I’ve never been big on John F Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. I’ve been willing to entertain them, and have even read books pushing them, but they never quite seemed to close their cases; their evidence is weak and indirect, or often just wrong. (That’s “cases”, plural, because each book had a different theory.) After reading them and also the standard account (as in Posner’s Case Closed), I think Oswald did it and that he was the sole shooter. The grassy knoll? As Fred Reed puts it, “The knoll is self-evidently the last place in Dallas to put a sniper.” Recently, though, I did read a book, itself not at all pushing any conspiracy theory, which had me pondering a much smaller and simpler conspiracy than any of the popular ones.

When I first heard that statistics had a long-running dispute between “Bayesians” and “frequentists”, I was confused: this is math; how can there be long-running disputes? In math, things are proven; the losing side loses definitively and moves on. So what gives?

I once read a description of the Code Duello, the formal set of rules that existed to govern duelling, which stated that it was a finely crafted, well-thought-out code which, in its entirety, should not exist. It seems to me the same is true today of the whole system of law that regulates trade unions and how businesses must deal with them.

The prostate gland causes entirely too many problems. In the US, prostate cancer kills about one man of every forty. “Benign prostate hyperplasia” (BPH) is even more common, affecting most men over age 60. It pinches the urinary tract, making it hard to urinate, and is constantly in danger of transforming from “benign” to “malignant”. Even the difficulty urinating is enough of a problem that men often get surgery for it, usually TURP, a sort of roto-rooter job (except cutting through the pipe instead of just cleaning it out).

Academic freedom has always seemed a weird concept to me. I mean, universities generally promise it to their professors; I’ve seen many people argue for it; I’ve hardly seen anyone argue against it (at least not in principle – it’s always “this is an exception” rather than “the rule is wrong”); but still, the whole idea seems so naive. When someone has been hired as a world-class expert, has been entrusted to teach others, and then reveals himself to be a prize ass, how can anyone look at him the same again?

The Wire is one of the great shows of our time: exciting yet sticking close to reality. I generally disdain TV shows and movies, and have hardly even heard of most of them. But The Wire has the reputation of being highly realistic, which is what got me to watch it in the first place, and it didn’t disappoint. It doesn’t get absolutely everything right, though.

The cause of the recent inflation seems clear, but a lot of people are getting it wrong. Kamala Harris is blaming price gouging, dismaying even people who are trying to cheer for her. Donald Trump, in his interview with Elon Musk, pointed to oil price increases as the main driver of inflation – which is plausible enough to deserve an actual refutation, since transportation prices do drive up the price of other things, and oil is also a chemical feedstock. But the early-2000s oil price jump was much larger, with the price of oil roughly tripling, yet the effect on overall inflation was much less than the 20% of the Covid years.

A recent post by Eugene Volokh describes a legal case which hinges on a rule of libel law that most people are likely unaware of:

“It has long been the law of Pennsylvania that statements made by judges, attorneys, witnesses and parties in the course of or pertinent to any stage of judicial proceedings are absolutely privileged and, therefore, cannot form the basis for liability for defamation.”

Reparations for slavery were paid a long time ago.

They were paid in blood, perhaps the only suitable currency for such a payment. As Lincoln put it, “…every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…”.

“It’s made of plastic” is a common put-down. Marketers selling higher-end bits made of plastic (like gun parts) try to evade the stigma by calling it “polymer”, but that’s just a stupid euphemism: every plastic is a polymer, though not every polymer is a plastic. The word “polymer” says nothing to indicate that this might be a superior sort of plastic. Yet there are superior sorts; plastics vary widely in their characters. Some analogies between plastic and human characters: