Keith Burgess-Jackson

From Today's Wall Street Journal

The congressional behavior noted in your articles "Congress's Travel Tab Swells" (page one, July 2) and "Lawmakers' Travel Reports Understate True Cost" (U.S. News, July 3) is truly disgusting to me and to millions of Americans, I'm sure. Many of our representatives in Congress are, at best, hypocrites and, at worst, clueless. While the economy is suffering, it is good to see that our congressmen carry on like nothing is wrong.

This should be stopped before it gets worse. Cut their $1 million administrative budgets in half, cut their salaries, allow voters to decide on future salary increases, limit terms, outlaw lobbyists and require all air travel to be on commercial airlines, citizen class.

Please publish on a quarterly basis a list of all congressional travel with names, destinations and email addresses. It is possible that we, who are paying their salaries, would like to get some travel tips on some of the exotic places they seem to "have to go." It was especially interesting to read about Rep. Bud Cramer, who after 18 years of service and with just two months left in Congress, just had to take care of business for two weeks in Europe on the public dole. Was he getting prepared for his lobbying job?

Doran Donovan
Amelia Island, Fla.

Are these the same lawmakers who demanded that bank and industry officers stop their outrageous spending of corporate money for personal travel and entertainment because their companies were in dire financial straits? Has our government recently paid off its massive debt and I didn't hear about it?

These politicians did promise change if elected, and it appears that they have fulfilled their promise by the recent tenfold increase in taxpayer-financed trips.

Lana Nusbaum
Lakewood Ranch, Fla.

Is anyone really surprised? I, too, would fly to Paris and stay in lavish hotels if someone else were paying. Who wouldn't? Why do we continue to expect government officials to spend our tax dollars wisely when they have virtually no market incentive to spend prudently. Our trillion-dollar deficit attests well enough to that.

With no real motivation to spend our tax dollars sensibly, why do we increasingly desire to turn over the most fundamental aspects of society, such as education and health care, to government control?

Caitlin McLean
Raleigh, N.C.

Note from KBJ: The letters in today's New York Times were so stupid, pointless, or boring that I had to get some from the Wall Street Journal!

Cycling

Here is a New York Times story about today's stage of the Tour de France, which I watched live on Versus starting at 7:00 this morning. The reporter makes it seem as though Lance Armstrong couldn't stay with his teammate Alberto Contador on the final climb. We don't know that. Armstrong said after the stage that he played the good teammate. This means (or implies) that he could have stayed with Contador, or ridden up to him, but chose not to, for the sake of the team. Had Armstrong ridden up to Contador after the latter's attack, Armstrong would have taken other contenders with him, which would have nullified Contador's effort. It was perfectly acceptable for Armstrong to stay on the wheel of those chasing Contador, but he couldn't help them. You don't chase down your teammate(s).

I have never liked it that Armstrong and Contador are on the same team. It complicates things immensely. Suppose they were on different teams today. When Contador attacked, Armstrong would have been able to chase him. If he couldn't, then that would show that Contador is stronger. But all we know about today's events is that Contador attacked first, not that he is stronger. Had Armstrong attacked precisely when Contador did, it would have been Contador, rather than Armstrong, who stayed behind for the sake of the team. The same thing happened a year ago on L'Alpe d'Huez, when Carlos Sastre attacked early in the climb. This prevented his teammates, Andy and Frank Schleck, from trying to stay with him. If I remember correctly, the Schlecks were surprised that Sastre attacked so early. They planned to attack themselves later in the climb. Do you see how one teammate can screw another?

I sense that Armstrong was upset by Contador's attack. You could hear it in his voice during the post-race interview. The mere fact that Armstrong mentioned that he was being a good teammate indicates that he wants the world to know that he could have stayed with Contador had he wanted to. It's possible that the team's plan was for everyone to stay together on the climb, trying to ride rivals off their wheels. If this is so, then Armstrong will get his revenge on Contador. The next time they are together on a climb, it'll be Armstrong who attacks, and it will be merciless. This will force Contador to be the good teammate, as Armstrong was today, and allow Armstrong to take time out of everyone. When Armstrong takes time out of everyone, it won't be 21 seconds. It will be minutes.

Addendum: The New York Times story has been updated and rewritten since I wrote the post. Here are several paragraphs from the revised story:

Armstrong fell to third, eight seconds behind Nocentini. After the stage, he was nearly crushed by a mass of reporters who surrounded him. “Step back!” he had to yell several times, as he tried to answer questions, many of which focused on Contador. Armstrong said he was “a bit surprised” that Contador had taken off when he did.

“Like I said yesterday, I expected him to assert himself in the race, and he did that,” Armstrong said.

