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(Click on the graph for a larger view.)We have become squeamish at the thought of the valor that is expressed in killing enemy soldiers through acts of bravery. We know instinctively that we should honor courage, but shy away from honoring courage if it results in the taking of life rather than in just the saving of life. . . . When are we going to start awarding the Medal of Honor once again for soldiers who kill people and break things so our families can sleep safely at night? [Full article is here.]It’s easy to make fun of this mentality. People of a certain age might be reminded, especially around Thanksgiving time, of “Alice’s Restaurant.”
I don't think there is any truth to it. When you're winning, honestly, people are excited. But it's not going to do any good for jobs. It's not going to bring General Motors, Chrysler and Ford back. . . .Even in New Orleans. People said when the Saints won the Super Bowl it would regenerate the economy down there in the city. For a time being, it did help the city. But New Orleans is still in the same situation . . . That uplifting is gone.If Mason is as sharp on the field this Sunday as he was in the Sun last week, I’d take the Ravens and lay the ten points, broken pinky and all. (Besides, the Panthers have covered at home only once this season; they haven’t covered much on the road either.)
Cognitive dissonance is really the close cousin of Hypocrisy — changing your perceptions to make them square with your larger ideas. Cognitive Dissonance went to grad school; Hypocrisy chose religion and politics.Secret recording is morally dubious, to say the least, as we have seen recently here in New Jersey. When a Rutgers student committed suicide after two other students streamed video of him in a romantic encounter with another male, Gov. Christie was quick to say that the secret taping was a violation of conscience. “I don't know how those two folks are going to sleep at night, knowing that they contributed to driving that young man to that alternative.” (Was it a violation of the law? Christie, whose previous job was US Attorney, said that he would leave it up to his attorney general.)
bought drinks for Ploshnick and began asking about tenure. Ploshnick talked about how difficult it was to fire a tenured teacher. She said some things she shouldn’t have said. She quoted someone else as having used a racial obscenity, the so-called “n-word..”All the while, he was secretly videotaping, and Ploshnick’s comments are part of an anti-union web video, “Teachers Gone Wild.”
Christie recently praised O’Keefe’s secret taping of Ploshnick and others and said: “If you need an example of what I’ve been talking about for the last nine months — about how the teachers union leadership is out of touch with the people and out of control — go watch this video.”The dissonance goes further. The person whose privacy or confidentiality you violate should be someone who deserves it. But Ploshnick doesn’t seem like such a bad person or teacher. In 1997,
Alissa Ploshnick risked her life to save the lives of a dozen Passaic schoolchildren. She threw herself in front of a careening van to protect her students and landed in the hospital with broken ribs, a fractured wrist, a badly bruised pelvis and glass cuts in her eyes. She could have died. . . . She says she spent $9,000 of her own money on school supplies for her students, made sure a child in her class made his dental appointments by bringing him there and was just asked to be a godparent to the child of another student.
I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow.Rates have gone up. In 1995, students were paying $20 a page. Dante’s clients pay per project – $2,000 for a 20-40 page paper, which works out to $50-100 a page. The writer-company split is still the same – 50-50.
When I’m alone in my room, in front of the computer and between the headphones, it’s hard not to write something good for myself and maybe even for the imaginary absentee professor or appreciative T.A., something that will last. But when I’m standing in the crowded Tailormade office, next to someone elegant and young and in eight hundred bucks’ worth of calfskin leather, someone who not only has never heard of John Stuart Mill and never read Othello but doesn’t even know he hasn’t, doesn’t even mind that he hasn’t, and doesn’t even care that he hasn’t, the urge to make something that will last somehow vanishes.
Refused to overturn a lower court decision that failed to deny that government does not have the right to refrain from excluding unstated principles that do not have . . . .
Prices are going through the roof. Basic cost of living, food, clothing, energy, is all going up. And there will be a QE3 and QE4. . . . Leading economist Nouriel Roubini, he tweeted this: . . . : “QE2 will be followed by QE3 and QE4 as QE2 will fail to revive the real economy and to prevent deflationary pressures.” There you go.Beck seems to think that Roubini is saying that QE2 will lead to inflation. In fact, Roubini is saying just the opposite, but he phrases that idea with a double negative: will fail to prevent deflation. It’s possible that the negative connotation of deflation also added to Beck’s apparent confusion.
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I confess, I had to look twice at the Biblical citation.
outnumbered by liberals by 3 to 1 even in fields known to be relatively conservative, such as economics, by more than 5 to 1 in moderate fields such as political science and by 20 to 1 or more in many fields, such as sociology and anthropology.The numbers are cited by Richard Redding in a recent op-ed in LA Times and other newspapers (including yesterday’s Star-Ledger, which is where my colleague Arnie Korotkin found it and brought it my attention.)
