Inequality and Risk

Paul Graham summarizes the link between Inequality and Risk:

Decreasing economic inequality means taking money from the rich. Since risk and reward are equivalent, decreasing potential rewards automatically decreases people's appetite for risk. Startups are intrinsically risky. Without the prospect of rewards proportionate to the risk, founders will not invest their time in a startup. Founders are irreplaceable. So eliminating economic inequality means eliminating startups.

Economic inequality is not just a consequence of startups. It's the engine that drives them, in the same way a fall of water drives a water mill. People start startups in the hope of becoming much richer than they were before. And if your society tries to prevent anyone from being much richer than anyone else, it will also prevent one person from being much richer at t2 than t1.

When you reduce inequality, you reduce risk, and that reduces growth:

Ok, so we get slower growth. Is that so bad? Well, one reason it's bad in practice is that other countries might not agree to slow down with us. If you're content to develop new technologies at a slower rate than the rest of the world, what happens is that you don't invent anything at all. Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. And the only thing you can offer in return is raw materials and cheap labor. Once you sink that low, other countries can do whatever they like with you: install puppet governments, siphon off your best workers, use your women as prostitutes, dump their toxic waste on your territory — all the things we do to poor countries now. The only defense is to isolate yourself, as communist countries did in the twentieth century. But the problem then is, you have to become a police state to enforce it.

Of course, no one's goal is to stop high-risk startups:

The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?

We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power. And there has been progress on that front. Before he died of drink in 1925, Commodore Vanderbilt's wastrel grandson Reggie ran down pedestrians on five separate occasions, killing two of them. By 1969, when Ted Kennedy drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, the limit seemed to be down to one. Today it may well be zero. But what's changed is not variation in wealth. What's changed is the ability to translate wealth into power.

How do you break the connection between wealth and power? Demand transparency. Watch closely how power is exercised, and demand an account of how decisions are made. Why aren't all police interrogations videotaped? Why did 36% of Princeton's class of 2007 come from prep schools, when only 1.7% of American kids attend them? Why did the US really invade Iraq? Why don't government officials disclose more about their finances, and why only during their term of office?

Flashback: Psychiatric Experimentation With LSD in Historical Perspective

The Canadian Psychiatric Association looks at the history of LSD in Flashback: Psychiatric Experimentation With LSD in Historical Perspective:

In 1938, in search of a new migraine medicine, Swiss biochemist Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD at the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Laboratories. It was not until 1943, when some of the liquid chemical substance spilled onto his hand, that Hofmann had the first recorded LSD “trip.” Three-quarters of an hour after absorbing some of the chemical into his skin, Hofmann experienced growing dizziness, some visual disturbance, and a marked desire to laugh. After about an hour, he asked his assistant to call a doctor and accompany him home from his research laboratory. In Hofmann’s mind, he was not on the familiar boulevard that led home but, rather, on a street painted by Salvador Dali — a funhouse roller coaster where the buildings yawned and rippled. Hofmann later wondered whether he had permanently damaged his mind. Hofmann’s serendipitous discovery of the chemical compound LSD introduced a new drug that subsequently inspired a flurry of medical interest.

(Hat tip to Boing Boing.)

1864 "Freedom Primer" for slaves scanned and posted

Boing Boing points to a 1864 "Freedom Primer" for slaves scanned and posted:

Here's a Flickr set of 'The gospel of slavery: a primer of freedom,' a book with engravings published in 1864. It takes the form of a series of poems about freedom and slavery, and is purely marvellous.

Make San Francisco the Leftwing Paradise It Hopes to Be

James D. Miller makes his point with a silly suggestion in Make San Francisco the Leftwing Paradise It Hopes to Be:

San Francisco's city supervisors voted 8-3 against allowing the USS Iowa to become a tourist attraction in their city. The battleship saw action in WWII, Korea and the Persian Gulf. One supervisor voting against the USS Iowa complained about the military's treatment of homosexuals, another objected to America's involvement in Iraq and said 'I am sad to say I am not proud of the history of the United States of America since the 1940s.'

The vote against the USS Iowa shows that San Francisco is being treated unfairly by the U.S. military. Our military defends the people of San Francisco even though the city's elected leaders want nothing to do with the military. All Americans should be horrified that the good leftists of San Francisco must suffer the crushing moral burden of being protected by a force their leaders so despise. I therefore propose that the U.S. armed forces withdraw their protection of San Francisco.

The U.S. military should announce that they will not retaliate against any military or terrorist attack that occurs in San Francisco so long as the attack is completely confined to this city.

The spice of life

According to The spice of life, most "Indian" restaurants serve Bangladeshi food:

It was in the 1840s that lascars started jumping ship in the port of London (and Singapore, Southampton and New York too) and setting themselves up as cooks. Given that they all came from the same jungly patch of what is now Bangladesh, it was inevitable that their particular rice-heavy, pork-free cuisine came to represent 'Indian food' to the casual British mind. Even now, of the 8,000 Indian restaurants in Britain, the vast majority are run by Bangladeshis who come from what is still known at home as the 'Seaman's Zone'

Job Slayers

Job Slayers looks (askance) at the minimum wage:

We've sometimes lampooned minimum wages by asking why politicians should merely stop at $7.25. If they're such a great idea, why not $20 an hour, or for that matter why not pay everyone in America a Senate salary? But now we find that a group called Wider Opportunities for Women, which is funded by unions, has actually advocated a 'living wage' requirement of $24 an hour in San Francisco and $35 an hour in Manhattan, which of course would mean that hundreds of thousands of employed workers would suddenly have to make ends meet with a 'living wage' of zero.

The minimum wage is about the most ineffective poverty abatement program ever conceived. A new study by the Employment Policies Institute (EPI) estimates that Mr. Kennedy's $7.25 wage law would add $18.3 billion of costs on mostly small and local businesses with typically thin profit margins — restaurants, hotels and retail shops. Only 13% of that money would go to families that can accurately be described as poor. The EPI study finds that only one out of every 11 minimum wage workers is the head of a poor household.

Gates of Fire

I don't know how to describe Michael Yon's Gates of Fire — his latest dispatch from Iraq — except to say that it includes insurgents outrunning a helicopter in their German sports car, close-quarters combat — really, really close quarters — lots of blood, green troops paralyzed with fear, and veteran troops not at all paralyzed with fear.

