Month: September 2010

Jamelle Bouie watches their numbers swell. His proposal:

I understand the logic of incarcerating the elderly — a murder committed 40 years ago is still a murder — but it's hard to see the enterprise as anything other than absurd. Crime is a game for the young; the vast majority of crimes are committed by men in their late teens and 20s. Criminal behavior drops sharply drops after age 30 and enters a permanent tailspin after late middle age. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report for 2009, fewer than 1 percent of all crimes are attributable to those 60 and older. Assuming you could weed out the most dangerous inmates from those who are basically harmless, it makes the most sense to just release prisoners once they reach 65; at that point, they are well past the peak years for criminal behavior. If that's too radical, you could mandate the possibility of parole for any inmate serving a life sentence, or one that would leave them imprisoned past the age of 60.

Even chaotic Iraq now holds government torturers more accountable to their foreign victims than the United States does to its. Seriously. When it comes to American exceptionalism – human rights apply to every state but the US if it will embarrass us – the cognitive dissonance is impossible to parody.

Alex Needham insists that Paglia "missed the point by a mile":

Paglia's main criticism seemed to be that Gaga simply isn't sexy enough. "How would a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation?" she asked. But Lady Gaga has never presented herself as a sex object. She sells weirdness and eye-popping spectacle, not sex. She isn't posing in a meat bikini to woo Nuts' one-handed readers, and why should she? Though Paglia's tome Sexual Personae posits sex as the prime mover behind all culture, you'd still think that as a feminist she'd applaud the fact that there's a massive female pop star whose appeal doesn't depend on how many men she manages to arouse. Before Gaga, we had Britney – and look how that turned out.

Maria Bustillos is less kind to Paglia. Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper defend her. Klausner:

Gaga can be a smug diva with her little monsters lifting her throne as nothing more than fame cogs. Sex—and her “gays”—are accessories for her. Like Gaga showing up at the VMAs with gay soliders who were kicked out of the military for being gay–like they were a clutch purse.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 4.30 pm

Scott Horton looks at the real reason the Obama administration went so far to deny any day in court for torture victims – even using unclassified evidence alone:

The Holder Justice Department would have us believe that it is protecting state secrets essential to our security. That posture is risible, and half of the court saw through it. The dilemma faced by the Justice Department was rather that evidence presented in the suit would likely be used in the future (not in the United States, obviously) to prosecute those who participated in the extraordinary renditions process. Twenty-three U.S. agents have already been convicted for their role in a rendition in Milan. Prosecutors in Spain have issued arrest warrants for a further 13 U.S. agents involved in a botched rendition case that touched on Spanish soil. Prosecutors in Germany have opened a criminal investigation into the use of Ramstein AFB in connection with torture and illegal kidnappings. Prosecutors in Poland are pursuing a similar matter. And Prime Minister David Cameron was recently forced to brief President Obama on his decision to direct a formal inquiry which could lead to prosecutions tied directly to the subject matter of the Mohamed case. This is the remarkable background to the case decided by the Ninth Circuit, and remarkably not a single word about this appears anywhere in the opinion—or even in most of the press accounts about it.

Greg Mankiw explains a scheme used by some universities in New York City:

1. The university buys a rent-controlled building. The purchase price is low, because the existing landlord cannot make much money renting it.

2. The university then rents the apartments to its own senior faculty, who view this as a great perk. In essence, the difference between the free-market rent and the controlled rent is a form of compensation for the professor. As a result, the university can reduce the professor's cash compensation by an equivalent amount. The university is effectively earning the market rent for the apartment.

Unusually smart for a university administration, don't you think?

Greg Scoblete counters Joshua Foust:

By all accounts, the U.S. is running a fairly aggressive drone campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan without anywhere near the same number of troops on the ground that we currently have in Afghanistan. If we don't need 100,000-plus coalition troops inside Pakistan to wage an effective drone war against al-Qaeda there, why do we need them in Afghanistan?

Felix Salmon responds to Bill Easterly. Salmon thinks that inequality "increasingly [ignores] national borders":

Once upon a time, national borders were useful boundaries to use when measuring per-capita income across the planet. And given that statistical agencies are still national, that’s not going to change any time soon. But those numbers are going to be less and less informative as pockets of wealth spring up in poor countries, and pockets of poverty persist in middle-income nations.

A reader writes:

In a country founded by Washington, Adams, Paine, Hale, and Jefferson, how can we have reached a point where it has become a slur to call someone an "anti-colonialist"?

Frum corrects:

I should have said “most pervasive” not “worst.” The French violence involved the greatest number of participants, but the Madrid train station bombing of 2004 and the London public transit bombing of 2005 claimed the most victims.