Coyote Blog

Many universities over the last several decades have created race and gender studies programs.  One of the problems with many of these programs has been the appalling quality of scholarship.  The recent broohaha around Ward Churchill at Colorado is but one example -- there are many others.  For example, look how Cal-State Long Beach chose the head of their Black Studies Department:

On September 17, 1971, Karenga was sentenced to one to ten years in prison on counts of felonious assault and false imprisonment. The charges stemmed from a May 9, 1970 incident in which Karenga and two others tortured two women who Karenga believed had tried to kill him by placing "crystals" in his food and water.
       

A year later the Los Angeles Times described the events: "Deborah Jones, who once was given the title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vice. Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."       

The shooting at UCLA caused Karenga to become deeply paranoid and spurred his bizarre behavior. At his trial, the question of Karenga's sanity arose. The psychiatrist's report stated, "This man now represents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and elusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment." The psychiatrist observed that Karenga talked to his blanket and imaginary persons and believed that he had been attacked by dive-bombers.

Eight years later California State University at Long Beach made Karenga the head of its Black Studies Department.

Or, check out the scholarly discussions around choosing the head of Black Studies at UCLA:

In 1965 Karenga founded the United Slaves Organization (US), a group that would rival the Black Panthers on the UCLA campus. The US was more radical than the Panthers, setting off quarrels between the two.
       

The biggest dispute between the US and the Panthers centered around the leadership of the new Afro-American Studies department at UCLA; both groups backed a different candidate. On January 17, 1969, 150 students gathered to discuss the situation. Panthers John Jerome Huggins and Alprentice Carter used the meeting to verbally attack Karenga, much to the dismay of his followers. Two US members, George and Larry Stiner, confronted Huggins and Carter in a hallway after the meeting and shot and killed them.

Universities all raced to create new race and gender-based studies departments, and tenured many  based on their strong opinions and the positive response they would get out of the relevant community, rather than normal academic guidelines.

Anyway, I have, as often happens, gotten away from the point of my post.   The NY Times has a good article on Roland Fryer, who appears to be the leading edge of a new generation set on bringing real scholarship and fact-based analysis to these programs.  (hat tip:  marginal revolution)  I don't necessarily agree with him, for example on paying cash for good grades in school, but I am happy to see his dedication to real analysis and challenging conventional wisdom.

I am not sure what causes this, but my otherwise healthy children always seem to get violently ill on vacation.  On various "vacations" past we have had several trips to the emergency room, on 3-day stay in intensive, and any number of barfing incidents.  Sure enough, my poor daughter is now vilently ill.

Doubt I will blog much - it is my kids' spring break and we are off skiing in Utah. 

As the owner of a small blog as well as of a number of small commercial websites, I spend a lot time trying to Google to index me higher (hey, you, down here, look at me).  So its strange to me when I see this:

WASHINGTON : Agence France-Presse has sued Google Inc. for
copyright infringement, alleging that the Internet search engine
included AFP headlines, news summaries and photographs published
without permission.

In a suit filed in a Washington court, AFP sought damages and interest
of at least 17.5 million dollars (13.1 million euros) and an
interdiction on the publication of its text and photos without prior
agreement.

I know several news agencies have tried this.  My guess is that this is a bid for payment rather than delisting.  It would be interesting to test them and see what their reaction would be if Google said "OK, we'll drop you".  My guess is that if Google purposely did not include AFP in their news index, they would probably get sued instead for anti-trust.  Damned if you do, damned if you don't.  Something Walmart is probably coming to understand nowadays.

One of the eye-opening experiences of being a small business person is finding all the licenses you need - sales tax license, witholding license, unemployment, occupancy, food handling, alcohol, tobacco, prescription drug sales, etc etc.  This gets multiplied for us since we are in 10 states.

This week I got my new favorite:  My Kentucky Retail License to Handle Eggs.

I was afraid that there might be some special training that went with this - something like walking a hundred yards with an egg on a spoon without dropping it - but fortunately all they wanted was our name and $5.  Note that there is a $100 a day fine for selling eggs without a liscence in KY, so beware all you black market egg purveyers.

Ryan Sager has interesting revelations in the NY Post about who supported Campaign Finance "Reform".  There is not a lot of confirmation yet on his story, though he has transcripts from some interesting insider speeches linked. 