It takes a while to get to the good parts, but read the whole thing.

The Battle for Mosul: Reality Check

In The Battle for Mosul: Reality Check, Michael Yon explains the difficulty of making explosions connect with a target at the right time:

The Chinese first began using gunpowder a thousand years ago, and quickly realized that making a bomb and using it effectively are two different problems. They made rockets from bamboo, and invented grenades. The real challenge is making the explosions connect with a target at the right time, in the right way; meaning, there is an optimal point and moment for initiation. Achieving both of these simultaneously can be extremely difficult.

What's true for simple IEDs also holds for large car bombs against armored targets — if the timing is off, by as little as a quarter-second as the vehicle drives by… BLAM! …everyone inside the vehicle might be fine.

Definitely watch the video clip.

Jungle Law

Michael Yon describes an ambush set for the insurgents by American troops in Jungle Law:

They planned an operation with snipers, making it appear that an ISF vehicle had been attacked, complete with explosives and flash-bang grenades to simulate the IED. The simulated casualty evacuation of sand dummies completed the ruse.

The Deuce Four soldiers left quickly with the "casualties," "abandoning" the burning truck in the traffic circle. The enemy took the bait. Terrorists came out and started with the AK-rifle-monkey-pump, shooting into the truck, their own video crews capturing the moment of glory. That's when the American snipers opened fire and killed everybody with a weapon. Until now, only insiders knew about the AK-monkey-pumpers smack-down.

He also cites a Captain Jeff van Antwerp who notes that most serious terrorists do not fear prison; they joke that they would pay 5,000 dinar per night to stay at Abu Ghraib — A/C, showers, good food, and clean water.

Why 'Theology Is a Simple Muddle'

Lee Harris has written a lengthy essay, Why 'Theology Is a Simple Muddle', on religion and philosophy, and especially Creationism, Intelligent Design, and Evolution.

He takes a sympathetic look at the farmers — on the "wrong" side of the Scopes Monkey Trial — who didn't want their children taught evolution:

If an elite group of men enter into a community and claim to possess a truth that no one in the community can judge for himself, by the standards of common sense that the community normally falls back upon to make judgment calls about the ordinary questions, then this elite group may be said to possess a gnosis — a Greek word that we shall use to indicate a special source of knowledge that gives cognitive authority to those who have it, and where those who lack this knowledge are in no position to be able to evaluate it. For example, if you tell me that a long series of numbers add up to 123, and if I can check your addition by adding these numbers for myself, either in my head, or on paper, or by means of a calculator, then we are not dealing with gnosis, because we each are capable of adding the sum, and because we both recognize the legitimacy of the other's method: if our tallies conflict, we both agree that one of us has made a simple error in our calculations, and we will redo them until we find the error and are thus able to come to an agreement.

This, however, is not how gnosis works. With gnosis, one party claims to have a method for discovering truth that the other party lacks. It may be because the party claiming gnosis has received divine revelation whereas the other party has not. Or it may be because the privileged party has keener intuitions than the less privileged. The influential English literary critic F.R.Leavis, for example, argued that certain persons, like himself, have a special faculty for identifying great works of literature which normal people lack. Leavis could intuit the greatness of the novels of D.H.Lawrence by a process that is frankly a mystery to less gifted mortals such as myself, who would rather have an important appendage removed than to read another monstrosity like Women in Love. Or the elite claiming gnosis may base their cognitive superiority on their access to secret traditions and esoteric lore, passed down from generation to generation, and forever guarded from the undiscriminating eyes of the vulgar, in which case the cognitive elite approximates the sociological entity called a priestly caste.

When we discuss a priestly caste, the assumption is often made that the priests have deliberately chosen to make their knowledge inaccessible to the ordinary person. For example, the Chinese literati spared no efforts to keep a monopoly of reading and writing to themselves; and a similar tendency can be found in virtually every priestly caste. From this perspective, any claim about esoteric knowledge that cannot be shared with the general public is viewed as hogwash; if anything, the priestly caste has gone to trouble to make their pretended secret knowledge appear to be far more difficult to access than it really is-a device dubbed obscurantism.

Yet what about quantum physicists? Where do they fit sociologically? Their knowledge is inaccessible to the average person, at least without elaborate initiation into the mysteries. Yet do we wish to accuse quantum physicists of engaging in esoteric hocus-pocus in order to baffle and bewitch the masses into accepting their cognitive authority over them? That is going too far-and yet, what happens to a society where so much of what constitutes science is no longer comprehensible to the average layman, and where questions that touch very close to home can only be decided by an intellectual elite whose process of inference cannot be checked and verified by the man in the street?

I love this metaphor:

The Baptists and Methodists were missionaries to the periphery, and because they appealed to the laboring class and those who got their hands dirty, it had to address them in metaphors that they could understand-and not in bloodless abstraction. Logical arguments felt them cold; but stories they could understand. And that was what the Bible was — a set of entrancing Arabian night tales that allowed a man to hover for a spell in another world that was still so much like his own. To ask whether the stories were true was like asking a fan whether professional wrestling is real — We'd rather not think about it, thank you just the same, because we are enjoying our willing suspension of disbelief to the max, and we'd prefer not to have anyone quiz us about where Cain got his wife. It is like having a brainy kid sitting next to you during a sci-fi movie, who every now and then whispers smugly, 'You know, that can't really happen,' in reference to some minor violation of the special theory of relativity.

Bush's summer reading list

Bush's summer reading list lists the books President Bush is bringing along on his working vacation — John Barry's The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History, and Edvard Radzinsky's Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar — as well as suggestions from a number of prominent folks around Washington.

(Hat tip to Dan Drezner, who recommended Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.)

Burned, Baby, Burned

Burned, Baby, Burned examines the Watts riots of 1965:

The Watts riot began when white police officers stopped an intoxicated black driver in South Central Los Angeles. He resisted arrest and was forcibly subdued. A rumor quickly spread that the officers had beaten a pregnant black woman, and a growing mob started throwing rocks and bottles at the cops. The incident snowballed into a five-day conflagration, with blacks destroying a thousand businesses. Thirty-four people died, more than 1,000 were hospitalized and nearly 4,000 were arrested.

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.com.)

