It's been interesting reading conservatives over at the Lonestar Times beginning to embrace the candidacy of Kinky Friedman, though not surprising. Astonishingly, in the four candidates for the Governor of Texas, conservatives don't actually have a whole lot of options. They have a lousy governor, a comptroller that has been a thorn in the side of the party, a Democrat, and of course Kinky.

Nor that the establishment left has begun to take aim at him. Every vote for Kinky is one that Democratic nominee Chris Bell would have a pretty good chance at getting.

What surprises me most is how many liberals seem to be unwavering in their support for the eccentric Jewish cowboy. The number of Kinky bumper stickers I've seen out here outstrips all other candidates combined by a factor of ten.

This is a serious election, people. This is not a case of an invincible or doomed incumbent. It's the story of an unpopular governor that is about to get re-elected at least in part because a large number of would-be detractors are wasting their time with someone that wants to name Willie Nelson as their energy czar. Whatever chance Kinky had of being the Jesse Ventura of the race ended when the pox-on-both-houses vote was itself divided by Carole Keeton Strayhorn's entrance as an independent.

Meanwhile, I have yet to hear what is so wrong (from a Democrat POV) with Chris Bell, the guy that's actually a Democrat. The main argument against Bell is that he can't win. To the extent that's true, it's at least in part because Democrats have refused to back him, opting instead for Strayhorn or Friedman. If Chris Bell were ideologically unpalatable I'd understand, but he's more consistantly liberal than Friedman*. If Friedman honestly, seriously had a better chance at getting elected I would understand that, too. But the biggest obstacle Bell faces is Friedman... and the second, the rightward tilt of the state, is a problem that Friedman shares.

Six years ago, enough liberals rallied around Nader to keep Gore from conclusively winning Florida. They've been kicking themselves for it ever since as 'sticking it to the man' ultimately cost them a lot of ground on a lot of issues they held dear. It would behoove liberals not to repeat that mistake. I appreciate what they did in 2000, don't get me wrong, but this is one Republican I would quite like to see lose, dangit.

This whole election manages to reinforce my belief that political belief and action is derived as much from self-image as it is the an evaluation of the issues and a desire to enact change.

I am against the establishment, therefore I will vote for the anti-establishment candidate. To heck with everyone else.

* - In fact, Kinky has been suspiciously non-liberal in the last couple of weeks. I almost wonder if he sees the effect that he's having on the race and has decided that he needs to take more votes from Republicans and send some Democrats back to Bell.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Randy Galloway has an... interesting... take on the proliferation of NCAA powerhouse football programs scheduling impossibly weak opponents. It, like everything else, is the BCS's fault -- one suspects from reading it that he would blame athletes getting pulled over with pot and guns in their car on the BCS.

Included within the article is this tidbit:

"As a coach, my theory was that a tough schedule in September made you double tough in November," [Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association and former Baylor coach] added. "But those were different times. I remember one season in the '80s when we had one loss but went into our last game having to win to get the Southwest Conference bid to the Cotton Bowl.

"If we lose it, we don't go to a bowl at all. Now, there are six-win teams eligible for bowls."

Accurate, but so what?

If the above hypercompetitive atmosphere in the way things used to be is good, then the BCS is much better than a playoff system. In the old system, if you didn't win a conference you didn't get into the desired (or maybe any) bowl game. In the BCS system, if you don't win a conference you probably don't get into the desire bowl game. Yes, you get to go to the Cheese & Ham Bowl or whatever, but if the existence of small bowls is the problem, that can easily be addressed within the current system. It has very little to do with a playoff structure at all. In fact, the move comprehensive the playoff structure (ie the more teams included), the less each game matters. The less comprehensive the playoff structure, the less it alleviates the problem that Galloway supposedly devoted the column to solving: if the choice is between an 8-game bowl system or an 8-game playoff system, the main issue with both is how those teams are chosen, and each game will continue to matter quite a bit and coaches will be less inclined to schedule tough games.

If, on the other hand, Galloway was attempting to present the way things were as something undesirable, then why did he use the same guy as a hammer on the subject of a 12th game?

