lexicography.com

My old law professor, Phillip Johnson, wrote a book on bribery. I never thought too much about bribery before he mentioned some of the issues addressed in his book.

An unsolicited bribe offered to an official and refused, is how we generally view the crime. That is the picture in our mind of a briber and a bribe. The person offering the bribe is a wrongdoer, probably compounding some other wrong he committed or seeking some unfair gain for himself. The official being solicited is a victim of the crime. It is a solicitation of the official to commit a crime himself and the incentive is probably seriously enticing to the official, or it would not be offered. If you would not be tempted by the five crisp hundreds offered to forget a possible DUI, imagine a starlet who offers a sexual favor. If the official accepts the bribe, the other victim is the public, for if an official misuses a public trust for personal gain; well, the public trust has been misused. Rule of graft is plainly less efficient and less just than rule of law.

When I was younger, there was a huge “US domestic corporations bribe foreign governments” scandal. When the press (MSM) was finished with the story of large corporations giving money to oily foreign officials in order to get contracts or permission to sell or permission to develop in foreign lands, well they just painted the perfect picture of the general view of the crime.

There were even changes to the accounting standards for public corporations. FASB (federal accounting standards board) required corporations to list in their financial statements the amount of bribes paid to foreign government officials. Since paying bribes is illegal, well, you either paid the bribe and confessed in your financial statements, paid the bribe and lied in your financial statements or did not pay the bribe. The same number of corporations reported foreign bribes as the number of people purchasing marijuana tax stamps.

This was great because, apart from the stringent, relatively clean, and wholly domestic controls applied to accounting violations, the operations of foreign subsidiaries and the foreign officials who had power over them were corrupt and opaque. Frankly, you did not do business of any sort in these countries without a bribe, and if you were too Donny Osmond to learn these facts pretty rapidly, you would be advised in a totally deniable way. Every US Corporation and every foreign headquartered corporation paid bribes. The FASB could hold US corporations’ feet to the fire easily with no reform of the sphere of actual operations by turning a foreign bribe into a domestic financial non-disclosure.

Digression: the US corporations answering to the FASB lost foreign business to all non-US corporations, because the non-US entities were not so foolish as to think that cracking down effectively on their bribe offers was a reform. The non-FASB corporations continued to offer bribes as a cost of doing business and gained more market share at our expense.

I’ve finally got to my point. There is a non-usual subset of the crime of bribery.

Sometimes the law or regulation or rule is not expected to be followed, or it does not even matter if it is followed or not. In too many countries, the day your enterprise makes money, an official arrives and states that you need a permit to do something you have been doing for years while there were no profits. In too many countries, you can not start a profit making and job creating enterprise until you pay off the local magistrate. In some situations, you know you have done nothing wrong and a bribe is being implicitly solicited by the official standing before you. You see with your own eyes the next person cross the border after slipping a payment to an official while you wait day after day for permission which is never forthcoming. Then the crime of bribery, while having the same name is a totally different monster.

The malefactor is the government official, who uses discretion or unwillingness to follow the rule of law to hinder your lawful and positive actions. The intention is to prevent no wrong but to convince you to pay a bribe so that you can go about your business. The victim is the briber, who recognizes the scam going on. The other victim is the public; because, once again, the public trust is being subverted to personally benefit an official at the expense of the public at large.

Through subtle variations, all the parties are ethically reversed.

Were the US corporations who paid third world officials bribes in order to do business in their countries satanic corruptors or complying with the local cultural norms? Was the FASB rule change a bombastic cultural imperialistic reaction of the US elite?

Please turn your attention to the US government. Let us suppose that one line in the tax code about timber depreciation rules could turn a huge corporation losing money into a huge corporation with a high profit margin, as is certainly true. When a line of tax code means more to the profitability of a dozen thousand person enterprise than any cost controls, execution improvements, marketing plans, merger, &etc, where do you expect the corporation to apply its efforts? If any political contributions made by the corporation are legal, some would nevertheless call it corporate America bribing Congress, but which type of bribe are we talking about? Perhaps we are so much a banana republic that optional payments to government officials are now the key to success.

Microsoft became a huge economic entity while totally ignoring Washington. Former President Clinton met with many CEO’s of companies who thought Microsoft was a bar to their success. Some of the other CEO’s came out in public in favor of President Clinton. Even gave President Clinton a reputation as a politician supported by members of the new economy. An antitrust enforcement action against Microsoft followed. This was later followed by Microsoft entry into lobbying and political action on a large scale.