Slaves by the grace of God

Slaves by the grace of God looks at slavery in the Muslim world. This excerpt from Islam's Black Slaves reprints an article from 1956 (apparently describing the contemporary slave trade):

A trader would nudge a slave's jaw with a stick and the man would open his mouth to display his teeth. Another probe with the stick and he would flex his arm muscles. Young women were forced to expose their breasts and buttocks. A dispute developed over the virginity of a tall young ebony woman, and during the hour-long argument she was forced to squat while one of the most prominent buyers examined her with his fingers. She was terrified; her trembling was visible fifty yards away.

Occasionally children were sold in batches. They did not cry, mainly, I think, because they had no tears left, but they held tightly to one another and kept looking around as if for help. Boys of about ten or twelve had their anuses examined; homosexual buyers are fussy about disease.

It was even worse in the old days, it would appear:

There are other issues relating to slavery where sharia commands a particular course of action, but Muslims generally found ways to skirt the letter of the law. For instance, castration is banned in Islam, but eunuchs were omnipresent in Muslim courts. How was this so? There were multiple avenues of recourse. In some places non-Muslims specialized in castrations, in Al-Andalus it was Jews, in the Ottoman Empire it was Christians. In other cases slaves were castrated outside of Muslim lands, so that Prague in Christian Bohemia became a center for the generation of eunuchs for Ottoman service. In Africa the Muslims were often castrated en route. Sometimes, castration was attributed to a "mistake," the slaves were sent to a barber who was going to circumcise them and he simply grasped their genitals and sliced everything off (while European slaves generally had their testicles removed, black slaves had both testicles and penis removed).

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.com.)

History, geography, society and Islam

History, geography, society and Islam asserts that Islam fits the "contested areas" of the Middle East:

Geography has always made the Middle East, Central Asia and Northern India radically contested areas repeatedly plagued by conquerors, movements of peoples, and fluctuating despotic empires run by foreigners. As a result, in that part of the world it has been every man — or rather every small group — for itself. A radically divided form of society developed that featured intense local loyalties and enmities and lacked any civic feeling or public life. It is in that kind of society (or rather asocial state) that Islam began and has mostly existed.

Under such circumstances the things outsiders complain about in Islam and Muslim life become comprehensible. If social life is basically war then force and fraud become the two cardinal virtues. Suspicion, double-dealing, treachery, political corruption, and sporadic violence become permanent features of what passes for public life. Honor becomes everything. Women become prey who must be kept secluded and watched closely to prevent capture. And without social trust political reasonableness becomes impossible.

(Hat tip to 2blowhards.com.)

Betting on Peak Oil

Steven Levitt makes an eye-opening point in Betting on Peak Oil:

Imagine that a brilliant inventor came along and said that he had invented a pill you could drop into a gallon of distilled water to turn it into gasoline. How much would you be willing to pay per pill? For most of the last 50 years, the answer is next to nothing, because a gallon of gas usually costs about the same as a gallon of distilled water.

Glass Gave Venetian Paintings Their Glow

Glass Gave Venetian Paintings Their Glow:

How did paintings by Tintoretto and other Venetian Renaissance artists get their special glow? Using an electron microscope, Barbara Berrie, senior conservation scientist at the National Gallery of Art, discovered one of their secrets: tiny bits of glass the artists mixed with their pigments.

'By looking beyond the limits of their usual practice and transforming materials from other trades to their painting, the great artists of the Renaissance created a palette that gave them an immediate and lasting reputation as brilliant colorists,' Berrie said.

Device allows building hurdle

Someone's been watching Batman movies. From Device allows building hurdle:

The PowerQuick personal lifting device can raise or lower a load of up to 145 kilograms at the rate of one metre per second, enabling special forces, rescue services or even construction workers to quickly ascend or escape buildings.

New Scientist magazine said the operator would shoot a rope attached to a grappling hook to the top of the building and then attach the rope to a harness-like device which hauls them up.

It said one battery charge would be sufficient to climb 250 metres — the equivalent of five times the height of the Statue of Liberty.

Quoin International, the Nevada-based company that developed the device for the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, said on its website the solid fuel military version was designed for hostage rescue and urban warfare.

However, the battery-powered civilian version had been designed with commercial applications such as building repair, logging or window washing in mind.

"Peak Oil": Welcome to the media's new version of shark attacks

Steven Levitt looks at a recent New York Times piece, The Breaking Point, and says "Peak Oil": Welcome to the media's new version of shark attacks:

One might think that doomsday proponents would be chastened by the long history of people of their ilk being wrong: Nostradamus, Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, etc. Clearly they are not.

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

Which is exactly the situation with oil right now. I don't know much about world oil reserves. I'm not even necessarily arguing with their facts about how much the output from existing oil fields is going to decline, or that world demand for oil is increasing. But these changes in supply and demand are slow and gradual — a few percent each year. Markets have a way with dealing with situations like this: prices rise a little bit. That is not a catastrophe, it is a message that some things that used to be worth doing at low oil prices are no longer worth doing. Some people will switch from SUVs to hybrids, for instance. Maybe we'll be willing to build some nuclear power plants, or it will become worth it to put solar panels on more houses.

The Fall of the House of Saud

From The Fall of the House of Saud:

Saudi Arabia operates the world's most advanced welfare state, a kind of anti-Marxian non-workers' paradise. Saudis get free health care and interest-free home and business loans. College education is free within the kingdom, and heavily subsidized for those who study abroad. In one of the world's driest spots water is almost free. Electricity, domestic air travel, gasoline, and telephone service are available at far below cost. Many of the kingdom's best and brightest — the most well-educated and, in theory, the best prepared for the work world — have little motivation to do any work at all.

About a quarter of Saudi Arabia's population, and more than a third of all residents aged fifteen to sixty-four, are foreign nationals, allowed into the kingdom to do the dirty work in the oil fields and to provide domestic help, but also to program the computers and manage the refineries. Seventy percent of all jobs in Saudi Arabia — and close to 90 percent of all private-sector jobs — are filled by foreigners.

