Someone asked me about the past few years’ papers on exclusive dealing, so I did some thinking. I’ll lay it out in my own way.
Suppose we have 100 buyers, each with 1% of the market, one upstream incumbent seller who charges the monopoly price. Everybody knows that in a year a potential entrant seller will arise, and that he will need 15% of the market to achieve the necessary scale economies.
Baylor University is clearly infringing on academic freedom when it tries to shut down Professor Robert Marks’s pro-intelligent-design website, located here with the disclaimers the professor put on in response to Baylor’s complaints that people might think Baylor officially approved of his research. I wish there were more publicity about this kind of thing. Even if a professor believes in astrology, if that’s his research, he should be allowed to pursue it, if not necessarily give pay raises as a result. Of course, a professor’s astrology page would *not* be shut down– it is precisely the plausbility of intelligent design that infuriates its opponents. They take its threat seriously. For an article in WORLD, see here.
Visiting Taipei, I saw this brand of coffee for sale in cans, and it is also a chain of coffeeshops. G. said the chain is in India too. Note the design, and how easy it would be for someone who does not read the Roman alphabet to distinguish B AR I STA and STA R B UCKS.
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The WSJ has good commentary comparing crooked prosecutors Nifong and Fitzgerald in “A Tale of Two Prosecutors Mike Nifong is punished, but Patrick Fitzgerald isn’t.”
David Frum writes of how young Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman is following the shameful style of so many of the older professors in that school. In Feldman’s case, he is not plagiarizing, though. Rather, he is making up stories about his personal life to make his high school and Orthodox Judaism generally look bad. He claimed in a New York Times story that he and his Korean-American girlfriend were deliberately cropped out of a reunion photo. When the Times got the photo to use with the story, it was obvious to them and Feldman that he was wrong– the number of people was simply too big to include them all (so 18 were left out). Since the photo contradicted Feldman’s story, they decided not to run the photo!
Clergymen in England had significant legal disabilities as well as privileges. Blackstone’s Commentaries; 1-11 says:
But as they have their privileges, so also they have their disabilities, on account of their spiritual avocations. Clergymen, we have seen,7 are incapable of sitting in the house of commons; and by statute 21 Hen. VIII. c. 13. are not allowed to take any lands or tenements to farm, upon pain of 10£ per month, and total avoidance of the lease; nor shall engage in any manner of trade, nor sell any merchandise, under forfeiture of the treble value.
A church constitution is useful for two things:
1. To resolve disputes over authority (if everybody agrees, it doesn’t matter what the constitution is— so design the constitution for when there is bitter disagreement). Don’t design a constitution for when the church is going well- design it for when people are behaving badly.
WSJ Best of the Web has piercing things to say about the subjectivism and hypocrisy of Justice Stevens: (more…)
The Far Left has a desire to suppress free speech that is ominous, in view of the authoritarian state that we would have if a party like the Greens ever won office. See this article about how a Green leader in Australia wants to punish Cardinal Pell for his views: (more…)
WSJ Best of the Web says good things about the Supreme Court saying that allocating students to schools by race is unconstitutional (and you thought that 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education this wasn’t controversial?). Recall that in Brown one reason the lawyers chose Brown as plaintiff was that the little girl had to walk a long distance to go to a colored school rather than go to the nearby white school.
People have been skeptical about my claim in an earlier post that the media has been misrepresenting VP Cheney’s position on why his office is exempt from certain OSOO reporting requirements. It is truly amazing how Representative Waxman’s office has smeared him on this. Of course, it helps that VP Cheney doesn’t try seriously to defend himself. So I’ll do that for him.
What everybody wrongly thinks is that Cheney said that the VP’s office is not part of the executive branch.
But what is the source of the claim that he said that? Have you ever seen a direct quote? I couldn’t find one– it certainly is not in the very detailed Waxman attack materials.
