Ascribing Morality Where None Exists

Andrew Sullivan says:

A reminder of the vast financial risks they take to save and improve lives...

From the linked article:

We did it, naturally, because we expected to make a profit out of it in the end.

Who would have thought that pharmaceutical companies, like all companies, are simply attempting to maximize their profits? If lives are saved as a result, that is a positive side effect, but profit is the guiding principle.

Quote of the Day

Dan Rhiel, on Karl Rove:

Especially given his comments on Fox News tonight, until this is resolved, it seems impossible to trust Rove as an objective analyst.

I Hate Telus

So, their website kindly informs me that they're available Monday to Friday, from 7:30 a.m. I call them up, go through a ridiculous series of keying in numbers (including telling them twice that I would like to speak English), and finally get the message that they are not open yet. Apparently, they open at 8:00 a.m. That sort of useful information should really be put on their website.

Everything Wrong With Politics

Everything wrong with politics is summed up in this article in the Washington Post (and especially the ensuing comments):

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." According media reports, this quote keeping Obama company on his wheat-colored carpet is from King.

Except it's not a King quote.

To back this up, we are provided with a quote from Theodore Parker:

Parker said in 1853: "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice."

Why would Obama attribute the quote to King? Because King would often say:

"How long? Not long." He would finish in a flourish: "Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

In summary, Obama's rug quotes King, who was inspired by Theodore Parker's imagery. Of course, if the quote were to have been attributed to Parker, we would undoubtedly be reading a story about how Parker never actually said that, and that instead the quote was from King. And this is why I am seriously considering abandoning politics.

Anecdata

Andrew Sullivan has a very annoying habit of giving was too much credit to anecdotes relayed by his readers. His most recent letter from a reader shows how misleading it can be to rely on anecdotes:

Unfortunately, in the mid 90s, I spent just over four years (52 months) in prison. 

[snip]

While there were instances of sex abuse in some of the prisons I visited, they were few and far between.

[snip]

I firmly believe that the sex abuse in prison is not a significant enough problem to warrant any action from the federal government.

You can rely on this compelling anecdote, or you can rely on the US Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics:

According to the report, released today by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), “Sexual Victimization in State and Federal Prisons Reported by Inmates, 2007,” 4.5 percent of the state and federal prisoners surveyed reported sexual victimization in the past 12 months. Given a national prison population of 1,570,861, the BJS findings suggest that in one year alone more than 70,000 prisoners were sexually abused.

While the sexual abuse rate is not as high as the "they're raping everybody in here" image often portrayed in the media, it is way higher than a decent society should ever allow it to be. Or, if you didn't happen to be abused during your years in jail, "not a significant enough problem to warrant any action".

Paul Ryan Lies To Your Face

Paul Ryan's recent op-ed should demolish any credibility he has left. He writes:

And the Congressional Budget Office said in March that the health-care overhaul's Medicare savings "would be used to pay for other spending and therefore would not enhance the ability of the government to pay for future Medicare benefits."

This sounds rather dire. Fortunately, the linked document does not say that. According to the CBO, "the majority of the HI trust fund savings ... would be used to pay for other spending". There is a massive difference between the HI (a.k.a. Medicare Part A) trust fund and Medicare. Medicare includes Part A and Part B. Obamacare reduced the Part A unfunded obligations by $11 trillion, and Part B by $5.5 trillion. Even if all (not just "a majority") of the savings from Part A were used for other spending, Obamacare still reduced the unfunded obligations facing America by $5.5 trillion. This is much better than the $9.7 trillion increase due to Medicare Part D, for which Ryan voted.

Paul Ryan, Deficit Fraudster

Anyone who still listens to Paul Ryan is an idiot. In Friday's Washington Post, Ryan has an op-ed entitled A road map to saving Medicare. He begins by stating:

The annual analysis of Medicare's financial health released by the program's trustees on Aug. 5 led some Democrats to claim that Medicare's imminent bankruptcy has been delayed, thanks to the creation of their health entitlement program.

Unfortunately, the first link goes to socialsecurity.gov, which is not generally the go-to resource for Medicare information. Not a good start. Ryan continues:

Last year's report revealed a $38 trillion shortfall over the next 75 years. This year the shortfall appears to have decreased, but only after the Democrats' health bill cut $529 billion from Medicare. This apparent improvement was the basis for Democratic celebration -- even though the program remains tens of trillions of dollars in the hole.

