In honor of the recent slowdown by New Jersey doctors in response to crushing malpractice insurance rates, I recommend three articles (and the comments thereof) by Mindles H. Dreck regarding the relationship between insurance companies' investments and malpractice rates. Click here, here and here.

The New York Sun had a very offensive editorial yesterday coming too close to equating anti-war protest with treason. Eugene Volokh dismantles it quite expertly. I agree with him 100%.

Last week, I pointed to a special drive sponsored by Manhattan's Libertarian Party to collect and distribute free toy guns to underpriviliged NY children, before the New York City Council bans the sale of such guns.
The efforts of the valiant Libertarians were not well received.
The New York Times opined (and not in the editorial pages): "The stunt turned out to be more of a dramatization of how to shoot yourself in the foot."

The Times elaborated on the reaction:

Few were amused. From City Hall to the streets of East Harlem, whose residents are predominantly Hispanic, the Libertarians were branded racists and accused of exploiting an issue and a neighborhood where the toll of gun violence is far from child's play.
"I'm livid that the Libertarian Party would have the racist nerve to come into a community of color just to get some attention," Councilman Charles Barron of Brooklyn said as the hearing opened, "to give toy guns to our children, knowing that these toy guns have led to deaths. This is not a game for media attention."
..."Get out of Harlem," protesters shouted as the two men tried to hand out the guns, many of them from donors across the country. "Go to your own neighborhood." The confrontation ended without any arrests and only a handful of the guns distributed, several to pupils who smashed them in protest.
Ydanis Rodriguez, 38, a teacher at Gregorio Luperon High School in Washington Heights, was among the parents and protesters alerted to the Libertarians' plan by a letter from Maria Diaz, the P.S. 72 principal.
"They wouldn't go to Stuyvesant or Bronx Science to do this," Mr. Rodriguez said. "They thought that in a Latino community the parents wouldn't mobilize."

That reaction seems bad enough. But the Times does not report the worst of it. For that, check out the NY Daily News' report:

Earlier, at a City Council hearing on the proposed toy-gun ban, lawmakers wondered why the party was making its point in a largely black and Latino neighborhood.
"If you want to give out toy guns, go and give it out in your neighborhood," Councilman Robert Jackson, an African-American legislator from Washington Heights, shouted at Libertarian Joseph Dobrian.
When Dobrian, who is white, protested, Jackson got livid.
"You go and give it out where you live at. Okay? Don't come up here in the 'hood and give out toy guns!" he said. "Don't come uptown with that bull."
"Speak respectfully to me, if you please," Dobrian urged.
"Listen, don't tell me how to talk to you," Jackson retorted. "If you don't like it, you pull out a toy gun and squirt me with it."
Party spokesman Jim Lesczynski said the Libertarians targeted Harlem because they believe that's where the crackdown will happen if a ban on imitation guns that "substantially duplicate" real weapons is passed.

I heard Jackson's diatribe on the radio this morning, and the News' account is accurate. (I liked his final zinger, though.)
Just wondering...what would the reaction be if a white politician (especially a Republican) told a black protestor to stay in his own neighborhood?
Would the Times find that worthy of reporting?
(Although, given the Times' sloth on the Trent Lott story, I suppose it is more complicated than that...)

Here's an interesting article about a new Hebrew translation of Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed," as well as a good summary of why Maimonides is a useful role model for rabbinic leadership today:

Regarding the book's relevance for today's generation, Kleinberg admits that "tackling the challenge of Greek philosophy is not a burning issue in the present era. Nonetheless, great importance should be attached to the presentation of a model that we are not so familiar with in our generation: another breed of rabbinical scholar, namely one who, in addition to being an expert on contemporary scientific and philosophical literature, seeks to cope with it and with the relationship between that literature and the Jewish religion."
In this context, Schwartz notes the long tradition of Jewish works that seek to bridge the gap between Judaism and contemporary thought: from the days of Rabbi Saadia Gaon's "The Book of Beliefs and Opinions" in the 10th century, through "The Guide of the Perplexed," to Nachman Krochmal's "Guide to the Perplexed of Our Age" in the 19th century and to Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, who tried to bridge the gap between Judaism and 20th-century Western philosophy.

