Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

From Human Events:

Blackmun later recalled that Nixon asked him, “What kind of woman is Mrs. Blackmun?” When Blackmun wondered what this question was getting at, Nixon said, “She will be wooed by the Georgetown crowd. Can she withstand that kind of wooing?”

Blackmun contended she could. But, later, when Blackmun was contemplating whether the Constitution protected a right to privacy that encompassed a right to abortion, Mrs. Blackmun turned out to be the best-placed lobbyist for the pro-abortion movement. As Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong revealed in The Brethren, the justice’s wife told one of Blackmun’s pro-abortion clerks: “You and I are working on the same thing. Me at home and you at work.”

The result was Blackmun’s Roe v. Wade opinion, which took the abortion issue away from state legislatures, where it had always been, and elevated abortion to a constitutional right.

“Those with superior intelligence need to learn to be wise,” says Charles Murray in the WSJ. He has wise things to say.

We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

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From Philosophers’ Playground, something relevant to Intelligent Design:

The” grue” of which he speaks comes from Nelson Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction” in which he argues that the central logical tool in scientific reasoning, induction, is not the language independent thing we think it is. The idea is that if the word “grue” means “green before 1/1/07 and blue thereafter” then all of the evidence we currently have that the grass is green is also evidence that the grass is grue since all observations have come before the year 2007. By using induction from this evidence, speakers of our color language would predict that on New Years’ Day, the grass will still be green, but using the very same logical inference, grue-speakers will be lead by their language to argue that all scientific evidence points to it being what we would call blue. So we have different claims about how the world will be based on the same evidence and the same scientific inference, with the only difference being the language we choose to speak — something that should be innocuous.

Is the statement “Grass is grue” only falsifiable after 1/1/07. In the naive sense, yes, because that is the first point at which there theories make different predictions. But as Duhem, Quine, Kuhn, and Lakatos (amongst many others) point out. No matter what we observe, we haven’t necessarily falsified anything in particular. We can hold onto the grue language and grue-based inductions if we are willing to make adjustments elsewhere in our web of belief.

I liked this plaid wrapping paper, which Tom and Euna sent to us. Why do I like it? The repeated pattern, the double way to look at it, the mild colors, perhaps.

Pastor Bayly makes a good point with respect to wifely submission, but a larger point with respect to which doctrines need emphasis. It’s not the doctrines that are popular in worldly circles anyway– it’s the doctrines that arouse fury and opposition in the world, and discomfort in the Church. (more…)

I learn from the 2003 U.S. State Department report that “The Coptic Orthodox Church permits divorce only in specific circumstances, such as adultery or conversion of one spouse to another religion.” Thus, it does not take the Roman Catholic position.

At the Law Lunch yesterday we had another great discussion. We spent the whole time on the subject of various articles of Professor Fairfield (who was absent): virtual-world property. Here is the question:

Suppose Bigfirm sets up a computer game in which customers pay to be able to create monsters and other characters and to build their own houses. Bigfirm includes a clause in the contract saying that Bigfirm will own copyright in anything created, and can at any time kick out any player and destroy anything he creates.

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G. P. N. emailed the Uni list with a very nice collection of words at the same time obscure, striking, and likely to be useful some day:

liminal : marginally perceptible

threnody A poem or song of mourning or lamentation.

steatopygic or steatopygian With an extreme accumulation of fat on the buttocks. “Related and much more useful is calypigian - beautiful hips, and someone proposed cacopygian, ugly ones.” See this discussion.

marmoreal: of or relating to or characteristic of marble

Suppose Thief has stolen Owner’s car and the car is now in Thief’s locked garage. The law does not let Owner break into the garage and retrieve his car. This seems wrong. Why not let Owner break into the garage? We could add that Owner might have to pay Thief damages. He would not have to pay for the damaged lock, since that is the minimal harm needed to undo the effect of Thief’s crime. But Owner would have to pay for the Thief’s garage wall, perhaps, if Owner used a bulldozer to knock it down to get the car.

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