ve been sitting on this great post about reforms to US bankruptcy laws and how they fit into the general pattern of risk being shifted from business to workers and to ordinary people in general. But I waited too long and Paul Krugman’s already written it. So go and read his piece, and then, if you want, you can look at the things I was going to write that Krugman hasn’t said already.
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Trevor Phillips is urging that consideration be given to segregating black boys, and teaching them separately.
bq. Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, said it may be necessary to examine the option of segregation because of the discrepancy between the academic achievements of black and white teenagers. Low levels of self-esteem, an absence of positive role models and a culture where it was “not cool to be clever” were combining to affect the performance of Britain’s black pupils, according to Mr Phillips. While he acknowledged some might perceive his conclusions as “unpalatable”, he insisted the steps were essential to protect future generations of black youths.
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Former Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, England cricketer, ecumenicalist, and anti-apartheid campaigner David Sheppard has died. For my dad he was a cricketing hero. For me, as a teenage Anglican, he was a political hero. (via Normblog where there is more).
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Mad Melanie Phillips has started using the subject-line “Weimar Broadcasting Corporation” for “her”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001080.html “rants”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001081.html against the BBC. I have to say, it sounds rather a good idea. How about “these guys”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar for a new board of governors:
bq. Weimar is one of the great cultural sites of Europe, since it was the home to such luminaries as Bach, Goethe, Schiller, and Herder. It has been a site of pilgrimage for the German intelligentsia since Goethe first moved to Weimar in the late 18th century. The tombs of Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche may be found in the city, as may the archives of Goethe and Schiller.
And we’d still be able to turn over to Channel 4 for “Wifeswap”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003305.html …..
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Regular CT readers will know that “I’m a big fan”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003012.html of Edgar Reitz’s “Heimat”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0087400/ and that I was thrilled when it was released on DVD in the UK. The “Heimat news page”:http://heimat123.net/news.html now announces that “Heimat 2”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0105906/ (the sequel) will be out in May in the UK (and slightly earlier in parts of Europe). Fantastic!
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In O’Hare airport, the Starbucks sells Lemon Poopy Seed muffins. At least they’re honest about it. Makes you wonder what’s in the coffee.
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As mentioned here, there has been a general increase in repression in Iran in recent years, and several bloggers have been arrested and imprisoned Similar repression is taking place in Bahrain. You can keep up with developments and suggested actions with The Committee to Protect Bloggers.
This is worth thinking about in relation to the current euphoria about positive developments in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine (and some positive gestures in Egypt and Saudi Arabia), and attempts to tie all this to US policy in Iraq.
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I haven’t had a chance yet to read Nicola Lacey’s “biography”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199274975/qid=1110056861/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-3107565-2133731 of H.L.A. Hart, but it’s not every day you see this kind of exchange in the “London Review of Books”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n04/letters.html#1. Unfortunately, Nagel’s initial “review”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n03/nage01_.html is only available to subscribers. (Brian Leiter had a link “posted”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/gardner_reviews.html to some comments from John Gardner on Lacey’s biography, but it doesn’t seem to be working now. Maybe Gardner has published his comments?)
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What would you have “paid”:http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2005/scene_bitkower_marapr05.msp to take a class with Nozick? The end of the article linked is, as it says, priceless.
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Sadly I can’t link to it directly because it’s in an annoying popup, but the discussion of the best college basketball players of the year on “ESPN.com”:http://espn.go.com/, featured an hilarous quote from Andy Katz about Australian “Andrew Bogut”:http://utahutes.collegesports.com/andrewbogut/.
bq. Bogut is a unique foreign player. He has a toughness that contradicts the stereotype of foreign big men and has helped him become a force in the paint.
I’ve heard of German stereotypes and American stereotypes and Australian stereotypes and so on, but the idea of there being a stereotype for _foreigners_, i.e. non-Americans, as such is astounding. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so other in my life.
Seriously though, were Australians in the NBA perceived of as weaklings? I wasn’t following American sports when Luc Longley was with the Bulls, so for all I know he’s responsible for Americans thinking of us foreigners as people who can be blown over with a puff of wind.
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Bill Gardner notes an uptick in infant mortality in the US, and links to the National Center for Health Statistics report which tries to explain it. As Bill points out, undertsanding a slight rise in the rate is all very interesting, but not to the point when we know what can be done to lower the rate, even if what we know doesn’t address the sudden (and slight) increase. Here are his suggestions:
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I was pretty sure that I was on the right side of the betting odds when I predicted a few days ago that the FEC was going to have to start thinking about how blogs fit into the current regulatory system, but I didn’t expect to be proved right this quickly. “Stephen Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/03/thanks_you_sena.html has more.
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Here in Brisbane, we’re not really up with which fork you should use first and so on, so I was concerned to this piece from the New Statesman by Nick Cohen (reprinted with the usual delays in Australia by the Financial Review)
I think you can smoke in the Groucho[1], but you can’t in Waitrose or at any Islington dinner party I’ve been to in the past decade. The social taboo against smoking is becoming absolute, in the middle classes at any rate … it is social death to put a cigarette in your mouth, not to stuff cocaine up your nose.
I’m obviously out of touch here. Last time I checked the etiquette manual was de rigeur to go to the bathroom to snort cocaine, and to go out to the porch to smoke. But now I fear total embarrassment at my next middle-class dinner party: obviously I should have the cocaine served at the table. Can anyone give me more details here – are individual salvers the way to go, for example, and is it OK to ask guests to bring some of their own?
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Lots of post ideas stacked up, so time to clear them by just publishing my notes:
Lessons from the Argentinean crisis and default, with applications to the current state of the US economy
- Massive devaluations work
(this could be part of a series including “Lessons from the UK experience, Lessons from the Asian crisis, the Mexican crisis etc etc etc)
Thoughts on current developments in Lebanon
- The important thing to note is that when the USA acts alone, a hundred thousand people die. When it stands together with France, putting the rogue state on notice that it can’t depend on its historic friends, we win without firing a shot. And this is a victory for unilateralism in foreign policy?
An introduction to Linear Algebra for Econometricians, pitched at a level which ought to allow you to read a graduate-level econometrics textbook
- X’X means a sum of squares
- (X’X)-1X’Z is a linear regression of Z on X
- Most of the rest you can pick up from context.
That’ll do for the minute, cheers.
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I have left the bitter “Sonoran desert”:http://www.desertusa.com/du_sonoran.html behind and am in balmy Chicago for a “conference about body parts”:http://www.law.depaul.edu/institutes_centers/health/pdf/body_parts.pdf. Packing my suitcase, I realized that I’m going to have some trouble keeping my own body parts at a reasonable temperature: where are all those Winter clothes I used to own? Didn’t I live in New Jersey and Connecticut for years? So I just brought everything I had.
The conference should be interesting. Mainly lawyers and bioethics people, along with some economists. I am the token sociologist. I’ll be talking about some work I’m doing on organ procurement rates in seventeen OECD countries, so obviously I am on the panel titled “The Battle Between Bioethics and Religion.” As it happens, my friend “John Evans”:http://sociology.ucsd.edu/faculty/EvansJ.htm wrote “the book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226222624/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ on the battle between bioethics and religion. The final score was Bioethics 3, Religion 1.
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