Here Dr. Washington was introduced by Judge W. S. Bullock, in an address that for sincerity and the highest praise can have no equal.

“Dr. Washington, you are engaged in a great work.  We sympathise with you in the delicate and arduous undertaking… My countrymen and my friends, I commend to you our distinguished guest on this occasion.  He comes upon a mission that we welcome.  He is the leader of the negro race in America… He is taking the benighted, vicious, ignorant and superstitious negro from their [his] condition and clothing him in the garments of industry, intelligence, and morality.  In short, he is qualifying the negro for citizenship.”

~From The Booker T. Washington Papers, Volume Eleven, page 484.  The above is a press release issued by the office of Dr. Washington

When reading the above, the most striking thing about it is how absolutely insulting it sounds, towards both Booker T. Washington, and to black Americans in general.  It would sound horrible if anyone today said this about the accomplishments of Dr. Washington.  It would be unforgivable if anyone said this about any contemporary person.  But at the time, he himself categorized it as the highest of praise.

What is the point of this example?  Well, for starters, that context is often everything.  We know all of the words, but they mean much different things to us today than they did to people then.  At the time, that was the height of progressivity about race in America, while today, it would be too insulting and antiquated a perspective to even voice public ally.

There isn’t much to say about the horrors taking place in Zimbabwe right now.  But while we cannot do anything, really, to prevent the disaster that is being visited on the people of Zimbabwe (although I must say I love the idea of demanding that the 2010 World Cup be withdrawn from South Africa), we can at least recognize what is taking place right now.

Via Reuters:

The poll has been widely condemned and a security committee of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) called for the vote to be postponed, saying Mugabe’s re-election as the only candidate could lack legitimacy.

Zimbabweans had hoped the run-off would help end a severe economic crisis marked by acute shortages of foreign currency, food, an 80 percent unemployment rate and the world’s highest inflation rate, estimated to be two million percent.

A loaf of bread now costs 6 billion Zimbabwe dollars, or 150 times more than at the time of the first round of elections.

Mugabe, 84, planning to extend his 28-year-old uninterrupted rule, remained defiant and even ridiculed African leaders who said he should delay the election.

“Even today they are saying do away with the election, what stupidity is that,” Mugabe said at his last campaign rally on Thursday, where he urged people to vote in large numbers.

Mugabe has barred observers from Western countries critical of his government and all but refused entry to hundreds of foreign journalists who were keen to cover the election.

A grouping of local observers has said its members were harassed and intimidated by government supporters and that they would not observe Friday’s vote.

Emphasis added.  Let’s all at least bear witness.

To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

~Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century

Noted without comment: a study of drug deaths in Florida shows nearly three times as many deaths from legal drugs than from illegal drugs.

The report’s findings track with similar studies by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which has found that roughly seven million Americans are abusing prescription drugs. If accurate, that would be an increase of 80 percent in six years and more than the total abusing cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, Ecstasy and inhalants.

The Florida report analyzed 168,900 deaths statewide. Cocaine, heroin and all methamphetamines caused 989 deaths, it found, while legal opioids – strong painkillers in brand-name drugs like Vicodin and OxyContin – caused 2,328.

Drugs with benzodiazepine, mainly depressants like Valium and Xanax, led to 743 deaths. Alcohol was the most commonly occurring drug, appearing in the bodies of 4,179 of the dead and judged the cause of death of 466 – fewer than cocaine (843) but more than methamphetamine (25) and marijuana (0).

The study also found that while the number of people who died with heroin in their bodies increased 14 percent in 2007, to 110, deaths related to the opioid oxycodone increased 36 percent, to 1,253.

Florida scrutinizes drug-related deaths more closely than do other states, and so there is little basis for comparison with them.

Do you suppose that the government will start defoliating GlaxoSmithKline’s territory like they have been doing to Columbia for over a decade?

You’re talking history, right? I’m talking now. Because down here, it’s still “Who’s your old man?” ‘Til you got kids of your own and then it’s, “Who’s your son?” But after the horror movie I seen today… Robots! Piers full of robots! My kid’ll be lucky if he’s even punchin’ numbers five years from now. And while it don’t mean shit to me that I can’t take my steak knives to Dibiago and Sons, it breaks my fucking heart that there’s no future for the Sobotkas on the waterfront!

~Frank Sobotka, The Wire

One of my favorite concepts in economics is the Theory of the Second Best.  While it can be a bit technical, in summary, the theory is that if, for whatever reason, the required conditions for the optimal outcome are impossible to achieve, the second best outcome may require deviating from the conditions which were required to make the optimal outcome possible.  To use an analogy, most Democrats preferred ranking of the last three candidates for President was Obama, Clinton, McCain.  But one of the required steps to the optimal outcome of Obama’s election was his nomination, which made the second best outcome impossible.

The second-best problem is one which has particular resonance for me as a libertarian.  Many libertarians allied themselves for years with the Republican party, to try and establish the required conditions for a libertarian state.  However, the outcome of a libertarian state is further away than ever; responsibly, a libertarian must consider which of the desired conditions for our optimal outcome are negotiable in order for us to achieve our second-best outcome.  Of course, this is hardly only true for libertarians.