I bet every one of the groups who financed this effort and that Mr. Sager lists would piously swear that they are supporters of civil rights and the first amendment.  It is interesting to see the hypocrisy in their assault on political speech.

Its pretty clear that open academic discourse is on life support at Harvard in the wake of the recent Larry Summers vote of no confidence.  Now, there is a question about whether simple entrepreneurship can survive.   Via Cafe Hayek, several Harvard students created dormaid to provide maid services to dorm students that wanted to pay for it.  Seemed like a great idea to me, which I would have loved at school, but the Harvard student magazine has hammered the entrepreneurs:

By creating yet another differential between the haves and have-nots on
campus, Dormaid threatens our student unity.... We urge the student
body to boycott Dormaid

Socialism has been rejected by countries around the world.  It seems like it is still alive and well at Harvard.  Here is the angst coming through of a frustrated top-down Stalinist planner:

A service like Dormaid can bring many levels of awkwardness into this
picture. For example, do two people sharing a double split the cost?
What if one wants the service and the other does not? What if one
cannot afford it? Hiring someone to clean dorm rooms is a convenience,
but it is also an obvious display of wealth that would establish a
perceived, if unspoken, barrier between students of different economic
means.

Here is the Cafe Hayek response:

This episode is too typical. An enterprising soul perceives a need
and creatively offers a product or service -- at his own financial risk
-- to satisfy that need. Everything is voluntary. No one is forced to
buy the service; no one is forced to work for it. But well-read
ignoramuses, infatuated with their own imaginary higher capacity for
caring for others, viscerally react against commercial exchange. In
this case, those opposed to Dormaid worry that because some but not all
students will find it worthwhile to buy maid service, "inequality"
among the Harvard student body will increase.

Is the typical Harvard student so immature that he suffers envy when
some of his fellow students buy maid service that he chooses not to
buy? (Bonus question for economics students: Why did I say "that he
chooses not to buy?" rather than "that he can't afford?")  Is he so
sensitive, so very, very tender, that he loses emotional stability at
the sight of a friend's dorm room freshly cleaned by maids?  Is he so
intellectually and socially inept that he can't work out an amicable
arrangement with his roommate if one wants to use Dormaid and the other
prefers not to do so?

Read the rest - Cafe Hayek has links to the original Harvard Crimson article.  I will tell you that my roommates would have been fine if I had used this service in college.  In fact, I was such a mess that they might have paid for it for me!

I have never been bothered by the trade deficit.  Concern over the trade deficit always seems to be a holdover of 18th century mercantile thinking.  The key failure seems to be thinking of wealth as static or zero sum.  In a zero sum world, running a consistent trade deficit might indeed pour all of a countries wealth overseas like a tank springing a leak.

Wealth, of course, is not zero sum.  New ideas, productivity, technology create wealth.  Ever year, the US creates tremendous amounts of new wealth.  If we spend some of it overseas, so what?   

Often, problems like the deficit that seem problematic at a macro level fall apart when studied as part of individual behavior.  Cafe Hayek takes this approach in a nice post on why not to panic about the deficit:

If my paying my Virginia neighbor $10 to mow my lawn creates neither
debt nor other economic problems, how would my paying a Canadian $10US
to mow my lawn create debt or other economic problems? What conceivable
economic difference can the latitude or longitude of the seller's
residence make?

UPDATE: I always felt this same way, from Steve Landsburg:

I hold this truth
to be self-evident: It is just plain ugly to care more about total
strangers in Detroit than about total strangers in Juarez. Of course we
care most about the people closest to us-our families more than our
friends and our friends more than our acquaintances. But once you start
talking about total strangers, they all ought to be on pretty much the
same footing. You could say you care more about white strangers than
black strangers because you've got more in common with whites. Does
that make it okay to punish firms for hiring blacks?....

Stealing assets is wrong, and so is stealing the right to earn a living, no matter where the victim was born.

This morning my sitemeter here at Coyote Blog rolled over the 50,000 visit mark.  I know that Glenn Reynolds gets more than this during his bathroom breaks, but it really exceeds my expectations after just 5 months online.  Thanks to all you readers!

We libertarians are often argue that both the left and the right are equally guilty of stepping on key freedoms.  We currently have an excellent example of that in the case of freedom of speech in broadcast media (radio and TV).

From the Right:  New initiatives to crack down on "bad language" and sexual content in broadcast media, most famously driving Howard Stern to satellite.

