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:

The argument is often made that although some group committed a violent aggression, they were provoked into it by an act that was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The South at Fort Sumter; the Russians in 2022; the Nazis: all those have had that argument made for them.

Usually I think of FDA restrictions as being quite adequate, even overdone. Sunscreen is an exception.

There has been a lot of nonsense talked about the new mRNA vaccines, but one objection that seems well grounded is that they can be rather rough on people. Boosters, in particular, can make people quite sick for a couple of days and occasionally even put them in the hospital. This was apparent in the trial data when it first came out, and has only been confirmed since.

This effect is understandable if you look at the way they work.

If Elon Musk’s Starship works – and there’s no reason it shouldn’t – it will expand access to space to a degree that will seem ludicrous. At present, getting into low earth orbit costs in the neighborhood of a thousand dollars per kilogram. Starship could lower that to tens of dollars per kilogram. At present, the number of launches to orbit is in the double digits per year, with the larger launchers delivering on the order of ten tons. Starship, with both stages being fully reusable, could do more flights even just using a single spacecraft; and it is so large that each flight could deliver on the order of a hundred tons. And Elon is building not just one Starship or four Starships but a factory for Starships; we saw something of its production rate when Starships were being crashed on what seemed like a monthly basis during landing tests. Multiply all those factors together, and we’re talking perhaps a thousandfold increase in launch capacity.

But what is to be done with all that capacity? Elon has been saying that the idea is to colonize Mars, but how that would pay off is not clear. Mars has a mere wisp of an atmosphere (and that mostly CO2) and very little water. The soil is actively hostile to life (that being one of the few things wrong with the movie The Martian: he couldn’t have grown his crops). Living there would have to be done inside a pressurized bubble, and would require most supplies to be transported from Earth, at least until a very substantial local economy had emerged. Even living in the most hostile desert on Earth would be far easier. For a settlement to be viable, it would have to export something to pay for all those imports – and no, Halliburton isn’t going to drill for oil there, as some clowns were imagining when Bush Jr proclaimed his Mars initiative: there probably isn’t oil on Mars, and even if there were lakes of oil on Mars, it isn’t valuable enough to pay the return freight, even at Starship rates.

But there is a different Mars that pays very well: Mars the god of war – though he can be fickle.