And in either case, there really is no reason to bring it up except to try to suggest that any system, which requires more than two paragraphs to establish.

And then he proceeds to write something that is patently false:

Go 4-0, then plow through eight foes in a weak, weak Big 12, and no matter how many other undefeated teams in the land, the 'Horns would have been 12-0 and back in the "title" game in January.

Texas very likely would have been the odd man out if there had been even just a third undefeated (BCS) team. There was talk about this mid-season, in fact. And that was with Ohio State and Arkansas. Replace those two with Ohio and Arkansas State and it would have been hopeless indeed. They certainly would have been allowed into a playoff system, though.

Overhauling the system wouldn't do a lick of good if the same teams left out of the BCS bowls are also left out of the playoffs (in the case of an 8-team playoff) and in fact it would exacerbate them. The degree to which a team would be upset to be left out of the playoffs would dwarf the degree to which they are upset to be going to the Sun Bowl instead of the Fiesta Bowl. Which would drive coaches to be more cautious and not less. Which would mean more rollover opponents scheduled.

Of course, a 16 or 32-team playoff system could remedy the problem by telling a team that they can schedule a big game and afford to lose it because so many teams are included. But that also makes every other game somewhat less important, too. There's a big difference between playing week in and week out to keep your national championship hopes alive and playing week in and week out for seeding. There is a tradeoff involved here. I personally don't believe so, but maybe it's a tradeoff worth making. Maybe not. But even if it is, it is a very imprecise solution.

Whether it's a playoff system or a bowl system like the BCS, the issue at hand is how teams are ranked. The precise solution would be to change that. This is, ironically, something within the control of the people complaining about it in the article: Mack Brown, Bob Stoops, and Mike Leach. If they want teams to stop being rewarded for baking cupcake teams, then they should penalize those teams in the polls. In fact, collectively they have more control over this than anyone (tied with those that do the other poll that goes in to the formula).

Though imperfect, I prefer the BCS system to any of the proposed bowl systems I have heard thus far. I am, however, willing to entertain the idea of a playoff system if it is well done. I have at least one idea in mind that I would accept quite gracefully. But if Galloway wants to convince me that the BCS system is bad, bad, bad and that it causes this problem and a playoff system would fix it he's going to have to do better than this bad, bad, bad column.

My results on the Moral Politics quiz:

Your scored 2 on the Moral Order axis and 0.5 on the Moral Rules axis.

Matches

The following items best match your score:

1. System: Authoritarianism
2. Variation: Moderate Authoritarianism
3. Ideologies: Social Republicanism
4. US Parties: No match.
5. Presidents: Gerald Ford (82.18%)
6. 2004 Election Candidates: John Kerry (75.29%), George W. Bush (72.31%), Ralph Nader (64.58%)

Statistics

Of the 229006 people who took the test:

1. 0.5% had the same score as you.
2. 36.2% were above you on the chart.
3. 52.2% were below you on the chart.
4. 14.3% were to your right on the chart.
5. 77.5% were to your left on the chart.

... but kind of funny considering what I just posted.

You Are a "Don't Tread On Me" Libertarian

You distrust the government, are fiercely independent, and don't belong in either party. Religion and politics should never mix, in your opinion... and you feel opressed by both. You don't want the government to cramp your self made style. Or anyone else's for that matter. You're proud to say that you're pro-choice on absolutely everything!

A guy by the name of Jason Fortuny put up a provocative woman's picture on Cragslist's risque personals section and pretended to want to play slave to someone else's master to see what kind of response he could get. Within 24 hours he got "178 responses, with 145 photos of men in various states of undress." Fortuny then took the emails, which included real names, phone numbers, and email addresses (with employer's names) and put them on another side (that doesn't appear to be working at the moment).

This brought an emphatic condemnation from Wired's Ryan Singel:

These aren't prominent people, there weren't breaking the law and there's no news value in posting their identifying information. There'd hardly be any value in posting the stuff even with the information removed and faces blurred on the photos, but there might be some -- if only as a warning to naive people.

And I hope Fortuny does get sued.