From the Left:  While bent out of shape about the right's crackdown on immoral speech, the left turns around and attempts a crackdown, via renewal of the Fairness Doctrine, on political speech.  See hapless John Kerry decrying loss of the Fairness Doctrine here, and a more coherent history here.

Can't we just agree to allow everyone free speech and turn off what we don't want to hear?

When I attended Princeton about 20 years ago, it was always considered the most "conservative" of the Ivy League schools.  Once I attended the school for a while, I thought that was a hilarious description, given how leftist and socialist viewpoints seemed to dominate much of the campus discussion. 

Over the years since, I have come to understand that "conservative" in academia means that some non-leftist voices are allowed to remain on campus.  The line I used in the first paragraph accurately describes why Princeton was considered conservative - note that I said "leftists and socialist viewpoints seemed to domintate MUCH of the campus discussion".  In most academia, instead of "much" I would have said ALL.

LGF has a nice pointer to an article in the NRO on diversity at Princeton.  Again, the debate is not about how to balance the mix of professors.  The debate is whether there should be one conservative non-socialist non-hate-America professor on the Middel Eastern Studies staff, or zero.

Sam Spector, who wrote his senior thesis under Doran and also worked as a
research assistant to him while an undergraduate at Princeton, explains that
"the controversy really blew up because Doran's publications were seen as to
some degree supportive of the Bush administration's policies, which are needless
to say not popular with the majority of academics, particularly academics who
specialize in the Middle East and who believe that the U.S is the single
greatest force for bad and instability in the region."

Yet, while Doran's publications do challenge academic orthodoxies, they
hardly reflect the work of a far-right ideologue, and he is generally well
regarded among centrists. If anything, the overriding themes of his articles are
a qualified defense
of American power and a view that Arab politics, and Arab problems, are more
about Arabs themselves than about Israel: As he argued in one ,
"Palestine" has become a generic symbol of resistance to the West. These may
sound like fairly uncontroversial propositions to you, but in academic Middle
East studies they're far from it. If, as Michael Young has
suggested, the major dividing line in the field is where one stands on the
"substance of Western power and its historical impact," Doran clearly takes a
minority "” and often-derided "” position.

Note what the other academics really want - total intellectual conformity and therfore avoidance of any disagreements:

More recently, several anonymous history professors told a student reporter that
Doran's getting tenure would create a rift between the NES department and
theirs.

"We don't want him," said one professor, quoted in Princeton's daily student
newspaper, The Princetonian, in December. In the future, the professor
asked, are the two departments "going to be mutually supportive or are they
going to be antagonistic?"

...Sethi continues, "Several history professors said they consider a decision to
tenure or not to tenure [Doran] a litmus test for future cooperation between
Princeton NES and the history department. If Doran is tenured, two history
professors said relations between the departments could be severely damaged."

I am embarassed that my University has professors that appear afraid of intellectual challenge.  They want to create an echo chamber where they are surrounded by people who agree with them.  This is pathetic.  As an engineer, I was generally sheltered from all this professor-as-political-figure-rather-than-educator stuff, but one of my favorite liberal arts professors was Uwe Reinhardt.  In most every campus debate I can remember, Reinhardt was the token defender of free markets and private property against, well, most everyone else in the liberal arts faculty.  Reinhardt always seemed to revel in the challenge of pitting his ideas against others.  Today, academics seem to shrink from this challenge.

James Taranto in "Best of the Web" reports on a Tampa Tribune article about a rally to revive the ERA.  The funny part was this:

Dozens of veterans of the women's equal rights movement, state lawmakers and relative newcomers to the cause gathered at the [Florida] state Capital [in Tallahassee] to renew the call for ratification of the 24-word statement.  In unison,  many repeated the text from  memory: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

OK, this may not seem funny yet.  To understand it, you have to picture the building in front of which they chose to hold their rally.  Picture hundreds of women rallying for women's rights, then picture that occurring in front of this building.  LOL.

By the way, I am not a Constitutional scholar, but can anyone tell me what women can't do now that they could do if the ERA were passed?

Should Maureen Dowd have the right to more political speech than I?  Should George Will enjoy more rights than you?

I signed the petition from the Online Coalition opposing speech limits in the blogosphere.

We are concerned about the potential impact that Judge Colleen
Kollar-Kotelly's decision in the U.S. District Court for the District
of Columbia in Shays v. FEC, 337 F. Supp. 2d 28 (D.D.C. 2004) and the
FEC's upcoming rulemaking process may have on political communication
on the Internet.

