Have Opinion, Will Travel posts a rather succinct notice of appeal by someone acting pro se.

I hope I never have to file a criminal appeal. But if I ever have to sue someone I'm going to use this line in the complaint:

You have been hereby served notice you're not getting away with this shit that easy.

(Hat tip: Crimlaw)

I think this guy used to be a manager at one of my former employers. Actually, we had few people like that.

(Hat tip: Zonker)

Got this bit about Mel Gibson's recent DUI bust from TMZ.com:

Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, "You mother f****r. I'm going to f*** you." The report also says "Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me."

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"

The deputy became alarmed as Gibson's tirade escalated, and called ahead for a sergeant to meet them when they arrived at the station. When they arrived, a sergeant began videotaping Gibson, who noticed the camera and then said, "What the f*** do you think you're doing?"

A law enforcement source says Gibson then noticed another female sergeant and yelled, "What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?"

We're told Gibson took two blood alcohol tests, which were videotaped, and continued saying how "f****d" he was and how he was going to "f***" Deputy Mee.

[Censored words in the original.]

I don't want to make too much of the stupid things people say when they're drunk, but...wow. Well, he had a nice career.

Top two AP wire stories on Yahoo:

Hezbollah politicians back peace package

Hezbollah fires new rockets into Israel

And so it goes.

In response to an article I wrote last month about Police Shootings that Make You Go Hmmmm..., a Chicago SWAT team member named Erick left an interesting comment. I responded to part of it yesterday in Too Much SWAT, Part 1.

Here's the rest of Erick's comment:

In response to raids including non-violent crimes let me shed light onto the fact that it's not unusual for a pot smokers and gamblers to have weapons in their homes. Never underestimate anyone's potential. Timothy McVeigh was in the Army with a relatively minor criminal background.

That's a good point about never underestimating anyone's potential. It probably keeps a lot of cops safe. But I have a question: Don't they still teach Chicago cops how to arrest a suspect safely? They never used to need a SWAT team to arrest a bad guy.

I'm pretty sure that in most cases they still don't. There's an underlying assumption here that is at the core of the problem as I see it, and this is where I suspect Erick and I have a serious difference of values. I don't really have a problem with SWAT tactics. My objection in these kinds of situations is to SWAT's mission.

But first, a story. A few years ago, some bozo told the cops that a friend of mine had pointed a gun at him while both of them were driving down the street. The next day, the Chicago police arrested my friend outside his home as he was going to his car. He's a little shaky on the details, but I think a pair of plain-clothes officers did the arrest, with a couple of patrol cars backing them up in case he fled. Call it six officers in total. It wasn't SWAT.

(Before I go on, I should say that my friend never owned a gun and the police didn't find one. The case against him fell apart when the complaining witness's girlfriend, who was also supposedly a witness, refused to back his story. All the charges were dropped.)

So here's the mystery: How come it takes a SWAT team to arrest pot smokers and gamblers, but when the police arrested my friend who a witness claimed was armed with a handgun and likely to use it the local precinct cops just took him down themselves?

The answer, I think, is that you can't flush a handgun down the toilet.

Most of these troublesome SWAT-style raids are not part of the traditional SWAT lifesaving mission. Instead, they're one of the routine evidence-gathering techniques in the war on drugs and, to a lesser extent, the war on illegal gambling. That's because, unlike my friend's alleged crimes, both of these criminal activities involve evidence that is easy to destroy.

When the police come knocking, an alert drug crew can flush the drugs before the police can find them. For a gambling operation, the police need to find book-making records. In the past, bookies used to keep records on chalkboards or on quick-burning flash paper. Nowadays, I imagine a sophisticated operation just needs to erase a few computer files.

This means that police serving a search warrant need to make a dynamic entry, moving very quickly to secure the site and restrain the occupants. That takes a SWAT team, or something that looks very much like one.

According to NYPD officer Edward Conlon, detectives making narcotics arrests don't actually like to use ESU (New York's version of SWAT) because they are so careful and methodical that the bad guys have plenty of time to destroy all the evidence. Thus, NYPD has special SWAT-like teams that do the kind of dynamic entry it takes to get the evidence.

