Feeling good? You may make yourself sick!

"...bans on disposable plastic grocery bags may make people feel good, but they also have substantial unintended consequences"

Recipe for two sesame baguettes

Has one Sezme been looking at my recipes?

3 cups all purpose flour
1½ cups water
¼ teaspoon yeast
1½ teaspoons salt
(optional: small piece of risen dough: see below)
• Mix and let rise 4 hours, then refrigerate overnight.
• Take out the next morning at 9 a.m. to let it warm up
• At 10 shape it into 2 baguettes (at this point I take a thumb-sized piece of risen dough for next time)
• Place in baguette mold that you’ve sprinkled with sesame and let them rise in the oven
• At 11, take out to pre-heat the oven to 450° F
• Brush baguettes with milk and sprinkle the sesame seeds
• Slash baguettes with a knife (I have trouble making decent cuts)
• When the oven reaches 450°, put baguettes in mold back in the oven and bake for about 20 min.
• Remove from oven and cool.
• Then you can eat it at noon, but I prefer to leave lots of leftovers that I slice and toast on subsequent mornings.

The war on drugs causes high rate of gun deaths

A sure fire way to dramatically lower gun homicides: repeal drug laws

Guess which country this is

In the last four years alone, it has used drones to end people's lives in six predominantly Muslim country (probably more). Under its Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, it has repeatedly wiped out entire families (including just this week), slaughtered dozens of children at a time, targeted and killed people rescuing and grieving its victims, and either deliberately or recklessly dropped bombs on teenagers (including its own citizens), then justified it with the most foul and morally deranged rationale.

It embraces and props up the world's most repressive tyrants. It isolates itself from the world and embraces blatant double standards in order to enable the worst behavior of its client states. It continues to maintain a global network of prisons where people are kept indefinitely in cages with no charges. It exempts itself and its leaders from the international institutions of justice while demanding that the leaders of other, less powerful states be punished there. And it is currently in the process of suffocating a nation of 75 million people with an increasingly sadistic sanctions regime, while proudly boasting about it and threatening more.

It spent years imprisoning even Muslim journalists with no charges. And then there's that little fact about how, less than a decade ago, it created a worldwide torture regime and then launched an aggressive war that destroyed a nation of 26 million people, one that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings.

From The PSY scandal: singing about killing people v. constantly doing it.

How can they be even "more respectful" of Obama?

In response to the contention that the media will now be even "more respectful" of Obama than they have been up to now, Glenn Greenwald writes,

Short of formally beatifying him, or perhaps transferring all their worldly possessions to him, is that even physically possible?

The hypocrisy of "pardoning" Thanksgiving turkeys

In his discussion of this absurd ritual, unemployed negativity cites The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, The Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánomo by Magnus Fiskejö, who explains what actually happens to the turkeys:

The chosen birds are killed because they have been engineered and packed with hormones to the point that they are unfit for any other purpose than their own slaughter and consumption. They are fast-forward turkeys. Presidential turkey caretakers have explained that most succumb rather quickly to joint disease—their frail joints simply cannot bear the weight of their artificially enhanced bodies.

"Pardoning" Thanksgiving turkeys was ridiculous to being with, given that it makes a mockery of those unjustly imprisoned in general, and in Obama's case in particular, underlines how few human pardons he has actually granted, not to mention the fact that the president, like many other Americans, eats turkey anyway. But like so much in modern life, to me it seems to be no more than meaningless ritual (although Fiskejö would disagree).

The most influential book in Western economics?

From Yang Jisheng: The man who discovered 36 million dead (Paul Mason's article on Yang Jisheng, author of Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao's Great Famine):

He had stumbled on Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom in a library and chuckles with mild scepticism when I tell him it is probably the most influential book in Western economics:

"Before I read Hayek, I had only read works the party wanted me to. Hayek says that to use the state to promote a utopia is very dangerous. In China that's exactly what they did. The utopia promoted by Marx, even though it is beautiful, it is very dangerous."

The most influential book in Western economics? Or what Kate Zernike saw as one of a number of once-obscure texts by dead writers?

Getting harvested.

So I just watched the first episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (I've got to say I just don't see what the excitement was about). Anyway, recently I've seen a few bumper stickers for something called "Harvest Crusade". Any connection? but then Memrise has something called "Harvest", too.