Does anyone think that Microsoft suddenly needed the political force, laws and guns of Washington to make money?

In this aritcle I argued that Feminism is Culture Suicide
Personal experience is unscientific, yet I note that my wife and I have two children, fewer than replacement rate - our genes are in net removal from the human race gene pool. My wife has two brothers, between them they have one genetic child. I have two brothers, both married. They have two children. So in all, my wife’s family of three married adults and my family of three married adults produced five offspring. Twelve people produced five offspring.

The subject is creepy (always makes me think of: “The lower classes are outbreeding us better people”), but when a generation of twelve people produces five people and if this is not unusual. the people involved are in decline.

The Civil Right’s movement had a truth, a person’s race was not fundemental, but incidental. The woman’s
movement said, a person’s sex is not fundemental but incendental. Feminism cashed in on the capital of the Civil Rights movement. According to the feminists, distinctions made between men and women were just as illegitimate as distinctions made between two men of dfferent races.

I accept that a black man is not diferent from a white man. I do not accept that a white woman is no different from a white man. I am not saying that man should have advantages under law or women should not be able to become investment bankers - but to pretend people with such obvious differences do not have the differences is foolishness. If a woman becomes a doctor, lawyer or investment banker, she will have fewer children because the cost in her forgone income will be great.

It took many years for me to even entertain these thoughts.

The Claremont Institute: Love’s Language Lost

Our lament, therefore, must not be for the loss of a word, for all words are, in themselves, purely conventional. Nor should we lament the redefinition of “marriage” merely because of the immediate moral, political, or policy consequences. As judicial review becomes literary deconstructionism, our lament must be for the loss of the possibility of a natural basis for human laws. The argument for same-sex “marriage” (and even much of the argument against it) elides the question of whether the noun “marriage” refers to anything in nature. Is the thing that marriage signifies a particular concept with an essence outside the mind and control of the observer—or is it a whim subject to infinite reinterpretation by lawyers and judges?

Ann Coulter has been blogging: AnnCoulter.com - Quotations from Chairman Ann

Articles You Are Not Likely to See in the New York Times:

“Kibbutzim: The Retrospective”

When I was in college, every idealistic youth was going for a summer to work on a Kibbutz, even my best friend, and he was such a rich Wasp his family did not like him keeping company with a DP (Displaced Person - Eastern European) like me. I remember his story of being put in a pen of chickens and set before a chopping machine - would he have to spend blood filled day after blood filled day, chopping off the heads of chickens all summer? No, merely chopping off the beaks as chikens pecked each other to death in close quarters with unmolested beaks.

You don’t hear much about Kibbutzim nowadays. Lets see, voluntary socialistic colllectivistic communities in a newly settled world unfettered by the weight of history other nations toiled under.

Much of the appeal of the Kubbitz was socialism.

The Kibbutz, a collective community existing in the early days of the nation of Isreal met with total failure. An account of the decline from Wikipedia:

The Kibbutzim have gradually and steadily become less collectivist in the past twenty years. Rather than the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” kibbutzim have adopted “from each according to his preferences, to each according to his needs.”

The first changes to be made were in utilities and in the dining hall. When electricity was “free” kibbutzniks had no incentive to save energy. People would leave their air conditioners running constantly. In the 1980s kibbutzim began to meter energy usage. Having kibbutzniks pay for energy usage required that kibbutzniks actually have personal money. Hence returned private accounts.

The dining hall also was one of the first things to change. When food was “free,” people had no incentive to take the appropriate amount. Every kibbutz dining hall would end the night with enormous amounts of extra food; often this food would be fed to the animals. Now most kibbutz dining halls are a la carte cafeterias.

Kibbutzniks see their neighbors more than most other Israelis, but they have begun to live private lives. Several kibbutz dining halls are no longer even open for three meals a day. Kibbutz families have DVD players and the internet like other Israeli families. Group activities are much less well attended than they were in the past. Instead of all-night discussions of cosmic issues, kibbutz general meetings are now infrequently scheduled.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of how kibbutzim have abandoned the principle of equality is the implementation of differential salaries. A manager of a factory would now receive a much larger personal allowance than a factory worker, or agricultural worker.

In the 1970s nearly all kibbutzim abandoned Children’s Societies in favor of the traditional nuclear family. The reasons were many. Some kibbutzim believed that communal life for children led to psychological problems; some said that giving up one’s children was too great a sacrifice for parents. The children themselves said that they remembered being fearful at night in the dark, away from their parents.