It seems California is now offering a luxury prison system.

   The Santa Ana Jail is pleased to host a full range of alternatives to traditional incarceration.  Our offerings include weekends in jail, non-linear jail sentences, and a variety of work release options.  Our philosophy is designed to allow our clients (!, AT) to serve their obligations to the court in a manner that respects them as human beings and permits them to continue to provide for themselves and their families….

   * Programs that include 2-day or 3-day weekends with minimal impact on the client’s professional life.  Work on Saturday and Sunday?  No problem…

   * Programs that permit jail sentences to be served in multiple parts. Perfect for clients that live out of the area or clients with frequent business travel.

   * Programs that permit the client to leave jail for work everyday.  We have helped everyone from 9 to 5 business people to oil-rig workers, so no work schedule is out of the question.

Alex Tabarrok has a lot more about this over at Marginal Revolution.

Why is it that it seems people can’t understand the difference between what should be market activity and what should be government activity?  I’m pretty sure that we ought to keep prisons equal for everyone, and allow people to pay different prices for sugar.  Instead, the price of sugar is regulated, but you can buy a better prison experience openly (of course, you can buy a better criminal justice experience in many ways at every step, just less openly).

Anyone else watching this shit?

You know, every politician always talks about cars with fuel cells and hybrids and shit and making driving more affordable.  Doesn’t this seem to be obviously only one possibility?  What if we can’t do that?  What if we need to live a bit differently?  Markets are already considering this possibility.

Let’s see if we can do a liveblog here.

Writer Molly Lambert wrote a remarkable essay about pornography, sexuality, and the sexualization of young girls over at the mp3 blog This Recording.

It is not (and never has been) shocking that people sexualize children, especially girls. It is not the pictures that rob these girls of their agency, it is the discussion around them. When an actually shocking story like the Austrian guy with the incest dungeon breaks, the public’s repulsion is matched only by their lust for sordid details. The flip side of disgust is fascination.

The internet is a Pandora’s Box for pornography, and shutting down provocative preteen modeling sites like Lil’ Amber will not stop pederasty or the sexual exploitation of minors any more than banning Lolita would have. Shows like To Catch A Predator play on the desire that morally outrageous crimes be stopped, and encourages the public to think that modern society and its evils are somehow responsible for outbreaks of sin.

But none of these problems are new. They occur behind closed doors in purposely antiquated settings like the FLDS, and reading any of the true crime records widely available online (or The Bible, for that matter) makes it obvious that most transgressions, no matter how hideous, have been happening for thousands for years. Which is not the same as deeming them acceptable.

The whole thing is worth reading (and talking about, if anyone cares to).

The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they’re told. It can be traumatic for the ones who wake up during the operation. Here’s what happened to Einstein:

   Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies: it was a crushing impression. [2]

I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end. That’s why movies like The Matrix have such resonance. Every kid grows up in a fake world. In a way it would be easier if the forces behind it were as clearly differentiated as a bunch of evil machines, and one could make a clean break just by taking a pill.

Paul Graham, from his essay Lies We Tell Kids.  The whole thing is worth reading.  Hat tip to Robin Hanson.

Bayes’ theorem is useful in evaluating the result of drug tests. Suppose a certain drug test is 99% sensitive and 99% specific, that is, the test will correctly identify a drug user as testing positive 99% of the time, and will correctly identify a non-user as testing negative 99% of the time. This would seem to be a relatively accurate test, but Bayes’ theorem will reveal a potential flaw. Let’s assume a corporation decides to test its employees for opium use, and 0.5% of the employees use the drug. We want to know the probability that, given a positive drug test, an employee is actually a drug user. Let “D” be the event of being a drug user and “N” indicate being a non-user. Let “+” be the event of a positive drug test. We need to know the following:

   * P(D), or the probability that the employee is a drug user, regardless of any other information. This is 0.005, since 0.5% of the employees are drug users. This is the prior probability of D.

   * P(N), or the probability that the employee is not a drug user. This is 1 ? P(D), or 0.995.

   * P(+|D), or the probability that the test is positive, given that the employee is a drug user. This is 0.99, since the test is 99% accurate.

   * P(+|N), or the probability that the test is positive, given that the employee is not a drug user. This is 0.01, since the test will produce a false positive for 1% of non-users.

   * P(+), or the probability of a positive test event, regardless of other information. This is 0.0149 or 1.49%, which is found by adding the probability that the test will produce a true positive result in the event of drug use (= 99% x 0.5% = 0.495%) plus the probability that the test will produce a false positive in the event of non-drug use (= 1% x 99.5% = 0.995%). This is the prior probability of +.

Given this information, we can compute the posterior probability P(D|+) of an employee who tested positive actually being a drug user:

P(D|+)  = (0.99 x 0.005)/(0.99 x 0.005)+(0.01 x 0.005)

P(D|+)  = 0.3322

Despite the high accuracy of the test, the probability that an employee who tested positive actually did use drugs is only about 33%, so it is actually more likely that the employee is not a drug user. The rarer the condition for which we are testing, the greater the percentage of positive tests that will be false positives.