In Salon (reading the article requires clicking though a somewhat-annoying advertisement) Ferry Biedermann has a very interesting dispatch from the "Arab Street"
regarding the likelihood of pro-Saddam unrest, or - more technically -lack of such.
She has many good insights. Regarding an anti-American rally in Jordan that was jointly organized by secular and fundamentalist groups:

While the conventional wisdom holds that Saddam's secular Baath regime and Islamic extremists regard each other with suspicion, the presence of the fundamentalists in the protests suggests that two sides are willing to put aside their differences and to join in battle against the United States. "We all hate the U.S. for what it is doing in the region," says Dr. Mohammed el-Oran, chairman of the Jordanian Medical Association and head of the Al-Ard political party, which he says is "very close" to Iraq's Baath party. As protesters chanted for "war, war, war against the Jews," and their banners proclaim the U.S. "the head of the snake," El-Oran blithely refuted the reports that his country will cooperate with the U.S. "We will not allow any American soldiers to cross Jordan to attack Iraq," he blusters. "If they even try they will be dead before they reach Iraq. They will be killed."
Such views neatly dovetail with those of fundamentalist Jordanians. Last year a meeting of Islamic scholars in Amman issued a religious edict, or fatwa, warning that support for the U.S. plans was un-Islamic. "It is considered a crime against Islamic sharia law what ruling governments have adopted in outlawing Jihad and preventing Muslims from fighting the aggressor U.S. invaders," according to the fatwa. "It is not permissible for any Muslim to help Americans in any way possible, whether by guiding him or her to roads that harm Muslims or filling their planes or cars with fuel or selling the aggressor a piece of bread or even giving them water."

Of course, it is inconceivable that the secular Saddam could cooperate with the fundamentalist al-Qaeda...

Regarding the Iraqi exiles:

Over the past decade, their hostility to Saddam has filtered down to the grassroots through much of the Arab world. In Baka'a, one of the Palestinian refugee camps near Amman, it is hard to find traces of the earlier enthusiasm for the Iraqi leader. The Palestinians were among the most ardent supporters of Saddam Hussein, partly because of his strident rhetoric toward Israel. But now, even with the intifada still blazing across the border, Baka'a stays quiet and offers few visible signs of support for Iraq.

And she gets her history right regarding a sensitive topic - the first Palestinian intifada:

Many Palestinians and other Arabs fear that when world attention is focused on Iraq, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will crack down hard in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, maybe even expelling the population. Others recognize, however, that Israel will also be pressured by the United States to keep things quiet during an operation in Iraq.
That's what happened during the Gulf War, some say. "Look at what happened during the first intifada," says Ziad Abu Amr, the chairman of the political committee of the Palestinian Legislative Council. "Everything stayed quiet." The first intifada started in 1987 and petered out after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait when the world's attention was focused on Iraq.

The Oslo agreement in 1993 did not stop the first intifada; it had effectively ended beforehand.

And those espousing "containment" of Iraq would do well to heed her words:

Today, neither Iraq nor the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at the root of the region's problems, but each represents a flashpoint around which the discontented are likely to rally. Among many Palestinians, and throughout the Arab world, there is still instinctive sympathy with Iraq because of its anti-Israeli stance. Clearly, the U.S. is aware of this too, and every option seems to have enormous risks. But Bush administration officials apparently have decided that by overthrowing Saddam, short-term outrage here is likely to die down and go away. And if they're right, that would remove one of the main irritants in Arab-Western relations.
If the U.S. and U.N. work only to contain Saddam, they will need to keep troops and inspectors massed in the region. That might be effective in checking his development of weapons of mass destruction, and it might deter him from once again invading a neighboring country. And clearly, Iraq's neighbors -- Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and even Iran -- would be disappointed if the U.S. left the region to fend for itself. They have very little doubt that Saddam Hussein poses a real threat, maybe not now but certainly in the future if he's given a chance to rearm. And even among relief agencies operating in Iraq, there is no question that the regime spends huge sums on weapons and the army while neglecting the human needs of its own population. Then it magnifies those ills and blames them on the West.

In September, Biedermann had another good article describing the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" phenomenon that the U.S. faces in Arab public opinion:

In this suspicious, even paranoid climate, no matter what America does, it only reinforces the belief in the Arab world that Washington is attacking it. The U.S. is facing a classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't" scenario in Egypt and other Arab countries: Siding with the government makes the Americans unpopular with the people: "Why should we like somebody who helps our government oppress us?" says one human rights activist who wants to remain anonymous. But intervening is seen by most people, not only government officials and activists, as pernicious meddling in Egypt's internal affairs.
On human rights, many Egyptians accuse Washington of being more tolerant toward abuses perpetrated by friendly regimes because of the war on terror. But when the U.S. does take a stand, many of those same people accuse it of using human rights to curry favor with the Arab masses to clear the way for some anti-Arab, anti-Muslim scheme. This is what happened in the recent case of the prominent pro-democracy activist Saed Eddin Ibrahim. Human rights groups were initially appalled when Washington took no action when Ibrahim, who holds a U.S. passport, was convicted to seven years in jail in July for "damaging the image of the country abroad." Ibrahim is a sociology professor at AUC and heads the Center for Democracy and Democratization. He had previously been sentenced to seven years, on charges that included accepting money for his center from foreign sources, but that sentence was overturned and a retrial was ordered after an international outcry. The result remained the same, though.
After the trial, human rights activists condemned the inaction of the U.S. administration, charging the Americans with trying to stay on friendly terms with the regime because of the war against terror. Just a few weeks later, the State Department did announce it was taking steps against Egypt over the case. The administration said that it would not consider new aid to Egypt on top of the approximately $2 billion a year, mostly in military support, that it already gets. Surprisingly, not only the government but also the human rights groups who had called for action criticized the U.S. "This looks too much like the U.S. wants to make the point that it really does care about human rights and democracy, ahead of an attack on Iraq," says Hafez Abu Saeda, secretary general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR). His organization thinks that using aid to apply pressure in the case of one man is not the right way to go about it. "If it were used consistently and long-term for furthering democracy and human rights, then I do think that aid can be used," says Abu Saeda. He warns that using aid as a stick at a time when the economy is not doing well will antagonize the Egyptian people, adding, "the aid is meant for them, not for the government."

"U.S. Economy in Worst Hiring Slump in 20 Years"
The economy has fallen into its worst hiring slump in almost 20 years, and many business executives say they remain unsure when it will end.

- David Leonhardt of the New York Times, February 6, 2002

"Unemployment Rate Falls in January"
The nation's unemployment rate dropped to 5.7 percent in January as businesses added 143,000 new jobs, a shot of good news for an ailing economy.
The increase in payroll jobs, mostly in the retail area, was the largest since November 2000, said Friday's Labor Department report. The overall rate dropped by 0.3 percentage point from the 6 percent rate in December that matched an 8-year high.
Analysts had expected the unemployment rate to hold steady at 6 percent for a third straight month, with a more modest increase in payrolls.

- David Leonhardt of the New York Times, February 6, 2002
(Link via Robert Musil, who has much more.)

Chris Suellentrop argues that with regard to space travel, we should aspire to boredom.

Click here for it. And make sure you aren't eating or drinking anything when you do.

Scrappleface scoops the rest of the media, describing new evidence regarding Iraqi conduct to be presented today by Colin Powell.

After their latest election debacle, Heather Hurlburt detailed the Democrats' long-term unseriousness regarding national security. Rather than learn from the mistakes described by Hurlburt, top Democrats seem determined to repeat them. Tom Daschle and John Kerry should never again be taken seriously on matters relating to national security.

A preview of the Yankees' new strategy, brought to you by (who else?) the Onion.

A long time ago, Greg Connors called for more sports blogs, a request met with skepticism by Glenn Reynolds.
The almighty Professor was wrong. Specifically, baseball – the sport I know best and thus will confine this discussion to – is absolutely perfect for blogging, and there should be more baseball blogging than there is at present. Some thoughts on why:
1) Josh Marshall recently criticized the tendency among some bloggers to assume that they automatically know more about a given subject than ignorami like reporters for the New York Times. While that criticism is certainly unwarranted in many cases – many of the best bloggers are those who are knowledgable specialists in a given subject and can outclass reporters with less experience in the field – it’s something important to keep in mind. It’s not crazy to assume that a reporter’s experience covering a field gives him special knowledge of that field, that many bloggers wouldn’t have. (For example, a political journalist’s knowledge of inside gossip is a specific source of knowledge, often relevant to the story, that many bloggers can’t match.)
This is less true about baseball than most fields. Journalists who cover teams do have inside knowledge, but that knowledge is often less valuable than performance analysis in analyzing the game. Outsiders can and do performance analysis – or “sabermetrics” – better than most baseball journalists. The intellectual action in baseball analysis is with the outsiders, at places like Baseball Prospectus or Baseball Primer. It’s not that outsiders have access to special knowledge – just that most inside journalists don’t use sophisticated analysis, making it easier for outsiders to compete. (It’s getting better, but slowly. Some mainstream journalists – most notably Joe Posnanski – use all the tools at their disposal, but they’re the exceptions.) The single most important insight into baseball analysis in the last few years was developed by a college student, working with numbers that had been freely available for decades. He was just the first one to ask the right questions.
2) The Godfather of sabermetrics, Bill James, contributed more than specific insights into the game, which systematically undercut decades of received wisdom with no empirical support. His work - most notably in his annual Baseball Abstracts and two editions of the Historical Baseball Abstract, and more recently with Win Shares – introduced a generation of fans to a methodology of critical thinking, which – as explained by Eric Neel – had ramifications far beyond baseball. Describing the experince of reading James' New Historical Baseball Abstract:

The experience reminded me of the winter of 1983, when my friend Matt Welch first introduced me to the "Bill James Baseball Abstract" books, and the two of us spent the better part of several gray Long Beach weekends playing Strat-o-Matic, eating microwave burritos, listening to Beatles records and reading James with the zeal of revolutionary converts.
We loved the way he spoke plainly, and said smart, provocative things that cut against the grain of conventional wisdom. If he thought a player was underrated or overrated, or believed a theory was nonsensical, he said so and then set about demonstrating why. It wasn't fancy, but it was rhetorically sharp and intoxicating.
...We were 16, and we heard in James the clarity and wit we wanted to fashion in our own voices.
We grooved on his mathematics, too, on which statistics are actually significant in terms of understanding how the game is played. He made basic claims that were nonetheless revolutionary, like, "a hitter's job is not to compile a high batting average. The job is to create runs. That is what all hitters are trying to do in every plate appearance: They are trying to create runs."
Working through James' formulas gave us a chance to cut our teeth as problem-solvers, and it gave our devotion to the game a kind of scientific weight; it made us believe we were doing real work in the world when we examined and debated the relative offensive value of Don Mattingly vs. Wade Boggs, or Henderson vs. George Brett. And we were exhilarated when we assumed, along with James, a kind of iconoclastic, fight-the-powers-that-be attitude.
...It sounds silly, and my wife laughed that "oh, sweetie, you're so cute" laugh when I told her, but I don't think it's too much to say that James' approach to baseball helped a lot of us decide what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it.
"I devoured those early abstracts," Matt said when I talked to him last week, "because they were reorienting my thinking about life, believe it or not." Matt's a terrific journalist now. He and some friends started a newspaper in Prague in the early 1990s, and he's since come back to the States to work as a freelance political writer. He told me that reading James was the beginning of his own life as a writer. "There are a lot of journalists out there who don't write about sports who are directly influenced," he said. "James really is my No. 1 journalism guy because the thing that mattered to him the most was finding a way to the truth, regardless of how he got there." For guys like Matt, James is part of the 1960s New Journalism, along with Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe and a bunch of others. He got our attention because he talked about baseball, which we were already interested in, but his approach helped launch us into our own so-called adult lives, too.
I've been an English teacher and a writer most of my so-called adult life, and though I hadn't thought about it until now, I like the idea that my tendency to turn texts inside out and to stretch ideas thin enough to see their hidden underpinnings is somehow the product of reading Bill James.

Yes, that Matt Welch. In an e-mail to me about a year ago, Welch opined that a “huge number of warbloggers are Bill James freaks.” I know of Welch, Dan McLaughlin, Aaron Haspel and Max Power, but that’s about all I know of. (Any other warbloggers who wish to be so classified should let me know.) When you consider his methodology and the amount of BS he hacked through, Bill James has a valid claim to be the first “anti-idiotarian.”
I was reminded of that thought by this article, arguing (mostly tongue-in-cheek) that James should turn his attentions to politics:

[W]hen President George W. Bush makes a statement like, "Today, the women of Afghanistan are free," as he did in Tuesday's State of the Union address, there is no way to establish the veracity of that statement short of traveling to Afghanistan or doing lots of dull, boring newspaper reading, which almost no one can be bothered with anymore. You've got to take his word for it.
It would be harder to be cynical, both from a producer and consumer point of view, if we had better stats for politics. Sure, groups like the Americans for Democratic Action and the Sierra Club rate politicos on their lefty-righty percentages (that is, whether they lean liberal or conservative on key issues), but those only scratch the surface.
We need the kind of numbers that announcers toss off casually in baseball and football games: "The congressman has made 28 misstatements and 12 deliberate falsehoods out of sixty statements in this address for a calumny percentage of .667. The all-time record of .812 was set by Senator Huey Long (D-LA) in his Jefferson Day address, 1933." Or more appropriately, "Afghanistan population: 26.8 million. Afghanis living in freedom: 4. That would have to be classified as something of a misstatement, wouldn't it Bob?"
Baseball has a Manichean transparency that politics lacks: the proof is in the standings. A team can claim a good faith effort at contention, but a 72-90 record is what it is. On the other hand, a president can propose a tax plan and say that it will give a break to everyone, but unless you're prepared to wade up to your elbows in the U.S. tax code, it's hard to know whether the plan will be good for some, all, or none -- and often that's just what the plan's proponents are counting on.
This would no longer be the case if James (now a consultant for the Red Sox) could be convinced to turn his attention away from the horsehide sphere for awhile and produce a new magnum opus, the Bill James Political Abstract. Your senator is running for reelection and says he's working 24 hours a day to pass legislation for you. Not sure? Pick up your copy of the BJPA and flip over to the attendance tables, then head to the back of the book for the all-time records and see where your guy ranks.

