You may want to goto the Boston Blogger Meetup next Wednesday. I'll be there.#

J.D. Tuccille writes about the advantages of federalism and secession.#

Grouse links to Newsweek which reports about a recent Homeland Security plan.#

"American counterterrorism officials, citing what they call "alarming" intelligence about a possible Qaeda strike inside the United States this fall, are reviewing a proposal that could allow for the postponement of the November presidential election in the event of such an attack...

The prospect that Al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the U.S. election was a major factor behind last week's terror warning by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge... Ridge's department last week asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit the postponement of the election were an attack to take place."

Grouse's comment:

The United States has held presidential elections on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November without fail, ever since 1845. Even during two world wars, and a civil war, the election day has never changed. Now, according to Newsweek, Homeland Security officials are preparing to allow the postponement of the election in response to a predicted major terrorist act.

Tyler Cowen comments on the status of economics as a science in response to the recent election of an economist to the Royal Society (of Scientists) in Britain.#

I've long been an admirer of how he [Dasgupta] blends microeconomic technique and philosophic reasoning about welfare economics. I would have voted for him without reservation. That being said, he is an odd pick in the sense of being less "scientistic" than most traditional empirical economists. He is not an ideal test case to broach the precedent.

And in my view economics is surely a science. We produce empirical knowledge which is subject to process of testing, broadly interpreted, and feedback; see my post above. We even now have controlled experiments. And look at some of our competitors. String theory is not yet empirical. Environmental science and ecology are rife with ideology. Astronomy doesn't have controlled experiments. And isn't chemistry just plain outright boring? There is plenty of empirical economics I don't trust, but usually it is for quite hackneyed reasons (e.g., data mining), rather than for "intrinsic to economics" reasons.

OutFOXed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism#

Tony Pierce and Howard Stern ally against the FCC - Sunday is Fight Night!#

A dog named Delta Foxtrot writes about how Niall Ferguson is "scary."#

Meet Niall Ferguson, celebrated intellectual Scottish historian, promoter of US world emperialism, and the perfect example of a really smart guy so wrongheaded that he gets a lot of people killed needlessly.

He links to my category on Ferguson and an article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

Bunko Squad: "Unconfirmed sources are reporting that, as part of pre-Democratic Convention security, local and federal officials are discussing the option of just rounding up everyone in Boston and surrounding cities and shooting them."#

The Death of Politics, by Karl Hess, is a classic from the days when Playboy was worth reading.#

Faré links to Overview: An Ode to the Granovetter Diagram, from the E team about capabilities and computer security systems.#

Every novel cooperative arrangement of mutually suspicious parties interacting electronically -- every smart contract -- effectively requires a new cryptographic protocol. However, if every new contract requires new cryptographic protocol design, our dreams of cryptographically enabled electronic commerce would be unreachable. Cryptographic protocol design is too hard and expensive, given our unlimited need for new contracts.

Just as the digital logic gate abstraction allows digital circuit designers to create large analog circuits without doing analog circuit design, we present cryptographic capabilities as an abstraction allowing a similar economy of engineering effort in creating smart contracts. We explain the E system, which embodies these principles, and show a covered-call-option as a smart contract written in a simple security formalism independent of cryptography, but automatically implemented as a cryptographic protocol coordinating five mutually suspicious parties.