However the politically correct mass authors of Wikipedia discovered unrelated causes for the failure of this socialistic experiment:

Kibbutzniks give reasons other than an increase in private time for why the communal feelings disappeared. The half-million non-Jewish Western European kibbutz volunteers in the 1970s and 1980s may have brought hedonism to kibbutz life.

Lets see, a half million idealistic volunteers who workled for free or subsistance brought hedonism to the kibbutz.
Another reason for failure:

Veteran kibbutzniks say that kibbutzim failed in passing on socialist ideology because they assumed that children would see the examples of their elders and simply want to copy them. Kibbutz education had never had its students read classics of socialism and labor Zionism—no Marx, no Ber Borochov. Some kibbutzniks suggest if kibbutz education had incorporated deliberate ideological instruction, as Orthodox Jewish education does, then kibbutz children would be more likely to embrace kibbutz values

Not the air conditioning left on nor he waste of food nor the children fearful without their parents - raised alone because of ideology. I see. Not incompatability of socialism with human nature, not even considered in the article as a cause of failure. It was execution as ever.

Wretchard, quoting Paul Johnson identifies something:

But behind this relativity of wills there are demographic facts. A colony is lost once the level of settlement in exceeded by the growth rate of the indigenous peoples. 19th century colonialism reflected the huge upsurge in European numbers. 20th century decolonization reflected European demographic stability and the violent expansion of native populations.

Wretchard concludes:

Algeria was lost to France even before the events of 1945, when the first troubles began. And because there is really no dividing line between colonialism and the counter-colonization Western Europe is experiencing today, Johnson’s observation applies with at least partial validity to modern South Africa, Israel, France and the Scandinavian countries. Declining European birthrates and burgeoning Muslim immigrant fertility are making the policy of “assimilation” just as problematic in Western Europe as it was in Algeria five decades ago.

In other words, Europe is being lost to the peoples of its former colonies mostly because of demographics.

Others have made similar observations:

Ready for yet another scary prognostication?
China will dominate Asia by 2050.
“How could that happen?,” you ask.
Well, curiously obliging reader, PacRim Jim will tell you.
If the current Russian population trend continues, by the year 2050 Russia will be home to only 60 million people, less than half its current population. Not to be out-enervated, Japan’s population also will dwindle to 60 million, not counting the bazillion androbots.
By contrast, China’s population—hence its relative military and technological strengths—will swell, reaching approximately 1.5 billion Chinese in 2050, more than 10 times the combined populations of the Russian remnant and the senescent Japanese.
Emboldened by such trends, tens of millions of lebensraumisch Chinese will drift northward into Siberia, quickly outnumbering the hapless Russian population and quite settling the question of Siberian sovereignty. By 2050, therefore, with the addition of Chinese Siberia (Sinoberia?)—formerly most of Russia—China’s area (and natural resources) will more than double.

Does anyone have the courage to draw the obvious conclusion explicitly? The idea that women should live their lives mostly as men do in the name of equality is cultural suicide. For women, on the whole, to become medical doctors and attorneys and investment bankers, leads to reduced birth rates. Add to this a right to abortion. Is there any culture where women have a right to abort and are expected to have careers idential to men that has other than a less than replacement birth rate?

Viewed in this light, our insistance that the Middle East accept our view of the proper role of woman in society is tatamount to our exporting poison. Why should we insist that a percentage of the elected officials of Iraq be women?

Uncomfortable thoughts. Beyond the borders of your world someone is saying, “if you do not want to reproduce, fine, we will.”

The New York Times Appreciations: Johnson’s Dictionary:

Two hundred fifty years ago, on April 15, 1755, Samuel Johnson published the first edition of his Dictionary of the English Language, compiled and written almost wholly by himself. It appeared in London in two folio volumes.

Europe is failing before our eyes. I would provide as supporting evidence the below stasis population replacement rate, the influx of people of other cultures who do not accept European culture, the low economic growth rate, the increase in crime, the publication of fewer books, &etc.

Yet, with destructon and failure assured, the Europeans continue to do what they were doing which lead to this state of affairs, and call for more of the same, more vigorously applied. They laugh at America for resisting their progress.

How does someone get to such a state, looking into failure and refusing to see any problem?

China once had an ideology which was failing. They saw Hong Kong and Singapore, relatively free economies, prosper while they stagnated year after year. Of course they realized there was great risk to the ruling elite in allowing economic freedom. At the same time they saw stagnation everywhere controlled economies existed. They set in motion a great risk, a measure of economic freedom to progress their nation (richer people and greater military power). The end game is yet to be. Perhaps a empowered middle class and merchant class will force liberal governance when student protests failed. Perhaps the rulers can surf a wave and clamp down on all political freedoms while providing economic freedoms. In any case, China did what Europe refuses to. China in its great practicality, saw what did not work and abandoned it. Europe refuses to accept any contrary evidence, come hell or high water.

I offer this name free for anyone who needs a blog name: The Daily Barfing

It’s how I feel lately.

Now I’ll get a lot of hits on the word “free”. Lots of hits for the wrong reason are not good. When I read that almost all sensical English words in the com domain had been registered, the article included a list of unregistered words. Most were negative, such as invalid.com (I should have taken it) or uninhabited.com. Still, a few captured my eye, lexicography.com, which seemed to be a nice positive word with future sale potential to a dictionary publisher and stockholders.com, non-registration of which had to be an oversight - anything that might remove money from its present owner should have been taken on day one of the Internet. Anyway, lexicography gets lots of hits via Google, other search sites, or just people typing it into their address bar. Unfortunately they are looking for something not found here and never return. If I add google advertisements, I will benefit from the accidential hits.

Stockholders.com, I have always had a plan for. A corporation is like a little primitive model of a representitive republic. In fact it is like a model of American government. The stockholders (citizens) democraticaly elect a board of directors (representatives). There is no direct democracy, the stockholders do not vote on the price of a widget produced by the company; just as the citizens do not vote on the income tax rates. In both cases, the vote is for a representative, and even the representative acts indirectly. In a corporation, the directors elected by the stockholders hire management and oversee management’s actions, the directors do not manage the business themselves. In a representative democracy the Congress, state legislature, town counsel, school board, &etc hire others to execute their directives. The President of the US is an exception to the parallel as he is elected (albeit by an indirect election, the electorial college) while the president of a corporation is hired by the board of directors. Still the parellels are amazing. the government of the United States in many ways resembles the goverance of a capitalistic private stock corporation more than it does the system of government the founders of the Unitd States lived under - the monarchy of the United Kingdom.

So that is where I got interested in the clear failure of stockholder representative democracy in corporations. It is simply a failure and no serious thinker in the field says anything otherwise. It appears to parellel the slow failure of the republic in our country, but that is only my opinion.

Finally, to cut this short (in college I never had enough thoughts to fill the required pages, now there are enough words to fill a book but I don’t have the time or will to develop it out), I became absolutely convinced that the Internet and parts of it, such as email lists, blogs, newsgroups, &etc., are a solution to the problems of shareholder democracy. That is why I am posting at stockholdrs.com and trying to make it into a site which uses the information transmission powers of the Internet to try to reform corporate government and shareholder democracy. I really think it has a chance to change things.

The corolary is, maybe the changes in transmission and control of information of the Internet may change politics. Of course the Internet is changing politics. Entrenched powers are fighting back so powerfuly you can see the threat by the nature of the response.

The Annotated New York Times
I like it.

The libertarians are all in a snit, summery here, about how properly to take over the country. The discussion is actually quite fecund. Here’s my take, much as my heart is with you, you ain’t gonna. Like a booze hound, this country has to hit bottom to reform, and it is a long way from that. I’m buying junksilver (a bag at $5,000 is actually under today’s spot and available on the net - free shipping) and feeling sorry for my kids. If only there were some way to fix this. Then I say to myself, well - stupid, why did the vast majority of humans spending time on the face of the Earth live in abject slavery? Because freedom and dignity are the exception, not the natural condition.

I am appalled that volokah thinks this way:

While the ABA and AALS congratulate themselves based on increasing the numbers of black lawyers, they neglect the carnage caused to people’s lives who enter law school with a good-faith belief that the law school they are attending thinks they will succeed, while in fact admissions officers and law school administrators know that it is likely they will never become lawyers. Anywhere from one semester to three-plus years of these students’ lives are wasted in a futile effort to become attorneys, while they could have been succeeding in some other field. The ABA won’t accredit a law school that doesn’t ADMIT what they consider to be enough black law students, but doesn’t seem to mind that at many of these schools, most of the black students admitted won’t become lawyers. It’s a fraud, a travesty, and something that makes me very angry. If I were a class action attorney, I’d organize a group of former black law students admitted under these false pretenses and find a way of suing their law schools, the ABA, and the AALS for fraud or some other legal cause of action (how about, as an anonymous colleague suggested, a qui tam action for taking student loan money in a racket no more successful from a student point of view than fly-by-night hair colleges?) At the very least, law schools should inform admittees–whether admitted for reasons of race, alumni relations, or political reasons–with very low scores about the statistical odds that they will become lawyers

Not a word for the people unjustly turned away, they have no currency. People unjustly advantaged, if it does not thereafter work out for them, are a matter of deep concern. People unjustly harmed - lets not go there.