After considerable digging, here is the closest I could find:
(1) A paraphrase from a newspaper reporter of a supposed report from Cheney’s office to the newspaper (since when does the VP report to newspapers rather than the other way around?) [with a followup one-sentence quote extracted from a verbal response by a Cheney spokesman.]
(2) A paraphrase by the OSOO itself of what it takes to be the VP’s position.
Moreover, neither paraphrase actually says Cheney said the VP wasn’t in the executive branch– that is an additional step. See below.
It seems that Cheney’s office is being treated most unfairly in this business about “The Vice President is not in the Executive Branch”. Actually, Cheney’s claim is “The VP’s office is not an agency; it is like the President’s office.” See “Dick Cheney Rules” The vice president consistently gets hostile, biased, uninformed press coverage. by Kate O’Beirne
(or the anti-Cheney website at the end of this post) which say:
The Washington Times tells us
The dispute began in January 2003, when the two Oakland employees created a subgroup at their workplace called the “Good News Employee Association.” It was partly in response to a group of homosexual employees having formed their own group 10 months before and being given access to the city e-mail system. One e-mail, dated Oct. 11, 2002, invited city employees to participate in “National Coming-Out Day.”
When several employees asked whether such a posting was legitimate city business, they got an e-mail from City Council member Danny Wan, reminding them that a “celebration of the gay/lesbian culture and movement” was part of the city’s role to “celebrate diversity.”
In response, the Good News employees posted an introductory flier on the employee bulletin board Jan. 3.
It said: “Preserve Our Workplace With Integrity: Good News Employee Association is a forum for people of faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day.” It said it opposed “all views which seek to redefine the natural family and marriage,” which it defined as “a union of a man and a woman, according to California state law.”
“Dum loquor hora fugit,” is in the main courtroom of the Ohio Supreme Court (something you should see if you visit Columbus). It means, roughly, “While you’re talking the hours are fleeing.” That’s funny, since each side has exactly 30 minutes to present its case, with a timer to keep track.
Stromata has an excellent concise statement of the injustice of the Libby prosecution:
Mr. Libby was charged with falsely describing conversations with three reporters: Tim Russert, Matt Cooper and Judith Miller. He was not accused of illegally exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent. According to the prosecution’s version of reality –
- He never discussed Valerie Plame Wilson with Tim Russert;
- Matt Cooper raised the subject of Mrs. Wilson’s CIA employment with him, not vice versa; and
- He “did not treat Wilson’s role, or the fact that his wife worked for the CIA, as a big deal” when he mentioned them to Judith Miller.
…There is likewise, despite Patrick Fitzgerald’s bald assertions, not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Libby’s statements impeded the investigation of the Plame Wilson imbroglio in any way. Had Libby testified in strict accordance with what the prosecutor insists is the truth, that would not have furthered the inquiry. (more…)
The Catholic Encyclopedia says:
“Another statute, of the first year of William and Mary, prohibited Catholics from residing within ten miles of London…
In 1700 an Act was passed which, Sir Erskine May observes, “cannot be read without astonishment”. It incapacitated every Roman Catholic from inheriting or purchasing land, unless he abjured his religion upon oath…
Concerning this Act of William III Hallam remarks, “So unprovoked, so unjust a persecution is the disgrace of the Parliament that passed it.” But he goes on to add, “The spirit of Liberty and tolerance was too strong for the tyranny of the law and this statute was not executed according to its purpose. The Catholic landholders neither renounced their religion nor abandoned their inheritance. The judges put such constructions upon the clause of forfeiture as eluded its efficiency.” No doubt this is generally true. But as Charles Butler tells us in his “Historical Memoirs” (London, 1819-21), “in many instances the laws which deprived Catholics of their landed property were enforced.” He adds that “in other respects they were subject to great vexation and contumely”. They were a very small and very unpopular minority in an age when a common creed was regarded, in every European country, as the chief bond of civil polity and dissidents from it were more or less rigorously repressed. As a matter of fact, it is to a great English magistrate that we owe the ruling which placed an almost insuperable difficulty in the way of the tribe of informers. At the trial of the Rev. James Webb on the 25th of June, 1768, at Westminster, at the suit of a notorious common informer named Payne, Lord Mansfield told the jury that the defendant could not be condemned “unless there were sufficient proof of his ordination”. Such proofs, of course, were not forthcoming. Lord Mansfield, as Charles Butler relates in his above-mentioned “Historical Memoirs”, discountenanced the prosecution of Catholic priests and took care that the accused should have every advantage that the form of proceedings, or the letter or spirit of the law, could allow. And at that period the same temper animated English judges generally….
