The Art of Living Dangerously
Michael Moore is not the most popular guy in his high school.#
Michael Munger in Democracy is a Means, Not an End:#
We teach that consensus as a value in itself, even though we know that true consensus appears only in dictatorships or narrowly defined decisions. As James Buchanan, Kenneth Arrow, and a host of public choice scholars have shown, groups cannot be thought to have preferences in the same way that individuals do. To put it another way, it is perfectly possible, and legitimate, for reasonable people to disagree. The role of democracy is not to banish disagreement, but rather to prevent political disagreements from devolving into armed conflict.
Anthony de Jasay writes an interesting article on opportunity cost and closes it with some fine Bastiat:#
"Good Lord," Bastiat sighs, "what a lot of trouble to prove in political economy that two and two make four; and if you succeed in doing so, people cry: 'It is so clear that it is boring'. Then they vote as if you had never proved anything at all".
Bruce Schneier links to Matt Blaze (PDF) on safe-cracking and the resulting discussion among locksmiths.#
Observe that safe testing as described here does not produce upper or lower bounds on security in the sense usually used in information security. They are clearly not lower bounds, since better tools or techniques not known when a safe was tested might substantially reduce the required penetration time. The results are not especially meaningful as upper bounds, either, since the conditions are sufficiently generous to the attacker to make it very unlikely that they could be achieved under field conditions. Instead they are less formal "guidelines," intended mainly for comparison, and useful as approximate lower bounds only under the (perhaps tenuous) assumption that improved tools and techniques will not become available in the future.
The bounds are given in time. It would interesting to give the bounds in the expected amount of money that would be required to break into safe, thus suggesting that you should not store anymore than that amount of money plus a reasonable rate of profit. (Of course, some of the tools must be durable and could be considered the capital of thieves.)
Tom G. Palmer recollects a quote from Narmin Othman.#
Reading the moving story of [Wijdan al-Khuzai, a Iraqi woman campaigning for a seat in the national assembly] life and terrible death by torture reminded me of a presentation I attended by the current Iraqi Minister for Women's Affairs, Narmin Othman, in which she described her years of struggle against Saddam's regime and now against jihadi and Ba'athist terrorists. When asked about negotiations with the jihadist beheaders, she said (with some difficulty, in clear but halting English that I have reconstructed from memory) that "With such people you cannot negotiate. The people who cut off the heads, they are.…..evil. They are the men who see a beautiful flower and can only cut it. We must fight them for our country."
Mike Rogers explains a Japanese custom, Seijin no Hi, complete with beautiful pictures of a girl in a kimono.#
Tony Pierce is still my favourite person: "how is it that ellen is getting hotter chicks than me? i'll tell you how, shes got a better job than me. and a bigger dick."#
Tyler Cowen links Will Wilkinson's argument about the best help a victim of a natural disaster can get: admission into the U.S.#
77 is top notch.
88 contains a poem:
Two daughters of a silk merchant live in Kyoto.
The elder is twenty, the younger, eighteen.
A soldier may kill with his sword.
But these girls slay men with their eyes.
Tyler Cowen links to a disappointing article about the SAT.#