An astonishing resurgence

Today, the eastern third of the country has the largest forest in the contiguous U.S., as well as two-thirds of its people. Since the 19th century, forests have grown back to cover 60% of the land within this area. In New England, an astonishing 86.7% of the land that was forested in 1630 had been reforested by 2007, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Not since the collapse of Mayan civilization 1,200 years ago has reforestation on this scale happened in the Americas, says David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, an ecology research unit of Harvard University. In 2007, forests covered 63.2% of Massachusetts and 58% of Connecticut, the third and fourth most densely populated states in the country, not counting forested suburban and exurban sprawl (though a lot of sprawl has enough trees to be called a real forest if people and their infrastructure weren't there).

If there are aspects of life that God does not control, he is not omnipotent, but just one magical force among many.

Whether we construe Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s statement generously and limit it to his obvious intentions—that the life that results from a rape is a gift that God intends to happen—or construe it less favorably to what Mourdock meant to say but faithfully to Christian theology—that God intended the rape that impregnates the victim—either interpretation is required by the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent God. Given the nonstop stream of prayers that believers send God’s way every second, seeking favorable dispositions of, inter alia, their home foreclosure, their bypass operation, the election, the aftermath of an earthquake and every other natural disaster (belatedly), it’s clear that believers rightly reason that there is not a single aspect of life invisible to the all-powerful God and over which he fails to exercise utter control (even if he sometimes seems to get a little distracted). I mean, if he can perform such Iron Age miracles as ventriloquizing through a burning bush , he can sure as heck prevent a rape if he chose to do so. His will has no option but to be done.

I was going to send this to professors I know, but I didn't want to depress them

The Magic of Education by Bryan Caplan

Think about all the time students spend studying history, art, music, foreign languages, poetry, and mathematical proofs. What you learn in most classes is, in all honesty, useless in the vast majority of occupations. This is hardly surprising when you remember how little professors like me know about the Real World. How can I possibly improve my students' ability to do a vast array of jobs that I don't know how to do myself? It would be nothing short of magic.

...

Many educators sooth their consciences by insisting that "I teach my students how to think, not what to think." But this platitude goes against a hundred years of educational psychology. Education is very narrow; students learn the material you specifically teach them... if you're lucky.

The only difference between Obama and Bush

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He’s about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with every speech and every political maneuver overseas? There’d be riots in the streets about the people we’re killing. And yet because it’s Obama, and he’s better looking and better at reading the teleprompter, we let him get away with it.

Penn Jillette

More people have been starting college, but...

...the fraction that actually finishes college has remained flat. Or so Bryan Caplan argues:

...we already have an enormously high dropout rate, especially for marginal students. Most of, or at least a lot of the payoff from going to college comes from finishing. And yet, over the last decade or so we’ve had a large rise of the number of people who start going to college, but the fraction that actually finishes has been very flat. So it seems quite likely in a way that this is just going to encourage a lot of people to waste a couple of years of life and get very little show for it.

Spot the difference

Krugman didn't write this:

What continues to amaze me is this: our current strategy of massive, unsustainable deficit spending in the hopes that this will somehow generate a self-sustained recovery is currently regarded as the orthodox, sensible thing to do - even though it can be justified only by exotic stories about multiple equilibria, the sort of thing you would imagine only a professor could believe. Meanwhile further steps on monetary policy - the sort of thing you would advocate if you believed in a more conventional, boring model, one in which the problem is simply a question of the savings-investment balance - are rejected as dangerously radical and unbecoming of a dignified economy.

Will somebody please explain this to me?

He wrote this:

What continues to amaze me is this: Japan's current strategy of massive, unsustainable deficit spending in the hopes that this will somehow generate a self-sustained recovery is currently regarded as the orthodox, sensible thing to do - even though it can be justified only by exotic stories about multiple equilibria, the sort of thing you would imagine only a professor could believe. Meanwhile further steps on monetary policy - the sort of thing you would advocate if you believed in a more conventional, boring model, one in which the problem is simply a question of the savings-investment balance - are rejected as dangerously radical and unbecoming of a dignified economy.

Will somebody please explain this to me?

Should I vote for someone because I identify with him?

Obama’s ‘not one of us’ attack on Romney echoes racial code by Karen Tumulty, who might say "to be sure" before adding:

The context of the ad is very different from the one in which the phrase “one of us” was used to divide the country along racial lines....

But anyway, why must people identify with a particular candidate? Don't appeals to identity (which certainly do suggest racism to me) mean that a candidate doesn't have much to say on the issues?

Illegal immigrants don't take jobs away from American workers

Eduardo Porter in Immigration and American Jobs:

[Economists] confirm earlier findings that immigration on the whole has not led to fewer jobs for American workers. More significantly, they suggest that immigrants have had, at most, a small negative impact on the wages of Americans who compete with them most directly, those with a high school degree or less.