Among men, at least, the Saudis have an admirably high literacy rate, especially for a place that only three generations back was inhabited mostly by nomadic tribesmen. About 85 percent of Saudi men aged fifteen and older can read and write, as opposed to less than 70 percent of Saudi women of the same age. But because in recent years the Saudi education system has been largely entrusted to Wahhabi fundamentalists, as a form of appeasement that many in the royal family hope will direct the fundamentalists' animus at foreign targets, its products are generally ill prepared to compete in a technological age or a global economy. Today two out of every three Ph.D.s earned in Saudi Arabia are in Islamic studies. Doctorates are only very rarely granted in computer sciences, engineering, and other worldly vocations. Younger Saudis are being educated to take part in a world that will exist only if the Wahhabi jihadists succeed in turning back the clock not just a few decades but a few centuries.

Then there's the demographic problem. Saudi Arabia has one of the highest birth rates in the world outside Africa — 37.25 births for every 1,000 citizens last year, compared with 14.5 per 1,000 in the United States. Ninety-seven percent of all Saudis are sixty-four or younger, and half the population is under eighteen. The simple presence of so many people of working age, and especially so many just now ready to enter the work force, places enormous pressure on an economy — particularly one designed less to accommodate those who want to work than to provide sustenance for those who would rather contemplate original intent in the Koran. A middle class stabilizes society. Saudi Arabia's middle class is imploding.

Modern Germs

In Modern Germs, Alex Tabarrok cites a number of stats from John M. Barry's The Great Influenza:

The great influenza of 1918 probably killed 100 million people, about five percent of the entire world's population. An even higher percentage of young people died, and most shockingly all of this occured in about 12 weeks.
[...]
One doctor visiting Inuit in Alaska found everyone dead in 3 villages and 7 other villages with a death toll of 85%.

In Retail, Profiling for Profit

Chain stores used to aim to please the generic shopper, but that's changing. From In Retail, Profiling for Profit:

But inspired by Columbia University Professor Larry Selden's book, 'Angel Customers and Demon Customers,' Best Buy chief executive Bradbury H. Anderson is on a mission to reinvent how the company thinks about its customers. Best Buy has pared some less desirable shoppers from its mailing lists and has tightened up its return policy to prevent abuse. At the same time, it has begun to woo a roster of shopper profiles, each given a name: Buzz (the young tech enthusiast), Barry (the wealthy professional man), Ray (the family man) and, especially, Jill.

Based on analyses of databases of purchases, local census numbers, surveys of customers and targeted focus groups, Best Buy last fall started converting its 67 California stores to cater to one or more of those segments of its shopping population. It plans to roll out a similar redesign at its 660 stores nationwide — including about 15 in the Washington area — over the next three years. The Best Buys in the Springfield Mall, the Fairlakes shopping center and Potomac Mills, for instance, are being transformed into stores for Barrys, featuring leather couches where one might imagine enjoying a drink and a cigar while watching a large-screen TV hooked up to a high-end sound system.

The Santa Rosa Best Buy, Store #120, is a Jill store.

Pink, red and white balloons festoon the entrance. TVs play 'The Incredibles.' There is an expanded selection of home appliances as well as new displays stocked with Hello Kitty, Barbie and SpongeBob SquarePants electronic equipment. Nooks are set up to look like dorms or recreation rooms where mom and the children can play with the latest high-tech gadgets at their leisure. Best Buy has new express checkout lines for the Jills; store managers say anyone can use them, but if you are not escorted by a special service representative they can be easy to miss. The music over the loudspeakers has been turned down a notch and is usually a selection of Jill's favorites, such as James Taylor and Mariah Carey.

What Makes People Gay?

What Makes People Gay? shares the new, technical term for what used to be called "being a sissy":

Patrick exhibits behavior called childhood gender nonconformity, or CGN. This doesn't describe a boy who has a doll somewhere in his toy collection or tried on his sister's Snow White outfit once, but rather one who consistently exhibits a host of strongly feminine traits and interests while avoiding boy-typical behavior like rough-and-tumble play. There's been considerable research into this phenomenon, particularly in males, including a study that followed boys from an early age into early adulthood. The data suggest there is a very good chance Patrick will grow up to be homosexual. Not all homosexual men show this extremely feminine behavior as young boys. But the research indicates that, of the boys who do exhibit CGN, about 75 percent of them — perhaps more — turn out to be gay or bisexual.

Student's t-distribution

I was aware that Student, the mathematician who created what we now call Student's t-distribution, was operating under a pseudonym, but I didn't realize where he was working at the time and why he needed a pseudonym:

The derivation of the t-distribution was first published in 1908 by William Sealey Gosset, while he worked at a Guinness brewery in Dublin. He was not allowed to publish under his own name, so the paper was written under the pseudonym Student. The t-test and the associated theory became well-known through the work of R.A. Fisher, who called the distribution 'Student's distribution'.

The Dread Pirate Bin Laden

The Dread Pirate Bin Laden argues that we need a legal framework for handling terrorists — as neither state agents nor citizens:

Coming up with such a framework would perhaps seem impossible, except that one already exists. Dusty and anachronistic, perhaps, but viable all the same. More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Tullius Cicero defined pirates in Roman law as hostis humani generis, 'enemies of the human race.' From that day until now, pirates have held a unique status in the law as international criminals subject to universal jurisdiction — meaning that they may be captured wherever they are found, by any person who finds them. The ongoing war against pirates is the only known example of state vs. nonstate conflict until the advent of the war on terror, and its history is long and notable. More important, there are enormous potential benefits of applying this legal definition to contemporary terrorism.

At first glance, the correlation between piracy and terrorism seems a stretch. Yet much of the basis of this skepticism can be traced to romantic and inaccurate notions about piracy. An examination of the actual history of the crime reveals startling, even astonishing, parallels to contemporary international terrorism. Viewed in its proper historical context, piracy emerges as a clear and powerful precedent.

Piracy has flourished on the high seas for as long as maritime commerce has existed between states. Yet its meaning as a crime has varied considerably. The Roman definition of hostis humani generis fell into disuse by the fifth century A.D. with the decline of the empire. But the act didn't disappear with the definition. By 912, pirates along the coasts of Western Europe who styled themselves as 'sea-warriors,' or Vikings, had terrorized Britain and conquered Normandy. In the early Middle Ages, with no national navies to quash them, pirates held sway over nearly every trade route in Europe. Kings like Edward I of England then began to grant 'Commissions of Reprisal' to merchantmen, entitling them to attack both pirate ships and any other merchant vessel flying the same country's flag as the one flown by the pirates they had seen before.