Unfortunately, it's also the kind of entry that frightens the crap out of the people inside the building. If they're innocent, that's bad enough. But sometimes in the panic and confusion innocent people do something that gets them shot. Even when the people being raided are guilty of a crime, they usually aren't doing anything they deserve to die for.

When the raid starts, however, people may do something crazy like trying to shoot a cop. On an individual basis, they earn a bullet for that. It's a totally justified shooting. But as a matter of policy, I don't think it's a good idea to create an endless series of armed confrontations with people who don't like cops and have poor impulse control.

I don't object to SWAT teams or SWAT tactics...unless they're unnecessary. Supporters of these raids say that if police can't storm the building in a close-quarters infantry assault, they'll be in danger. I say that if police can't storm the building in a close-quarters infantry assault, they'll just have to find a safer, less violent way to arrest suspects and conduct searches. If that means that a few drug dealers get away with flushing the evidence, I can live with that.

Glenn Reynolds blogged the arrested-for-photographing-the-cops story too. Of course, he did it earlier.

In his commentary, he offers this terrific idea:

I think we need civil rights legislation making this kind of arrest illegal. Treble damages, plus the right to civil forfeiture of any police property or equipment used in the arrest. Oh, and respondeat superior liability against supervisors.

I don't even know what that last thing is, but civil forfeiture of police property is a great idea.

Think about it. Police departments all over the country have been earning a sizable income by seizing the assets of criminals. There's clear evidence that police make choices about which criminals to go after based on how much stuff they can take. This is why you get a lot of silly small-time pot busts: Ordinary citizens own valuable stuff, whereas drug dealers are careful to hide their assets with friends or family members.

Isn't it only fair that these same police departments should themselves be subject to asset seizure when they break the law? Maybe it would give some of them cause for thought when they're planning a raid if violating peoples' rights meant the police could lose the battering ram they used to break down the door, the communications gear used to coordinate the raid, and the police cars they drove to get to the raid site.

The story is a little vague, and there may be more to the incident, but it seems a Philadelphia police officer has proven his ignorance of the rights of the free press:

PHILADELPHIA — A Philadelphia family said they are outraged over the arrest of one of their family members.

The family of Neftaly Cruz said police had no right to come onto their property and arrest their 21-year-old son simply because he was using his cell phone's camera. They told their story to Harry Hairston and the NBC 10 Investigators.

...

Cruz said police told him that he broke a new law that prohibits people from taking pictures of police with cell phones.

"They threatened to charge me with conspiracy, impeding an investigation, obstruction of a investigation. ...They said, 'You were impeding this investigation.' (I asked,) 'By doing what?' (The officer said,) 'By taking a picture of the police officers with a camera phone,'" Cruz said.

The police eventually let Cruz go, telling him some story about how there was no supervisor on duty so they couldn't charge him. That's nonsense and they know it.

It's established law, based on the constitutional freedom of the press, that you can take pictures of anything you can see from anywhere you are allowed to be, unless the owner of the property you're on tells you not to.

Cruz says he was in his own yard. The police say he was on public property. Again, it's established law that when the owner of the property is the government, constitutional rights kick in, and the government can't prevent you from taking pictures on public property as long as you have a right to be there. (There are some exceptions to allow military bases to restrict photography in certain areas.) The police might be able to order you to leave the area under certain conditions, but they have no right to tell you to stop taking pictures.

Come to think of it, if this cop thinks you can interfere with something by taking pictures of it, he's also ignorant of the laws of physics.

(Hat tip, The Agitator)

In response to an article I wrote last month about Police Shootings that Make You Go Hmmmm..., a commenter named Erick writes:

I've been on the Chicago Police SWAT team now without incident for over a year. SWAT teams don't just take random phone calls from anonymous callers, gear up and go smashing in peoples doors. If this were the only criteria people would call in false claims on their neighbor for not picking up their dog crap. Furthermore, SWAT officers are hand selected from a pool of numerous candidates each of whom are vigorously tested and backgrounds checked.