One area of great concern is the potential regulation of bloggers
and other online journalists who distribute political news and
commentary exclusively over the web. While paid political advertising
on the Internet should remain subject to FEC rules and regulations,
curtailing blogs and other online publications will dampen the impact
of new voices in the political process and will do a disservice to the
millions of voters who rely on the web for original, insightful
political commentary.

Under the current rules, "any news story, commentary, or editorial
distributed through the facilities of any broadcasting station,
newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication," is exempt from
reporting and coordination requirements. It is not clear, however, that
the FEC's "media exemption" provides sufficient protection for those of
us in the online journalism community.

As bipartisan members of the online journalism, blogging, and
advertising community, we ask that you grant blogs and online
publications the same consideration and protection as broadcast media,
newspapers, or periodicals by clearly including them under the Federal
Election Commission's "media exemption" rule.

I have always been opposed to McCain-Feingold's limitations on political speech, so my objection to current law goes beyond just extending the media exemption to blogs.  I support a broader extension of the media exemption from political speech restrictions to -- call me crazy -- all citizens, something I thought the First Amendment took care of but I guess we have to fight for again.  Actually, what might be more useful is to fight for an elimination of the media exemption altogether - this would likely raise such a howl from the media that McCain-Feingold (also known as the incumbent and MSM protection act) would soon be overturned.

As mentioned below, I visited Tallahassee last week.  The Florida State Capital building there always makes me laugh:

Am I crazy, or does the tall tower flanked by two hemispherical domes look like the Florida government is sending its citizens a message?  To paraphrase Dave Berry, I am not Photoshopping this - Google it yourself.  The architect has got to be laughing himself silly.

More here.

UPDATE:  It gets better and better.  Apparently women's groups chose the steps of this building as their venue for trying to reignite interest in the ERA.

I was pretty frustrated after my negotiations with Florida State Parks on Friday.  We were apparently the winning bidders for one of their park concessions, but their process requires a "negotiation" after the winner is accepted, something that is very unusual in these situations.  Typically, these Request for Proposals (RFPs) for these projects include all the minimum requirements the bidders must accept.  The RFP then lays out a point system that will be used for scoring the submissions (e.g. 20% of score on bid rent, 20% on financial stability of bidder, 30% on experience, etc).  Usually, the relevant agency reviews proposals to see if they meet all the minimum requirements, throwing out proposals not meeting these minimums, and then choose a winner from the remaining proposals based on the scores.

In this case, in the Florida State Park RFP, there was no minimum rent payment set (rent is usually bid as a percentage of concession sales).  Also, in the scoring, of the 800 total potential points, only 20 or 2.5% were assigned to the size of the bid rent payment.  The other 97.5% of the points were allocated to experience and services offered, etc.

Well, after spending a lot of time and money on the bid response itself, I was called to Tallahassee as the winning bidder to "negotiate".  After we sat down, the first thing they said was "your bid of x% is too low -- we won't accept anything less than twice that".

This is a classic bait and switch.  I assume it is legal under Florida government contracting law but it is illegal for federal contracts and in most other states.  They caused me to spend a lot of time and effort bidding and then flying to Florida on the assumption that there was no minimum rent amount and that the rent amount was a trivial requirement, as compared to quality and experience.  In their negotiations, the revealed the opposite.  They are hoping that now that I have gone through all this time and effort, I will agree to up the $ given my sunk costs.  What they don't know is that I am the world's number one believer in "sunk costs are sunk and therefor irrelevant".

If Best Buy issued an ad in the paper saying they were selling Sony plasma TV's for $500, and I rushed to the store only to find no $500 Sony's for sale but instead a pushy salesman trying to sell me up to the $2500 model that is on hand, they would be breaking the law in most states.  What Florida is trying to do is no different.

I am going to tell Florida that I need a few more days to respond to their hijack demands concerns.  I was taught long ago not to get emotional in a negotiation, and right now I am emotional.  When I calm down, I will sit down and try to calmly evaluate if it is still a good deal at twice the rent.  I will also call up some other concessionaires in Florida to see if this is an isolated incident or see if it is representative of ongoing arbitrary behavior I can expect in the future.

