Blog Jones

Why is Michael Savage still on the air?

As if his “You should only get AIDS and die” comment that got him fired from MSNBC wasn’t bad enough, and as if his ridiculous claims about John Kerry weren’t bad enough, now we get the following comments about the tsunami, as reported by Le Sabot Post-Moderne:

“I wouldn’t call it a tragedy. … We shouldn’t be spending a nickel on this.”

Some other quotes: “This is more a UNICEF deal, it’s a U.N. deal, it’s a Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, George Soros, Bill Clinton bleeding-heart-liberal deal. I don’t want to send them any money. . . Many of the countries and the areas in these countries that were hit . . .were hotbeds of radical Islam. Why should we be helping them destroy us? . . . I truthfully don’t believe in foreign aid.”

InstaPundit also links to Classical Values which makes the argument that Savage is an agent provocateur, a “deliberately inflammatory poseur masquerading as conservative.” I certainly wouldn’t be surprised.

I’m about to email WORD, my local radio conservative radio station to request his removal. I recommend that you do the same in your areas.

It goes without saying that the education of our young people is one of our country’s top priorities. Taxpayers dole out huge sums of money–on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year–to ensure that the children of America receive the highest quality education possible. Therefore, it stands to reason that we want to spend our education money in the most effective way possible.

Duh.

Kevin Drum has a post today that looks at the idea of merit pay for teachers. His take: Good idea, but who’s going to evaluate the teachers? The principal is the only real manager, and there’s no way that he can accurately evaluate each teacher. He seem to recommend that public schools should hire additional management to observe, evaluate, and manage the teachers. His final paragraph:

So there’s the paradox: I don’t think teachers are somehow immune from needing supervision, any more than any other white collar worker. But there’s precious little of it available, and it would cost a fortune to provide it. Private sector firms seem to think that reasonable levels of management make them better companies, but public schools don’t. Why?

It’s an excellent question. On the other hand, oftentimes I hear that the money that’s supposed to be going to education is often eaten up in “administrative costs,” which is why teachers have such low salaries compared to the rest of the marketplace despite the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend each year. Unfortunately I don’t know where to find the statistics, and even then there’s the question of what exactly adminstrative expenses entail.

In any case, while hiring enough managers to properly run a school is a good idea, it’s going to be hard to sell that idea to legislators and voters–so I think additional funding to hire managers is out. And I imagine the teachers’ unions would be firmly against hiring additional management at the cost of funds that could be used to pay teachers higher salaries and at the cost of some of the teachers’ freedom in the classroom.

I think that the way to fund the idea is to find out what the “administrative expenses” are and to reduce them. Indeed, depending on what they are, better, closer management might actually *reduce* those costs, and the management will pay for itself.

In any case, adding a thin layer of management to schools might be worth a try. It certainly can’t hurt anything, after all.

(Of course, this all assumes that the government should be providing education in the first place. I think that the private sector could do a better job; indeed, the small Christian school that I went to costs significantly less per pupil than the public schools do, and turns out significantly better students on average than the local public schools.)

Wow! It’s great not having to rebuild my website anymore. And I see an option to email entries to the blog, which I was never able to figure out with Movable Type.

Instead of importing all my entries from MT into WordPress, I’ve decided to keep all the old entries in the Movable Type archive folders to prevent link rot. That’s why there are two search boxes instead of just one on the sidebar.

By the way, it looks a little better in FireFox than it does in Internet Explorer.

Anyways, chances are that I’ve missed something in setting up the template, although I spent all day on it. If you see anything, let me know.

As soon as I can get it looking right, I’ll (probably) be moving from Movable Type to Wordpress. This is actually just a test of the WordPress trackback function. Hopefully, it will work.

Anywho: If you want to see the work in progress, click here.

Liberal blogger Amy Sullivan received a letter from the RNC that opened with “I hope you and your family had happy holidays.” She draws the obvious conclusion.

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s no more pointless issue to fight over. So, quite fighting over it.

And that’s my final word on the subject. At least until late November.

I saw a very strange advertisement today over at baldilocks.

So… I should pay $17 to write about somebody else’s idea?

Here’s a better idea if you have writer’s block. Go to Google News, pick an article, and write about it. It’s current, about something that’s interesting to a number of people, and you got the idea for free.

Yay! Our friends over at w.bloggar have issued the first upgrade to their software in over a year! It has better support for extended entries, and, I’m told, better trackback support. Can’t complain about that.

You’ve no doubt heard cynical comments complaining that all of our manufacturing jobs are being exported to China and the other far-eastern countries. But remember: No trend lasts forever.

One of China’s main advantages from an economic standpoint is that it offers labor very inexpensively. This will only continue until the Chinese rediscover the concept of unions, and I believe they’re heading that way. A report from China Digital News quotes the Asia Times as follows: “Recent protests have been sparked by the near-fatal beating of a migrant worker, an illegal hike in taxi fees and low wages in an electronics plant - to name a few. These are but the tip of the iceberg in the nation of 1.3 billion people where the wealth gap is widening, corruption is widespread and the rule of law is far from entrenched. For those who know their Chinese history, this raises the specter of devastating peasant and other revolts over the ages, sometimes cataclysms that have toppled regimes.” (My emphasis)

According to Marginal Revolution, “58,000 major incidents of social unrest took place in China in 2003 — an average of roughly 160 a day and 15 percent more than the year before.”

I believe that the Chinese labor bubble will collapse as either A) the Chinese unionize or B) the Chinese revolt against the system holding down their wages.

As the Chinese proverb goes, interesting times.

The BBC has a list of “100 things we didn’t know this time last year” that’s pretty interesting. Among my favorites:

1. Street brawlers sometimes arm themselves with potato peelers, according to the Home Office, which wants to make them banned weapons.

As I said, it is the British Broadcasting Corporation. Britain is the only country I know that could seriously consider banning potato peelers as weapons. Anyways, back to the light stuff:

5. 52% of households have five or more remote controls.

8. Brazilians are the nationality most likely to read spam.

19. The collective noun for rhinos is “crash”.

22. George W Bush got the highest number of votes for president of any candidate in US history, in November 2004.

23. John Kerry got the second highest number.

35. George Bush and John Kerry shared the same debating coach while at Yale University. His name was Rollin Osterweis.

38. Yoda was based on Albert Einstein.

51. The day after the atomic bomb exploded on Hiroshima, the banks re-opened. They had one customer, John Reader’s book Cities recorded.

72. Desert locusts can travel 120 miles in 24 hours.

100. Bill Clinton sent just two e-mails while he was president.

According to Reuters, the Bush administration is considering holding suspected terrorists, without trial, for the rest of their lives.

The Bush administration is preparing plans for possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists, including hundreds whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts, The Washington Post reported Sunday.

Citing intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials, the newspaper said the Pentagon and the CIA had asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for those it would not set free or turn over to courts at home or abroad.

I’m thinking it’s about time for the Supreme Court to step in here. I don’t want the government to have the power to hold people indefinitely without sufficient evidence to charge in court. I refer you to Article I Section 9 of the Constitution.

One can hope, however, that the article is in error, or, as newspapers tend to be, extremely skewed.

(I won’t bore you with a whole post about having a happy new year. Just have one, OK? No terrorism, no elections, no natural disasters, no high-profile murder investigations. Let’s have a quiet year for once?)

Anyways.

When I changed my major to Comprehensive Business last year, that meant that I was required to take micro- and macroeconomics. I found it to be very dull and uninteresting at the time, but I’ve since revised my opinion, largely because of posts like this one over at Agoraphilia. In this particular post he talks about the long-abandoned practice of dueling as method of conflict resolution, as well as trial by ordeal and wartime atrocities.

What interests me about Agoraphilia is that the authors use economic terms and theories to address all kinds of issues. Allow me to quote his first paragraph:

Tyler Cowen makes an interesting point about duels: they may have served to facilitate conflict resolution. Counterintuitive, but true. Think of nemeses as being engaged in a two-stage game. In the first stage of the game, they try to negotiate to a peaceful settlement of their differences. In the second stage they fight a duel, and this stage is only reached if the first stage results in a stalemate instead of a resolution. If the second stage occurs, both parties can anticipate a high expected cost. (This is true even if you?re the superior gunman. Even if there?s a 90% chance you?ll win, a 10% chance of death or serious injury is nothing to scoff at.) As a result, both parties have a strong incentive to reach a mutually agreeable settlement in the first stage of the game.

You see?

All economic theory is based on a single concept: all human beings seek out the things that they believe will bring them the most utility, or pleasure, at the least cost. In essence, economics is the study of human motivation, and so it applies to many more situations than a textbook might initially reveal. Agoraphilia is great at pulling back the veil of ennui that so often shrouds the field of economics.

(I’m proud of that last sentence. Is it overwrought? Probably! Am I keeping it anyways? Yes!)

I found the post about Santaism to be particularly insightful, and I’ll again quote the first paragraph here:

Lots of parents lie to their children, repeatedly and ardently, about the existence of Santa Claus. Why? Santaism imposes large costs on parents, both the moral costs of lying and the opportunity costs of losing credit for well-regarded gifts. Yet Santaism does not appear to offer countervailing benefits. You don’t need that mythical construct to tie good behavior to good gifts; parents routinely use carrots and sticks to get their kids to act appropriately. As d said of Santa Claus last night, during our long drive home from a dinner party, “What’s in it for the parents?”

The rest of the post and the comments are mostly dedicated to answering that final question.

Conclusion: It’s a great blog. Five stars out of five. Go read it.