First of all, thank you Erick for taking the time to respond to a blow-hard like me. I don't know a lot about police procedures, organization, and tactics, but here in the blogosphere we don't let things like that that stop us from offering our opinion.

Second, I'm not surprised you haven't seen any ugly incidents. You're on the Chicago SWAT team. I can't find much about the Chicago SWAT team online (which is probably a good thing) but I assume that a city the size of Chicago—and which is a known terrorist target—has a very professional SWAT team. [Update: Not quite. See Erick's comment on this post.] Of the nearly 300 botched raids listed on the CATO raid map, only two of them—both wrong-house raids in which no one was seriously hurt—were in Chicago, and according to the source newspaper articles, neither of these involved the SWAT team.

Not all SWAT teams are as good as you are seeing here in Chicago. The town of Anderson, South Carolina has a SWAT team despite a population of only 25,000. [Update: Kelly in the comments says the SWAT team is associated with the much larger Anderson County.] They probably got federal anti-terror or anti-drug money for that. I'm sure the Anderson police are a fine bunch of people, but they're just not going to be as highly trained as Chicago's SWAT team.

I don't blame the officers for this. The weapons and training are provided free by the federal government to police departments meeting certain broad criteria. If I were a cop, I'd sure take advantage of a government-funded opportunity to get that kind of equipment. Some of that equipment could be very useful. It would also be very, very cool.

Lots of cops apparently think the same way, because in some small towns, every single officer is on the SWAT team and has an M-16 fully-automatic assault rifle available to him.

Third, you say that "SWAT teams don't just take random phone calls from anonymous callers, gear up and go smashing in peoples doors." No, but in some places SWAT teams gear up and go smashing in peoples doors based on a request from another police unit (narcotics, vice) that does take tips from anonymous informants, confidential informants, or arrested criminals trying to make a deal. All of those people can sometimes make stuff up.

Erick had more to say, and so do I, but that's all I have time for right now.

Update: Part 2 is now up.

Radley Balko says this:

In Tacoma, Washington, the "Sound Transit," a government agency, offered a landowner $439,000 for a piece of property in 2004. Finding the offer low, the landowner sued, and eventually lost in the State Supreme Court. Now, the Sound Transit is offering just $240,000, citing a "reassessment" of the property's value. That's about half what the same agency paid for an adjacent piece of land (perhaps the value of the land declined because it's now known that it's targeted for eminent domain!).

Of course, for property tax purposes, the government has assessed the land at $303,400.

Funny how the value of the land changes, depending on what the government wants to do with it.

Of course, the value of land does change depending on what you want to do with it. That's the problem with determining the price of land for purposes of eminent domain: Everybody has a different idea of what the land is worth.

If you and I are both looking at a piece of land, we probably have different plans for it. Maybe you want to farm it, and I want to build an amusement park. So how do we decide which of us gets it? How do we reconcile your subjective estimate of the value of the land for farming with my subjective estimate of it's value for entertainment?

In most cases, it's actually very simple. The free market tells us. If I think the land will be worth more to me than you think it will be worth to you, I'll be willing to offer more money for it than you.

Note that the free market works even if one of us owns the land instead of a third party: If you own the land, you can decide if my offer is more than the value of the land to you. If it is, you sell. If not, not. Conversely, I get to decide if your asking price is higher than the value I place on the land. If it is, I pass on by. If not, I buy the land.

Sure, we may negotiate over the final price, but on the whole this is a very fair and efficient system that has some attractive features: Every party to the transaction is a willing participant, and every party has to put their money where their mouth is. In particular, if the buyer makes an offer that's less than the value of the property to the seller, the buyer doesn't get the property. The risk of offering too little money is that the buyer will not get what he wants.

None of this is true about an eminent domain seizure. The property owner is involved unwillingly, and the government isn't taking a risk that the offer might be turned down. And if there's no risk to a low offering price, there's no reason not to offer less than the property is worth. Also, since the government doesn't have to show a profit, the governments's willingness to make an offer has nothing to do with the value of the property to the government and everything to do with the influence of powerful special interests.