“Things didn’t go according to the plan we had set out earlier, but it didn’t matter,” he added, not long before chugging an entire can of grapefruit drink. “It was a fine day over all.”

Armstrong and his teammates, including Levi Leipheimer, had been out front of the peloton nearly all day, with Contador riding just behind Armstrong for a chunk of the ride. When Evans attacked with about a mile to go, it was Armstrong—jersey zipped open and mouth agape—who reeled him in.

In the team car behind them was Astana’s team leader, Johan Bruyneel, who said the team’s plan was uncomplicated: to keep its rivals at bay. Contador’s late-race attack, however, was not as scripted, Bruyneel said, adding that he was getting no information about the move on television or his race radio.

“The only thing I said this morning was you guys sit and talk about the day, and I think that’s what they did, then Alberto went,” Bruyneel said of Contador’s attack. “It was really something that they decided.”

Armstrong is quoted as saying that he was "surprised" by Contador's attack and that things didn't go according to plan. Team manager Johan Bruyneel is quoted as saying that Contador's attack was "not as scripted." What this tells me is that Contador tried to screw Armstrong. Contador knew that if he attacked, Armstrong would not be able to follow him—because of team loyalty. This is bound to infuriate Armstrong. On the next mountaintop finish (a week from Sunday), Armstrong will get his revenge. Mark my words. He will attack early on the final climb and take several minutes out of Contador, who, as Armstrong's teammate, will be unable to follow.

Addendum 2: Here is the Cyclingnews account of the stage.

Addendum 3: Here is a video of Armstrong after the stage. Does he sound upset?

Baseball

Mark Spahn sent a link to this story about a man who was thrown out of Yankee Stadium for not standing still for "God Bless America." He sued and won. What do you think? I feel sorry for the taxpayers of New York, who had to work a little extra to compensate the man for being brutalized by the police. The money should have come out of the police officers' pockets.

Weather

Check out our forecast.

Blogging

Dr John J. Ray of Brisbane, Australia, who helped me get started as a blogger in November 2003, when I knew virtually nothing about the medium, began blogging on this date in 2002. That makes today his seventh anniversary. Congratulations, John! You must have been one of the first bloggers. John maintains many blogs, which you can peruse by going here and looking at the sidebar. Perhaps John will tell us what the blogosphere was like in July 2002, and how, if at all, it has changed during the past seven years. Some day, a history of blogging will be written. Since John was there at the beginning, he has an obligation to posterity to share his thoughts.

Nazareth, "Teenage Nervous Breakdown" (1974)

Loud 'n' Proud (1974).

Dilbert

Here.

Cycling

Here is a video recap of today's stage of the Tour de France. It rained for much of the stage, which made the road slippery. There were, as a result, many crashes. Scots cyclist David Millar, who rides for the American team Garmin-Slipstream, broke away from his breakaway companions with a few miles to go, but was caught by the peloton near the finish line. I felt sorry for him. He made a valiant effort. Here is tomorrow's stage. It's not only the longest stage of this year's Tour, at 138.9 miles; it has a great deal of climbing. The mountaintop finish will separate the men from the boys. I can't wait to watch the stage live at 7:00 tomorrow morning (on Versus). These are wonderful days for me: televised cycling in the morning; reading and running in the afternoon; televised baseball in the evening. I feel sorry for people who have to work.

A Year Ago

Here.

From Today's New York Times

To the Editor:

“Just why the college crowd continues to drink so heavily” is no mystery to this teacher. Students can get away with it. Increasingly, the college or university campus presents young men and women with an environment in which they can indulge in all manner of irresponsible behavior without consequence.

Witness the large number of students who typically miss Friday morning classes because they’re still sleeping off Thursday night’s bacchanalia. Or the multitudes who regularly fail to complete assignments on time, blithely assuming that their hackneyed excuses actually excuse their behavior.

If these kids had real jobs, this sort of nonsense would get them fired. College kids will stop drinking as soon as teachers and administrators allow them to suffer the consequences of their misguided priorities.

John J. Holden
Albany, July 1, 2009
The writer is an adjunct professor at Hudson Valley Community College.

Note from KBJ: I have read this letter five times. I still don't know what the letter writer is advocating. Is he saying that instructors should make attendance a part of each student's grade? Many instructors already do that. Is he saying that there should be no excuses for failure to complete assignments? Who accepts excuses? The rules in my courses are clear, simple, and uniformly applied. If you don't do the work, for whatever reason, you don't get a good grade.