At first I thought of this "prank" as frat boy boorishness, but its worse than that.

It's sociopathic.

My sympathies to the guys who responded and take note -- any of you out there -- anything you divulge over email can come back to haunt you, even when divulging that information is illegal.

Then, in response to various comments supportive of Fortuny's actions, he wrote:

As Fortuny shows, it may be practically so, but that lack of knowledge does not obviate these persons' legal rights.

While I'm not a big fan of guys into dominating women (it's rather retrograde for my taste), the only truly pathetic individuals involved in this whole debacle are Fortuny and his supporters who get off on their own righteousness.

This was not like a legal sting.

None of these people are violating any law.

No journalist would ever pull a stunt like this, because exposing the private lives of private persons, in absence of any justifiable public interest, is both unethical and a clear violation of the law.

If Fortuny wanted to show the world that there's a lot of guys willing to, not so smartly, email pictures of their members to a woman who wants to be dominated, Fortuny could have easily obfuscated phone numbers, email addresses and identifying pictures.

That wasn't his point.

The point of the whole 'prank' was to shame and humiliate other people and to let Fortuny and his LiveJournal hangers-on feel intellectually and morally superior -- e.g. the victims are 'perverts' who aren't smart enough to know how use the internet anonymously.

I won't speak to Fortuny's motives, which appear to be as banal and narcissistic as Singel suggests. Nor will I speak on the legality of Fortuny's actions, as I will let the state of Washington figure that out. And, to be honest, I'm not that concerned with the behavior of those targetted except to the extent that they are married. Abstractly, what interests me in this is Singel's repetition that what's important here is that the emailers were not breaking any laws and his suggestion that one type of legal behavior is just as valid as another.

One of the tenets of libertarianism and social liberalism in general is that liberty is not license. It is not right to pass laws against certain behavior simply because you don't find them acceptable. And just because somebody can do something doesn't mean that they should or should.

The problem with this idea, as attractive as it is, is that it quickly breaks down when things do become decriminialized. When facing social consequences for one's actions, "I wasn't breaking any laws" becomes an oft-used defense. Largely, the same people that want to de-criminalize various activity are the quickest to denounce judgmentalism from a purely moralistic standpoint.

Which is exactly the opposite of the way it should be. Social libertarianism requires more, not less, judgmentalism. For libertarianism to sustain, it requires not only that man regulate his own behavior, but also regulate the behavior of others by whatever the law permits.

In some ways the most disappointing aspect of this (aside from the possible illegality of it) whole this is that it was thought up by a self-proclaimed provocateur. This is the sort of thing that social conservatives ought to be doing. The quickest way to shut down a new porn store is with a camera, access to DMV records, and smart press. Once people start hearing about their actions being relaid to their spouses or even parents, few would risk their comfort by frequenting it.

I believe firmly that it is the government's responsibility to protect our privacy from the government, but protecting our privacy, in public places, is nowhere in the contract. People that frequent the merchants of immorality depend not only on freedom from the law, but freedom from consequence. It's not society's job to preserve immoral behavior through the lies and deceptions of the actors.

In the comment section of my previous post on housing, my friend Linus speculates on whether or not his area (Jackson, WY) is in a bubble:

Whether or not people think there's a housing bubble, I've noticed that the vast majority of people think it won't hit their area. I've always thought that a place like Jackson Hole will be somewhat safe because, questionable loans or not, demand for housing here will never really decrease. You think that Houston will be fine because fewer people are signing bad mortgages there.

My friend Keith and I both find ourselves in rental situations because we truly can't afford houses in the valley and can't fathom commuting 50 miles over a mountain pass every day. We've both calculated it out and it makes more sense for us to rent unless we were planning on staying for at least 7 years (maybe more with talk of a slowdown in appreciation).

