This will be the entry for live blogging the debate. I'm sitting next to Mitch, and Jo's behind us chatting. I'll mention others as we can.

7:35 -- this is amazing how many people have laptops. David's network is going to struggle with all this traffic!

7:40 -- Tradesports has Bush 66.5, Kerry 36.5 last trades. Nice -- one of those moves tonight.

7:48 -- Hindrocket was on Hewitt from here. Lileks was trying to get on, but I don't think he did. Rocketdaughter and Rocketwife are here as well. Word is Rocketdaughter will blog as well. Must investigate.

7:50 -- Jim Lehrer is on the screen. I feel ill.

7:56 -- Rocket asks about the stupid light and Kerry. How petty Kerry seems. Offer to sell Kerry contracts at 36. Bid 65 on Bush. Paying a premium, but I want a position to trade.

7:59 -- Some sells me the Bush contract. Beetle Barnes on the air with Kondracke. They're the only reason I watch Fox, btw.

8:02 -- Lehrer is pretty damned imperious. That's the reason I don't like this guy. On come the candidates. Kerry lets Bush come on first, Bush crosses to Kerry's podium to shake hands. I like the confident stride.

8:04 -- Stalling Kerry thanking people. Praising alliances. What is "leacing our allies in shatters"?

8:06 -- Bush explains the Bush doctrine. Nice. What's with the inhalation whistle? I know that sound -- I take antihistimines

8:08 -- He's a little slow on his first question but finishes strong. He's timing the end, I think. Kerry still splitting the Iraq and al Qaeda questions. "Colossal misjudgements." Then blames Bush for letting OBL out of Tora Bora. Farging icehole.

8:11 -- First mention of Vietnam. Who knew?

8:14 -- Kerry once said anyone who doesn't take removing Saddam Hussein seriously shouldn't be president, Bush says. "I agree with him." People here cheer. He calls out the UN.

8:16 -- "We have the capability of doing both" Iraq and Afghanistan. Mitch asks how Kerry knows where OBL is. Bush now makes the point that Iraq is part of the GWOT, and he mentions Philipines as well. Good for him.

8:18 -- Someone's trading a huge Kerry block at 35.5. I won't hit my contract there.

8:20 -- Took the short to 35.2 get ahead of the big block.

8:23 -- Kerry promises a boatload and gets a tax shot in on Bush. Who's he appealing to? Bush "The best way to protect the homeland is a good offense." Very good. Kerry's rebuttal was good, but don't his ads say to take the tax cuts to pay for health and education?

8:26 -- Hit the Kerry short at 35.2. I need that contract to go down to make money. I think that's safe.

8:28 -- Tried to buy Bush wins MN at 42. Should I buy at 44?

8:29 -- Kerry wants to organize conferences? Bush shows some disdain at Kerry, and Kerry tries to say "But you made a bigger mistake." A direct Vietnam reference. Feeds to Lehrer asking the Winter Soldier question. Hey, I might start to like Lehrer!

8:30 -- keeps citing Shinseki. "Invading Iraq to catch OBL is like invading Mexico after Pearl Harbor." That's over the top.

8:32 -- HALLIBURTON! How did it take half an hour to get that in?

8:34 Bush: "What's he going to say to our allies, 'Join us in a war that's a grand diversion'?" Much laughter.

8:36 -- profits on both contracts. Sweet.

8:37 -- Saint Paul replaces Elder to my right. Gang-blogging. COLEMAN!!!! Kerry has to backtrack to apologize for his questioning the allies. Still says 90% of cost and 90% of casualties are US. What would be the right share?

8:39 -- Hindrocket says Kerry's doing very well. But my contracts still trading well. Bush is still hanging the flip-flops on Kerry. Kerry's playing defense a lot, I think, and I cannot believe this is good for him. Bush is channelling Saint Paul "My opponent'sonly consistent position is that he is inconsistent."

8:44 -- Bush was ready for the # deaths question. Kerry calls up his Vietnam thing. Mitch colors the references red on his blog. OK, Bush, you hung the flip-flops. Get on to something else. You think Kerry's ever been in a Pottery Barn?

8:48 -- Lehrer asks for specifics on when the troops are out of Iraq. Mitch shouts "yes!" Too many conditions -- do as I say, be successful. What's the plan if you're not successful? "Change the dynamics on the ground" - says Bush should have finished them off in Falluja, close Iraqi borders. How many troops would it take? Bush says the troops will train Iraqis to do that. Isn't that what Kerry would want?

8:50 -- Bush calls out Kerry on the criticism of Allawi. Of course, I doubt Kerry wants Allawi to stay in power. Kerry says Allawi said terrorists coming over the border. Bush replies that they're coming because Iraq is a big part of GWOT. There, that defines the debate right there. That one minute does it all for me.

8:52 -- Bush contract now up 2 bucks during the debate, Kerry down two. Nice spread trade. Close this position? Thinking.

8:53 -- Saint, it's Polo. Mrs. Scholar likes it. I'd rather you didn't.

8:57 -- I agree with Rocket -- Kerry will bounce because he doesn't suck as bad as we thought he would. That last answer on other choices to attacking Iraq sounded like a real answer. Wrong answer, IMO, but it may sell. I sell my Bush contracts for a profit.

9:00 -- "global consensus" met with a call for U.S. sovereignty. I think people are getting this. The International Criminal Court is brought up. "Trying to be popular when it's not in our interest makes no sense." Good line.

9:01 -- not much action on the Kerry market. Better close the short in case there's a run. Good. Profited both trades.

9:03 -- Moo-LAAAS? Must be a Crawford thing.

9:04 -- Mitch is arguing with the guys on New Patriot. I thought I was multitasking!

9:06 -- Kerry wants to go it alone! ... with North Korea. Bush calls him on facts uranium v. plutonium. Sanctions already against Iran, what next John?

9:07 -- now Kerry looks petulant calling back on the Iran sanctions with a question asked about Darfur. Rocketdaughter looks like it's bedtime. Kerry's talking about the Guard, not about Darfur. OK, gets back to it in last 20 seconds. Whoops, Bush calls back on Iran to say the sanctions are Clinton's.

9:10 -- Tradesports bouncing back towards Kerry by fractions. I have got to stop reading Saint Paul.

9:11 -- Wow, what a question. Bush handles it very well -- these are policy disagreements, and the mixed messages are sending the wrong signals. He's consistent on this. "In councils of government there must be certainty from the president." Kerry "I share his sentiments about my family." Gets laughter. "But ..." "It's one thing to be certain and be right, but not good to be certain and wrong." Goes after a known weakness. Bush "I won't change my core values." "I've never wilted in my life. I've never wavered in my life." Oh?

9:16 -- nuclear proliferation? Why is he not looking at biochem? I don't know, I think I'm hearing Amy Carter here. I had to stop and be sure I heard Kerry right. Can't disarm nukes that aren't there. Most of the disarming in the 90s was Ukraine and the 'Stans, who were bribed. Bush handles this better than I thought, because I can't believe he was ready for it. Whoops, he agrees with Lehrer saying it's nukes. Wish he hadn't agreed. Gets back on message with NK. Seems they both are making mistakes here. Not good for Kerry.

9:20 -- seems to me Bush has not made any bad mistakes. Playing defense. The breathing sounds better too.

9:22 -- OK, going short again on Kerry. Wish I hadn't closed it before.

9:25 -- Kerry goes to the Vietnam thing again in the closing. Everyone groans. Bringing allies. Fund Homeland Security -- OK, that and health and education, where's the money? Bush -- fight them on the road so we do not face them at home. Bush ends early.