Unfortunately, the libertarian "bloc" in the country tends to be a bit too small for either of the two major parties to fight over - kind of like expending energy on wooing left handed Eskimo pipe-welders.  However, last year, with many libertarians opposing key parts of the Patriot Act, the growth in government spending, and the war in Iraq, the left and the Democratic Party made a bid to woo libertarians over to the Kerry camp. 

I would have found this argument more compelling had the left proven themselves to be a bit more consistent supporters of democracy and individual rights around the world.  Many on the left bent themselves into pretzels supporting blatant totalitarians in hopes of seeing George Bush fail.  Other leftists continue to be strong Marxists, supporting socialist regimes with a blind eye towards their human rights records.

While the socialists are probably a loss, there is still hope for much of the left to craft a freedom- and individual-rights-based foreign policy that libertarians could find compelling -- I handed out some free advice here.  However, before they left can really make progress here, the need to learn how to recognize a dictatorship:

You Know its a Dictatorship When:

1. Michael Moore portrays the country as a kite-flying paradise
2. Jimmy Carter sanctioned their last election
3. The UN certifies that there is no genocide
4. They sign friendship pacts with other dictatorships (also here and here and here too)
5. They are a member of the UN Human Rights commission (not 100% foolproof but getting closer every year)
6. They were once a French colony, and/or France is opposing sanctions against it (also here too)
7. Their people are impoverished and they lag the world in economic growth

Update:  Welcome Powerline and Instapundit readers. 

I'm finally back from a near week-long trip to Florida to visit our operations there and try to drum up some new business with the State of Florida.  I'm happy to be back, and I am working to catch up on what went on in the world the last few days.

A while back I wrote a series of posts here, here, and here on buying a small business.  One of the things I said in that post was:

Then, there are the banks. From my experience, it is very, very
difficult to get a bank to make an collateralized loan - i.e. a loan
that is secured only by the cash flow of a company rather than by
assets. In fact, I have never been successful at that. About the only
way that I have found that banks will make a loan is if it is an SBA
loan, where the SBA basically guarantees the loan for the bank. The SBA
goes through cycles of being very open to lending to being very tight.
I have not dealt with them for over two years, so I don't know what
their stance is today. Remember, though, that the SBA is not going to
approve any loan where the buyer has no experience in the industry or
where the buyer is not putting down his own money as well. The SBA has
a lot of information here.

This statement is still mostly true but I have learned a lot over the last couple of months.  The following is an update.

One of the things they tell you all the time in business school, but frankly I always found impossible to really internalize, was how much cash growth takes.  I guess I always thought of businesses with cash flow problems as being unsuccessful, slowly sliding down the drain and trying to make ends meet.  Wrong.  Growth is tremendously expensive.  And stressful.

My business is based on concession contracts.  Each winter, we are usually presented with the opportunity to bid on many contracts.  We narrow the field down to 4-6 we bid on, hoping to win about 2.  One of the things I did last year was greatly improve our standard bid materials, hoping that would help us win good projects.  Did it ever.  We bid on 6 last year and we won 6 (including Burney Falls, Pyramid Lake, and Lake Havasu).  Yea!  But then I began adding up all the investments in new inventory, new equipment, salary (you always have to hire people before the first revenues come in), licenses, building improvements, etc.  Eeek!

After a lot of work with bankers, I stand by most of my statement above.  Most bankers will not lend to businesses on cash flow, and always want some type of collateral (like my home equity).  Over time, though, I have found a few bankers who are willing to lend on cash flow and really understand business growth and why maybe I don't want to have my business's growth rate limited by how much equity I have in my personal home.  There are bankers who will put together packages of long-term loans backed by the SBA plus short term working capital loans that will now let me grow faster.  The folks at Copper Star Bank, for example, have been great. 

One of the reasons I felt the need to post this update is that I have been told that my difficulty finding a good business banker was due in part to my location here in Phoenix.  The Phoenix banking market is very real estate driven, so bankers usually come from that background rather than a business background.  I am told that those of you on the east coast or in the Midwest may have an easier time finding good business bankers.

Postscript: By the way, you might ask how I feel as a small government libertarian about accepting the government subsidy implicit in an SBA loan.  The answer is "conflicted".  Some libertarians are fine accepting government services, on the theory that they certainly have paid for them with all their taxes.  Some try to avoid government services, but that is almost impossible in today's world (such as using government roads).  I generally try to be pragmatic, operating somewhere in the middle.