You don't really need to know the rest of this story about a "zombie dance party" to appreciate this paragraph:

Police say the group was uncooperative and intimidated passersby with their "ghoulish" makeup at a time when officers were on high alert in reaction to a bulletin about men in other states who wear clown makeup while attacking and robbing people.

Now that's great newswriting.

(Whole story here.)

I've never really understood how trackbacks work. In fact, for over a year now, trackbacks haven't been working. I get lots of notices of spam trackbacks, but not a single legitimate trackback ever. I assume something in my Movable Type blogging software is swallowing them up, but I don't know where it happens.

I'm giving up. I've removed the trackback-receiving page from the site. I know some people live and die by trackbacks, but I just can't take the spam anymore.

[Feedback has been disabled for this page because it appears to attract a lot of spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.]

Earlier I pointed out the exciting changes to Windypundit when it became Windypundit 2.0 (summary: rounded corners).

Now I bring you the next step: AJAX. That's right, the hottest new trend in web site technology. The Windypundit page now makes background queries back to the Windypundit server to update its content.

In keeping with the dedication to usability and customer service that brought you rounded corners, I now bring you live AIM status. The box on the upper right (yes, the white one with the nice rounded corners) displays my AIM user ID and status if I'm available. You can then click it to reach me in AIM. If I'm not available, it shows nothing. But best of all, if I change status, the display changes without having to refresh the page. All through the magic of asynchronous HTTP queries.

Don't believe me? Just watch that box for a while until it changes. It shouldn't be too long, because I change my AIM status 2 or 3 times every day. Be careful not to miss it.

Item 1: One of the things bouncing around the libertarian blogosphere is Radley Balko's recent whitepaper for the Cato Institute called Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America. It's about the absurd creation of SWAT-style teams for seemingly even the smallest towns. These teams often create violent confrontations where they appear not to have been necessary, often raid the wrong house, and occasionally kill innocent people.

Item 2: The Insurance Corporation of British Columbia has created a series of CounterAttack TV anti-drunk-driving ads, each of which ends with the death of the spokesperson in a violent collision, presumably caused by a drunk driver.

Does anybody else besides me think that the Cato Institute (or some other libertarian think tank) should be producing anti-paramilitary-police ads in which the spokesperson is killed in a botched SWAT-style raid?

Update: I've changed "SWAT" to "SWAT-style" because a lot of these teams aren't really in the mold of the original SWAT concept of a highly-trained specialized team.

The rain always wins.

Ripley is a curious and active cat, except when it rains. Then he retreats to the only room in the house that doesn't have windows, the main bathroom, and hides behind the door. Because, you know, there's water falling from the sky!

Here he is during yesterday's downpour. We put down a pad for him behind the door because we figure the tile is cold.

Larger ImageRipley Hiding From the Rain

Windypundit is now Windypundit 2.0.

"Web 2.0" is the big buzzword going around the web these days. There are lots of discussions of what constitutes a Web 2.0 site—interactivity, interoperation, customization, Ajax, user-designed content, blogging, social networking, syndication, wikis...the list goes on and on—and the web business bigshots are all picking sides and trying to win the battle to define what is really Web 2.0.

In upgrading Windypundit to Windypundit 2.0, I've done extensive research on sites that are widely acclaimed to be Web 2.0 sites, and I've discovered the following list of critical Web 2.0 features:

• Rounded Corners

As you can see I've added panels with rounded corners to the right-hand sidebar. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

As an extra bonus Web 2.0 feature, I've also added drop-shadows to all the photographs I took myself.

(Some sites have drop shadows on rounded corners, but that exceeds my research budget. If enough people hit the tip jar, I just might try to implement it. Go ahead. You know you want it.)

Rounded corners and drop shadows. Just one more way I'm keeping Windypundit at the leading edge of Web trendiness.

Want to help me out at no cost to you? Read on.

I buy most of my photographic equipment from Adorama Camera.