9:30 -- Mitch is getting summations. I say Bush held serve. He knows he has a lead, he had to not screw up, and he did not. I think Kerry was successful in lowering expectations and will get a bounce of a point or two from this. He is good. I'll scan around later for comments from others, but I'll close my post here.

Most of the NARN crew is liveblogging the "debate" tonight from "an undisclosed location." I was going to do it from St. Cloud, but the thought of having all that energy in one room is too much to resist (and apparently the RNC bash was pretty darn good.) Come back here during and after the debate for live coverage, as well as following Mitch, Ed, and the Fraters.

You will notice that none of them are expecting me. Who do they think I am, Spitbull?

One thing I will also do is trade some shares on Tradesports. I'll report the action here as well. Given how poorly my football betting is going, I need to get some bucks back. This looks like some good advice. Short against the box?

Economists talk with graphs (too much, I think, but that's another post), and the ability to draw a good graph is part of the skill set econ professors have to develop. I am fond of using four-quadrant diagrams to draw IS and LM curves for my intermediate macro students. I can't hold a candle to one of my colleagues however, who teaches microeconomic theory with a personal cache of colored chalk. We have plenty of classrooms with computers and projectors and the like, but he needs none of these.

PZ Myers calls my attention to this article on the decline of blackboards at the U of M, and offers this reminiscence.

Although…there is one place where I would favor the chalkboard. One of my pleasantest memories of my undergraduate education was my comparative anatomy course. I and many of my fellow students would always show up early for class, because Professor Snider would come in 10 or 15 minutes before it started, armed with his own personal box of colored chalk. And then he would start drawing. He’d sketch in these elaborate diagrams—skull bones of reptiles, birds and mammals, a hindlimb with the muscles pulled apart to show their attachments, a time-series of kidney development. One thing you can do with chalk that is impossible to do well with a dry erase marker is shading, and he’d carefully color-code all the parts he was planning to talk about that day. It was like watching a good sidewalk artist at work. And all of us students would be sitting at our desks with our collections of colored pens and pencils, filling in the pages of our notebook before he started talking, because we knew that once he started explaining things there wouldn’t be time to draw.

And at the end of class, he’d take an eraser and quickly destroy all of his work. It was a marvel. The ability to blithely obliterate a beautiful creation because one can create it quickly and at will is a real talent.

I never took biology in college -- chemistry was my only science, and I wish I had taken another science as well -- but I can tell you this is right. Not all economics is susceptible to chalk-and-talk, and indeed the best parts you can express with words alone. But watching someone draw out third-degree price discrimination on a board is to witness something elegant.

Given the number of barracudas, I think Nick's new nickname should be chum.


There is of course nobody more qualified to stalk Mr. Limpid than Saint Paul.

Thankfully, in this new world of media and information access, Coleman doesn't get the final edit on reality. Not even of his own life story. Nick, welcome to the future.

Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch think statewide textbook adoptions are an avenue for rentseeking. They're right. Rentseeking will include both the actions of the cultural elites forcing through their preferred politically correct books, as well as domination of the textbook business by a few firms. Here's the killer paragraphs to me as an economist:

In the last two decades, the el-hi publishing industry has gone from having considerable competition among independent publishing houses to a cartel of four mega-publishers. Dozens of venerable houses, including MacMillan, Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, and Prentice Hall have either been acquired and absorbed as imprints or shut down. Today, four multi-national conglomerates—Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Reed Elsevier, and Houghton Mifflin—chalk up a total of about $3 billion in el-hi sales and account for roughly 70 percent of all K-12 textbooks sold.

Not surprisingly, the cartel's development, by restricting choices and imposing prohibitive entry barriers, has made it harder than ever to develop or locate high quality textbooks. Publishers now typically spend millions in development and production costs merely to prepare a textbook for the adoption process, and few medium-sized publishers can afford such outlays or the risk of going insolvent if they aren't adopted. In addition, state committees have repeatedly buttressed the cartel by demanding gilded textbooks and every imaginable supplemental instructional aid. Gilbert Sewall of the American Textbook Council points out that "any company that plans to compete nationally in school publishing must be capital intensive and 'full service,' offering study guides, workbooks, and technology, along with discounts, premiums, and an array of teacher enticements. Spanish text versions, margins, texts, binders, and answer keys may determine which books are adopted."

I would argue the same is true for colleges, where the same consolidation has taken place, often with some real rentseeking behavior. Here's a paper that argues the point.

As the quote in the title makes clear, who controls the textbooks has some real power. (Hat tip: Joanne Jacobs)

Forget the pajamas. Nick Coleman has become the Incredible Mr. Limpid and declared us "talk-show barracudas".

This just in: I am a very wealthy man, born into privilege and power, and a stooge of the Democratic Party.

Oh. That reminds me, Smithers: Bring me the heads of some Republicans, would you? Also, set out the good silver. Fritz is coming over to give me my marching orders.

Dad-ums would be so proud, wouldn't he, Muffy?

Nothing in the opening paragraph is true, but bloggers and talk-show barracudas have said so, tossing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

What sticks, I think, has been the recent string of "outings" of media bias, including a laying of the wood on Coleman's colleague Jim Boyd. As Captain Ed points out,

I'm curious, Nick: exactly what kind of accountability do you have? What kind of accountability does the Strib have? Is there some magic about putting words into
newsprint that automatically assigns truth to your words? Because from where I sit, having read your column for several years and laughing at all the wrong parts, I'd say that you're not fit to carry Scott's pen. Scott and John helped unmask an electoral fraud at a major news organization while you write paeans to editors, for Pete's sake.

I'd simply ignore Coleman -- as I've said, I don't read the STrib except for the parts Minnesota bloggers point me to -- except that I'm now stuck with a Heart song in my head.

So this ain't the end -
I read you again today
Had to turn my eyes away
You write like no one -
Slandering everyone
And tall tales - it never fails!

Your point's so low in the ledes
Bet you gonna ambush me
You'd have me dressed in my undies
Wouldn't you, Barracuda?

Back over Time when we were all
Writing for free
Met up with Boyd and me
No right no wrong your selling a Song-
A name whisper game.

If the real thing don't do the trick
You better make up something quick
You gonna burn it out to the wick
Aren't you, Barracuda?

"Edit me edit you" the Boyd said
But down deep my party's dead
You...I think you got the blues too.

All that night and all the next
Wrote without looking back
Made for Fritz's pools - silly fools!

Remember, lil' Nicky, barracudas hunt, and you're being found by many, even leaving out the Fraters. Many have punted on your newspaper and taken to the blogs. (Nick, for the love of God, don't bring sharp objects to the screen when you read Steve.) Hell, even your friends don't like you today.

I have just the thing: new underwear.

When I have co-written the last three Quarterly Business Reports (the latest should be up by the end of the week, by the way), I've always had to save a paragraph to talk about trade, and China always comes up. I have been waiting for the time when the Chinese decide to do something about their exchange rate.

Now may be the time.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said in Beijing Tuesday that China will adopt measures from a number of aspects to improve exchange rate mechanism of Renminbi (RMB), the Chinese currency, in a steady and appropriate manner.
...
"We will further advance the reform and forge a mechanism which is more adapted to the changes in market supply and demand with still better flexibility," Wen said, acknowledging this reform represents a systematic project involving a host of aspects.

Many have suggested a float of the currency, usually after a period where it trades within a band against a basket of currencies larger than they currently use. But one wonders if it's in China's best interest to do so.