It’s a seductive argument, but I don’t think it would work out as well as the author hopes. In the end, baseball’s results are objective and easily found on the scoreboard. Empiricism in political analysis rarely reveals objective results as easily, a basis for the existence of many competing think tanks in Washington (even after accounting for the inevitable self-interest). It’s easier to demonstrate the efficacy of a strategy in baseball than in most public policy, and it’s not so easy even in the former case. (This helps explain why George Will’s writings on baseball are infinitely more convincing than his political columns. And I like the latter, but the comparison is still true. Will is a big Bill James fan, by the way.) And finally, political weblogs try do the fact-checking which the author deems impossible. He must not be familiar with the blogosphere...
3) Prof. Reynolds has compared the potential impact of blogs to the newsletters of I.F. Stone, which had a narrow but influential readership and thus had influence disproportionate to its circulation.
Many baseball fans of “sabermetric” bent will recognize a historical parallel – James’ early Baseball Abstracts, especially before they enjoyed national distribution. More contemporaneously, Baseball Prospectus has built up an influential following - including among baseball insiders - even though they’re not yet a nationally recognized brand.
And the Prospectus, along with Baseball Primer, has been using the Web for years to develop its ideas in shorter form before putting them into their annual book.
UPDATE: This post has been revised slightly to correct some sloppy writing pointed out by Matthew Yglesias. And check out the comments - Bill James fans of the world, unite!

Columbia, Columbia, to glory rise,
The queen of the world, and the child of the skies!
Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold,
While ages on ages thy splendours unfold.
Thy reign is the last, and the noblest of time,
Most fruitful they soil, most inviting thy clime.
Let the crimes of the east ne'er encrimson thy name,
Be freedom, and science, and virtue, thy fame.

The life of a Sabbath-observer can, on Saturdays, be an isolated one - which is, of course, partially the point.
Walking through my apartment building on Saturday afternoon, I passed a woman who said, passing me by, "Everyone's in shock."
"Everyone's in shock about what?" I thought, running through a few possibilities:
1) President Bush had been assassinated,
2) Terrorists had mounted another massive attack killing untold numbers of americans, or
3) North Korea had used a nuclear weapon against Seoul.
This is one example of the post-9/11 thought process.
I ran downstairs and asked my doorman (who usually has a TV or radio at the desk) what had happened. He filled me in.
My first thought was: "What a tragedy, especially for the families and for Israel."
My second thought was: "Thank God that's all it was."
This is a second example of the post-9/11 thought process.
I realize that thought #2 sounds incredibly callous. But 9/11 raised the bar on what constitutes an overwhelming national tragedy.
For gentler expressions of similar concepts, see these items by Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds.

I hope this tragedy will serve as an impetus to rethink the principles governing our space program. Rand Simberg has some thoughts, as does James Bennet. Paul Krugman has a good overview of the cost/benefit ratios of the status quo. Charles Krauthammer proposes a new direction.
Gregg Easterbrook has one of the most anticipated pieces, in which he argues vociferously that the shuttle must be shut down. (Rand Simberg responds to his arguments here.) Easterbrook has more credibility than almost any other journalist on the subject, due to his frighteningly prescient 1980 article for the Washington Monthly about the shuttle's design flaws.

Most importantly, condolences and prayers to all the families affected by the tragedy.
Here's a link to the cover of Easterbrook's 1980 article.

And here's a link to the picture of the drawing taken by Ilan Ramon into space, a copy of one drawn by Peter Ginz, a teenaged Holocaust victim:

...if more of them were as intellectually honest as Matthew Parris.

No comments, because none are possible. Just read this.