Their site is well-organized and easy to search. For example, check out this page on 35mm & Digital SLR lenses (the link might be broken if you're looking at this article in my archives). As I type this, it shows 708 lenses.

You can choose to filter the lenses by manufacturer, digital/film, focal length, and style of lens mount. The filter choices are pretty flexible, in that you don't just drill down by manufacture; instead, you select as many manufactures as you want to see. You can also select from several different filter categories at the same time. For example, you can choose to see all macro or fisheye lenses made by Sigma and Tamron for the Nikon lens mount. The query finds 8 of them.

The adorama site has a good checkout process and provides detailed tracking information. They also have excellent customer service if you have questions about an order.

I mention all this because I just signed up for the Adorama affiliates program. If you click the Adorama banner at the top of this article or any other Adorama banner on this page (there's one in the left-hand column right now) I get a piece of the action if you buy something from following that link.

(It's a tiny percentage, but if only a few people decide to buy a Linhof Kardan Master GTL 4x5 view camera, Windypundit will cover its hosting costs for the year!)

So, check out Adorama and see if you can find what you want. Shop around. Compare prices. If you like what you see at Adorama, click through to them from my site and place your order.

I'd certainly appreciate it. Thanks.

In communist countries, the leaders like to pretend the revolution is still going on, that they're still standing up for the little guy. Twenty or thirty years after the revolution is over, the powers-that-be like to pretend they are still revolutionary leaders rather than, well, the powers-that-be.

In that spirit, meet Senator John McCain, who still likes to pretend he's a Washington outsider.

Here's the background image for my MySpace page:

Larger Image

A lot of folks around here, such as Marathon Pundit and Ferdy, are posting in support of Israel's incursion into Lebanon to suppress Hezbollah forces there.

Well, if you folks want to give them some concrete Chicago-style assistance, don't forget you can send them a pizza.

What a world.

I heard some radio talk show host discussing the idea of sending a delegation of former Presidents of the United States to try to get Israel to settle down. I have no considered opinion on the matter, but I was rather peeved that the guy kept referring to "President Clinton." Bill Clinton is not the President anymore, and people technically shouldn't be using the title.

You may have heard of Senators and Governors being called by those titles long after they are out of office, and that's okay. They are allowed to keep the honor of the title for holding the office. But the rules are different for the President (and the Vice-President).

The general rule—established by Thomas Jefferson, I believe—is that official titles which are only held by one person at a time should not be used after the person leaves office. Note that it's the title, not the office, that has to be unique. There's only one Governor of Illinois, but there are many people with the title of Governor. There are also a lot of Senators, but there's only one President.

There's also only one Vice President, so he loses the title too when he leaves. I'm not sure about the Chief Justice of the Supreme court.

So what should Bill Clinton be called? (Please don't go there.) The answer is that he reverts to his previous title, which is the highest title he held before becoming President. Ex-President Bill Clinton is now Governor Clinton.

Jimmy Carter is also still properly referred to as Governor Carter.

As for George Bush Senior, well, he's now back to being Ambassador Bush.

It's not that important, and I don't know why this bothers me, but does.

[Day 1 was here]

On Saturday a few of the Ogmeet 2006 crowd went shooting, but I didn't get any pictures from that. 9-frickin'-am on a Saturday morning is way too damned early for me. By the time I got going, it was way too late.

I did make it to Klas for dinner, though.

Larger ImageKlas

It was mostly just dinner and conversation, and not really a picture-taking event. I did get a somewhat nicer picture of Leslie:

Larger ImageLeslie

And here's Zonker from Thunder and Roses and Tammi from Tammi's World (that's Tammi on the right):

Larger ImageZonker and Tammi

I didn't get to talk to these next two guys much, but here's Biloxi from The Republic of Biloxi and That 1 Guy (a.k.a. Beerbrains Joe) from Drunken Wisdom:

Larger ImageBiloxi

Larger ImageThat 1 Guy

Finally, here's the whole gang. Og, without whom none of this would have been necessary, didn't want his picture taken, so I've only got this shot of his back (in the black shirt).

Larger ImageOgmeet 2006

The photo gallery is here.