As far as SBA loans go - I don't know what the commercial banking world would look like without SBA loans.  I think that the banking world would have found an alternative way to mitigate the risk (e.g. via securitization) without the government gaurantee, but we can't know.  The fact is that SBA gaurantees exist and banks would be crazy not to use the gaurantees in making business loans.  So, the reality is, if I want a cash flow based loan for a company my size, it will likely carry the SBA gaurantee.  My appologies to all those whose taxes support my loan gaurantee.

I wrote before of the cost that licensing imposes on the economy.  I love Milton Friedman's take on licensing and certification:

The justification offered is always the same: to protect the consumer. However, the reason
is demonstrated by observing who lobbies at the state legislature for
the imposition or strengthening of licensure. The lobbyists are
invariably representatives of the occupation in question rather than of
the customers. True enough, plumbers presumably know better than anyone
else what their customers need to be protected against. However, it is
hard to regard altruistic concern for their customers as the primary
motive behind their determined efforts to get legal power to decide who
may be a plumber.

Now, from Ohio (and via Cafe Hayek) comes this attempt to regulate auctioneers:

Besides costing $200 and posting a $50,000 bond,
the license requires a one-year apprenticeship to a licensed auctioneer, acting
as a bid-caller in 12 auctions, attending an approved auction school, passing a
written and oral exam. Failure to get a license could result in the seller being
fined up to $1,000 and jailed for a maximum of 90 days.

Keep Friedman's quote in mind.  Note that under this system, auctioneers have an automatic veto over new competition, since all potential competitors must find an existing auctioneer to take them on as an apprentice.  Imagine the consumer electronics business - "I'm sorry, you can't make or sell any DVD players until Sony or Toshiba have agreed to take you on as an intern for a year".  Yeah, I bet we'd see a lot of new electronics firms in that system - not.

It gets better, though.  The law is written in a way that it applies to Ohio residents trying to sell on eBay:

Here's the response offered by state Senator Larry
Mumper, author of the legislation: "It certainly will not apply to the casual
seller on eBay, but might apply to anyone who sells a lot," he said. "If someone buys and sells on eBay on a
regular basis as a type of business, then there is a need for
regulation."

This is the kind of regulation mentality that is killing us.  eBay has a great rating system, and while the system sometimes trips for small sellers (since they can just start a new account) but big volume competitors ruthlessly protect their reputation on eBay because it is so visible.

Italian communist Giuliana Sgrena claimed to have been specifically targeted by US troops, and had hundreds, perhaps thousands of rounds shot at her oncoming vehicle from a US checkpoint.  She even claims to have been shot at by a tank.  We mourn the loss of and the needless death of her translator, but must observe that, based on her story, US soldiers don't seem to be able to hit the broadside of a barn.  Courtesy of LGF, here's her car:

click to enlarge image

Note that the front end, which should have taken the brunt, looks almost pristine.  One hit in the windshield, one in the left-front tire, and one or more in the drivers side window.  More pictures here.  More too at Captains Quarters.

Further, Ms Sgrena

said her car was hit by 300 to 400 bullets from an armored vehicle. She said she
was picking up handfuls of spent rounds from the seats.

OK, maybe I was wrong.  If hundreds of rounds went into the car, they must have all gone through that same single hole on the windshield.  That's GREAT shooting.  So I guess what is really needed is better weapons penetration.  Its a pretty pathetic bullet from an armored vehicle that would enter a car and have so little energy left that it would just land on the seats in piles.

Look, here is some advice.  Take it from the CBS memo forgers.  If you are going to make something up, know your subject.  If you are going to forge a memo from a typewriter, make sure you know how typewriters worked.  And if you are going to exaggerate a story about military weapons, make sure you understand weapons.  Rounds entering the car would not build up in a pile on the seat so that she could scoop them up - they would have embedded in things.  And, if enough rounds were fired that they started building up on the seats, then no one would be alive to scoop them up. 

I have no doubt that this was a harrowing experience for all concerned, especially in the midst of their exhilaration at being released.  It was a tragedy that neither the drivers nor the Italian government knew enough about the rules of engagement on that road to recognize that speeding toward a checkpoint might be dangerous.  But it is also clear that Ms. Sgrena is exploiting the death of her comrade for personal and political gain, just as the Italian government is exploiting the incident to take attention away from the fact that they basically just established a bounty for kidnapping westerners.

It strikes me that no matter what happens with Syrian troops, one victor will certainly be Lebanese women, who have certainly made a positive impact on the American male's aesthetic radar screen of late.

