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16 Nov 2003 — What you can observe from a verb

(Yeah, if I had read the parsha earlier in the week, I would have had time to post a drash before Shabbat, and it would probably be a better one, too. `Al chet, `al chet. I’ll try to do better this week. Bli neder.)

While reading the parsha, I noticed something in Genesis 18:17 — God wonders to himself whether or not he should hide “what I do” (asher ani `oseh). If God had only been thinking about how much to tell Abraham about His plans for Sodom, He would have used the imperfect tense and said “what I will be doing” (asher ani ya`aseh). So He’s actually referring to something much broader here.

I mentioned this to my wife, who was preparing to give a drash at our synagogue for seudah shlishit, and it fit very well with the drash that she had prepared, so she included it. And she did a much better job than I did at studying the parsha and thinking about it, so you should read what she has to say on her own blog.

16 Nov 2003 — Property and propriety

Michael Freund proposes that the Israeli Foreign Ministry pressure European governments to return Jewish land that was seized, not just by the Nazis and Soviets, but by medieval European governments.

Eugene Volokh objects:

The principles that bona fide purchasers can’t get rightful possession of stolen property, and that corporate bodies may have obligations that persist over long times, are sound over the short-term, but they become less and less just over the long-term.

From a strict libertarian point of view, such claims become more just over the long term, not less just. If I steal a bushel of seeds from some farmers, and it takes a whole year for them to recover their property, I have not just deprived them of the seeds, but of the produce that they would have grown from the seeds. Thus, quite appropriately, when a court convicts someone of a tort, the defendant must pay back the plaintiff with interest. Furthermore, everyone agrees that if the victim of a tort does not live to collect on his or her claim, the victim’s heirs have the moral right to prosecute the case. Someone who really believes that property rights are a supreme value should be very, very concerned about how to settle 500-year-old stolen-property claims.

I’m not a strict libertarian (and, to be fair, neither is Prof. Volokh), so I don’t particularly care about recovering the assets that were looted from my great-great-great-grandparents. However, if the Anarcho-Libertarian Revolution sweeps the world and various disposessed groups start lining up at the courts, I can propose a simple way to satisfy them.

Simply invite everyone to join a Stale Property Claim Mutual Insurance Fund. The fund would estimate how much property each member would owe to other members to compensate for past historical wrongs, and how much others would owe to that person. Depending on which number was greater, the fund would send the member a bill or a check for the difference. The fund would also use the combined premiums of its members to sue non-members who appeared to be sitting on ill-gotten ancestral gains, and to defend any member from similar suits by non-members.

Of course, the more money you have, the more likely it is for some of it to be tainted by a previous theft. And no matter what ethnic group you belong to, there was probably some period of history in which your ancestors were rich and then some invading hooligans made them poor. So, in practice, a fund like this would be taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor.

Hey, maybe I should become a strict libertarian, after all. I mean, I’m very much in favor of private property. I think everybody should have some.

07 Nov 2003 — This is not Genesis 16

And Sarai, Abram’s wife, had not had a child by him, and she had an Egyptian maid named Hagar. And Sarai said to Avram, “Behold, the Eternal has held me back from childbirth. Please, go to my maidservant; perhaps I will be built up through her.”

And Abram said to Sarai, “Behold, babe, the Guy Upstairs told me, in the last chapter, that I would have children. If I don’t sleep with anyone but you, then the only way He can fulfill His own prophecy is by letting me make you pregnant! So stick with me, honey, and let Hagar find her own damn husband.”

Why doesn’t the story go that way?

In the previous chapter, along with God’s promise that Abram would have children, there is a warning (Genesis 15:13): “your offspring will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, and [the natives there] will make them work and suffer for four hundred years.” So perhaps, when Sarai made her offer, Abram thought: Hmm. If my heir is the son of an Egyptian woman, when my descendents have to become “strangers in a land not theirs,” they’ll be going somewhere other than Egypt. And Egypt, as I saw when I visted there a few chapters ago, is no place for a nice monotheist; they’re as rich as Sodom and Gomorrah, and just as corrupt, too. I know that if I stick with Sarai, she’ll eventually get pregnant, but taking Hagar would spare my descendants a lot of grief.

Too bad it didn’t work out like that, eh?