By the 16th century, piracy had emerged as an essential, though unsavory, tool of statecraft. Queen Elizabeth viewed English pirates as adjuncts to the royal navy, and regularly granted them 'letters of marque' (later known as privateering, or piracy, commissions) to harass Spanish trade.

It was a brilliant maneuver. The mariners who received these letters, most notably the famed explorers Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, amassed immense fortunes for themselves and the Crown, wreaked havoc on Spanish fleets, and terrorized Spain's shoreside cities. Meanwhile, the queen could preserve the vestiges of diplomatic relations, reacting with feigned horror to revelations of the pirates' depredations. Witness, for example, the queen's disingenuous instructions saying that if Raleigh 'shall at any time or times hereafter robbe or spoile by sea or by lance, or do any acte of unjust or unlawful hostilities [he shall] make full restitution, and satisfaction of all such injuries done.' When Raleigh did what Elizabeth had forbidden — namely, sack and pillage the ports of then-ally Spain — Elizabeth knighted him.

This precedent would be repeated time and again until the mid-19th century, as the Western powers regularly employed pirates to wage secret wars. After a series of draconian laws passed by George I of England effectively banished pirates from the Atlantic, the Mediterranean corsairs emerged as pre-eminent maritime mercenaries in the employ of any European state wishing to harass another. This situation proved disastrous. The corsairs refused to curtail their activities after each war's conclusion, and the states realized that they had created an uncontrollable force. It was this realization that led to the Declaration of Paris in 1856, signed by England, France, Spain, and most other European nations, which abolished the use of piracy for state purposes. Piracy became and remained beyond the pale of legitimate state behavior.

If this chronology seems familiar, it should. The rise and fall of state-sponsored piracy bears chilling similarity to current state-sponsored terrorism. Many nations, including Libya, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan, have sponsored terrorist organizations to wage war against the United States or other Western powers. In each case, the motivations have been virtually identical to those of Elizabeth: harass the enemy, deplete its resources, terrify its citizens, frustrate its government, and remain above the fray. The United States is credited with manufacturing its own enemy by training, funding, and outfitting terrorist groups in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Central America during the cold war.

Don't Have A Cow, Man

In March, 2002, Harper's published Don't Have A Cow, Man, "an exchange of emails in fall 2001 between Judd Apatow, the creator of the sitcoms Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared and a successful writer of Hollywood screenplays, and Mark Brazill, the creator of That '70s Show."

Read the exchange. It gets really, really ugly, really, really fast.

(Hat tip to mi hermano.)

Stout on Princess of Mars

In this interview, movie production designer William Stout explains his brief work on A Princess of Mars, which never came to fruition:

And before I forget, in regards to John Carter of Mars — it's already been made into a movie; a really successful one. So why do we need to make another? That film's called Return of the Jedi. Princess Leia is dressed as Deja Thoris throughout the film; you've got Martian fliers as ERB described them; the main characters sword fight throughout the movie. If you look at it, it's the essence of John Carter. So if you make a John Carter movie, your audience, who are mostly unaware of the Burroughs books, is going to think you're ripping off a Star Wars film.

This story illustrates why Hollywood adaptations often fall flat:

So I'm happily humming away on this and from the other room I hear McTiernan say, "Virginia. Does John Carter have to be from Virginia? Why can't he be from Alaska? Alaska's much more butch — and we wouldn't have to deal with those touchy race issues." I set down the pencil and walk into the next room and say, "John, John. There are really great reasons why John Carter is from Virginia. He was a Captain in the Civil War, but he fought on the wrong side — the South. And he lost. He didn't own slaves; he was a warrior his entire life. This was a very personal crisis. He was unsuccessful in the defense of his culture. He didn't know how to deal with it, so he did what a lot of people do when they're faced with failure. He tried to escape. He went West, where, while trying to just be alone and mine for gold, he's engulfed in another warrior situation. Americans there are fighting the Indians. Then, he ends up on Mars in the midst of a huge, worldwide Civil War. He is back to Square One but now he's in a world he was born for. The more he tries to run away from himself the more he finds he has to confront himself. So you have this incredibly rich character, history and past to deal with, which, if he's from Alaska, you completely lose." That was my pitch to keep John Carter a Virginian captain in the Confederacy.

The Proper Attitude Toward Financial Regulation

Science-writer Matt Ridley amusingly points out that genes are not there to cause diseases, even though they're named that way. Arnold Kling points out that financial instruments are not there to cause risk. From The Proper Attitude Toward Financial Regulation:

Often, the goal of financial regulation is to keep certain types of securities away from particular individuals or institutions. This is based on the 'folk finance' view that risk resides in securities, as opposed to portfolios.

In a previous essay, I mentioned economist Robert Shiller's idea of creating a futures market in indexes of local home prices. That way, buyers of homes could hedge against the risk that they are buying into a bubble. However, most individuals would face stiff regulatory hurdles for setting up accounts to trade in such futures contracts. From the government's perspective, it is just fine for you to buy a really expensive house 'on margin' (that is, using money borrowed in the mortgage market), but you would face strict scrutiny if you tried to scale back your risk by using a futures market!

Until very recently, banks and other financial institutions faced much tighter restrictions on the use of 'derivatives' (options and futures contracts on Treasury securities, foreign currencies, etc.) to hedge risk than on having large unhedged exposures to interest rate movements. Even now, the use of derivatives is considered suspect, although bank regulators have gotten wiser about looking at overall portfolio risk exposure.

When an individual or institution is discouraged from using derivatives, the effect is to deter someone from hedging a risk. As a result, a regulation that supposedly is intended to reduce risk-taking can have the effect of forcing someone to retain exposure rather than spread the risk.

Slicing the Pizza in Perfect Capital Markets

In Slicing the Pizza in Perfect Capital Markets, Arnold Kling cites an interview with Merton Miller, who explains his work on the irrelevance of capital structure — whether you fund a firm through stocks or bonds:

People often ask: Can you summarize your theory quickly? Well, I say, you understand the M&M theorem, if you know why this is a joke: The pizza delivery man comes to Yogi Berra after the game and says, Yogi, how do you want this pizza cut, into quarters or eighths? And Yogi says, cut it in eight pieces. I'm feeling hungry tonight.