Meanwhile, the research has found that immigrants – including the poor, uneducated ones coming from south of the border — have a big positive impact on the economy over the long run, bolstering the profitability of American firms, reducing the prices of some products and services by providing employers with a new labor source and creating more opportunities for investment and jobs.

Should I vote for someone because of his ethnicity?

Jay Chen seems to think I should vote for him because of his ethnicity. Funny, though, how a couple of Latinas seemed to have snuck in. No blacks or whites, though. So if one is not East Asian or Latina one shouldn't vote for him?

Is the Cato Institute right wing? (II)

Please, no bigotry toward those who are successful in pursuing the American Dream

According to the IRS, the top 1 percent of earners take home 17 percent of the nation’s total taxable income. Yet they pay 37 percent of the nation’s taxes. They are paying a disproportionate share of the burden of government and yet the Occupy protestors, public employee unions and even President Obama demonize them.

Think about who the 1 percent are. They are entrepreneurs who have pursued life, liberty and happiness. For many, pursuit of a dream is the root source of their wealth. They risked some of their own money and perhaps recruited investors to put in some of theirs. They hired workers to join them in making this dream a reality. Some of those workers became 1 percenters, too.

And how do these dreams come true? By operating businesses that succeed by serving others well. That is the essence of the free market and capitalism. Despite all its flaws, despite the risks, despite the many challenges, success is achieved by serving others well. This should be championed, not vilified. It’s surreal we must be reminded of this.

What a watery mess

From Parched in the West but Shipping Water to China, Bale by Bale by Peter Culp and Robert Glennon：

In 2012, the drought-stricken Western United States will ship more than 50 billion gallons of water to China. This water will leave the country embedded in alfalfa -- most of it grown in California -- and is destined to feed Chinese cows. The strange situation illustrates what is wrong about how we think, or rather don't think, about water policy in the U.S.

...the most curious consequence of this export market involves water. Alfalfa is a water-guzzling crop -- and the water embedded in the alfalfa that the U.S. will export to China in 2012 is enough to supply the annual needs of roughly 500,000 families.

Southern California's Imperial Irrigation District gets its water from the Colorado River, 82 miles to the east. Alfalfa farmers in the district use as much as 50% more water than growers in other areas of the state due to scorching heat, salty soil and, perhaps most important, their legal rights to an enormous quantity of cheap water. This single irrigation district controls more than 20% of the total annual flow of the Colorado River. Remarkably, the district's water rights are 10 times higher than that of the entire state of Nevada.

...

The perversity of a situation in which California taxpayers must spend tens of billions to protect the water supplies of vital farms and cities -- even as California farmers convert tens of thousands of irrigated acres to feed cows in China -- reflects the growing incoherence of domestic water and agricultural policy. Antiquated Western water laws often block intrastate or interstate water transfers that could satisfy changing domestic urban, agricultural and environmental needs.

Cutting the Bureau of Reclamation and Reforming Water Markets by Chris Edwards and Peter J. Hill notes the problems caused by the eponymous agency:

The large subsidies built into many Reclamation projects indicate that they have been a loss to taxpayers and the economy. But Reclamation projects have also harmed the environment, which has prompted Congress to burden taxpayers with further spending aimed at mitigating the damage.

...

President Jimmy Carter was an early anti-dam crusader and he famously tried to terminate 19 major projects of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps of Engineers. Carter examined the environmental and economic effects of these projects, and he concluded that they were boondoggles. However, Carter misplayed the politics of the issue, and his spending cuts to water infrastructure projects went nowhere in Congress.⁶⁹ Carter's skepticism of dams is more widespread today, and a movement has developed to remove dams where the costs seem to outweigh the benefits.⁷⁰.

If these Cato authors praise a Democratic president, does that mean he's wrong?

[California's Central Valley Project] is Reclamation's largest irrigation project, providing roughly 6,800 farmers irrigation water for about 3 million acres of land. The farmers receive the water at roughly 10 percent of its market value, which in 2002 worked out to an annual subsidy of about $416 million a year, according to EWG...⁸³ 

On top of the irrigation subsidy, about one-fifth of CVP farmers who receive federal irrigation water also receive crop subsidies from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.... This subsidized production of often water-intensive crops in the arid West competes with more efficient production of the same crops in other regions of the country. Federal farm subsidies encourage overproduction of crops in all parts of the nation, and so the government is exacerbating the overproduction with irrigation subsidies in the West.

(via Water: Excess of Subsidies, Lack of Markets by Chris Edwards)