04 Nov 2003 — A legal disclaimer

Until the Supreme Court clarifies our liability, I’d just like to state for the record that the YeshOmrimMobile is a drug-free vehicle, and we expect all of our passengers to keep it that way.

03 Nov 2003 — Flat, but not too flat

Conservatives, rejoice! Not only is Iraq proving that an armed society is a polite society, but the American viceroyCoalition Provisional Authority administrator has decreed a flat tax of 15 percent for all individual and corporate income. For anyone looking to snicker at the way the Bush Administration is handling the post-“Mission Accomplished” era, this order provides, shall we say, a target-rich environment.

• If even Red Cross workers aren’t safe from terrorism, who is going to go out and collect these taxes?
• Most members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the closest thing Iraq has to a government recognized by the United Nations, are against this decree. Why should any entrepreneur or investor care about a tax law which, in all likelihood, will be torn up as soon as the occupation is over?
• In many oil-rich countries, since revenues from oil export go directly to the national treasury, income tax on individuals ranges from trivial to zero. (See these summaries of tax laws in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.) If Iraq has such bounteous oil reserves, why should it have any income tax at all?
• Some of the Hussein-era excise taxes remain in effect, but the Coalition Provisional Authority itself, the armed forces, and their contractors (including all those Indian and Bengali cooks that the US Army is hiring) are exempt from them. Apparently, if Viceroy Bremer had placed himself under the same tax burden as his Iraqi charges, the tax structure would have been a little too flat for his comfort.

via Calpundit

31 Oct 2003 — The power of the nameless ones

One striking thing about the Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11:1–9) is the absence of names. In between the geneology of the ancestors of the “seventy nations of the world” (10:1–32) and the line from Shem to Avram (11:10–32), there is a story in which “a man said to his fellow, ‘let us make bricks…’ And they said, ‘Let us build a city and a tower … and make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered all over the earth’” (11:3–4). Why doesn’t the text identify who invented the brick, or who first proposed building the city and tower?

Today, when political theorists model how people act in society, it is popular to treat every behavior, even behavior that seems altruistic and civic-minded, as an person’s attempt to advance his or her individual self-interest. (The truly au courant, of course, talk about genes promoting their own self-interest.) Two and three hundred years ago, philosophers were more sophisticated. Having seen the brutal wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe, they understood, among other things, the human capacity for selfless cruelty. People do horrible things in the name of Great Causes that they would never imagine doing for their personal benefit.

The anonymous masses wanted to “make a name for ourselves … lest we be scattered all over the earth.” But we know, from the previous chapter, that God intended for the children of Noah to spread all over the earth. The tower-builders had tied their egos to the success of a project that was destined to fail. The only question was, how was it going to fail?

It seems to me that when God said “now nothing will prevent them from doing what they plan to do” (11:6), He means that nothing would prevent them from doing what they wanted to each other. If one person had broken away from the group and said “I don’t think this tower is such a good idea after all” or even “hey, the mortar down here is crumbling, we need to come up with a better formulation,” the energy that the community had focused on building the tower would be refocused on punishing the dissenter. They would tell each other that no torture could be too cruel for the fiend who had insulted their city and tower.

To prevent this from happening, God destroyed the group’s unity of purpose. As Rabbi Yehuda Henkin points out in Equality Lost, the Tower of Babel story uses the word safah, which is usually translated as “language,” but can also be translated as “opinion.” By reintroducing diversity of opinion into the community, God prevented any one person from becoming a scapegoat for the tower’s failure. (Perhaps everyone still wanted to build the tower, but nobody could agree on how to continue the project.)

If the people had considered the tower to be one man’s idea, then God could have convinced that man to lead the community in a new direction, or punished him in a way that diminished his authority. But as long as everyone else considered it “our tower,” they would have simply raised up a new leader. However the tower-building enterprise got started, since no single person was responsible for maintaining it, no single person deserves to be mentioned by name in the story.

30 Oct 2003 — Chazzerai

An Israeli guard-dog supplier is trying to sell West Bank settlements on guard pigs. One argument in favor of the pigs, according to Kuti Ben-Yaakov, is that “according to the Muslim faith, a terrorist who touches a pig is not eligible for the 70 virgins in heaven.” Al-Muhajabaha links to a fatwa refuting this idea.