Update:  Ditto Kuwait.

Via Dave Berry, here is an addictive new take on the classic breakout game.

By the way, here is Dave's semi-serious take on what electronics he travels with.

In accordance with federal law, I also have an iPod. It has 15G of
memory, which is at least 14G more than I actually need, since I
realize in my old age that I really only like something like nine
songs. I have Bose noise-canceling headphones, which are wonderful on
planes. The plane could make an emergency landing in the ocean, and
those of us with Bose noise-canceling headphones wouldn't notice until
squid swam past our seats.

Last week I wrote that I was confused on this diversity thing:

For years, women at Harvard argued there needed to be more women on the
faculty to support "diversity".  I have always thought that diversity
meant that you had a lot of difference - in this case different kinds
of people with different skills.  Now, Larry Summers is getting
attacked by the female faculty for implying that women are, uhh,
perhaps different from men.  Women are insisting that there is no
justification for even studying the question of whether women are different than men.  They maintain that women are the same, no argument allowed.  But if they are the same, how is hiring more women contributing to diversity?

Fortunately, hat tip to James Taranto, the diversity term is clarified on the web site of an Oregon lodge.  The page begins:

WE WELCOME DIVERSITY
Respecting the interdependence & diversity of all life.

Helpfully, they clarify what they mean by diversity a bit down the page:

No Smokers...No Pets...No Visitors...No Hummers, No RVs, No Bush Voters (due to his environmental destructive policies.)

Oh, and in the spirit of good customer service: no refunds for cancellations.

It can't be long before this same text appears on the Harvard web site.

PS- I would be curious to see a quality, thoughtful listing of GWB's war-crimes on the environment.  Not his "lack of commitment", but actual changes in regulation.  While I know environmentalists hate his rhetoric, in reality, he has not actually changed much, other than the Clear Skies Initiative, which I discussed here as actually reducing emissions.  Heck, he's actually a disappointment for those of us who would like to see a roll-back of some of the sillier environmental rules (e.g. ANWR drilling).

Presumably environmentalists dislike GWB's going along with the Senate's 98-0 rejection of Kyoto, but does this reaction really make sense for minimize-man's-impact-on-nature people like those quoted above?  Global warming hasn't been shown to hurt plants or animals or such - I am not sure many would notice.  Global warming primarily impacts man, and in particular, technological high-population-density coast-living man.  I would think that rising oceans swamping out civilization would be a positive outcome for these folks.  (update: more on Clear Skies here at Volokh)

I HATE most new loyalty programs at stores.  When loyalty programs really came in vogue with airlines, they made sense.  Airlines gave their best customers bonuses for spending lots of money with them.  Today, though, every store I go into has a loyalty program.  I have a Fry's card, an Albertson's card, and a Safeway card (grocery stores);  I have a Borders and a Barnes and Noble card;  I have an Ace Hardware card and a Best Buy card;  For god sakes,  I have a TGI Friday's card.  Not to mention the cards from American, America West, Southwest, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, National, Hertz and probably 20 others I can't remember off-hand.  I carry a stack of the travel related ones in a big rubber band in the bottom of my briefcase.  The rest bulge my wallet up to about an inch thick, even when it is (all too often) devoid of cash.

Did I mention I hate all these programs?  Most of them have no real reward for purchase volume, you just have to have their card in your pocket to qualify for the best deal.  What is the point of this --its not like they are rewarding purchase volume (in fact, grocery stores do just the opposite, by rewarding the people who buy the least with better service via the express lane).  Why do I need to fatten up my wallet to unmanageable proportions just to get a store's best price? 

This analogy will date me, but its kind of like all those women who used to carry eggs and live chickens in their purses on Let's Make a Deal in the hopes that Monty Hall will ask for that item to qualify for some prize.   When I check out in the grocery store, they even put little asterisks by certain items to remind me that I am not getting their best price because I have not shown them their plastic card.  Come to think of it, my Monty Hall analogy may be flawed.  It is more like the pagan gods refusing to provide rain until their hapless subjects had sacrificed the right kind of goat.  Now how would that be for a loyalty program -- "I am sorry Mr. Meyer, but you sacrificed a goat, and Best Buy requires that you sacrifice an ox to get 10% off that DVD player".