``If a stronger yuan were in the best interest of China, it would have let its currency appreciate, or formally revalued it, a long time ago,'' says Carl Weinberg, chief global economist at High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York.

China's financial system is mess, and home to untold numbers of non-performing loans. Officials in Beijing know it's simply not ready to face the unpredictable views of currency traders who would decide the yuan's value.

The Chinese have been slow to respond so far, and it may be prudent for them to continue this way. The IMF and most economists argue it's less costly to exit the pegged exchange rate when things are going well, but the "if it ain't broke" philosophy probably is at play.

UPDATE: Shawn says this is too esoteric, and maybe he's right. Here are the issues at play here. First, the yuan is undervalued, which is helping to contribute to our trade deficit. Local manufacturers to whom I speak complain of everyone "wanting American products at Chinese prices". My response to them is normally, "if the Chinese want to sell us good stuff cheap, American consumers benefit." But if the Chinese would let the yuan appreciate versus the dollar, the price of Chinese imports to America will also rise.

Second, for two reasons I think the Chinese are not going to make a big move on their exchange rate. I stated these reasons before, but I'll elaborate. First, the biggest problem the Chinese have isn't an undervalued currency but rapidly expanding economy that is creating bottlenecks. Chinese willingness to buy raw materials at premium prices is causing problems for U.S. manufacturers; the cure for that is to tamp down demand for raw materials in China, and letting the yuan appreciate isn't going to be much help with that. Second, the effect of floating the yuan on Chinese bank balance sheets isn't all that clear; it might really hurt them at a time when they already look a little dodgy.

The Chinese may have felt they had to say something about exchange rate policies due to their presence at the G-7, but I'm skeptical whether there's any real news here or if it's just talk.

Many thanks to reader Dave Sheridan for some hacks that seem to have helped Mozilla/Gecko users get the sidebar on the side rather than descended into bit hell. I'd never have found that hack myself. The padding around the blogroll now looks like an offset rather than a box-in-box that IE users would see, but that's frankly a lower priority for me than the other fixes. When I get a chance I'll tinker.

I've also decided to use Blogads to try to defray some of the costs of using Hosting Matters for this site rather than Blogspot. Traffic has been good enough here lately that I think advertisers will be attracted; I have not and will not put out a tip jar. Visitors are more than readers -- they're my friends, and I am not one to ask friends for money.

This is disgusting. Given the use of draft reinstatement scare tactics by the Democrats, for a group to call itself non-partisan and use this advertising is worse than tone-deaf.

YOU HAVE BEEN DRAFTED!
http://blahblahblah
This is not a real draft, but a real one may happen soon if the current situation doesn't improve.

As it is, our military is stretched almost to the breaking point trying to maintain troop levels in Iraq and around the world. If Pakistan, North Korea or other nations begin to pose new military threats, how would we expect to meet the demand for troops?

Did you know that:

* It would only take two to three days for Congress and the President to authorize a
draft and set the Selective Service System's plans in motion?
* Twenty-year-olds would be the first to be inducted?
* Women are very likely to be included in the next draft?

It's up to us to educate ourselves.

It's up to us to educate our students on how they are being played. Sean at The American Mind has more examples from the Badger State.

While our deans are engaged in petty flattening of the adjunct payscale, down at the University of North Texas they are into full bloodletting. K.C. Johnson reports that 12 of 32 faculty up for tenure were denied in 2003-04, after granting it to all but one applicant the previous two years. Looks like a new provost decided to start looking more at research than his predecessor.

[The provost] looked at several criteria. They included what he calls "evidence of sustained inquiry" and the development of a specific area of expertise. He also looked at whether a candidate's research represented a new activity and whether it was "thought-provoking," "interactive," and "transportable," he says. But in doing so, he says, he used the same standards that were in place when he arrived last fall.

K.C. Johnson raises a valid concern:

What, then, of the professors in the middle--those hired under the old, less rigorous, standards, and then denied under the new? Again, it seems to me (based on the information public available) that Johnson's actions were justified. I'm reminded by guidance I received from the longtime former chair of the Brooklyn History Department (and a prestigious scholar) Paula Fichtner, who argued that first-class departments make first-class hires, while second-class departments search out third-class candidates, because their occupants want to surround themselves with colleagues who will not push them to perform harder. And so tenuring candidates with mediocre research credentials makes it more likely that these now-tenured professors will continue the institution's apparent culture of downplaying research in personnel decisions. For [the new provost] to have waited until those hired under the old regime were tenured, he would have needed to delay his reforms by 3-4 years, while also strengthening the very culture he was brought in to overturn.

True, it's hard to change the direction of a school without causing some transition problems. And while adding more for research is an issue in a school that has a substantial teaching load, a 2/3 load as had at UNT isn't a bad deal (we are contractually 4/4 here -- for non-academics, that means we teach four classes in the fall semester and four in the spring.) Still, it's always a bad sign for a university to go from sacking nearly no one to sacking 38% of your tenure-year faculty -- they may have accepted jobs with UNT with the implicit assumption of lifetime employment in return for lower salaries.

I have a new dean. One of his first acts was to require that every adjunct professor receive the same rate of pay regardless of field, even cutting the pay of some who had previously been hired. I mailed him this morning this article, pointed out to me by Skip Sauer.

Published studies conducted at multiple universities, including the University of Colorado-Boulder and the University of Washington, showed great discrepancies in salaries between departments, some with double the average salary of another department at the same university. ...

Salary increases and averages are overseen by the Committee of Three [at Princeton], another name for the Faculty Advisory Committee on Appointments and Advancements. The group meets twice weekly with President Tilghman to advise her on appointments, promotions and faculty salaries.

Caryl Emerson, a member of the Committee of Three and chair of the Slavic languages and literatures department, declined to comment due to her position on the committee. However, she said she didn't feel the humanities were poorly treated
in regard to relative earnings.

"After all," she said, "we don't make any money for the University."

In contrast, the professors of the science departments are in high demand, not only in academia but also by large pharmaceutical companies and the biotech industry.

Although the University provides a haven for independent laboratory research at the discretion of faculty members, it must still compete with commercial industries.

Science faculty also have the potential to bring in large research grants to the University, increasing both prestige and funding.

Similarly, economics and finance professors are sometimes lured away from the business world.

Of course, we're unionized at SCSU, and our union brothers do not recognize market differentials. While not broken down by departments, university salaries at public schools can be compared here.

Erin O'Connor notes the new list of books that are cited as "challenged" by the American Library Association, which she paranthetically says means "an attempt to ban", all as part of Banned Books Week. This would give the appearance that attempts at censorship are alive and well in the USA. Peter Swanson challenges that viewpoint.

A close examination of what qualifies as "banned" or "challenged" reveals that the ALA does not want any interference with its choices for acquisitions or curriculum. To them, any complaint about accuracy or age-appropriateness is the equivalent of a book burning.

The Library of Congress is the most comprehensive collection of books that are published in the United States. Every other American library's collection will be a smaller subset of this. Each library must choose which volumes to acquire and shelve. When a librarian makes that choice, it is deemed to be based on quality or pedagogical criteria. When a taxpayer or parent questions that choice, it is deemed to be narrow-minded censorship.

The arrogance is compounded when discussing school curriculum. In choosing a certain book for a certain class in a certain grade, it is necessary to whittle down the millions of books in the Library of Congress to a mere handful. Then students must attend classes, under penalty of truancy, and read the assigned books. Is it wrong for parents and taxpayers in a free society to involve themselves in the choice of books? Should we limit the discussion to those people with degrees in teaching or library science?