I can't figure out from whence he got the $38 trillion number. If you go to the Medicare trustees' report for 2009 (pdf), you will find a 75-year "unfunded obligation" of $13.4 trillion for Medicare Part A (Hospital Insurance), $23.2 trillion for Part B (Medical Insurance), and $9.2 trillion for Part D (prescription drug plans). Adding the unfunded obligations for Part A and Part B (and ignoring Part D*) gives $36.6 trillion, which is pretty close to Ryan's figure.
Now, if you look at the Medicare trustees' report for 2010 (pdf), the corresponding numbers are $2.4 trillion for Part A, $17.7 trillion for Part B, and $9.7 trillion for Part D. The sum of unfunded obligations for Part A and Part B is $20.1 trillion.
The upshot of this year's report is that Obamacare knocked $16.5 trillion off of the unfunded obligations of Medicare. To Ryan, however, this doesn't count because... well, he doesn't really explain why.

* It's really funny that Ryan appears to be ignoring the cost of Medicare Part D. According to the actuaries, Part D has an unfunded obligation of $9.7 trillion, so you would think a deficit hawk would be concerned about the program. Of course, in 2003, Paul Ryan, self-proclaimed deficit hawk, voted for Part D. I'll leave the conclusions to you.

Religious Disaffiliation

Via Andrew Sullivan, there is a new study by Philip Schwadel in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion*.   Sullivan summarizes the article thusly:

A new study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion finds that Americans between the ages of 36 to 50 are more loyal to religion than Baby Boomers.

In his study, Schwadel is mainly interested in people who disaffiliate from a religion. This means that they were raised with a religion, but now report no religious preference. Schwadel concludes:

Additionally, the probability of nonaffiliation grew from between .06 and .08 in the 1970s and 1980s to almost .16 in 2006. Estimated growth in nonaffiliation, however, is notably smaller when being raised with no religious affiliation is constrained to 3 percent of respondents. These results suggest that a substantial proportion of the growth in nonaffiliation is due to more Americans being raised with no religious preference rather than solely being due to an increase in disaffiliation among adults.

In the Reuters article, Schwadel is quoted as saying the trend "is good news for those who worry about declining religious adherence." I would have to disagree. Even after controlling for being raised with no religious affiliation, Americans between the ages of 36 and 50 are still disaffiliating from religion, even if they are doing so at a slower rate than Baby Boomers. Even worse, the real world is not controlling for being raised with no religious affiliation. In fact, the probability of being raised without a religious affiliation is increasing.
It would be very interesting to see the rate of religious affiliation among those raised without a religious affiliation. To me, this represents the biggest opportunity for religions, as it is a growing demographic group.

* Note: I do not understand the statistics involved in the study. However, according to Wikipedia, the journal is peer-reviewed, with a 2008 impact factor of 0.907, which places it 37th of the 99 sociology journals ranked by Journal Citation Reports.

The Weakness of the Case Against Tenure

From Christopher Beam at Slate:

Mark C. Taylor ... calculates that someone who serves as an associate professor with tenure for five years and then becomes a full professor for 30 years costs a private university $12.2 million. Public universities pay $10 million over the same period. And because most universities pay tenured professors out of their endowments, each professor freezes up tens of millions in otherwise-liquid endowment money for a generation. University debt jumped 54 percent last year, with an average debt of $168 million. If the average university tenured about 15 fewer professors, they'd be in the black.

This has to be the worst math I have seen in a while. Using the private university's cost of $12.2 million over 35 years, we get an annual cost of just under $350,000 per professor. Note that the median salary for full professors in law (the highest-paid field for professors) is $136,634, so the majority of the cost per professor is not actually the professor's salary. Beam shows his numerical illiteracy by saying that by simply having about 15 fewer professors, they would not be in debt. Of course, the university would have needed to have 15 fewer tenured professors over the past 35 years to accomplish this savings. Of course, cutting 15 tenured professors would also have a fairly substantial negative impact on the university as a whole. Either class sizes would have to increase (bad for students), professors would have to teach more courses (bad for professors), or fewer students would be admitted (bad for the university's revenue). To lightly toss off the suggestion to fire 15 professors suggests that Beam does not have even a basic understanding of how a university operates. Lastly, here is Beam concluding the article:

Evergreen State College in Washington implemented renewable contracts back in 1971. Florida Gulf Coast University scrapped tenure when it was established in 1991. Boston University now offers salary premiums to professors who decide not to take tenure. Market forces will drive other universities to follow suit, whether they want to or not.

So, Boston University has found that cutting tenure requires an increase in salary. What an awesome money-saving technique!