John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, Paragraph 89

While my intimacy with Roebuck diminished, I fell more and more into friendly intercourse with our Coleridgian adversaries in the Society, Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, both subsequently so well known, the former by his writings, the latter through the biographies by Hare and Carlyle. Of these two friends, Maurice was the thinker, Sterling the orator, and impassioned expositor of thoughts which, at this period, were almost entirely formed for him by Maurice. With Maurice I had for some time been acquainted through Eyton Tooke, who had known him at Cambridge, and though my discussions with him were almost always disputes, I had carried away from them much that helped to build up my new fabric of thought, in the same way as I was deriving much from Coleridge, and from the writings of Goethe and other German authors which I read during those years. I have so deep a respect for Maurice’s character and purposes, as well as for his great mental gifts, that it is with some unwillingness I say anything which may seem to place him on a less high eminence than I would gladly be able to accord to him. But I have always thought that there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my contemporaries. Few of them certainly have had so much to waste. Great powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for putting something better into the place of the worthless heap of received opinions on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first, and that all the truths on the ground of which the Church and orthodoxy have been attacked (many of which he saw as clearly as any one) are not only consistent with the Thirty-nine articles, but are better understood and expressed in those articles than by any one who rejects them. I have never been able to find any other explanation of this, than by attributing it to that timidity of conscience, combined with original sensitiveness of temperament, which has so often driven highly gifted men into Romanism from the need of a firmer support than they can find in the independent conclusions of their own judgment. Any more vulgar kind of timidity no one who knew Maurice would ever think of imputing to him, even if he had not given public proof of his freedom from it, by his ultimate collision with some of the opinions commonly regarded as orthodox, and by his noble origination of the Christian Socialist movement. The nearest parallel to him, in a moral point of view, is Coleridge, to whom, in merely intellectual power, apart from poetical genius, I think him decidedly superior. At this time, however, he might be described as a disciple of Coleridge, and Sterling as a disciple of Coleridge and of him. The modifications which were taking place in my old opinions gave me some points of contact with them; and both Maurice and Sterling were of considerable use to my development. With Sterling I soon became very intimate, and was more attached to him than I have ever been to any other man. He was indeed one of the most lovable of men. His frank, cordial, affectionate, and expansive character; a love of truth alike conspicuous in the highest things and the humblest; a generous and ardent nature which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors; and an equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty, formed a combination of qualities as attractive to me, as to all others who knew him as well as I did. With his open mind and heart, he found no difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf which as yet divided our opinions. He told me how he and others had looked upon me (from hearsay information), as a “made” or manufactured man, having had a certain impress of opinion stamped on me which I could only reproduce; and what a change took place in his feelings when he found, in the discussion on Wordsworth and Byron, that Wordsworth, and all which that name implies, “belonged” to me as much as to him and his friends. The failure of his health soon scattered all his plans of life, and compelled him to live at a distance from London, so that after the first year or two of our acquaintance, we only saw each other at distant intervals. But (as he said himself in one of his letters to Carlyle) when we did meet it was like brothers. Though he was never, in the full sense of the word, a profound thinker, his openness of mind, and the moral courage in which he greatly surpassed Maurice, made him outgrow the dominion which Maurice and Coleridge had once exercised over his intellect; though he retained to the last a great but discriminating admiration of both, and towards Maurice a warm affection. Except in that short and transitory phasis of his life, during which he made the mistake of becoming a clergyman, his mind was ever progressive: and the advance he always seemed to have made when I saw him after an interval, made me apply to him what Goethe said of Schiller, “Er hatte eine fürchterliche Fortschreitung.” He and I started from intellectual points almost as wide apart as the poles, but the distance between us was always diminishing: if I made steps towards some of his opinions, he, during his short life, was constantly approximating more and more to several of mine: and if he had lived, and had health and vigour to prosecute his ever assiduous self-culture, there is no knowing how much further this spontaneous assimilation might have proceeded.

Note from KBJ: Google translates the German sentence as "He had a terrible progression." Can anyone do better? By the way, Mill's antipathy to religion comes through clearly in this paragraph. I find it quite unbecoming.

Race

Dr John J. Ray, my polymathic friend Down Under, comments on a recent New York Times story.

"Media-Created Falsehoods"

Mark Spahn sent a link to this essay about Sarah Palin. Won't her enemies hate it when she is elected president?

Health

Duh.

Haiku

How long has it been
Since I composed a haiku?
Does anyone care?

Steve Miller Band, "Rock'n Me" (1976)

Fly Like an Eagle (1976).

Dilbert

Here.

Peter Singer on Bullet Biting

If we accept the Total View, we are forced to accept the following proposition: for any world containing a finite population of very happy people, there is some possible world containing a very much larger population living lives that contain a very tiny surplus of happiness over misery—and this second world is preferable to the first. This is a consequence of the Total View because we can, in theory, make the second world as large as we like; and there must be some number of people such that even a tiny amount of happiness, multiplied by that number, gives a larger total amount of happiness than that which exists in the first world, with its smaller population.