Well, the revolt (or, if you accept the pagan religion analogy, the reformation) begins today.  I chucked everything in a drawer except the travel cards.  The book store cards are easy - its Amazon all the way now.  I used to drop in and buy some impulse items at my local Borders, but with free 2-day shipping for the rest of the year at Amazon (I signed up for the offer) there is no reason to buy anywhere else.  Amazon always gives me their best price without a piece of plastic in my pocket or an animal sacrifice and I don't have to deal with that irritating reminder from the cashier at Borders that without their card, I'm not going to get their best price.

Time will tell whether I can live with the increased grocery prices that will come from not having their card, but I am going to give it a shot on principle.  The revolt begins -- anyone want to join me?

PS - should I name this effort my loyalty pogrom?

UPDATE:  Thanks David, I fixed "principle".

UPDATE #2:  Per the comments, I do indeed understand that  one of the major goals of  well-structured loyalty programs is to gather data about the customer.  However, I would argue that out of 100 companies gathering customer purchase data, maybe 3 know what they are doing with it - meaning that they do more than just make nice powerpoint slides for the bosses with the data.

Take an example of my grocery store, Fry's.  Fry's has a loyalty card you must present at the register to get the best pricing.  Once you present the card, the checkout person will tell you at the end of the transaction how much you saved by using the card.  But half the time the people around me forget their cards, and the checkout person asks other people in line to lend their card, so the hapless customer who forgot theirs can still get the better pricing.  In other words, if the data is really being used, it is corrupted.

But how do they use the data?  Certainly bricks and mortar stores have limited options - they can't do like Amazon does and present me with a custom selection of goods when I first walk into the store.  They might send me a customized coupon package, but I have found no evidence that any loyalty program I have used has ever done this.  My guess is that most of the data just feeds the voracious appetite of the bosses to see data.  At best, the data might be used in vendor negotiations, but I doubt this too.

By the way, to provide a customized customer experience

UPDATE #3:  One of my friends who used to work with me in the pricing practice at McKinsey & Co. suggested that the cards may be a way of maintaining multiple pricing levels for different customers, much like airlines have done for years with business and leisure travelers.  The theory goes that the most price sensitive will get and use such a card, while the busier, perhaps wealthier and less price-sensitive shoppers won't bother.   This is certainly possible, but if this is the strategy, they certainly need to train their register people not to shout all over the store to find a card for shoppers that don't have one.  Since I put my Fry's card in the drawer last week, I have visited the store three times and every time the register clerk, without my asking, has borrowed a card from someone else so I could get the discount.

This is a great post from Brian Micklethwait of Samizdata describing government as "distributed stupidity" and demonstrating how we all face an anti-lottery every day as more arbitrary laws are piled on top of us:

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that there is now a
crisis of excessive lawmaking in the West generally, and in the
Anglo-Saxon world in particular. It is not that our political class is
hell bent on tyrranny, impure and simple. It is more that they have
become legislative entrepreneurs, so to speak. And just as a
businessman who is delighted to make a fast buck selling mobile phones
does not bother himself about the grief inflicted by railway travellers
with mobiles on other railway travellers, so too, lawmakers who are
"aiming" at one particular group of alleged wrongdoers have a tendency
to neglect what you might call legislative collateral damage. The laws
pile up, and the other legislators, the ones who you would hope would
be sitting there solemnly trying to limit that collateral damage,
neglect that duty, because they are too busy hustling through other
little laws of their own, aimed at other preferred clutches of alleged
wrongdoers. Laws go straight from legislative entrepreneurs to
government regulators, without no intervening process of scrutiny that
is worthy of that adjective.

Which means that government regulators are then tempted to mutate
into what you might call regulatory entrepreurs. They cannot possible
enforce all their laws, rules and regulations. There are not enough
hours in the history of universe for that to happen. So, just like the
legislative entrepreneurs, they also lose sight of the big picture (it
having become too big to bother with) and decide for themselves which
regulations to take seriously. How? Any way they please. In accordance
with what rules? Whichever ones they decide to go with.

Add a dash of right wing fervour (a point which Go Directly to Jail
apparently brings out very strongly) about crime being very, very bad
and having to be fought with implacable ferocity, and to hell with
those silly old legal safeguards, and you end up with a kind of
anti-lottery instead of a government. Any person, at any moment, is
liable to be picked on and turned into a criminal. At any moment, in
the words of those British National Lottery adverts, it could be
you-ou!!! And everyone is obliged to enter this one.

Theres more, and its all good.