I took the What Famous Leader Are You test. I don't like the result.

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Crap! You know, I'm pretty sure I've never built death camps or invaded France. I'd remember something like that.

Sure I'd like to crush my enemies. Who wouldn't? But really, when it comes to racial issues, I am very, very progressive...

Stupid test.

So then I slightly lowered my answers to the questions "I focus on my fantasies more than reality" and "I am on guard most of the time." Now I get this:

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

From Hitler to Lincoln in only two changed answers. I think the test is a little bit too sensitive...

(Hat tip: Blonde Justicee)

Friday was the first day of Ogmeet 2006, a.k.a. the Midwest Blogmeet, put together by Og and Omnibus Driver. Yesterday we just met at the Stonewood Ale House in Schaumberg around 6-ish for drinks and dinner.

Larger ImageOgmeet 2006, Day 1

Naturally, I took a few pictures.

Here's Leslie, who seems to have done much of the organizational heavy lifting:

Larger ImageOmnibus Driver

And Bruce the Human Pet from Conservative Cat:

Larger ImageBruce the Human Pet

Update: Got time to add some more pictures. I'm terrible at matching names and faces. I hope I got these right.

Here's Mr Right of The Right Place and a companion whom I can only assume is Mrs Right:

Larger ImageMr and Mrs(?) Right

Here's Grant Crowell from Grantastic Designs. He's not really a blogger, but he's preparing a documentary about Ward Churchill and it doesn't sound like it's going to be very flattering.

Larger ImageGrant Crowell

(He noticed me taking the picture and was trying to look thoughtful.)

Finally, here's JimmyB from The Conservative UAW Guy:

Larger ImageJimmyB

The rest of the pictures (not many) are in my Ogmeet 2006 gallery. Or just view the slideshow.

(Please link to this post, which has a permalink, rather than directly to the galleries, which could change.)

Update: Day 2 is up.

Apparently, Chicago is on the brink of passing a "living wage" ordinance that would require large big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Target to pay employees a minimum salary of $10 per hour with an additional $3 per hour going toward benefits.

One of the biggest problems with the "living wage" idea is that the Chicago City Council can't actually make the big-box retailers pay a higher wage. All it can do is prevent them from paying low wages. Retailers will then have to choose between paying higher wages and paying no wages at all.

Target and Wal-Mart have already responded with threats to pull out of the Chicago market. Home Depot is expected to follow suit.

"Wal-Mart and Target could pay their people a living wage. Then we wouldn't have this problem, and people could actually live on the money they made," [Ald. Leslie] Hairston said.

First of all, not everybody wants to live off their wages. A lot of people are working only to supplement their income.

Second, nobody is forcing people to work at Wal-Mart. They can quit and look for another job any time they want. If the local job market makes that hard, it's not Wal-Mart's fault.

Fortunately, Mayor Daley is trying to put a stop to this bad idea before the City Council scares away the dozens of big-box stores planning to open in Chicago in the next few years. Thousands of jobs depend on the City making the right decision.

Here's some really bad AOL customer service. I've had sales people treat me like that.

[This is a followup to Part 1, and Part 2.]

Charles B. Fruit, the Chairman of the National Kidney Foundation recently got a couple of letters published declaring his opposition to paying for kidneys. Both of them are worth reading, if only to see how pathetic the arguments are.

The first note was printed in the Wall Street Journal:

Rather than retreating from Mr. Epstein's dismissal, the National Kidney Foundation and I stand proudly, not only to endorse last month's Institute of Medicine report on organ donation, but to count ourselves among the millions of other "high-minded moralists" who oppose treating life-saving organs as commodities. There is a reason why Congress, through the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, wisely prohibited any "valuable consideration" -- including financial transaction -- to acquire, receive or transfer organs. Families decide to donate the organs of a loved one for altruistic reasons. Payment is an affront to those who have already donated,

Stop right there! This is probably the stupidest argument against organ markets ever.

First of all, a usage note: An affront is a deliberate offense. Clearly, nobody is trying to intentionally offend organ donors.