Government employees who seek to squelch citizen dissent should be careful when they throw around terms like "censorship."

There is no such thing as a banned book within someone's home; what you hold in your own library is what you accept. If you homeschool a child, there is no conflict over what is a banned or challenged book for your child.

You thought "sociocultural" was good? The Patriette has a better one:

So I am taking this Communism 101 education course on Monday nights. It is just about enough to make me drop out of graduate school altogether. I have to bite my tongue so much in the class, I might not be able to eat if I have to keep this up through the end of the semester.

"Just keep telling them what they want to hear."

That's what I have to say to myself, lest I indicate that my opinions greatly differ from theirs.

Sure, I could speak out - and then have the entire class pounce on me for being close-minded, too "Judeo-Christian," and "heterocentric" for them. (Yes, I said, "heterocentric" - we have a unit called "Disrupting Heteronormativity"...oh yay.)

I am subjected to many of these words on campus, but "heteronormativity" is completely new, unpronounceable (particularly with the Tom Bodett accent) and unfathomable. I can only guess it means I do something wrong when I admire Patriette's logo.

Feeling like she does? Go to No Indoctrination.

College students can't write, Joanne Jacobs notes, because they never learned in high school.

A few weeks before Rachel Vosika graduated this year from Pacific High School in San Bernardino, she worked on the biggest research paper she'd ever been assigned - a three-page biography of Virginia Woolf. She needed at least four sources, all of which could be from the Internet.

The effects of this trend show up in college classes. Fewer than half of students turn in papers relatively free of language errors, according to a 2002 survey of professors at California's public colleges and universities.

Joanne links to Dan Weintraub, who says that while teachers complain that they can't do this because of things like the social science standards, that's not true. They don't do it because nobody makes them, when making them wouldn't be hard:

If you look at the WW II standard, you can imagine a unit that would include some outside reading and conclude with a term paper requiring students to cover several of the points detailed in the standards. Students would have to show the very qualities teachers say they want to teach: understanding, not just memorization, critical thinking, analysis.

Am I dreaming? Of course, given where students are today. But 11th grade students were once capable of doing this kind of work. And they could be, again.

...it only gets worse at Southern Mississippi State U. Robert Campbell and Charles Nuckolls have the latest. Given our propensity at SCSU for hiring only administrators that have been fired from their previous posts, I am starting a pool on when we end up with the Ten of Spades.

UPDATE: Robert Campbell reminds me to make sure I've got the right name on my school here.

UPDATE 2: Campbell again: It starts above the Ten of Spades.

Let's keep in mind that in addition to alienating nearly the entire faculty at USM, Thames has neglected fundraising, driven away influential donors, been ordered to jettison two of his top operatives and drastically reduce the authority of a third, forfeited the support of the editorial board at the local newspaper, and kept on bloviating about "world class" status while USM dropped into the fourth tier of the US News rankings. These are derelictions that would induce the least faculty-friendly of governing boards to fire a president. They lend support to the theory that Thames was put in place to break USM down.

That could be our problem here as well.

Vox Day, commenting on the story that Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe lifted passages of one of his books from a lesser known book written eleven years earlier,

I suspect that historians will likely look back on the ascension of the left as the destruction of the academy. It is ironic that they enjoy accusing Christians as anti-intellectual, considering that it was Christians who started nearly every major university. And with the decline of Christianity will come the decline of scholarship, as the cause of truth is rendered secondary to questions of politics and power.

It's worth noting that the only new colleges being founded are Christian colleges, as the atheized universities gradually devolve into morasses of plagiarism, political correctness and low-grade minds filled with secular dogma.

I was at the Clemens lecture at St. John's University given by Peter Lindert last night, who noted that the one public-private provision of a good with many external benefits that works well in his (admittedly leftish) view of the world was higher education, and that it was formed first as public institutions. True enough, insofar as the colonial colleges were given charters by the Crown. But Charles Kessler noted a few years ago that most of the research universities (like Lindert's UC-Davis) had more leftish roots.

The Left took this path, beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, when it began to build America's first research universities and graduate schools, mostly on the German model, which its intellectual pioneers knew and intended would have a close, symbiotic relation with the modern state they would also eventually construct. Experts from one would baptize the other, for the modern welfare and administrative state would be constantly in need of scientific civil servants, and the modern research university would be constantly honing its sense of social justice and administrative expertness or ambition.

Listening to Lindert and the questions afterwards I could not help but be struck by the truth of Kessler's observation. Students and (more so) faculty were keen to inquire how to create just the right mix of public and private provision and funding for health and pensions. The admiration of the academic audience for the European model was striking. One humorous note: Lindert asked rhetorically why, if greater government spending was deleterious to economic growth, high-spending states like California and Connecticut had not sunk below Alabama and Arkansas? No one had the temerity to remind Lindert that Sweden's per capita income is on a par with Mississippi's. Or worse.

Not once, in a lecture titled “Does Big Government Hurt Economic Growth?”, did the words "property rights" appear. Ignorance or arrogance?

Our esteemed president announced that we had run a budget surplus last year, of which he seems extremely pleased.

I’m writing with some very good news for our campus. As we review the accounting of our finances, it appears that St. Cloud State University will have a positive budget balance from fiscal year 2004 after we have accounted for carry-forwards, set-asides, enrollment, MnSCU formula adjustments and settlements of contracts. This is in addition to the five percent that we are required by Minnesota State Colleges & Universities policy to hold in reserve.

So how did he make this happen? Three items are cited:

• "The Business Services Office has taken significant steps to reduce our accounts receivable balance from previous years that resulted in a one time collection of $1.35 million."
• "This includes a $250,000 savings in our utilities last year because our maintenance staff was careful to buy fuel oil when prices were most favorable and our collective efforts at conservation."
• "Nearly $1 million remains in unspent supply and equipment budgets from across campus, and we had significant savings from unpaid leave, salary savings, lower than expected health care premiums and unfilled positions because of postponed or failed searches."

OK, so we had money that our business office had allowed to remain uncollected, and now we collected it. Great, but as President Saigo notes you cannot go back to that well again. That's not a budget saving at all, just a conversion from accounts receivable to cash. Then the businesspeople made a few dollars speculating in the fuel oil market -- super. Had they bet the wrong way and bought early, would we have heard about it? Probably not.

The last one, however, is galling. I took about five years to build up departmental technology to the point where every computer in an office of lab was no more than three years old. For roughly $6000 I could have maintained that edge for a department that has 18 faculty and 130 majors, running about 3000 seats a semester. But I got no equipment money ... so that this guy can proclaim he has a surplus? And I have students complaining about not getting seats, and adjunct faculty having their salary cut, and we just approved a rather skimpy contract ... and they declare they have extra money.

Is there a plan to spend it? And can Saigo show that it will have greater value than it might have in new instructors and instructional equipment?

Cui bono from a budget surplus?

If there are young professors reading this, and if you want to know what a role model would be for you after you become the great economist, or great essayist, or great whatever, this is the target. I do not wish to teach at universities that would not prize a Gary Becker for his dedication to students as much as for his Nobel prize. Thanks to Craig Newmark for the link to this inspiring story.

In defense of advertising the showing of films put out by 527s seeking the defeat of the current administration, our Bolshie campus academics have shown themselves, as indicated by these additional "announcements" put out on campus:

this is a college campus! Debate, discussion, organizing, letter writing, demonstrating, opinions, arguing, and announcements of possibly controversial sorts should be occurring. Otherwise, we are .......(pick your D word)...dead, dumb, a doormat, a door knob, defeatist, opposite of democracy.