Everyone recognizes that's a joke because obviously the number and shape of the pieces doesn't affect the size of the pizza. And similarly, the stocks, bonds, warrants, etc., issued don't affect the aggregate value of the firm. They just slice up the underlying earnings in different ways.

...Reporters would say, you mean they gave you guys a Nobel Prize for something as obvious as that? [Lots of laughter.] And I'd add, Yes, but remember, we proved it rigorously.

The Blood of Martyrs

In The Blood of Martyrs, Lee Harris explains a perspective that's quite foreign to most of us:

Banners are flying today in Gaza that read: 'The blood of martyrs has led to liberation.' They are the banners of the popular militant Palestinian group Hamas, and they enunciate an unpleasant truth that proponents of the so called peace process would be well advised to ponder. Translated from the language of hagiography, the message of the banners is blazingly transparent: Terrorism works. It gets us what we want. Look what the intifada was able to achieve: the liberation of Gaza. Just think what more terrorism can do for our cause. If the blood of martyrs has led to the liberation of Gaza, may we not expect the blood of martyrs to lead to the liberation of Jerusalem. As the popular Palestinian T-shirt says, 'Today Gaza, tomorrow Jerusalem.'

Researchers Rescued From Polar Bears

Shark stories are good, but polar-bear stories might be even better. From Researchers Rescued From Polar Bears:

Three unarmed Polish researchers stranded on a remote Arctic island were rescued by helicopter as polar bears were closing in on them, officials said Wednesday.

The hairsbreadth escape took place on an island in Norway's Svalbard archipelago, about 650 miles from the North Pole.

'It was the worst imaginable situation. They were cold and wet, had no equipment or weapons, and were surrounded by hungry polar bears,' said Peter Braaten of the Svalbard governor's office.

The men had been shipwrecked at the edge of a tiny bay between two glaciers for 15 hours before the helicopter arrived, he said.

The three were aboard the Polish research ship Horyzont when they set out in a small inflatable boat to pick up equipment on one of the islands.

'Their boat capsized, and they lost all their equipment and weapons,' Braaten told The Associated Press. He said they swam and clambered over chunks of floating ice to get to the island of Egdeoya.

Braaten said the ship repeatedly tried to send in another small boat to pick them up, but conditions were too rough. The ship finally used a harpoon canon to fire a rope to land, so it could send the researchers food and water. Then it called for help.

'They managed to start a fire, to keep warm and keep the polar bears away,' he said, explaining that the men used the spark plugs from their capsized craft's outboard motor to get the fire going. The island has some dried grass and scrubby plants.

'It was a bit like MacGyver,' Braaten said, referring to the adventure television series featuring a character who relies on science and his wits to solve problems.

Braaten said a least three polar bears looking for a meal where within roughly 20 yards of the three men when the helicopter picked them up.

'That is dangerously close,' he said.

Polar bears have no natural enemies in their frozen domain and regard all other living things, including humans, as potential meals.

The three men, who suffered only minor scrapes and bruises, were flown directly to a Polish research base on the islands and dropped off for treatment.

Archaeologists Find Ancient Treasure

Archaeologists Find Ancient Treasure in modern Bulgaria:

Bulgarian archaeologists have unearthed about 15,000 tiny golden pieces that date back to the end of the third millennium B.C. — a find they said Wednesday matches the famous treasure of Troy.

The golden ornaments, estimated to be between 4,100 and 4,200 years old, have been unearthed gradually during the past year from an ancient tomb near the central village of Dabene, about 75 miles east of the capital, Sofia, said Vasil Nikolov, an academic consultant on the excavations.

'This treasure is a bit older than Schliemann's finds in Troy, and contains much more golden ornaments,' Nikolov said.

Elephants, lions to roam North America once more?

Elephants, lions to roam North America once more?:

Scientists are proposing reintroducing large mammals such as elephants, lions, cheetahs and wild horses to North America to replace populations lost 13,000 years ago.

The scientists say that not only could large tracts of North America act as breeding sanctuaries for species of large wild animals under threat in Africa and Asia, but that such ecological history parks could be major tourist attractions.

They might want to try this is, oh, say, San Diego...

A Common Runway Hazard

The Wall Street Journal's latest "The Middle Seat" column discusses A Common Runway Hazard:

Despite nearly three decades of warnings from safety experts, the U.S. still has more than 300 runways at commercial airports that don't have adequate overrun areas to help avoid accidents like the crash two weeks ago of an Air France jumbo jet that ran off a Toronto runway into a ravine.

Federal standards require an extra 1,000 feet of overrun area at both ends — where planes can skid to a stop without hitting obstacles — but under current rules, airports aren't required to retrofit existing runways. The National Transportation Safety Board has been pushing for runway-overrun improvements since 1977, and issued recommendations again in 2000 after a Southwest Airlines jet went off the runway in Burbank, Calif., and slid into a gas station.

Buying the Wrong Medicine Overseas

Buying the Wrong Medicine Overseas explains that sometimes different drugs in different countries share the same name:

A safety alert issued to hospitals and doctors this year by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit group, identified several drugs in the U.S. that have the same name as very different drugs sold by different manufacturers in European countries. For instance, Norpramin, which is an antidepressant in the U.S., is the name of an ulcer drug in Spain. Flomax for prostate disease has the same name as a pain medication in Italy. And Vivelle, which in the U.S. is a hormone treatment for menopause and osteoporosis, is a birth-control pill in Austria. The group says it has encountered more matches in Asia, South America and elsewhere.

In Brazil, for example, the brand name Dilacor refers to verapamil for irregular heart rhythm and hypertension. But in the U.S., Dilacor is a blood-pressure drug known generically as diltiazem. And in Serbia, Dilacor is the brand name for digoxin, used to treat heart failure.

Most Wild Chimps Are Southpaws

Who knew? Most Wild Chimps Are Southpaws:

A three-year study of 17 wild chimps in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, found that 12 of them used their left hands when using sticks to probe for termites.

Crocodile blood may yield powerful new antibiotics

Crocodile blood may yield powerful new antibiotics:

'They tear limbs off each other and despite the fact that they live in this environment with all these microbes, they heal up very rapidly and normally almost always without infection,' said U.S. scientist Mark Merchant, who has been taking crocodile blood samples in the Northern Territory [of Australia].