Weddings are usually carefully planned – the guest list, the clothes, the flowers, the music, the food – and scheduled fairly tightly so that everything goes well. But I wonder what that couple and their guests will remember about their wedding day. Will it be all those elements they planned? Or will it be the ten minutes of surprise, when, on their way out of the park, they were dancing to music they’d never expected and with other couples they’d never met?**“No man but a blogger ever wrote, except for money.”What Dr. Johnson actually said was “blockhead,” but what’s the difference?
Suppose that some editor offered me $1,000 to write an article.Then Mankiw does a little magic – like the magician who starts holding one ball in his fingers out soon winds up with many.
30 years from now, when I pass on, my children would inherit about $10,000.But then come the taxes.
Without any taxes, accepting that editor’s assignment would have yielded my children an extra $10,000. With [the proposed Obama] taxes, it yields only $1,000But ah, if we keep the Bush tax cuts for the rich . . .
Taking that writing assignment would yield my kids about $2,000. I would have twice the incentive to keep working.Other bloggers (Brad DeLong and Kevin Drum, for example) have criticized Mankiw’s math and economics. What I’m curious about is the assumption that rich people do what they do only or mainly because of the money.
Maybe you are looking forward to a particular actor’s next movie or a particular novelist’s next book. Perhaps you wish that your favorite singer would have a concert near where you live. Or, someday, you may need treatment from a highly trained surgeon, or your child may need braces from the local orthodontist. Like me, these individuals respond to incentives. (Indeed, some studies report that high-income taxpayers are particularly responsive to taxes.) As they face higher tax rates, their services will be in shorter supply.Should Mankiw really be using himself as an example? If Mankiw’s work output is merely or mostly a response to economic incentives, why is he writing this column at all? The Times paid him considerably less than $1000. I would guess about a third less, but whatever it was, it’s pocket change compared to what he makes from his books, and it’s probably much less than he could have made had he spent the same amount of time consulting.
JOE: I was playing about like $2000 a hand. And I told the doorman, “If you get a good ride, like to the golf course, come and get me,” y’know, like $75. Anyway, he came up to the table and told me, “Hey, I got a ride” Seventy-five dollars. The people in the pit, they all think I’m nuts, y’know. I just stopped.. I left, I took my money, and I ran down to take the guy for $75, and there I am playing two grand a hand.Nobody understands it? Viviana Zelizer does. So do most people, at some level. They know that their treatment of dollars is not universalistic They just don’t write books about it.
I try to separate the two. One has nothing to do with the other.
MARY BETH: I don’t understand that.
JOE: I know. Nobody does.
MAURY BETH: Do you understand it?
JOE: I don’t. I just. . . .Gambling to me is gambling, work is work.
After lunch at the food court (so much better than the typical mall food court), we took the subway to Astor Place and wandered the Lower East Side – gentrification happening as you watch. A community garden on Avenue B was having a harvest festival, with barbecue and salads (pay what you like) and a trio playing Indian-style music, and it was like walking back into the sixties.
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Son of Ali Baba”: “Dis is duh palace ah my fadda, an’ yonda lies duh Valley ah duh Sun.”
Are Muslims especially prone to large-scale political violence? From Montesquieu to Samuel Huntington, prominent modern analysts of politics have regarded Muslims as unusually inclined to strife. Many other observers have portrayed Islam as a peace-loving faith and Muslims as largely pacific. Yet scholars still lack much hard evidence on whether a relationship between Islam and political violence really exists. Precious few studies adduce empirical evidence on whether Islamic societies are actually more or less violent. This article assesses whether Muslims are more prone to large-scale political violence than non-Muslims. The authors focus neither on terrorism nor on interstate war. Instead, they investigate large-scale intrastate violence. The article makes three contributions. First, it offers useful data on Islam and political strife. Second,it investigates whether Muslims are especially violence prone. Relying on cross-national analysis, the authors find no evidence of a correlation between the proportion of a country’s population that is made up of Muslims and deaths in episodes of large-scale political violence in the postwar period. Third, the authors investigate whether Islamism (the ideology), as opposed to Muslims (the people), is responsible for an inordinate share of the world’s large-scale political violence. They find that Islamism is implicated in an appreciable but not disproportionate amount of political violence.
It would have been built and unremarked if the authors had given it a different name, say “The Arc of Embrace.” But it was called “The Crescent of Embrace.”
If you didn’t see it, that just shows how successful the terrorists have been in hiding their evil influence.
The public seems to be angry about values. The heart of any moral system is the connection between action and consequences. Today’s public anger rises from the belief that this connection has been severed in one realm after another. . . . What the country is really looking for is a restoration of responsibility.I guess he never went to anger management or couples therapy, where they tell you to make “I statements” (“When you text at the dinner table, I feel ignored,”). Instead, it’s, “When you text at the dinner table, America feels ignored.”
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