In this year, 1778, the first Catholic Relief Act was passed. It repealed the worst portions of the Statute of 1699 above mentioned, and set forth a new oath of allegiance which a Catholic could take without denying his religion.
Turner justifies his reasonable foresight by explaining that Kitzmiller only provided a pyrrhic victory for the pro-Darwin lobby:
Although there was general jubilation at the ruling, I think the joy will be short-lived, for we have affirmed the principle that a federal judge, not scientists or teachers, can dictate what is and what is not science, and what may or may not be taught in the classroom. Forgive me if I do not feel more free.
(J. Scott Turner, Signs of Design, The Christian Century, June 12, 2007.)
Benjamin Barton, in Do Judges Systematically Favor the Interests of the Legal Profession?, says (I see fromDo Judges Systematically Favor the Interests of the Legal Profession?, says”> Emprical Legal Studies)
Many legal outcomes can be explained, and future cases predicted, by asking a very simple question: is there a plausible result in this case that will significantly affect the interests of the legal profession (positively or negatively)? If so, the case will be decided in the way that offers the best result for the legal profession.
Fischel, I think, had a good article on the Professional Ethics part of this.
From a Fumare commentor:
I had read Arroyo’s book (an outstanding biography of Mother Angelica!) but had forgotten about Harry John.
Mother Angelica’s caution about giving control of her endeavor to Harry John also extended to great concern about giving control to the Catholic Church or the bishops. In the book, there is a thrilling story about the American bishops trying to take over EWTN after Mother had made it successful (which Mother would not stand for, because she knew EWTN’s orthodoxy would be threatened with the bishops in control). If I remember the story correctly, the bishops attempted to gain control of EWTN through Mother: as a religious community in a diocese, Mother and her order were subject to the bishop, and thus, EWTN may have been subject to the bishop. Mother anticipated the bishops’ checkmate and preemptively called an unscheduled emergency EWTN board meeting where she (and her loyal laypeople) passed a new set of bylaws giving all control of the board to lay people and not to any religious or diocesan members, and then Mother immediately resigned from the board, cutting off the conduit between EWTN and the religious community through which the bishops were trying to gain control. A great story of political and church intrigue.
Instapundit points us to yet another example of FBI incompetence,
this time in the area of
network-security.html">securing data in its computers. I was just
reading a bio of Hanssen, the spy. What he did was sneak a look at
lots of secret files he shouldn’t have been allowed to see on the FBI
computers, downloaded them, and gave them to the Russians. It sounds
like they haven’t improved since then.
The reason, I expect, is that in a civil service system nobody ever
gets fired. In our civil service system, I wouldn’t be surprised if
nobody ever gets demoted or even loses their grade’s pay increase
either. That’s a big advantage of academia. We don’t demote
professors, but we do give them tiny salary increases if they are
incompetent (secretaries, etc. are a different matter).
The major purpose of the civil service system– to prevent
experienced workers from being fired and replaced with party hacks–
would be served if we merely protected workers’ current salaries, and
allowed flexible pay and postings otherwise. Then the FBI computer
security man could be put to sweeping floors, though on his current
salary. This would, of course, allow for punishment of civil servants
who don’t do what the President (Attorney General, FBI director, etc.
) wants, but we *do* want that kind of punishment– the voters should
be in charge, not the bureaucracy. And when a new President came in,
he could grant the punished civil servant back pay if he thought it
was deserved.
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