I visited Oakville’s River Oaks Community Church (http://www.riveroakschurch.ca) while in Ontario recently. It is a pentecostal church, with generally orthodox doctrine. I wondered, though, about the “prophecy” that occurred immediately after the sermon. A man got up and gave a sort of prayer/sermon-coda. Nothing he said was objectionable, but he did give the impression that what he was saying was directly inspired by God. (more…)
As I was shaving, I was thinking about aftershave (which I do not use). The attitude of the economist, which is also that of most moderns, is that a man should use perfume if he wants to and is willing to pay for it. But what would Plato have thought? The older approach is to say that whether men are allowed to use perfume depends on what kind of society you, the social planner, are trying to create. You could let each man decide, but that is unlikely to reach the optimal result, whatever your goal may be (unless it is just the economist’s goal of maximizing surplus). Instead, you might want all men to use perfume, if you wish them to be more like women, or no men, if you wish them to be more distinct. It is a matter of what you are aiming at. Individual preferences are not the point– except, perhaps as far as whether the gestalt satisfies individual preferences.
Go to a page like “HTML 4.0 Character Entity References” that has lots of different symbols. You will discover •, which means •, which you can also enlarge. Here is the input:
•
<big> • </big> <p>
<big> <big> <big> <big> <big> • </big> </big> </big> </big> </big><p>
Here is what it looks like on the screen:
•
•
•
A Hawaiian reader kindly called my attention to the contract case,
HONDA vs. BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE EMPLOYEES’ RETIREMENT SYSTEM OF THE STATE OF HAWAII (17 June 2005). Mr. Honda made a clearly stupid election for his retirement which gave his heir about a week of benefits instead of a lifetime. The form he filled out was unambiguous but confusing, and the other party had a fiduciary duty to him. His wife did not argue her case well, since she should have been arguing “unilateral mistake” but argued ambiguity instead, but the Supreme Court brought in the correct doctrine for her. This is related to two of my papers, “Explaining Incomplete Contracts as the Result of Contract-Reading Costs,” in the BE Press journal, Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy. Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 2 (2001) (http://Pacioli.bus.indiana.edu/erasmuse/published/Rasmusen_01.negot.pdf) and “Mutual versus Unilateral Mistake in Contracts,” Journal of Legal Studies (June 1993), 22:309-343 (with Ian Ayres) (http://Pacioli.bus.indiana.edu/erasmuse/published/Rasmusen_93JLS.mistake.pdf). (more…)
The Wunderground astronomy site. is very good. It tailors the night sky to your zip code, time, and direction like this 47401 view to the North.
Why would a Calvinist pastor convert to Roman Catholicism? Tim Bayly discusses the topic, and suggests it is the desire for authority, for certainty. Part of his post is on a different angle, though: disgust with the isolation in individual congregations or denominations of many Protestants: (more…)
The Monroe County Chronicle reports a typical example of Democratic use of public money to fund organizations that help them politically– in this case, a local radio station: (more…)
After reading a post and comments in He Lives, I wonder if someone could clarify the Lutheran and Roman Catholic positions on the following cases:
1. Smith acquires faith in Jesus Christ, but dies soon afterwards, before he has time to do any good works. His previous life is very sinful.
2. Jones acquires faith in Jesus Christ, but dies soon afterwards, before he has time to be baptized or take Communion.
Are Smith and Jones saved, or not?
John Derbyshire says Ted Heath is an example of someone who was successful in parliamentary politics despite lack of charm: (more…)
Laurence Silberman, deputy attorney-general in 1974, has a good op-ed in the WSJ on FBI misdeeds under J. Edgar Hoover– in particular, the “secret files” on political figures. Silberman says that Hoover’s name should be taken off the FBI building, something I agree with. Silberman learned of the files and had to testify about them. (more…)
“Trendy inflatable pools causing bylaw officers headaches” from the 17 July 2005 London Free Press reports that in Ontario a 3-foot deep swimming pool requires a six-foot fence to keep out children– at a cost considerably over the cost of the pools themselves. (more…)
Why do I like this photo so much? It must be something about the combination of linear and curved, and of green, yellow, and blue, balanced so nicely. The silos looks like humans– Man and Woman, perhaps– standing proudly on their land in opposition to the elements.
Michael Ledeen has a very good “interview” article at National Review arguing that the London “suicide bombers” actually were duped– they didn’t know the bombs would go off while they were carrying them. Apparently such cases have occurred in Iraq– maybe most of them are that way– and there was even one case where the bomber survived, and loudly complained about how he was used.
Publicizing this would be very helpful for the Free World cause. It would discourage all kinds of terrorist operations except the true suicide bombings.
Crime fell in the 1990’s. Why? Donahue and Levitt have a QJE article in which they suggest it is because in the 1970’s, potential criminals started being aborted in large numbers. They have various evidence, of which the most important is that doing a regression on year-state data to explain 1990’s crime, the coefficient on abortion in the 1970’s is big and significant. This result is robust to various specifications they present omitting particular control variables or states, and back-of-the-envelope calculations make it seem reasonable.
Oddly enough, “Chapter IV.- Why the Christians Do Not Kill Themselves” of Justin’s Second Apology connects together suicide, birth control, and a sermon by Pastor Mangrum of ECC: (more…)
The Washington Post reports that Senator Santorum’s criticism of Massachusetts morality has drawn fire from some of the most immoral men in Congress. (more…)
Update: My argument here has a fatal flaw as far as the law goes (perhaps it survives in ethics): it ignores the public/private status of the various players. It is perfectly legal for a private actor such as a private university’s law school to control the speech of people involved with it. Yale Law School could say that no law firm that opposes tort reform could recruit there, for example, or that it won’t support summer internships to work for anti-abortion public-interest law firms.
Thus, it would be consistent for Yale to object to a government attempt to stop Yale from suppressing the speech of its students or other people. The analogy would be to a Baptist school that lost federal funding because it refused to admit non-Baptist students. (I don’t know whether that has been fought in the courts or not, but that takes us back to the central arguments in Rumself v. FAIR).
July 15: At VC, Todd Zywicki links to the BRIEF AMICUS CURIAE OF LAW STUDENTS AND LAW PROFESSORS IN SUPPORT OF REVERSAL for Rumsfeld v. FAIR, the Solomon Amendment case. It is obviously constitutional for the government to refuse federal funds to universities that refuse to allow military recruiting, or, at least, it is more clearly constitutional than refusing funding to universities that discriminate by race, etc. (more…)
“Spring Forward and Die”: what a wonderful title for a weblog post Veal has come up with! It seems that daylight savings time kills people, because drivers get sleepier.
A New York Times article on
West Indians, Mulattoes, and Recent African Immigrants at Harvard said,
While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves.
Bad Behavior has blocked 1090 access attempts in the last 7 days.