This consequence most people find difficult to accept. The difficulty is not merely that our ordinary moral judgments prefer the first of the two worlds. A clash between utilitarianism and our ordinary moral judgments is, after all, a common enough occurrence, and stout-hearted utilitarians should be prepared to jettison a good many commonly accepted moral judgments. The difficulty is, rather, that this consequence does not seem to be in accordance with what is most appealing and plausible about utilitarianism. As [Jan] Narveson has said, this view treats the production of happiness like the production of milk—the more cows you have, the more milk you get, and the more people you have, the more happiness you get. This, surely, is not the version of utilitarianism that makes the utilitarian view appear so strikingly attractive, so self-evidently correct, to its supporters.

(Peter Singer, "A Utilitarian Population Principle," chap. 5 in Ethics and Population, ed. Michael D. Bayles [Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1976], 81-99, at 83-4 [endnotes omitted; boldface added])

Note from KBJ: I have two comments on this passage. In the first boldfaced sentence, Singer is saying that utilitarians can and should bite the bullet. This means sticking to their theory when it produces repugnant conclusions. Singer thinks that many or most "commonly accepted moral judgments" are rooted in ignorance, superstition, or bias. He is more confident of the correctness of his theory (utilitarianism) than he is of conventional morality or any particular judgments of conventional morality, so why would he use the latter to test the former? I have no problem with bullet biting. It's a way (though not the only way) to preserve consistency. I do object, however, to allowing only utilitarians to bite the bullet. If it's respectable for Singer and other utilitarians to bite the bullet, then it's respectable for ethical egoists to bite the bullet. And yet, you see ethics textbooks in which the author says that, since ethical egoism implies X, and X is unacceptable, ethical egoism is unacceptable. All I want is a single standard for all normative ethical theories. I don't want a lenient, respectful standard for utilitarianism and a strict, disrespectful standard for ethical egoism. Either everybody gets to bite the bullet or nobody does.

My second comment is about the second boldfaced sentence. Singer finds utilitarianism "strikingly attractive" and "self-evidently correct." I and many others find it strikingly unattractive (even revolting). I won't say that it's self-evidently incorrect, because, like J. J. C. Smart (a utilitarian), I don't believe that normative ethical theories are either correct or incorrect. One subscribes to them; one doesn't discover their truth or falsity. Isn't it interesting that there should be such a wide range of attitudes toward a given theory? I guess theoretical attractiveness, like personal beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Twenty Years Ago

7-8-89 Saturday. The surprise leader of the Tour de France is Greg LeMond, the only American to win the race (in 1986). He took the lead two days ago during an individual time trial. I now appreciate the significance of these individual “races”. When the riders are together in a pack, they can pace themselves and finish as one. No matter how far the pack extends, each rider is given the same time. When this happens, as it so often does, it’s virtually impossible for anyone to gain on the leader, whoever he may be. But in an individual time trial, each rider is on his own. He doesn’t know how fast the others have gone (or will go) and could very well fall behind. It was in a race like this, Thursday, that LeMond took the lead from Acacio da Silva. He held it during yesterday’s 161-mile sixth leg. It kills me to have a leg this long described as “easy”, but here it is, in to­day’s Houston Chron­icle (from the Associated Press): “Greg Le­Mond retained the lead in the Tour de France on Friday after an easy ride in which most of the pack rode together on the race’s longest stage.” Easy ride! A ride of that length would kill me, plain and simple. The fact that it was won by Frenchman Joel Pelier at an average speed of 23.12 miles per hour makes it all the more incredible. These men are inhuman. It was all I could do this afternoon to average 18.11 miles per hour for 20.08 miles. (I’m trying to rack up miles in an attempt to ride five hundred this month.)

Cycling, Part 2

Here is a video recap of today's stage of the Tour de France. Usually, the Tour starts in the north of France, where it's cool and wet. This year's Tour started in the south of France, where it's hot, dry, and windy. Many of the riders are suffering. The managers of Team Columbia-HTC put nylon-enclosed ice cubes into their riders' baguettes (food bags), which are taken aboard on the fly. I saw one rider remove the nylon and put it down his jersey, behind his neck. When I rode 100 miles in Waxahachie a couple of weeks ago, in 100º heat, I squirted cold water onto my thighs and neck from time to time to reduce my body heat. It felt good. Today's winner was Frenchman Thomas Voeckler, who was part of a six-man breakaway. He broke away from his breakaway companions in the final few miles and then bravely held off the charging peloton—by seven seconds! Here is tomorrow's stage.

Addendum: Voeckler's average speed for 122.1 miles was 27.17 miles per hour. These are the best athletes in the world, by far.