Alex Tabarrok refers to the paper War Politics: An Economic, Rational-Voter Framework by Gregory Hess and Athansios Orphanides.#

Gregory Hess and Athanasios Orphanides modeled voters as caring about two presidential abilities, the ability to make war and the ability to manage the economy. To get reelected an incumbent President must convince voters that his combined abilities make him better than a challenger.

This simple model has some profound implications. If the economy is doing well, the President is up on one score and without evidence can be assumed to be as good as the challenger in war-making ability. Thus, the President gets reelected. But if the economy is doing badly then an incumbent who cannot present evidence that he is of superior war-making ability will lose for certain. Crucially, an incumbent can't demonstrate war-making ability without a war - thus when the economy is doing poorly and the President is up for reelection the model predicts more wars.

My library is currently getting me access to this.

Moxie has the inside scoop about Osama bin Laden.#

-- OBL is apparently a "bottom" and proud of it. Claims he is hiding Saddam's WMD's deep inside his bowels. Will dare/allow anyone to search for them using whatever implements they desire.

-- He's talking with Michael Moore daily about future collaboration on a documentary about how much Bush sucks. As it turns out OBL hasn't been enjoying the sub-par cave dwelling.

So there you have it. Osama sends his love to John Forbes Kerry and looks forward to his election. OBL knows that man means freedom from responsibility.

Now that's liberty!

The Revealer discusses the public face of Bush's religion and what it says about him.#

Bush's religion is above all personal. That galls secularists, who find his insistence on infusing political speech with references to hymns and scripture uncomfortably akin to crusading -- a term Bush was happy to use until he was informed that it had historical meaning, at which point he dropped it. It may also mislead evangelical supporters, who are better able to hear Bush's equation of "freedom" with "soul." From there it's easy to make a leap of faith into the belief that Bush is not a politician so much as a missionary. This ignores the obvious: Bush is a politician. He happens to have strong religious beliefs, but unlike those of a missonary, they are neither precise nor exclusive. How do we know? He says so.

Let's take him at his word. Seriously. Not in the sense of believing or not believing his statements of fact -- another matter entirely -- but in the sense of listening to what he says. To Bush, religion transcends politics, and in his theory of belief, God transcends "religion." "America is on the side of Muslims who wish to live in peace," he said last night -- not because Islam represents an equal approach to the truth as does Jesus, but because Muslims have souls, and where there is a soul, there's the potential for "freedom" -- the greatest good.

Adam Curry links to AdultFYI which discusses a crisis in the adult film industry, a star has been tested positive for HIV and they are trying to figure out who else might be infected.#

Mitchell said James was confirmed positive this morning for HIV by PCR-DNA. Mitchell said the RNA viral load is pending. "We expect that soon." Mitchell noted that James has been very cooperative. "He's not done anything maliciously," she said. "It's just that the diagnosis has befallen him." According to Mitchell the date of James' last negative test was March 17 and before that was February 25. Mitchell said James had a pattern of testing every three weeks for the seven years that he's been performing in the industry.

Between February 25 and March 17, James went to Brazil, said Mitchell. "Darren suffered a very bad spider bite that may have masked some of the initial flu-like HIV symptoms. "He mignt not have known if he was getting a reaction from the spider bite. Without the viral load testing, that's also something that is interefering with me judging exactly when this might have hit." In between that time, Mitchell said she's had telephone calls with the company James works for, namely T.T. Boy. "They've been very cooperative and have released some names of two women that Darren worked with."

Mitchell said James, in the last week, has also worked for another producer, Lee Goodwin. "We're contacting him right now and getting names." Mitchell is also contacting another producer, Mark Anthony. "I'm pretty sure we've got all the names there. But as we get all the performer names I'll look them up in the data base for the date of their last test, the date they worked with him [James] and we'll count back of quarantine."

Tyler Cowen links to Edward W. Felten's discussion of file-sharing effects.#

The Grand Unified Theory explains the study results by breaking down the users of filesharing into two subpopulations, which I will call Free-riders and Samplers.

Free-riders are generally young. They have few if any moral qualms about filesharing, and they tend to assume that others feel the same way. They use filesharing to accumulate libraries of music, as an alternative to buying CDs.

Samplers are generally older and more risk-averse. They are highly engaged with cultural products of all sorts. They are morally conflicted about filesharing, and use it mostly to download songs that either aren't for sale, or that they don't value enough to pay for. They buy music that they really like, and filesharing causes them to find more music they like, so it tends to increase their CD purchases.

Now let's look at how the theory explains the studies' results.

AKMA is giving up his belief in tenure.#

I think, though, that I've come to the end of my tether when it comes to academic tenure. I'm a pro-labor guy, no hesitation, so I've resisted thinking about changes in (or dispensing with) the tenure system on the principle that it represents the kind of benefit that, once released, will never come again. It manifestly protects professors who propose uncongenial ways of looking at sensitive topics — no small matter, at a moment when the public arena admits an increasingly constricted range of views. Still, I think I've reached the point of counting the side effects worse than the disease that the prescription presumably remedies. Specifically, after a year or so of reading and thinking along with the circle that grew around Invisible Adjunct, I've been convinced that this "benefit" for academic labor really does serve the interests of the established professoriate to the disproportionate detriment of the least privileged academic workers.

Jane Natural-Disaster writes about fidelity and relationships.#

After that my promiscuous phase faded away. Honestly, it just got tiresome. Sex is fun but without that emotional connection, which I believe we are hardwired to desire, it quickly becomes something sad and even a little bit ridiculous. Perhaps I am misremembering. But the best sex I've ever had - the most passionate, fulfilling, exciting, uplifting, nasty fucking - has always been in the context of committed relationships.

Still, I have cheated on numerous boyfriends over the last decade. Usually it was because by the time I was looking at someone else with stars in my eyes, the communication with my boyfriend had broken down so far that I failed to resolve the issues present in the relationship. I was too chicken to break up when I realized it was time. Instead, my pattern has been to sort of drift away, severing emotional ties one by one and replacing sentences with vague monosyllables.

Julie Leung on the disturbing aspects of the youth of today: "And they have nothing to save. Not even their own faces."#