Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

The WSJ quotes

“While Congress was engaged in the hysterical debate over foreign
ownership of U.S. ports, something much more dangerous was taking
place in America’s vulnerable ports of entry. As disclosed yesterday
at a congressional hearing, federal investigators were able to smuggle
enough radioactive material into the United States last year to make
two dirty bombs…. The Government Accountability Office is the
investigative arm of Congress. In a test in December, undercover GAO
teams managed to sneak small amounts of cesium-137 across U.S. border crossing points in Washington State and Texas. Radiation alarms went off, but security inspectors were fooled by phony documents and
allowed the material through” — editorial in yesterday’s Miami Herald.

That’s interesting, but wouldn’t a terrorist be better advised to avoid border crossing points and customs officials altogether? There are, after all, hundreds of miles of other places to cross that the U.S. government studiously avoids watching lest it catch an illegal immigrant.

I realized I missed something in my earlier posts (starting here) on Georgia v. Randolph. I may have said that the Supreme Court ruled that one of two joint owners of a house can invited anybody in the world except a policeman into the house over the objections of the other owner. That is not quite right. He can also invite in the policeman, perhaps— but nothing the policeman sees can be used as evidence against the objecting owner. That is, it seems the objecting owner cannot sue the policeman for trespass, or stop him from looking around the house.

This, however, removes the privacy justification for excluding evidence. The policeman can legally enter and invade the objecting owner’s privacy. He just cannot use evidence. This has the worst of both worlds. Innocents lose their privacy, and criminals are protected.

Steve Sailer writes:

“Bush carried 25 of the top 26 states in white total fertility (number of babies per white woman), while Kerry was victorious in the bottom 16.”

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This week Yale Law School Dean Koh walked out with a large group of other people from a symposium on federal power because one of the speakers had used the word “nigs” some years ago in an unrelated context. When a Dean does this, what does that say about the likelihood of his putting performance above politics in his treatment of current and prospective faculty and students?

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From a Volokh Cons. comment:

“One case he lost 9-0 and he had to call up his client, which is never a fun thing to do,” recounted Richard Lazarus, a Georgetown University law professor who has known Roberts for nearly three decades and roomed with him in Washington. “His client was just incredulous, beside himself. ‘How could we have lost 9-0?’ John finally just quipped back, ‘Because there are only nine justices.’

Wesley Smith has a good National Review article on the Hippocratic Oath. He says few doctors do take it any more, though there are various watered-down modern oaths that they take. He notes that the Oath forbids a doctor from doing abortions, giving deadly drugs to patients who request them, and taking sensual advantage of their visits to patients, all of which are dropped from, for example, Cornell’s modern oath. The Hippocratic Oath is not very long actually— about a page— and dropping these things is dropping 2 of the 6 paragraphs of forbidden actions. (more…)

Robert Novak notes in Human Events that it is unlikely the Democrats can win a majority in the House in 2006. Incumbents are simply too safe. The gerrymandering that has long protected them will continue to protect them.

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This supplements my previous post , which makes the argument.

(1) The Solicitor-General’s amicus brief does bring up the property question, which is why Randolph’s brief discusses it.

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A Supreme Court case decided March 22 illustrates, I think, three big problems in con law: its dissociation from normal law and the ignorance of its judges about it, its preference for highflown principles over practicality or good policy, and its use of ungrounded factual assertions about what people do and believe. I’ll focus on the first and the third reasons in this case.

The question was whether if a wife says the police can enter a house, but the husband says they cannot, the police can enter. Surely the first question anyone would have about this is how the law applies to unwanted visitors in general. If the wife wants to let her obnoxious, husband-hating friend into the house, does the husband have the right to block her entry?

If the answer is “Yes”, then we would have to consider whether allowing the police to enter should be treated differently from allowing ordinary guests since policy entry aids the public good by catching crime (especially if, as in Georgia v. Randolph, the wife asks the police to come in because she claims her husband is a criminal). If the answer is “No”, then surely the police have as much right to enter as an ordinary guest.

Although 6 of the 8 judges participating put their names on separate opinions (opinion, concurrences, and dissents), none address the property law question, with an exception I’ll tell you shortly. Instead, the majority talk about social custom (without using any evidence about what social custom actually is), and the dissents focus on precedent, rule clarity, and the particular facts of the case. I find this appalling.

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I was teaching about Cinergy, an Indiana electric utility, and came across some interesting numbers I might want to remember later. The beta, measured over 5 years, is just .19. On another page, earnings per share are 2.18 and the dividend 1.92, and the price to book ratio is 1.94.

From National Review’s blog:

James Freedman, R.I.P.
[John J. Miller 03/22 06:42 AM]

Former Dartmouth president James Freedman has died. His NYT obituary, in the first graf, calls him “a forceful voice against anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance on college campuses” — apparently on the grounds that he despised the conservative Dartmouth Review. The NYT piously declared that the good liberal Freedman “defended The Review’s right to publish,” though I suspect that the staff of the Review hardly felt this way. A piece on Freedman’s legacy, published earlier this month in the Review, comments:

In addition to his treacherous efforts to destroy our undergraduate foundation, Freedman also had a long and dubious relationship with the student body and this publication in particular. “I now see that the Review is dangerously affecting — in fact, poisoning — the intellectual environment of our campus,” Freedman intoned in a 1988 address to the Dartmouth faculty. At that meeting, he called the newspaper’s staff “perversely provocative” and “irresponsible, mean-spirited, cruel, and ugly.”

Re:Mohammed cartoons, I came across a good Shiite webpage,
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People perceive causal patterns all the time, even when outcomes are random, not realizing that such patterns will occur randomly too. From p. 83 of Robyn Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: (more…)

I posted last week on the firing of the Daily Illini editor for publishing the Mohammed cartoons. Here are a couple of good data sources and some quotes: (more…)

I recently posted on Elizabeth Warren’s article on changes in consumption from 1970 to the present. Tim Worstall mentioned that Lomborg’s book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, had some relevant info, and so it does, around p. 78. The average house or apartment has gotten bigger:rooms per person rose from around 1.6 in 1970 to 2.2 in 2000 (all nubmers are approximate, because Lomborg only has graphs–though he does give sources too). Percentage of households with a washing machine rose from 70% to 78%. Percentage with cars rose from 83% to 92%. Microwaves: 0% to 84%. VCR’s: 0% to 95%. Computers: 0% to 51%. Other items–refrigerators, TVs, etc, were already in the 90s by 1970.

In Act III of Eugene O’Neill’s The Homecoming, General Mannon says to his wife,

That’s always been the Mannons’ way of thinking. They went to the white meeting-house on Sabbaths and meditated on death. Life was a dying. Being born was starting to die. Death was being born. (shaking his head with a dogged bewilderment) How in hell people ever got such notions! That white meeting-house. It stuck in my mind–clean-scrubbed and whitewashed–a temple of death! But in this war I’ve seen too many white walls splattered with blood that counted no more than dirty water. I’ve seen dead men scattered about, no more important than rubbish to be got rid of. That made the white meeting-house seem meaningless–making so much solemn fuss over death!

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Here’s an interesting
full-text book link site. It is for books that are out of copyright everywhere in the world except America: (more…)