This is a college campus: I think education might be something that should be occuring. I realize its first letter isn't 'D'.

Certainly, whether in favor of the context or not, all speech acts are subtly or overtly political, ideologically grounded, and socioculturally situated.

I'm going to a socioculturally situated lunch now. Let me go give this speech to my office manager, and tell her I will be back at the ideologically grounded 1pm. I might have a subtle or overt martini; I certainly could use one after reading that pomo bullcrap*.

And then of course there's Miss Median, who can't remember her own argument from eighteen months ago.

Anyone familiar with the 9-11 Commission Report probably realizes that there was a typographical error in Prof Kellogg's original announcement, and that she referred to a link between Iraq (or Saddam Hussein), Al Qaeda, and 9-11 bombings, as the 46% level of public belief in an Iraq connection has been reported in the media.

Glad you cleared that up. Too bad your poll is eighteen months old, long before the 9-11 commission report. And the Commission report doesn't say there's no connection when it arranged a meeting between al Qaeda and Sudan, and there's still that Prague meeting. Maybe, just maybe 46% of American is smarter than the 9-11 commission!

Where does the median lie?

*--Now that was political!

According to this article (from the St. Cloud Times, which hoses up its archives daily -- this is in the Sept. 25 edition) our university may fall from the ranks of one of only three in the state to have a smoking lounge for students.

A small group of St. Cloud State student government members met Friday with representatives from a local anti-tobacco coalition called Smoke Free Communities.
...

"I'm caught crosswise with the fact the university has a room dedicated to smoking," said Andy Vinson, executive director of HealthPartners Central Minnesota Clinics.

The doors of the Apocalypse Room are supposed to stay closed when it's being used, and the room has a ventilation system that is intended to keep it from getting too smoky.

Yes, our smokers' lounge is called "The Apocalypse Room", though it had that name before becoming the smokers' lounge. I don't know the history of the name, but someone clearly has a sense of humor.

Community leaders emphasized to student government leaders that no indoor smoking room is safe.

They stressed they are not demanding student leaders close the Apocalypse Room -- they just want them to bring it up to the student senate for discussion.

Where, of course, there will be protestors demanding the end to it.

No word yet on whether the food court will stop selling peanut butter.

This seems to make no sense to me:

Calling restrictions on publishing contrary to the First Amendment and acts of Congress, a group of publishers' and authors' associations expects to file suit today against the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces regulations against countries under a U.S. trade embargo.

The lawsuit, which will be filed in federal court in New York, asks for an immediate injunction against enforcement of the regulations, which require publishers to file requests for licenses to edit articles and books by authors in embargoed countries, such as Cuba, Iran, and Sudan. The suit also asks the court to strike down the regulations.

The Treasury Department office, known as OFAC, has previously justified the regulations on the grounds that editing the papers and books of foreign authors provides them with a service, and thus violates trade embargoes.

Somehow I think that if the paper to be copy-edited or reformatted was a call for reform against Castro or the mullahs, the embargo would not be enforced. I'm trying to figure out cui bono here. Somebody help me out, because this looks brain-dead.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only.)

UPDATE: John Wenger also has a problem understanding this (second item) and has spent more time thinking about it. Money graf:

...when we publish an author from any foreign nation in a scientific journal, the idea is tobenefit science in general and science in this country, not in the author’s country. He can publishin his own country if he wants to accomplish that. What this means is that we are actually preventing ourselves from benefiting from what someone does because we don’t like his country. Why would we do that?

The Wall Street Journal runs an article datelined St. Cloud (subscribers only) describing the appearance of Minnesota as a battleground state. At least with on voters up here, the morality issue is carrying some voters towards Republican candidates.

In Minnesota, political undercurrents developing over much of the past decade give Bush allies hope. Suburban sprawl around Minneapolis and St. Paul has created a bloc of mostly middle-class voters with pocketbook concerns and far less loyalty to Minnesota's tradition of progressive public consciousness. The state's economy, with a 4.8% jobless rate, has outperformed the rest of the nation. And social issues such as abortion and gay marriage have taken on greater importance among the rural and blue-collar voters who once were bedrock Democrats.

"It's the Clinton party," says 52-year-old Linda Sorum, among more than 13,000 Republican faithful crowding St. Cloud's Dick Putz Field as Mr. Bush kicks off a bus tour. A nurse at St. Cloud Hospital, Ms. Sorum says Democrats have fallen out of step with the Minnesota she knows. She is attracted to Mr. Bush because of her opposition to abortion and her support for the war with Iraq.

"Bush has the right idea," she says. "You have to be very aggressive."

The DNC has spent nearly half a million up here for Kerry, along with the Kerry campaign's own $200,000, compared to $470,000 for Bush (and no mention of RNC spending.) The thought of some strategists seems to be that health proposals from Bush will gain traction in a state with the Mayo clinic (which is trying to drum up business) and other hospitals in some difficulty. Bush money quote in St. Cloud, according to the article:

We stand for a culture of life in which every person matters and every being counts. In changing times, we'll support the institutions that give our lives direction and purpose -- our families, our schools, our religious congregations.

I'm sitting in with the Fraters covering for David Strom for Taxpayers League Live on AM1280 the Patriot, then of course we're doing NARN. 9-11, then 12-3. David's lined up Tim Taylor for the 9am hour, whom I will look forward to meeting. Vox Day is on at 2pm. Click here to hop onto the stream, good for both shows.

This site is normally untouched on the weekends. I usually don't even touch blogs on Saturday or Sunday before dinner. I've been playing for awhile with the idea of offering someone else a chance to post over that period, and a couple of weeks ago Libertarian Tom asked about the NA and how you join. Now membership doesn't permit me any rights to invite other members -- that's the function of the commissioner -- but having seen some of Tom's work I thought I might ask if he wanted to send something in, particularly since he was a magna cum laude graduate of SCSU during my first year on campus and so qualifies as an "SCSU Scholar". He did, and it appears next.

Democrats, Drunks and Denial
by Libertarian Tom

I once knew a guy -- I'll call him Fred -- who was an alcoholic. Drank himself into oblivion with alarming frequency. Amazingly, all of the problems in Fred's life (according to Fred) were someone else's fault: lost his job (again)? The boss was a jerk. Wife left him? She was a -- well, as they said about Leona Helmsley, "rhymes with rich." Kids didn't want to be around him? His ex-wife, the, uh, witch, turned them against him. And so on. Fred lived a miserable, failed life because he never look himself in the mirror and admit that any of these problems might be of his own making.

I can't help but think of Fred when I look at today's Democratic party. They've now lost the White House, congress, the Senate, most of the nation's governorships, and why? Because mainstream U.S.A. is rejecting their high tax, big government, extreme pro-abortion, radical environmentalist, excessively regulatory, terrorism-is-a-law-enforcement-issue policies? No, because Republicans are mean. Republicans are relentless with their dirty tricks, that's why they keep winning: it has nothing to do with the public's embrace of a positive, ownership-oriented economic plan and confidence in our war on terror. Or the failed policies of tax-spend-regulate-sue. No, it's just nasty campaigning.