Second, this "affront" sounds an awful lot like envy. If hospitals started paying for organs, I can see where people who had recently given them away for free would be angry. But if it were me, I wouldn't be angry that people were being paid, I'd be angry that I'd been ripped off!

The best reason for allowing payments for organs is to increase the number of donated organs, therefore saving lives. There may be good and moral reasons why that is not a trade-off we should make, but keeping people from being offended isn't one of them.

Besides, why should we care if those who have already donated are offended? It's not like they can take the organs back.

and evidence from a national poll indicates it may prove similarly offensive to future donors as well. The National Survey of Organ Donation (Wells, 2005) found that 10.8% of those polled would be less likely to grant consent for the organs of a deceased family member to be used for transplant if they were offered payment. And 68.2% said they would be neither more nor less likely to grant consent.

Those numbers add up to 79%. What about the other 21%? What did they have to say? The only remaining option seems to be "more likely." I can't find the National Survey of Organ Donation online, so I can't check.

If we give Fruit the benefit of the doubt and assume the omitted numbers don't invalidate his evidence, then this is a much better argument than the first one. If paying people would actually reduce the organ supply, then of course we shouldn't pay people.

But I don't believe it for a moment.

If paying people to donate organs makes them less likely to donate organs, it would be a shocking exception to the usual economic rules. In every other human activity, paying people makes them more likely to do what you're paying them to do.

Just because something is altruistic doesn't mean you can count on people doing it for free. We pay firefighters, don't we? Sure, there are also volunteer firefighters, but most of those are in small towns. That's the equivalent of kidney donors who give to their sick friends. In a large city, you have to pay people if you want them to bear that amount of hardship for strangers.

What about all those people who answered the poll and said payment would make no difference? They're lying. Nobody wants to admit they'd sell their family members' organs. It does sound unseemly, after all, especially with people like Charles Fruit going around badmouthing the idea. Of course they didn't want to admit it. After all, this was just a poll. If you want to find out what people will really do, you have to put some money on the table.

Few people take on difficult tasks solely for the internal feel-good reward. Priests are following a religious calling, yet the churches have to pay. Soldiers are patriots defending their country, yet the country has to pay. Doctors are paid to heal the sick, yet the sick have to pay. Organ donors heal the sick too, so why shouldn't they get paid?

Overall, Mr. Epstein calls for "a sensible, above-board, functional organ market" where "price should be determined by supply and demand." We moralists can only pray that his proposed market mechanism for the transaction of hearts, lungs, kidneys and other life-saving human organs would work a little better than it does for the nation's consumers of gasoline.

More stupidity. The national gasoline markets work very well, especially when idiot politicians leave them alone. Sure, people are complaining about the price of gasoline, but what they're not complaining about is a shortage of gasoline. The gas may cost more, but there's still plenty of it.

Here's a thought experiment for you: Go fill your car with gas right now. Even if you are reading this in the middle of the night, you could probably have your tank full within half an hour. For some people, it might be twice as long; for me, it's ten minutes.

The median wait for a kidney is three years. That's long enough to build an entire gas station. I think this is a clear win for market efficiency.

The second letter, published in the New York Times, repeats the polling data from the first one, and then goes on to conclude:

A wholesale sellout to the law of supply and demand is not the answer.

The "law of supply and demand" is a scientific law, like the "law of gravity." Unlike manmade laws, which are prescriptions for desired behavior, scientific laws are descriptions of observed behavior. The law of supply and demand is a description of what happens, not of what we'd like to happen.

The science of economics is softer than the science of physics, but not so soft that we can ignore its laws just because we want to. The supply of transplantable kidneys is subject to economic laws whether we want them to be or not, and right now the law of supply and demand is killing people who need kidneys.

In the United States, about 20,000 people need a kidney transplant every year. About 7,000 kidneys can be taken from people who donate their organs when they die, so only 13,000 kidneys have to come from living donors. In other words, the demand for kidneys is 13,000 per year.