Initial studies of the crocodile immune system in 1998 found that several proteins (antibodies) in the reptile's blood killed bacteria that were resistant to penicillin, such as Staphylococcus aureus or golden staph, Australian scientist Adam Britton told Reuters on Tuesday. It was also a more powerful killer of the HIV virus than the human immune system.

It's a wonderful life

In It's a wonderful life, Andrew Sullivan compares modern London to the New York City of the 1970s:

You heard the same arguments 30 years ago in America. No one believed things could or would improve. Many conservatives assumed that the 1970s had all but ended civilised life, and that only a minor miracle could rescue the family from terminal decline as a social institution. Crime would merely spiral upward; ditto illegitimacy and divorce.

And then over the next few decades something surprising happened. The trends slowly faltered, reversed and improved with surprising speed. From a hellhole far deeper and more worrisome than even the most depressed Londoners could conjure today, New York emerged in only a couple of decades as a different place altogether.

These days, even in the terrifying wake of 9/11, New York City boasts record low crime rates, a solid economy, rising educational standards, less racial tension and lower and lower levels of illegitimacy and domestic violence. In fact, much of what was once an edgy, terrifying, almost gothic Gotham now seems bathed in a near-narcotic calm, a bourgeois suburban theme-park from midtown south. If you want a good investment, try buying some housing stock in Harlem — yes, Harlem — the latest piece of former ghetto to become an impending upscale urban oasis.

New York was one of the more exceptional points of light in a two-decade upswing of social improvement. But much of America experienced the same beneficent trends: the reconstitution of the family, the decline of illegitimate births, the collapse of crime, the reinvention and expansion of work.

Lincoln: Hypocrite or Statesman?

For a long time, Abraham Lincoln has been regarded as America's greatest president. As Dinesh D’Souza points out in Lincoln: Hypocrite or Statesman?, that may be changing:

What unites the right-wing and left-wing attacks on Lincoln, of course, is that they deny that Lincoln respected the law and that he was concerned with the welfare of all. The right-wing school — made up largely of Southerners and some libertarians — holds that Lincoln was a self-serving tyrant who rode roughshod over civil liberties, such as the right to habeas corpus. Lincoln is also accused of greatly expanding the size of the federal government. Some libertarians even charge — and this is not intended as a compliment — that Lincoln was the true founder of the welfare state. His right-wing critics say that, despite his show of humility, Lincoln was a megalomaniacal man who was willing to destroy half the country to serve his Caesarian ambitions. In an influential essay, the late Melvin E. Bradford, an outspoken conservative, excoriated Lincoln as a moral fanatic who, determined to enforce his Manichaean vision — one that sees a cosmic struggle between good and evil — on the country as a whole, ended up corrupting American politics and thus left a “lasting and terrible impact on the nation’s destiny.”

D'Souza, by the way, does not agree with those criticisms:

In my view, Lincoln was the true “philosophical statesman,” one who was truly good and truly wise. Standing in front of his critics, Lincoln is a colossus, and all of the Lilliputian arrows hurled at him bounce harmlessly to the ground. It is hard to put any other president—not even George Washington—in the same category as Abraham Lincoln. He was simply the greatest practitioner of democratic statesmanship that America and the world have yet produced.

Self-satisfied Europe, thy name is cowardice

Mathias Doepfner pulls no punches in Self-satisfied Europe, thy name is cowardice:

The writer Henryk Broder recently issued a withering indictment: 'Europe, your family name is appeasement.' That phrase resonates because it is so terribly true. Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as Britain and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they realized that Hitler needed to be fought and defeated, because he could not be bound by toothless agreements.

Later, appeasement legitimized and stabilized communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then throughout the rest of Eastern Europe — where inhuman, repressive and murderous governments were glorified for decades.

Appeasement similarly crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Bosnia and Kosovo. Indeed, even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass murder there, we Europeans debated and debated — and then debated still more. We were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, to do our work for us.

Europe still hasn't learned its lesson. Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word 'equidistance,' often seems to countenance suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Similarly, it generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore the nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam Hussein's torture and murder machinery, and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace movement, to accuse U.S. President George W. Bush of being a warmonger.

This hypocrisy continues even as it is discovered that some of the loudest critics of American action in Iraq made illicit billions — indeed, tens of billions — of dollars in the corrupt UN 'oil-for-food' program.

Today we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement. How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland, Britain and elsewhere in Europe? By suggesting — wait for it — that the proper response to such barbarism is to initiate a 'Muslim holiday' in Germany.

I wish I were joking, but I am not.

Looks Do Matter

Daniel Akst summarizes the research on beauty in Looks Do Matter — and makes an amusing observation:

The paradox, in such an age, is that the more important appearances become, the worse most of us seem to look — and not just by comparison with the godlike images alternately taunting and bewitching us from every billboard and TV screen. While popular culture is obsessed with fashion and style, and our prevailing psychological infirmity is said to be narcissism, fully two-thirds of American adults have abandoned conventional ideas of attractiveness by becoming overweight. Nearly half of this group is downright obese. Given their obsession with dieting — a $40 billion-plus industry in the United States — it’s not news to these people that they’re sending an unhelpful message with their inflated bodies, but it’s worth noting here nonetheless.

Again, read the whole article for a good summary of the research on beauty and how much it matters.

To Dye For

Diane Ackerman reviews Amy Butler Greenfield's A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire, in To Dye For:

When Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico, he found a society besotted with strong sensations, from blood sports to drug-level chocolate, which the Aztecs sometimes stirred with the powdered bones of their enemies. The emperor, Montezuma, claimed the right to wear the most brilliant red and imposed on his subjects a special tax to be paid in cochineal insects, from which the vibrant dye came. The Spanish quickly monopolized the world's supply of cochineal; in 1587 alone, they shipped 65 tons of it home. Other countries soon coveted it, and the equivalent of corporate espionage ensued.

So what, exactly, is cochineal?

As it happens, cochineal comes from a fragile little insect that lives on prickly pear cactus. The female produces carminic acid to annoy ants and other predators, and she is the red dye. "Pinch a female cochineal insect," Greenfield writes, "and blood-red dye pours out. Apply the dye to mordant cloth, and the fabric will remain red for centuries."

Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg

Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg sounds like an absolutely fascinating character:

The extraordinary Gannibal was the African great-grandfather of Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, who spoke proudly of his own inherited 'blackamoor profile'. In his elegantly written new biography, Hugh Barnes suggests Gannibal was born in Chad, taken as a slave to Constantinople, and purchased in 1704, aged seven or eight, by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. While still a teenager, Gannibal was writing the tsar's letters, working on encryption for secret messages, and helping to plan military campaigns. As an adult he rose to the top of the Russian army. Gannibal also read Racine, Corneille and Moliere, and was, in Paris, the friend of Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire, who called him 'the dark star of the Enlightenment'. Yet this was less than a century after France had established its slave colonies in the West Indies, and Voltaire also said that the intelligence of black people was 'far inferior', while Montesquieu, equivocating about slavery, said it was sometimes 'founded on natural reason'. How did Gannibal manage to surmount 18th-century attitudes to slavery and to Africans?

Secret Signals in Lotus Flowers

Maya Jasanoff opens Secret Signals in Lotus Flowers, her review of Gautam Chakravarty's The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, with a narrative hook:

Tucked away in the lanes of Old Delhi, not far from the Red Fort of the Mughal emperors, sits the little visited Anglican church of St James, consecrated in 1836. With its Renaissance-style dome and campanile, and painted a cheerful lemon, this church would not look out of place in Italy. In Delhi it is an oddity, as was its founder, the swashbuckling military adventurer James Skinner, who built it ‘in fulfilment of a vow made while lying wounded on the field of battle’. (Skinner’s equally remarkable contemporary Begum Samru — a Kashmiri dancing-girl turned army commander — built a Catholic church in similar style at Sardhana, with two Wren-like spires flanking the dome.) Skinner did not come seamlessly to Christian piety: half-Scot and half-Rajput, he never visited Europe, began his career in the service of the Marathas, and sired numerous part-Indian children by (it was said) 16 wives and mistresses. In a small yard outside the church, members of his multi-ethnic clan lie buried. Some of their tombs have crosses on top and epitaphs on the side in Persian — memorials to a period in Anglo-Indian history when European and Eastern cultures comfortably converged.

Now I want to read about James Skinner and Begum Samru...

Ooh, BBC Radio 4 has a Woman's Hour devoted to Begum Samru.

Mindful of Symbols

Judy S. DeLoache describes her research in Mindful of Symbols:

About 20 years ago I had one of those wonderful moments when research takes an unexpected but fruitful turn. I had been studying toddler memory and was beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half- and three-year-olds. For the project, I had built a model of a room that was part of my lab. The real space was furnished like a standard living room, albeit a rather shabby one, with an upholstered couch, an armchair, a cabinet and so on. The miniature items were as similar as possible to their larger counterparts: they were the same shape and material, covered with the same fabric and arranged in the same positions. For the study, a child watched as we hid a miniature toy — a plastic dog we dubbed 'Little Snoopy' — in the model, which we referred to as 'Little Snoopy's room.' We then encouraged the child to find 'Big Snoopy,' a large version of the toy 'hiding in the same place in his big room.' We wondered whether children could use their memory of the small room to figure out where to find the toy in the large one.

The three-year-olds were, as we had expected, very successful. After they observed the small toy being placed behind the miniature couch, they ran into the room and found the large toy behind the real couch. But the two-and-a-half-year-olds, much to my and their parents' surprise, failed abysmally. They cheerfully ran into the room to retrieve the large toy, but most of them had no idea where to look, even though they remembered where the tiny toy was hidden in the miniature room and could readily find it there.

The Future of Tradition

In The Future of Tradition, Lee Harris looks at the battle between reason and tradition:

America has been in the midst of a culture war for some time and will probably remain so for some time longer. But culture war is not peculiar to this country. Indeed, there have been at least three great culture wars fought in the course of Western history, including one contemporaneous with the rise of the Sophists in ancient Greece, the epoch identified with the French Enlightenment and the German Aufklärung, and our own current battle. The first two ended in disaster for the societies in which they occurred — the outcome of the third is still pending.

Each of these wars has its own particular antagonists, each its own weapons of combat, each its own battlefield. But the essential nature of a culture war is invariant: A set of traditional values comes under attack by those who, like the Greek Sophist, the French philosophe, and the American intellectual, make their living by their superior proficiency in handling abstract ideas, and promote a radically new and revolutionary set of values. This is precisely what one would expect from those who excel in dispute and argumentation.

In every culture war the existing customs and traditions of a society are called to the bar of reason and ruthlessly interrogated and cross-examined by an intellectual elite asking whether they can be rationally justified or are simply the products of superstition and thus unworthy of being taken seriously by enlightened men and women.

Read the whole article. There's even a bit of a zinger near the end.

Judge: Frat Could Face Torture Charges

When the Abu Ghraib "torture" story broke, many people noted that the "torture" (at least some of it) was less severe than a typical fraternity hazing. Here's the flip side of that argument. Judge: Frat Could Face Torture Charges:

A judge raised the possibility that four fraternity members could be charged with torture in the death of a 21-year-old pledge, comparing the alleged hazing death to the torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers.

Butte County Superior Court Judge Robert Glusman said Friday that a summary of facts in the legal motions filed by attorneys appeared to support that charge, which would carry a potential life sentence.

'U.S. soldiers were charged with torturing Iraqi prisoners for doing far less than what happened in that basement,' Glusman said.

The four members of the now-defunct Chi Tau house at Chico State University are currently charged with involuntary manslaughter and hazing, which carry a maximum of four years in prison if convicted.

They are accused of forcing Matthew Carrington, 21, to drink large amounts of water while performing calisthenics in the frigid basement as part of initiation rite on Feb. 2. Carrington collapsed and died of heart failure due to water intoxication.

Dan Aykroyd, Still Full of the 'Blues'

The other day, I caught the tail end of an NPR "Fresh Air" interview, and I couldn't immediately tell who was being interviewed, but he mentioned dealing with Tourette's and Asperger's (which he pronounced Asperjer's). When Terry Gross mentioned that he co-wrote The Blues Brothers, it dawned on me that she was interviewing Dan Aykroyd:

After soaring to fame with Saturday Night Live, Dan Aykroyd built a solid film career. But he's still capitalizing on his early hit, The Blues Brothers (now available in a 25th-anniversary DVD).