In recent Newsweek piece, Jonathan Alter decried what he called the Democrats' "toughness gap." According to Alter, Democrats lose because they are unwilling to engage in the kind of dirty tricks the Republicans are so good at. "The toughness gap is the Democrats' own fault. Because liberals are temperamentally self-critical, they tend to see more grays than black-and-whites" Ah, that nuance thing. "Republicans offer 'red meat,' a sense that they share the resentments of their audience. Democrats, schooled in political correctness, tiptoe around...ever anxious not to offend." Oh really?

The Dan Rather forged memo affair, covered so comprehensively by Powerline and Hugh Hewitt, wasn't a counterexample, surely. Democrats just don't do this sort of thing. It would just be so out of character for them, and the Republicans are so good at, that the Democrats are now blaming Memogate on...Karl Rove!

And the "discovery" of George W. Bush's 1976 DUI arrest in Maine, just days before the 2000 election -- that wouldn't be example of Democrats practicing the partisan dirty tricks they now decry, now would it. Nah.

Any notion that Democrats lose because they are much too nice, and Republicans win because they're mean, should be obvious bunk to anyone with an IQ above room temperature. Two recent posts from Michael Moore's web site demonstrate this quite clearly. (Wait, you object, Moore is on the fringe -- he's not representative of the party! Okay, both parties do have their fringe elements; on the Republican side, we had the Clinton-ran-drugs-through-Mena-before-he-had-Vince-Foster-killed ranters -- but we never allowed the party to be infected by this. Republicans keep their fringe element on the fringe, not in the center of the party. To the Democrats, however, Moore is no fringe element -- he is emblematic of the party. Scads of powerful Democratic elected officials (and their major donors) attending the opening of Moore's propaganda screed Farenheit 911. Tom Daschle hugged him. Moore sat next to former-president Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention.)

In this posting by Moore, he writes that "They (Republicans) are never finished -- they just keep moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying...It's because they eat you and me and every other liberal for breakfast and then spend the rest of the day wreaking havoc on the planet." He actually makes the claim that polls are misleading because they rely on "likely voters." And he closes with an entreaty to "defeat the forces of evil we now so desperately face." Don't you just love the civilized, intellectual tone here?

In another post on Moore's site, Garrison Keillor (author, National Public Radio personality, and liberal sage of Minnesota) is even more high-minded and philosophical: "The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk...Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of." (Find yourself in there? I think I'm a "misanthropic frat boy" aspiring to become a "Lamborghini libertarian.) Like Moore, Keillor also uses the e-word, as in Republicans have become "the party of Newt Gingrich's evil spawn." Ronald Reagan (the "Evil Empire") and President Bush (the "axis of evil") used "evil" to refer to autocratic, mass-murdering regimes that subjugate their own people and menace their neighbors; Moore and Keillor use it to describe a guy whose public policy they disagree with. Clearly, an indication of the nuance and discernment of the Left.

The name-calling and refusal to address real issues remind me of alcoholic Fred. But remember, it's Republicans, not Democrats, who are mean.

Keillor would seem to be at home with this type of sentiment: "The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States;" and to be duly appalled by a President who would say about war, "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it," and about income inequality, "Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built." The first quote above is from the Chicago Sun-Times -- November 20, 1863, referring to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The second two quotes are from Lincoln himself. Perhaps we are not so far from the "party of Lincoln and Liberty" as Keillor suggests?

Keillor himself gets to the real reason the Democrats will once again lose in this fall's elections, when he writes "it's 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn't the 'end of innocence,' or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security." A lapse of security. If airport security at Logan had just stopped those box cutter-wielding terrorists from getting on those planes that morning, we'd be just fine, back in Clintonian nirvana. All nineteen of them would have just told Osama that it didn't work, and they were going back to their old lives. Al Qaeda would have just thrown in the towel. The Left is in la-la land on this, and the voting public knows it, and that's why they are doomed again this November.

In his Newsweek piece, Alter did get one thing (almost) right: "If Kerry loses, the Democratic establishment may be done, too. Fire-breathing liberals, mirror images of the ideologues on the right, will take over the party, likely dooming it to yet more defeat in a country that is fundamentally moderate." Too late; the fire-breathers already rule their party. Keillor and Moore are the Democratic party, and they aren't losing because they're too nice.

The author can be reached, by Democratic apologists or by "hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists" etc., at libertariantom-at-gmail.com.

I did a short presentation to a local civic group this week on the local economy. The title of my section of the new St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report (which should be up some time next week) is "Two Steps Forward, a Pause, and then ..."

The more I see of the early fall figures, the less I know about what happens after the ellipsis.

If you want to find bad news, it's not hard to acquire. One could start with the Index of Leading Economic Indicators, which fell for the third straight month. Existing home sales is backing off a bit, which I guess is bad, but with mortgage rates diving below 5.9% for 30-year fixeds, I think there should be some strength their going out. New housing starts look good. Local people I'm talking to in commercial real estate said their summers were OK but not great, but they expect to do better.

Most worrisome to most of us is the flattening of the yield curve, which is often a signal of economic weakness ahead. A 42 basis point drop in the spread between 3-month and 10-year Treasuries is a big red flag as the flattening yield curve kicked in 0.13% of the 0.3% drop in leading economic indicators last month.

There's of course oil, where dwindling inventories thanks to Ivan are pushing up prices around town to near $1.90 from $1.75 about ten days ago. Steve thinks this won't matter much, and as long as people think the increase is temporary as it appears to be, I agree. Nonetheless, there's room for worry.

Neither is good news hard to find. Today we got the durable goods data, which came in largely positive. The Washington Post plays it negatively looking at new orders, but this is after a healthy rise in July and is solid when you remove the volatility from airplane orders. The shipment and unfilled data look pretty good. Yesterday's Chicago Fed National Activity Index number for August indicates that we're set for an above average quarter.

I'm a relative optimist compared to many on the near-term GDP forecast, and today Morgan Stanley upped their forecast for third-quarter GDP to 4.2%, which is exactly where my own was three weeks ago. I think that when that number comes out, two things will happen: First, long interest rates go back up. People are thinking the economy is softening and that the run of interest rate hikes from the Fed won't last. Don't believe them. The Fed has decided its policy is to not surprise anyone, and you aren't hearing anything from them to indicate a pause just yet. I lightened today, for the second time this year, my savings plan's contribution to my bond fund. (Where did it go? Index fund. I'm mostly out of the stockpicking business.) I do think they'll pull up in early 2005 at about 2.5% to see what comes next. Elections will do that to you. The increase in long rates won't mean much outside the housing market, which is probably on the last leg of a good run. (I'll regret this sentence, perhaps, but I'll more regret not buying housing stocks in early '04 when I could see they were going so well. You know what they say about bulls, bears and pigs?)

The other thing likely to happen is on the trade deficit. At some point the continued weakness of the dollar versus the euro and thereby the yuan has to come into play; it's worth remembering how strong imports were in the second quarter. If my interest rate guess is right (and some disagree) I think money turns around and starts pushing the dollar back up. That will make it quite likely that the trade deficit stays over $500 billion through 2005. This in turn will keep GDP growth in 2005 below 4%.

That's not a call for a recession, at least not yet. But sniffing the wind more frequently is advised, in case my optimism needs more tempering.

I'm sorry we elected Mark Dayton.

Before Allawi arrived on Capitol Hill, Senator Mark Dayton, Democrat of Minnesota, called the speech "more window dressing from the Bush campaign."

Dayton told The Pioneer Press in St. Paul that he would "respectfully not attend" because Allawi "ought to be over there running the country, and not coming here for a staged production."

Big Trunk takes note as well:

Is there any chance we could turn Dayton's boycott into a permanent arrangement and keep him glued to the television? Dayton is up for reelection in 2006.