Bubbles usually occur on the backs of investors. These investors may be developers that are building neighborhoods or people hoping to flip houses for a quick buck. In the latter case, people holding on to a house that they don't wish to live in do wish to make as much money off of it as they can before they sell it. So what do they do? They rent it out. So what can you expect to see in cities with abnormally large numbers of investment properties? Houses and condos for rent and a lot of them. Since in this case supply (of houses and condos for rent) does not have much to do with demand (for rented lodging), and making money is not the primary motive and therefore they can be rented out at a loss, you can expect places these places -- with a large percentage of investment properties and an excess of rentable lodging -- to have comparatively low rent.

We would figure that rent in Los Angeles would be anything but cheap, but if a housing bubble exists there then it should be artificially low. So how can you determine whether rent is lower or higher than it should be? We compare it against markets in which we can be relatively sure there is no housing bubble. If we compare the cost-of-living differential of owning compared to renting, we should be able to determine whether or not housing prices are artificially high.

Lukckilly, there are tools that can tell you cost of living differences for owning and renting between two cities. I chose Casper, Wyoming, and Tyler, Texas as two places that it is unlikely that any significant bubble exists. None of the three are experiencing tremendous growth (Tyler grew 16% between 1990 and 2000, Casper grew 8%, and Lake Charles grew 9%), none have significant renter-friendly college populations, and none are near enough to a growing metropolis to be feeding off of that growth.

Keep in mind that we're looking at relative values here. There are a lot of other factors that go in to the cost of living, but those factors are controlled because they are the same for owning or renting. However, the actual differences (either in dollar amount or percentages) don't tell us anything about the relative housing markets between the cities themselves. Also remember that the higher the x or y value, the cheaper it is to rent/buy in the city we're testing.

Cities that I'm testing: Houston (where I'm from), Austin (where I'm living), El Paso (generally regarded as an undervalued housing market), Seattle (generally regarded as a likely bubble), and Los Angeles (ditto).

With the exception of Austin, the cities went almost exactly how you would expect given the hypothesis. The changes were more drastic than I would have even figured.

• The order from most likely to least likely to be a bubble based on buyer/renter cost ratios was: Los Angeles, Seattle, Las Vegas, Austin, Phoenix, Houston, Denver, and El Paso.
• The difference between buying and renting in Los Angeles is night and day. If you rent, cost of living in Los Angeles is actually cheaper than that in Tyler.
• There were significant renter discounts in Seattle and Las Vegas, as well, but they were less pronounced.
• Austin came down in favor of renting rather than buying against all three though I would have figured that it would be more pronounced than it was.
• The most puzzling of the results were Phoenix and Denver. Both had a rather high proportion of bad loans and should thus be renter-friendly rather than this close to the middle. So those markets aren't in nearly as much danger as I had thought or they are exceptions to this general rule for some reason.
• Houston was the only one with mixed results. The differential ran in favor of renting compared to Lake Charles and Tyler, but more heavily in favor of buying compared to Casper.
• As expected, El Paso is very buyer-friendly. I actually have to wonder what makes El Paso so much less desirable for investors than Tuscon
• Originally I was only going to use Jefferson City, Missouri for the comparison, but Jefferson City was so skewed in favor of buying it wasn't helpful. When I got the results comparing Tyler and Los Angeles, I was so suspicious that I decided to run three cities. The results were pretty consistent.

Unfortunately, the specific numbers (that I spent over an hour collecting) were accidentally erased due to some limitations between Nucleus and the webhost settings and my own carelessness in not accounting for said limitations. I need to start using w.bloggar again whenever I'm typing a longer post. You're free to toy around with the calculator and retrieve them for yourself, though.

Tucked away in an article about oral sex is the following:

Now, this is a glib explanation. A real economist would want a tighter hypothesis and serious data to back it up. That economist might well be Thomas Stratmann, who, with law professor Jonathan Klick, has pushed the idea of the rational teenage sex drive. Their hypothesis is that if teenagers really did think about the consequences of their actions, they would have less risky sex if the cost of risky sex went up. They discovered a very specific source of that higher risk: "In some states, there are abortion-notification or -consent laws, which mean that teenagers can't get an abortion without at least one parent being informed or giving consent." If teenagers are rational, such laws would discourage risky sex among teens, relative to adults.