Likewise, other nudniks have suggested that shooting Muslim terrorists with lard-covered bullets, or wrapping their corpses in pigskin, will deter their comrades.

Five hundred years ago, Muslim empires controlled southeastern Europe, northern Africa, most of India, and a chunk of the South Pacific. If pork could really function as a sort of anti-Muslim kryptonite, don’t you think some Christians, Hindus, or other infidels would have noticed this gimmick long before then, and stopped the imperial expansion in its tracks?

I know that “all Jews are smart” is a stereotype, but some people are trying too hard to refute it…

23 Oct 2003 — Plastic surgery correlated with suicide, poor taste

New York Times:

[W]ith Botox parties now mainstream and network television shows like “Extreme Makeover” documenting every nip, tuck and strategic enhancement, it was perhaps inevitable that before too long patients would be feting themselves with “coming-out” parties and surgeons would be showing off their patients like artists at a gallery opening….

And many invited their loved ones to the fashion show. Ms. Kaufman, who had a tummy tuck, works out avidly at a Bally’s gym, and she had a flock of friends in the crowd. Ms. Draizin, the high-school junior with the nose job, brought along her mother, her grandparents and six family friends.

David Sarwer, a psychologist at the Center for Human Appearance at the University of Pennsylvania, which studies the human form and its impact on people’s lives, said the acceptance of plastic surgery went beyond mere vanity. “We’ve become increasingly accepting of ways of changing our bodies,” he said “We’re much more comfortable with our bodies as malleable.”

BBC:

[R]esearch, carried out by Dutch scientists, found that there were almost three times the rate of suicides among women who had received breast implants compared with the population at large.

They say that a desire for breast augmentation may, in some women, be a symptom of a far deeper insecurity and low self esteem which, in extreme cases, could trigger a suicide attempt.

BBC article via the Othermag weblog

23 Oct 2003 — Once again, the chocolate ration has been increased

According to the preliminary figures from the Department of Labor, there were fewer initial unemployment claims last week than there were the week before. Of course, the corrected new-claims number for the week before last is higher than the preliminary new-claims number for that week. And last week, we were told that the preliminary new-claims number for three weeks ago was too low, and it, too, was corrected upward. Got that? No? Maybe Wampum can explain it better than I can. Or you can go back to Billmon’s observations regarding a similar correction of a different employment statistic, three weeks ago.

21 Oct 2003 — Warriors, tricksters, and Jews

Rashi’s commentary on the Chumash begins with a very odd dialogue.

Rabbi Yitzchak said: The Torah didn’t have to begin with anything but “This month shall be for you…” [the commandment for Rosh Chodesh, over in Exodus], because that was the first commandment that Israel was bound by. Why does it open with bereshit?… Because if the nations of the world say to Israel, “You are thieves, because you conquered the lands of the seven nations,” [Israel] would say to them, “All the world belongs to the Blessed Holy One. He created it and gave it to whoever is worthy in His eyes. By His free will he gave it to them [the seven nations], and by His free will he took it from them and gave it to us.”

What is the point of this conversation? It can’t be an argument over our moral claim to the Land of Israel. First, Rabbi Yitzchak couldn’t have expected the other nations to say, “well, if their holy book says that God gave them the land, it’s OK for them to have it.” (In our own day, that kind of argument hasn’t persuaded many Arabs, has it?) Second, as Rabbi Yeshiahu Leibowitz ztz”l pointed out, if we accept that God took the land from the Caananites and gave it to us, we also have to accept that He took it from us and gave it to the Romans, and so on … so we have no moral claim against other nations that are currently occupying parts of the land.

However, if we look at Rabbi Yitzchak’s dialogue in the context of the Roman occupation of Israel, I think we can find a better interpretation for it. These “nations of the world” are not talking about our land, but about our character.

They are saying: “Why are you making such a fuss about how the Romans took your land from you, destroyed your Temple, and killed so many of your people? Your ancestors took the same land from the Canaanites, destroyed their temples, and killed many of their people. If you think the Romans are thieves, your only real complaint is that they are more effective thieves than yourselves.”

We cannot refute such an accusation by telling other people about our laws. We can, however, refute it by telling our stories—the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, which do more to shape our attitudes than any legal code.

The basic psychology of the thief is, “whatever I can get my hands on, through any means, is mine.” If our ancestors were a nation of thieves, the heroes of their stories would be powerful warriors and ingenious tricksters. But the Torah has no such heroes. Avram played a decisive role in a war among Canaanite city-states, but when the king of Sodom offered him a share of the loot, he refused (Genesis 14:22). Jacob, with his stratagems against Esau and Lavan, is the closest thing the Chumash has to a trickster figure, but his life story is one tragedy after another. Instead of warriors and tricksters, we tell stories of one God, who has given free will to human beings, but who, from the first moment of creation, demonstrates absolute control over the physical universe.

This line of argument only holds, of course, if the stories in the Chumash do shape our attitudes. If the biblical narrative shows characters striving for one moral standard, but our behavior in everyday life shows us striving for a completely different one, we can no longer take advantage of R. Yitzchak’s argument. If we praise the same kinds of rogues that our enemies praise, the only difference being the targets of their crimes, then we shouldn’t wait for the nations of the world to accuse us of anything. We should ask ourselves: why are we mourning for the land that a more effective thief captured from us?

16 Oct 2003 — To serve and protect, and to guard money from harm

Marshall Brain is planning ahead for an age when robots do all the work and human beings become unemployable. When Mr. Brain and other pundits make predictions of this ilk, they forget that no robot, however advanced, is a match for the power of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Suppose that someone invents a robotic fast-food worker that can replace a worker at McDonald’s. If I own a McDonald’s franchise, I can choose to buy (or lease) the robot, or I can continue to hire human beings for the same job. If the robot is so cheap that no human would work for a competitive price, then all of my employees will be laid off. If workers in a wide range of industries are competing with similar robots, then we will see massive unemployment. Many workers who remain employed will see their wages drop, so that they can remain cheaper than the robots.

But this is where the Federal Reserve exercises its awesome power, the power to print money. What happens if more money is circulated through the economy? From a worker’s point of view, the inflationary effect of the increased money supply counteracts the deflationary effect of the robots. From a business owner’s point of view, inflation eats away the value of capital investments—including robots. Under those circumstances, someone opening a new McDonald’s, or looking to replace a broken fast-food robot, will be better off hiring a human being at inflated wages than hoping that a robot’s output will make up for the purchase price plus inflation. There’s no way the robot-makers can invent more productive robots faster than the Fed can crank out money.

If for some reason the Fed doesn’t exercise its power, we’ll have Depression-scale deflation, few people will be able to afford the products that the robots crank out, and once again, the robot owners will need to write off most of their investments.

As human workers look to specialize in whatever kind of work robots can’t do cheaply enough, a lot of people may end up taking massive pay cuts in new careers, or regretting the time they spent learning a skill that’s been automated away. A humane government, I hope, will do something to reduce the pain of these economic shifts. But until the Terminator takes control of the money supply, there will always be a market for human labor.

via Calpundit

16 Oct 2003 — Mostly invulnerable

About twenty years ago, I heard Sen. Gary Hart speak to a convention of community organizers. He said he had spoken to someone who was hoping for a scandal, like Watergate, to bring down the Reagan Administration. But, the senator declaimed, when President Reagan cuts spending on education, that is a scandal. And when he cuts such-and-such, that is a scandal. And when he does so-and-so, that is a scandal. (Wild applause from the audience.)

A few months later, Hart’s friend got his scandal: White House officals had sold arms to Iran and used the money to fund anticommunist insurgents in Nicaragua. And Reagan’s anointed successor, George H. W. Bush, still got elected.

Will the Plame scandal turn out the same way? After all the news stories and op-eds and televised hearings and indictments are over with, will the voters put Republicans back in the White House anyway? I have reason to hope otherwise.

Dubya has run for President, and maintained his power as President, by cultivating an aura of invulnerability. During the primaries, he quickly lined up endorsements and donations from the Republican establishment to position himself as his father’s anointed successor; after McCain won the New Hampshire Republican primary, Bush “waged one of the roughest primary campaigns in memory” to prevent the same thing from happening in South Carolina. During the Florida recount battle, while Gore’s partisans talked about making sure that every vote was counted and letting the recount process determine the victor, the Republicans portrayed Bush as the victor and the Gore/Lieberman team as “Sore/Loserman.” After his inauguration, some pundits expected Bush to make a special effort to cooperate with the Democrats in Congress, perhaps triangulating off of Tom DeLay; after all, he had portrayed himself as “a uniter, not a divider,” he had lost the popular vote, and the Senate was evenly split. Instead, he convinced Sen. Jim Jeffords to quit the Republican Party.