Maybe he could be with the starving pygmies in New Guinea.

Captain Ed has made it to the New York Sun, with his first article on the hyperventilation over stem-cell research. The restrictions on federal funding, Ed concludes, are far less onerous than Kerry and the MSM might lead you to think.

Arnold Kling has an excellent post the debunks a WaPo article with data contained in the article.

The article emphasizes that the middle has shrunk, from 22.3 percent of households to 15.0 percent. What it does not point out is that the two categories below the middle also have shrunk, from 52.8 percent of households to 40.9 percent. Adjusting for inflation, the percentage of households with incomes over $50,000 has climbed from 24.9 percent in 1967 to 44.1 percent in 2003.

The article's claim that it has become harder to stay in the income range of $35,000 to $50,000 is correct, if what you mean by "harder to stay" is that it has become difficult to avoid being squeezed up into a higher category.

One of the commenters to Kling suggests that we should adjust for the fact that people work more hours or that more people are participating in the labor force. I recall when some of the early work came out on increased labor hours in America, there were discussions of how overworked Americans were. One of my graduate school professors, Craig Stubblebine, remarked one day how absurd this was. "If real wages are going up, what should we expect to find for hours worked and labor force participation?" he asked, with eyes rolling to suggest the answer. Of course, economists will debate about income versus substitution effects, but the notion that workers respond to increased wages by working less is not well supported. (See Stefan Karlsson for more.)

And the main difference, according to Ed Prescott in this new article from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve, is taxes. His model shows not so much that the U.S. induced more work with lower taxes, but that Europe has reduced work effort in their countries through tax rates that permit workers to keep only forty euros of every 100 euros earned (including indirect taxation.) Since changes in labor taxation change the price of an hour of leisure, the tax cuts of the last 25 years have induced greater participation as well as greater hours. That shift can be seen in a companion paper from the MinneFed.

I realize it's an unscientific poll (and I love the disclaimer at the bottom), but this one from the STrib asks "What's your strategy for dealing with high gas prices?" 43% answer "Cut down on unnecessary trips." What does this mean? Aren't all trips unnecessary (except the one I had to make this morning from the bagel shop after some yabbo* spills coffee on the Dockers without Stain Defender)? At some price, all trips are economic or not economic. The word 'necessary' is nonsense.

My favorite classroom example of this? The Rip Van Winkle Caper. Featuring Simon Oakland, one of those omnipresent 1970s TV character actors, whose last role as a show regular was, well, forgettable. (But then, there's Toma.)

Hat tip: Steve Gigl.

* The yabbo was me. Too busy yakking about Rathergate to notice my elbow grazing the mug.

Our friend Polly is up to stuff again:

A video of Bill Moyer's summary of the 9-11 Commission's Report will be followed by a panel discussion {time, place}.

A video about the 9-11 Commission’s devastating findings on the errors prior to the attacks

Cut through media and government SPIN on 9-11, Iraq Invasion, and democracy

Sponsored by NOVA (Non-Violent Alternatives), WEG (Women’s Equality Group), College Democrats, CAAS (Council of African American Students), Human Relations.

Ok, someone please explain to me how an academic department (of the 3.7GPA) can join with College Democrats to put on an event that would seem to have a political purpose. Could we have the Political Science department sponsor an event put on by College Republicans? On a public university campus?

UPDATE (evening 9/23 and kicked to the top): Polly strikes again with an email mentioned by Dave in the comments. Here is the introductory paragraph for a set of videos:

46% of the public still believes there is a link between Al Quada and the 9-11 attacks. This level of misinformation is dangerous in a democracy. This this series of documentaries is an attempt to educate beyond the media and government spin about 9-11, the invasion of Iraq and democracy. Please announce and bring classes.

Their films? The Moyers special, Outfoxed, Hijacking Catastrophe and Unprecedented. For four weeks in October. It's more than coordination and cosponsoring. HURL has become a campaign office.

Speaking of Malkin earlier, she and edubloggers like Joanne Jacobs and Number 2 Pencil are having a field day with this story.

A terrorism response drill in Muskegon, Michigan featured an unusual enemy:

The exercise will simulate an attack by a fictitious radical group called Wackos Against Schools and Education who believe everyone should be homeschooled. Under the scenario, a bomb is placed on the bus and is detonated while the bus is traveling on Durham, causing the bus to land on its side and fill with smoke.

#2 calls it correctly:

In this day and age of political correctness, it is probably true that the school district could not have named any group without creating a firestorm (including, sad to say, white supremacists or Islamic terrorists, both of whom have attacked American citizens in the past). But in that case, why define the group at all? The focus was, as it should have been, on the rescue mission itself; the school could have given the fictional terrorist group a meaningless acronym for a name, and left it at that.

After posting this lunchtime I got thinking about this reading one of Prof. Lambert's last comments on the discussion of the Lott and Hassett paper (with which I am done for now.) Remarking on the Lott and Landes paper he says,

To get some sort of idea on when this might be published we could look at Lott's study on multiple victim public shootings where he claimed that there was a 78% reduction in such shootings after carry laws were passed. It was posted to SSRN in 1999 and is the most downloaded paper there (37099 downloads).

It has not been published in a journal.

To put the question simply: How many professional, peer-reviewed journals have that many readers? And wouldn't that many readers lead to a form of peer review? I am not sure why it makes that big a difference if the distribution of the paper is that wide. A Google search that kicks up the paper at the top also gets 522 other hits. I've been published in a few top-50 peer reviewed journals, and I didn't get nearly that much coverage. Not that I'm complaining {sniff}.

The Journal of Interesting Economics sort of bridges between the two worlds.

Another moment of SCSU fun with our Women's Center, who are bringing Carol Moseley Braun to campus on Monday. The campus announcement for this began with this paragraph.

As we enter yet another presidential election without a woman on the ballot, it begs a number of questions, including: When might women feel truly represented at the voting booth?

I don't know; could it have been 19th Amendment? This gets back to my first post today: Why do these Women's Center people think that women go to a polling place and can only identify with other women? Someone who promised to enact a true flat tax would get my vote regardless of sex or any other physical characteristic.

Why has the United States lagged far behind many other countries including Sweden, Rwanda, Spain and Cuba in terms of female representation in democratic institutions?

Boy have I been busy. How did I miss the news that Cuba was a democracy? And let me tell you, the U.S. is nothing until we achieve the political participation of Rwanda!

How might U.S. policy be different if a critical mass of women were in power to include the diverse interests of women?

Well, given that Bush seems to be polling quite well with women, I don't know that there's much of a difference.

Why is there so much resistance to the goal of gender balance in elective office?

Resistance? Yes, certainly, I do recall seeing men with pitchforks in front of polling places forcing women back to the kitchens and removing their shoes. Must have been on the same page announcing free elections in Cuba.

A trail blazer in U.S. politics, Carol Moseley Braun will be presenting the keynote address for the Women in Politics 2004, Women on Wednesday series!

Yes, Moseley Braun is a trailblazer alright, including FEC laws.