Klick and Stratmann claim to have found evidence of exactly this. Wherever and whenever abortion-notification laws have been passed, gonorrhoea rates in the teenage and adult populations start to diverge. When it becomes more troublesome to get an abortion, teenagers seem to cut back on unprotected sex.

So... decreased availability of abortions leads to more cautious behavior?

I swear that I've heard that argument before, but if I recall it is a position only advanced by backward-looking, science-hating troglodytes.

Seriously, of all the arguments in favor of abortion-availability, I've always considered the notion that you can't alter behavior by restricting possible remedies from the repercussions to be among the sillier of them.

That's not to say that abortion should necessarily be illegal because it will keep young people from having sex because it won't. The same argument could be made for condoms and The Pill and I support the availability of both. But in the abstract, I am amazed not only at the number of people that believe that the number of kids that will have sex need abortions is finite and unaffected by its availability and how they look at me like I'm brainwashed by my political allies when I suggest that's not the case.

I also got a kick out of the closer:

The rest of us may be wondering what to make of it all. On the one hand, good news: Teenagers are finding safer ways to get their kicks. On the other, it suggests that teenagers believe one of the most serious consequences of an unwanted pregnancy is that their parents will find out. If teenagers are avoiding unsafe sex, it may not be for the best reasons.

It goes to show the fascinating hybrid of rationality (weighing unlikely but potential consequences that are heavier more heavily) and curious priorities (having to tell the parents is a bigger deal than having the abortion) of young people.

On the other hand, I can't say I care much what the reason is that young people avoid unsafe sex, as there is no real right reason for them to have the other kind.

By way of The Corner I ran across this interesting Pew survey on world attitude towards America. Here are some of the more interesting findings:

• The nation with the most positive attitudes towards America is... India, at 71%. Poland is second at 64%. Oddly, Canadians like us more (59%) than Brits do (55%). Russians actually have a more positive view than not of us, 52% to 40%.


• France and Germany give one another higher favorability than they give themselves. Germany is the most popular of the five leading nations (US, France, China, Japan, and Germany) but doesn't rate itself as being particularly popular (as opposed to Canada and France.


• The two nations with views in America that have declined the most are Indonesia (75% favorable in 2000, 38% in 2005) and Morocco (77% in 2000 to 27% in 2004).


• The French have a higher view of the American work ethic than Americans do, 89% to 84%. More Americans think Americans are greedy than Canadians think Americans are, 70% to 64%.


• More Canadians think Americans "aren't religious enough" than think American's are "too religious", 38% to 35%. Very strangely, Russians feel the same way with a greater disparity at 38% to 27%. I'm not surprised that some countries feel that we are not sufficiently religious, but I am quite surprised at those two!


• Canadians have the most positive assessment of how the world sees them. 94% of Canadians believe they are "liked" abroad. Americans have the most negative assessment at 26%.


• India is the only country that sees the United States as the foremost "land of opportunity." (or, at least, the land to live "a good life") The US has been supplanted by Australia, Canada, and Britain for the most part. The US generally continues to rate highly, though, coming in second place frequently.


• The world (outside the Middle East) has a higher opinion of Americans than of the United States. Even 64% of Frenchmen have a positive view of Americans. A lot of the anger towards the US is aimed at Bush. Only in Jordan and China are dominantly negative opinions driven more by Americans in general than "mostly" by Bush specifically.


• With a couple of exceptions, the more successful, industrialized, or developing a nation is economically, the less satisfied it seems to be. The US rates pretty poorly on satisfaction (39%), but the rest of the Anglosphere rates below 50% (Canada at 45%, Britain at 44%) and Europe even lower (France at 28%, Germany at 25%). India scores poorly, too, at 41%. No data available on Australia, which probably scores better. The two big exceptions are China (72%) and Spain (51%).


• Bush has been making an enduring effort to solidify relations with India. That India is one of the relatively few that holds America in high regard, it is either working or Bush chose a good nation to focus efforts on (as opposed to, say, France). He's been making a similar effort on Japan, so it's frustrating to see Japan excluded from most of the charts in the survey. I also would have appreciated more data on Australia, which probably has more in common with the US than any other nation.