The 2002 electron returns and the current tax rates prove how effective this strategy has been. But it has one flaw: you can’t be mostly invulnerable. Once your opponents — or, more importantly, your wavering allies — discover that someone can defy you and live to tell about it, you can no longer keep them in line with a stern tone and a steely glare.

The most important sign of Bush’s infallability, of course, is his failure to uncover stocks of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, even after declaring “Mission Accomplished.” Consider what this Administration has faced since then:

• They had to eat sixteen words in the 2003 State of the Union address.
• The Plame affair grew out of the White-House–vs.–CIA finger-pointing over the sixteen words.
• Bush, who had extracted authorization to use force in Iraq without submitting any budget for the Iraq war, came back to Congress asking for an additional $87 million. The American public has not taken the news well.
• The Senate passed the Harkin Amendment, supported by six Republican senators, blocking the Department of Labor’s new overtime rules.
• The House and Senate passed separate resolutions blocking new FCC rules, passed in June and endorsed by the President, that make it easier for one corporation to own a large number of TV stations. The outcry against the FCC’s rule change was joined by a number of prominent Republicans, including William Safire.
• An unemployment rate that is still higher than it was two years ago, when the recession officially ended.
• A steady decline in Bush’s approval ratings.

When he was President, Reagan faced political challenges that were at least as daunting: e.g., an unemployment rate over 10%, a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, and an Administration where, in Molly Ivins’ words, “half of it is under average and the other half is under indictment.” But Reagan was used to political challenges, and even losses. He had run in the 1968 and 1976 Republican Presidential primaries before finally winning the nomination in 1980. He knew how to charm the electorate in spite of his political setbacks.

Our current President may have Reagan’s ideology, but he’s not Reagan. And while neither Dean nor Clark have Clinton’s charisma, they’re not Mondale and Dukakis, either.

09 Oct 2003 — For some people, the 70s never ended

This wireless X10 wall switch comes with a perforated sheet of labels, so you can mark what each switch is controlling. The labels on the sheet include all the possible locations you can imagine having a lamp: “kitchen,” “bathroom,” “study,” etc., etc., etc., … and “cove.”

I can’t shake the image of some overweight guy, his garishly colored shirt open to reveal copious gold chains and chest hair, reaching out for his X10 remote and saying “Hey, baby, let’s go to my cove.”

But maybe you can.

07 Oct 2003 — “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”

Nathan Newman argues that when you consider all the unsavory things that the CIA has done over the past fifty years, progressives shouldn’t care so much about the Bush Administration leaking the name of a CIA operative. John Quiggin follows this up by linking to an old essay of his.

A government, he says, can suppress its domestic opponents quite effectively with secret policecounterintelligence agencies, but when trying to root out secret information from other countries, it faces a paradox.

The basic lesson of game theory for a game of bluff like that of espionage is that, as long as it is possible for counterspies to generate misleading information most of the time, spies are useless even when their information happens to be correct. If the defence plays optimally, the spymaster can never have any reason to believe one piece of information produced by spies and disbelieve another.

Quiggin backs up the game theory by citing high-profile intelligence failures from World War II onward.

05 Oct 2003 — A thought for Yom Kippur

If you have committed an offense against someone else, even if you have already paid them whatever monetary damages you owe, you don’t get forgiveness from Above until you’ve asked your victim to forgive you. The Mishnah (Bava Kamma 8:7) derives this principle from the story of Abraham and Avimelekh; after Avimelekh has taken Abraham’s wife for himself (after that whole “she is my sister” thing, which we won’t go into here), God tells Avimelekh (Genesis 20:7), “now, return the wife of that woman, because he is a prophet, and he will pray for you.”

A commentary on the Shulkhan `Arukh (Me’irat `Einim, Choshen Mishpat 422:1) takes this argument a step further. You shouldn’t just get your victim to forgive you — you should patch up your relationship with your victim to the point where he or she would be willing to pray on your behalf.

May you all be inscribed and sealed for a happy and prosperous year.

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