Headline in St. Cloud Times:

SCSU hands out cards to cut risk of sex assault

Joe Carter notes that while the blogosphere may have disrupted the MSM's hegemony over political news in an election year, it may instead create a wholly different hierarchy. Looking both at Rathergate and the debate over Michelle Malkin's book leads Joe to conclude:

A comparison of these two cases provides an excellent example of how information is disseminated through the various information channels now that the concept of “media” has become more fluid. The rise of blogs has helped open access to media outlets that were previously unavailable and has enabled the coordination between various specialists. It has, as Patrick O’Hannigan writes in The American Spectator, “leveraged the increasing popularity of all things Web to make "asymmetrical warfare" by non-journalists against inaccuracies in Big Media easier than it had been before.”
...
The advent of the Internet and the blogosphere has not eliminated the concept of the media gatekeeper but has merely moved it to a different tier. Because there is too much information to be processed, gatekeepers perform the invaluable service of filtering out noise. While the role is essential, subjective judgments about what is noise and what is information can lead to the exclusion of ideas and issues that are worthy of broader attention.

Vox Day, commenting on his own role in this hierarchy (both a blogger and a columnist like Malkin, and as Captain Ed has now become) quotes Ann Althouse (from where I cannot tell) thus:

I have no idea whose facts are true there though. I'm happy to assume you're right about the scope of military operations in WWII and what is in Malkin's book, but I'm just not going to feel ashamed of not knowing such things. It's broadly assumed that the Japanese internment was wrong, and most people don't feel they need to reconsider it, so we're just not bothering to get up to speed on the info.

We will have Vox on NARN Saturday, and the invitation for Malkin to join in a debate remains open (and we will reschedule for her if necessary.) That gains a different tier in Joe's hierarchy but I think Althouse's comment is perceptive.

I often fall back on Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions, which is my favorite book of his because it expands on Hayek's "Use of Knowledge in Society", one of those papers you can never read often enough. In the book Sowell writes:

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilizationi over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less. ... The time and effort (including costly mistakes) necessary to acquire knowledge are minimized through specialization, which is to say through drastic limitations on the amount of duplication of knowledge among the members of society. ... The huge costs saved by not having to duplicate given knowledge and expecterience widely through the population makes possible the higher development of that knowledge among the various subsets of people in the representative specialities. (pp. 7-8)

So people economize on gathering knowledge. Advances in technology (Internet, Blogger, newsfeeds, etc.) permit therefore further specialization. And the type of specialization that occurs permits transmission of a different type of knowledge, as Hayek observed:

Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active coöperation. We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances.

The type of knowledge Scott and John and Charles were breaking were the particular kinds of knowledge that come with working with type in the pre-digital era. It's specific knowledge. That, I believe, is the advantage of the blogosphere -- quick dispersion of specific knowledge, particularly to events where people are still in the process of forming expectations about what this means, how it affects them. But what specific knowledge is there that can be brought forward by the Internet to bear on Malkin? More to the point, the hurdle Malkin has to overcome is huge, as Althouse observes: There is a received wisdom, a consensus that fits one's information: Remember Will Rogers, "Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."

Over time the degree of certainty (or, thinking statistically, the dispersion around the central tendency of one's belief in a proposition) tends to coalesce (the dispersion shrinks) around that received wisdom. An observation that is far away from that central tendency tends to be dismissed as an outlier, even when repeated on talk radio. Dissonance in music shocks at first, but listening over time either puts it in background or integrates it into the piece's theme. In short, I don't think that Malkin's book is gaining that much traction, and neither therefore will Vox, because debunking information that isn't changing behavior has low value.

What critics of Malkin probably need is a static website with information about attitudes towards internment. Over time, some tenure-track history professor might get tenure for a book on the subject. The book will be ignored by most everybody else, who have moved on to something more relevant.

UPDATE: Wendy McElroy is seeing some of the same things.

Our friend David Strom is having an angiogram today, and he has pictures. Our prayers go with him.

Craig Newmark finds this editorial enlightening:

The unavoidable conclusion is that if the masses won't do what's best for themselves, upper-class liberals will have to do it for them.

The liberal elite is now trying to sway people by pushing the politics of envy, revving up the class warfare in much the same way a carnival barker might steal the people
in line at another booth on the midway.

If regular Americans were as stupid as that theory requires, the new liberal game plan would be a sure thing.

But we know that the truth is far different.

The registered Democrats who will not vote for John Kerry because of abortion aren't doing it because they were tricked. They're doing it because they decided that some things are more important than self-interest.

The evangelical Christians campaigning for Bush aren't brainwashed dummies who don't know any better. They're people who believe submission to God is the root of leadership and justice.

The blue-collar workers who favor free trade and smaller government aren't basing
their decisions on the free lunch they could have in the next four years. They're thinking about opportunities for their children and grandchildren.

The small-town people willing to pay a cost in dollars and blood to free Iraq and Afghanistan aren't just looking for some Arabs to kill. They're thinking about preventing a horrific war for the next generation and saving Western civilization.

Liberty, opportunity and self-determination matter even to people who might never have taken a political science class.

'Nuff said.

David Beito reports that the Faculty Senate at the University of Alabama succumbed to the urge to suppress speech on campus. This occurs after an incident on the campus where a student at a student-organized party was the target of an anti-homosexual slur. David points out these two sentences appearing side-by-side in the resolution:

Whereas, the faculty of The University of Alabama cherishes freedom of speech as a fundamental right and strongly advocates freedom of speech in all aspects of University life; Whereas, the faculty of The University of Alabama recognizes that the right to freedom of speech is not absolute and is subject to both legal restrictions and standards of civility;

Been there, done that. The resolution doesn't call for any direct sanctions, but asks that everyone including guests of the University "to behave in a civil manner and to avoid any behavior which demeans or reduces an individual based on group affiliation or personal characteristics or which promotes hate or discrimination."

David cites this quote in the campus paper from one of the five people who abstained from voting.

Sen. Bing Blewitt, one of five senators who abstained from voting on the resolution, said the attempt to limit speech is a sensitive issue because offensive speech is subjective to each person.

"I think I know what is right and wrong but it's all that stuff in the middle," he said.

He wasn't there on Saint Crispin's Day, I'd venture.

Courtesy Chumley: A group of female faculty members at Harvard think that too many senior (tenured) appointments are going to men:

The proportion of women receiving tenured job offers went from a height of 36 percent during the 2000-2001 academic year to 26 percent in 2001-2002 and then to 19 percent in 2002-2003. Last year, just 4 of 32 tenured spots were offered to women.

...The drop has prompted 26 professors to sign a letter to President Lawrence H. Summers, who has presided over every year of the decline. Summers has agreed to meet next month with the professors.

"There's no question that hiring as many extraordinary women members of the faculty as we can has to be a crucial priority for the university," Summers, who took over as president in 2001, told The Boston Globe in Wednesday's editions.

...Summers said that some of the responsibility lies with Harvard's academic departments. Departments nominate and review candidates for senior jobs, though all must ultimately be approved by him.

Overall, women currently make up 18 percent of Harvard's senior faculty and 34 percent of the junior faculty, proportions similar to those of peer institutions.

I found the Globe article, which contains these amazing statements:

''When you see statistics like that, you have to wonder whether the president of the university takes women scholars seriously," said Ingrid Monson, a music professor who says she did not sign the letter because she was away when it circulated. ''Anybody in academia who has heard these numbers has been shocked."

Must suck to miss the party. The women faculty concede there could be legit.

The letter suggests that Summers may have inadvertently caused the decline simply by failing to highlight the issue, by concentrating new hires in disciplines with fewer women, and by seeking out ''rising young stars," who are more likely to be at an an age when women pause in their careers to have children.

But of course these market reasons are not legitimate, they reason, and therefore things must change. (The article quotes one woman faculty calling these "unintentional biases".)

My debate with Phil over the sources of the deficit and whether Bush is a big spender get some new data in this one-pager fr