UPDATE: What I mean is, if you accept that race based preferences are an ethical good, but that preferences lead to many not passing the bar or for other reasons not becoming lawyers; then you have to fiddle things so that more become lawyers. At U Berkelry when students admitted with lower scores got lower grades, they simply redefined the grading curve so that the bottom sixty percent of each class got the same grade (”Pass”) and any one of them could plausably claim to be above the median.

Blogs may be wrong for Internet self-publishing. Why should we believe, simply because blogs have had a measure of success, that they are the best this new medium can offer? Blogs may be an intermediate stage, something that will see a next better stage reached. Blogs suit commentary on current events mostly.

Blogs are like a loaf of bread where everyone is looking at, reading and commenting on the last slice added at the end. I could write the best post ever on January 3, 2005 and in a few weeks it would scroll off the front page of my blog and out of the public view and out of public discussion. In March, does anyone read Glenn Reynolds posts for January?

Lots of great product is not commentary on today’s news. In my opinion, blog posts should be ranked as google ranks web pages – not much consideration of when posted, lots of consideration of how many sites link to it. The timeliness of web logs is good for news commentary. It is bad for all other types of communication. Sometimes you write something that is not out of date in a week.

I imagine web publishing pages with a google like search engine which leads people interested to the most popular posts no matter if they are a few weeks old or older. Perhaps as the world wide web supplanted gopher (just when they started to charge for gopher servers) “something” will arise that fixes the transitory nature of web log conversation.

Everyone who blogs experiences it sooner or later, blog fatigue. I can remember my first exposure to the concept just as I can remember my first exposure to the concept of AIDS. For AIDS, I was in the living room of my Oakland apartment with a housemate, who happened to be a fellow lawstudent who happened to be gay, when the TV news discussed this new disease. Pretty soon the one small story became an avalanche of reports (I almost wrote “a tsunami of reports”).

For blog fatigue, I had just discovered and started reading blogs when some of the people I regularly read announced their impending hiatus from blogging. Blog fatigue took many great ones. Sometimes it strikes and endures only a few weeks, as with Daily Pundit. Sometimes the striker tries to quit and yet not quit, like Politburo Diktat. Sometimes it is an announced two week vacation, like Leiks. Sometimes it is an announced end of daily blogging, see USS Clueless (I won’t even provide a link – let the fellow rest).

Retirement is often accompanied by disgust, self recrimination, anger.

It seems to me to be unique, people start doing something no one has asked them to do. They exert a fair amount of effort. They become for the most part regular and dedicated. Then, with no change of circumstances, they quit in anger.

Now there are some rewards to blogging. For the typical person, if you reach a few hundred or thousand daily readers, it is more fame than you are used to or are entitled to expect. Still, on the fame meter, it is pretty thin gruel to sustain oneself on. I could imagine someone initially happy with a small readership but discouraged when it did not grow year after year. Similarly, when another blog links to one of your posts it is a great rush. Perhaps like heroin, larger doses are subsequently required to get the same effect. Some bloggers probably quit because their audience growth levels off at a not satisfactory level.

Is it a byproduct of the lack of monetary compensation for blogging? To my knowledge, no one who achieved a measure of blogging success attributed quitting to lack of compensation. It is an emotion laden subject and self reporting may not be reliable.

I think that the Internet and the web log software (in prior times, uusenet) allow individuals to very effectively inject their ideas into the public discourse. You never know who will read your entry or how far it will go, how many it may influence. Putting it out there is enough. One problem in the institution of the blog is that regular daily entries are the key to building readership – which is a proxy to the author for the influence of their blog. So soon the author is on a treadmill of production, and, later, tempted to step off.

I tend to think readership is independent of intellectual influence. Nietzsche had to pay to have his manuscripts published, had a minuscule readership and today, there is hardly an educated person who is not well acquainted with his thought. Obviously, one needs to reach more than a hundred people to have any conversation in the large sense, but where the line is drawn is not at all clear.

UPDATE: Ace of Spades announces retirement - satire site.