Every year in this country, four million people turn 18. Nearly all of those people have two kidneys but really need only one to survive and live a normal life. That means we have a potential supply of four million spare kidneys every year. To meet the demand for 13,000 kidneys, we only need a little more than 3 in every thousand people to donate a kidney.

However, because organs cannot be sold, the price of a kidney is effectively set at zero dollars. At that price, only slightly more than 2 people per thousand decide to donate kidneys. That means the supply is only about 9,000 kidneys per year. The other four thousand people who need kidneys can't get them. So they die.

Maybe we should sell out to the law of supply and demand just a little, because right now it's kicking our ass.

I took my camera to the Taste of Chicago festival a few days ago. I didn't get a lot of pictures, but I did get to try out the high-speed shooting mode of my Nikon D200:

It's been a while since I did any catblogging. However, I just ordered an expensive piece of camera equipment, so I figure I need to stay on my wife's good side.

Here are four rather nice views of our Buffy cat:

Larger ImageBuffy In Charge

Larger ImageBuffy the Lioness

Larger ImageBuffy Sleeping Hard

Larger ImageBuffy Up Close

Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Jerusalem have found common ground at last:

Even as the ties between Palestinian and Israeli politicians strained against the current crises in Gaza, religious officials from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities united Tuesday to oppose a gay pride parade in Jerusalem.

More than 50 prominent religious figures visited the Knesset's Interior Committee to urge MKs to stop the World Pride event, scheduled to take place in Jerusalem next month. Several right-wing religious MKs brought the coalition to the Knesset, asserting that "never before has the Holy Land seen such a union of religious leaders."

Of course, this being the middle east, everybody talks tough:

"I promise there's going to be bloodshed - not just on that day, but for months afterward," declared New York Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a representative of the Rabbinical Alliance of America.

...

"If gays will dare approach the Temple Mount during the parade, they will do so over our dead bodies," said MK Ibrahim Sarsur (United Arab List- Ta'al).

The Christians are keeping their response a bit cooler:

Last week, Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar wrote to Pope Benedict XVI asking for the church to issue an official condemnation. While the pope has not commented on the event, an ambassador from the Vatican told the committee that "as a representative of the Holy See to Israel, I believe... holding this event would contradict the sacred nature of Jerusalem."

And then there's this bit of wisdom, worthy of one of our own fine legislators:

MK Ibrahim Sarsur (United Arab List) told the committee that "these types of problems" don't exist in Muslim society. "Every man has the right to do what he pleases, but not if it offends others," he said.

I'm offended by that.

But there's a silver lining. Mideast peace at last:

MK Moshe Gafni of United Torah Judaism promised that if organizers of the World Pride parade agreed to hold the march elsewhere, he would utilize the new coalition of Jewish, Muslim and Christian officials to promote peace and brotherhood in Israel.

Sometimes I think the people of the Mideast deserve each other.

(Hat tip: Hit & Run)

I just received a comment to my Soggy Computers article that I wrote almost two years ago. Usually comments on something that old are pure spam—the spammers are hoping I won't notice comments on the old stuff—but I'm not so sure about this one. The message, in its entirety, is

Sorry for this

That's it. No links of any kind.

A friend and I spent about an hour and a half driving around the neighborhood last night, grabbing pictures of some of the fireworks going off. We stayed away from the professional shows and just found groups setting stuff off in the parks or right outside their houses.

Here's one at Portage Park:

Larger ImagePortage Park Pavillion

Here's another from Portage Park, a little low this time:

Larger ImageLow Blast at Portage Park

Over at Chopin Park, on the other hand, some of the action was too high:

Larger ImageChopin Park, Too High

This one turned out a little better:

Larger ImageChopin Park

Here's a close-up of the launchpad action:

Larger ImageLaunch Pad at Chopin Park

These people were just setting off stuff outside their home:

Larger ImageNeighbors With Cool Stuff

Just down the street another group was setting off some starburts one at a time. They shot up so far that I couldn't keep the launchpad in the scene:

Larger ImageNeighbors With Big Stuff

William Shatner's tribute to George Lucas. This is why I have broadband.

(Hat tip: The Volokh Conspiracy)