Why I Hate Argument By Analogy

It's nice to see liberal oxes gored in a magazine for liberals. John McWhorter has a good review of Amy Wax's book "Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century" in TNR. I would say that overall, McWhorter underestimates the effect of discrimination (current and past) on black culture. However, that is not what I want to talk about. McWhorter begins by recounting a parable from the book:

Wax appeals to a parable in which a pedestrian is run over by a truck and must learn to walk again. The truck driver pays the pedestrian’s medical bills, but the only way the pedestrian will walk again is through his own efforts. The pedestrian may insist that the driver do more, that justice has not occurred until the driver has himself made the pedestrian learn to walk again. But the sad fact is that justice, under this analysis, is impossible. The legal theory about remedies, Wax points out, grapples with this inconvenience—and the history of the descendants of African slaves, no matter how horrific, cannot upend its implacable logic. As she puts it, “That blacks did not, in an important sense, cause their current predicament does not preclude charging them with alleviating it if nothing else will work.”

Accepting this for argument's sake, how can you reconcile this with Wax's rhetorical question:

“Is it possible to pursue an arduous program of self-improvement while simultaneously thinking of oneself as a victim of grievous mistreatment and of one’s shortcomings as a product of external forces?” 

Now think back to the pedestrian analogy. Does anyone else see a problem?

How to Conquer America

I used to enjoy reading Cal Thomas back when I read Townhall.com. His most recent column, however...

A preacher might develop a good sermon on how nations fare when they mock God.

No less a theological thinker than Abraham Lincoln concluded that our Civil War might have been God's judgment for America's tolerance of slavery. If that were so, why should "the Almighty," as Lincoln frequently referred to God, stay His hand in the face of our celebration of same-sex marriage?

As Thomas might say, "A preacher might develop a good sermon on how Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and Sweden fared after they mocked God by legalizing same-sex marriage."
Being a reasonable person, I have to at least laud Thomas for a consistent set of beliefs. In addition to same sex marriage, he also opposes "the birth control pill (sex without biological consequences), 'no-fault divorce' (nullifying 'until death us do part'), cohabitation, easily available pornography, and a tolerance for just about anything except those who deem something intolerable." Luckily, this is not a winning election platform, and I doubt it ever will be.

Edit: I forgot to include the funniest quote:

Most great powers unravel from within before invading armies (or in America's case, terrorists) conquer them.

 Terrorists will conquer America, but only after America has already unraveled from within?

Gay Marriage

Andrew Sullivan has a great post up discussing gay marriage in the United States. You should read the whole thing. However, this one quote is dreadfully wrong:

And the process of litigation - the public educative function of the courts - has clearly pushed opinion in favor over the years. Just having this issue in the public realm as one generation grew up has transformed public opinion. I see this dynamic as a distinctly American one, where the three branches of government and the people address emerging social issues in a messy, but healthy way.

To me, this sounds very similar to how same-sex marriage was legalized in Canada. In 1999, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that same-sex couples have the right to civil unions. Then, a series of provincial court rulings legalized same-sex marriage in various provinces. By 2005, same-sex marriage was legal in 8 of 10 provinces (with Alberta and PEI abstaining) and 1 territory (go Yukon territory!). In 2005, Paul Martin's Liberal minority government passed a law legalizing same-sex marriage in all of Canada. In 2006, Stephen Harper's Conservative minority attempted to re-open the debate, but lost the vote by a margin of 175-123.

Mark Lehman has done some interesting work (pdf) on the change in Canadians' attitudes towards same-sex marriage.

In large part, the majority support that citizens held by 2004 came about as the result of shifts in attitudes, values, and beliefs, rather than because of demographic factors.

In short, rather than having opponents of same-sex marriage die of old age, public opinion changed because individuals' opinions changed. And here is the graph:

To paraphrase Sullivan:

And the process of litigation - the public educative function of the courts - has clearly pushed opinion in favor over the years. Just having this issue in the public realm as one generation grew up has transformed public opinion. I see this dynamic as a distinctly democratic one, where the three branches of government and the people address emerging social issues in a messy, but healthy way.

The Joy of Statistics

Allahpundit has a post about a new CNN poll on gay marriage in the United States. Allahpundit somehow manages to write the following:

It’s hard to draw strong lessons from a three-point swing, which is within the margin of error, but it does point towards the possibility...

Allahpundit goes on to write some more about the subject, but the reader only needs to understand 5 words: "within the margin of error".

Does Anybody Read Literature Anymore?

Via Matthew Yglesias, I discovered that Newsweek has an article entitled A Modest Proposal: the Pelosi-Boehner Speaker Debates. Really? Newsweek considers that a modest proposal? My more modest proposal: Pelosi and Boehner should have to have a speed-eating contest. Pelosi must eat one of Boehner's daughters, and Boehner must eat one of Pelosi's children. Whoever eats the fastest wins the house. Let's see who is hungrier for the House.

Anchor Babies

Anchor babies are everywhere. But really, aren't all babies anchor babies, as they drag down your hopes, dreams, and ambitions, down to Davy Jones' Locker, where they can be glimpsed only on the rarest of occasions, sepia-toned from the scotch lacing the empty glass into which you stare.

Know Your Fascist Dictators

Who is the "reigning undisputed fascist dictator of the 20th century"? Apparently, it's Mussolini, who must have beat Hitler on points in a disputed title fight.

Why Being a Research Assistant Sometimes Sucks

This post could be alternative titled "Why Being a Professor Sometimes Rules". From an interesting paper (pdf) I've been reading:

Two hundred and forty-three introductory psychology students at the University of Virginia volunteered for a study entitled “Choosing College Courses.”

[snip]

Their responses were later coded by a research assistant who was unaware of the subjects' condition. She assigned subjects a 1 for each piece of information recalled correctly, a 0 for each piece not recalled, and a -1 for each piece recalled incorrectly. One of the authors also coded the recall questionnaires of 7 subjects; his codings agreed with the research assistant's 94% of the time.

The research assistant had to do almost 35 times more grunt work than the professor. I wish I had a research assistant.

Censorship

This post by Francisco Toro on censorship in Venezuela is very insightful:

Welcome to the world of twenty-first century censorship: censorship without censors. The Chávez government operates nothing so crass and cumbersome as an old-fashioned censorship board. Instead, by keeping broadcast editors and station managers under the vague but constant threat of shutdown, it relies on them to silence their organizations. And it is wildly effective.

This reminds me a lot of the argument I have heard against the MPAA (the people responsible for rating movies in America) and the FCC (the governmental organisation responsible for regulating radio and television broadcasting in America).
Of course, this is not to say that the self-censorship imposed by the MPAA and the FCC is anything near the censorship imposed by the Chávez government in Venezuela. The censorship by the MPAA and the FCC is stilting the American conversation about profanity and sexuality. The censorship by Chávez is tearing down the adversarial media, one of the most important pillars of a liberal society.

The Death of Progressive Values

This guest post by Michelle Cottle reads like a right-wing parody of progressive values:

“[Bristol] doesn’t want him in Hollywood. … She wants him to sort of be like Todd Palin in the background while she does the running around. Levi, on the other hand, is not ready to settle into that role.”

I ask you: How awesome is that? It seems Bristol Palin has been raised to assume that a man’s role is that of supportive helpmeet, that it is Dad who’s supposed to keep the home fires burning while Mom goes out and sets the world on fire. If that’s not a progressive perspective on gender roles, I don’t know what is. Way to fly that feminist flag, Sarah! And, oh yes, you too Todd.

 Really? That is exactly the same attitude that progressives rightfully dismiss when it goes the other way. How ugly is it? Read it the other way:

Levi wants Bristol to be in the background while he does the running around. Bristol, on the other hand, is not ready to settle into that role.

I ask you: How awesome is that? It seems Levi Johnson has been raised to assume that a woman’s role is that of supportive helpmeet, that it is Mom who’s supposed to keep the home fires burning while Dad goes out and sets the world on fire. If that’s not a progressive perspective on gender roles, I don’t know what is.

 In answer to her implied question, I would say that the progressive perspective on gender roles is that both men and women should be able to work outside the home, or be stay-at-home parents, or anything in between. The exact roles each partner plays should depend on their personal goals and desires, and should be agreed to by both partners. An assumption that either partner is "supposed to keep the home fires burning" is a slap in the face to both of them.

Muslim Women Foil Airport Security

This YouTube video is making the rounds. Note the scary music:


The women apparently managed to get on the plane without the gate agent checking to verify their identity. The gate agent is an airline employee, who is required (apparently by federal law) to check the identity of everyone just before they board the plane.
To me, the at-the-gate ID check has always been the most ridiculous part of airline security. To get to the gate, you must pass through the security checkpoint, which is staffed by federal employees from CATSA. During this security check, the CATSA employee must verify your identity using photo ID (note: if they got through the security check without showing their faces, this is obviously a massive breach of security). However, for some reason, after having confirmed your ID at security, the federal government thinks that you need to re-confirm your identity at the gate.
I am having a very difficult time imagining a terrorist scenario which the gate check would prevent. Maybe two terrorists book flights for different planes, get through security, then decide to switch tickets so that they can... do something terrorist-y.