A friend of mine on Facebook posted recently about Mauldin’s Rule of Thumb Concerning Unintended Consequences:

For every government law hurriedly passed in response to a current or recent crisis, there will be two or more unintended consequences, which will have equal or greater negative effects then the problem it was designed to fix. A corollary is that unelected institutions are at least as bad and possibly worse than elected governments. A further corollary is that laws passed to appease a particular group, whether voters or a particular industry, will have at least three unintended consequences, most of which will eventually have the opposite effect than the intended outcomes and transfer costs to innocent bystanders.

I have heard various forms of this argument from small-government conservatives and libertarians. The shorter version is “Whatever you think the government should do, either they’ll do it badly, someone else will take advantage of it, or both.” The take-away, apparently, is that, in most cases, the government ought to leave well enough alone.

Two things:

1. While there will undoubtedly be unintended consequences to government actions, there are means of dealing with those consequences. Laws can be changed, and often are.
2. Unintended consequences are not unique to government actions. You might as well insist that no one do anything, lest something bad and unexpected happen.

My Twitter and RSS feeds have been lit up like a Christmas tree the last few days with posts about “Is Limbaugh’s apology enough?” My answer has largely been “I don’t give a shit whether Limbaugh apologizes or not.”

The guy is a loud-mouthed jerk. The apparently limitless stream of abusive, nonsensical crap that flows from the hole between his bloated, sagging jowls is such that any apology is the equivalent of the high school bully who punches you into a locker and then says “Hah! I’m just messing with you!”

Dennis G. at Balloon Juice, though, has a different take on the whole thing:

So, I thought I would catch the last segment of his show. What I noticed was commercials—a lot of them. And that reminded me how the Limbaugh show was mostly a grift about getting rubes to open their wallets for this, that or the other pitch. Some were legitimate businesses—your mattress companies, your computer software or gadget and the like. Others were multi-level marketing deals with referral kick-backs for anybody who mentions the show when placing an order. And others—most of them it seems—were straight up grifts to fluff up Rushbo’s wallet and fund this or that aspect of the wingnut money machine. The legitimate advertisers are the cover for the grifters. They are the honey pot to attract the rubes to scams to fund the cons funding the CONsevative movement—and Rush is the sideshow barker saying anything to pull the rubes in the door so that their wallets can be relieved of their Dead Presidents.

[...]

Getting the advertiser to separate from Rush is important. It hits him in the wallet, but more than that it removes the cover for all the other grifts he runs on his minions day after day. And it exposes every local radio station that caries the rat bastard to financial pressure and can send a warning flag to any advertiser supporting these stations.

I still could not care less whether Limbaugh apologizes (or if his apology is “enough”), but if this affair provides a means of fracturing his scams, I’m all for keeping the conversation going.

I get what all the people jumping into debate over contraceptive coverage with the comments along the lines of “Yes, but some people need to use the pill for health reasons!” are trying to get at. You’re opposed to birth control? Okay, but contraceptives should still be covered by insurance because they’re sometimes a medical necessity.

I’m not really sure that this argument helps, though.

What you’re basically saying is “Sure, you’re right about the dirty, dirty sex and the evil loose women who can’t get enough of it, but don’t forget about these other people who have a legitimate need.”

It’s great that Apple wants to reinvent TV or whatever. Also, it’s not surprising that a bunch of early-adopter types see this sort of thing as the magic bullet that will finally kill off the cable companies’ de facto monopoly over video content delivery into consumers’ homes.

What is missing from all this hype is that, regardless of whose box is connected to the Internet, the cable companies own the delivery channel for data into those homes.

I love my Roku, and I have no need for anything beyond the data-only plan that Verizon happens to be willing to sell me. However, I don’t for one minute think that if they were any sort of widespread adoption of Rokus, AppleTV, or any other “cable-cutting” box, Verizon and the other cable company ISPs wouldn’t come down like a ton of bricks with bandwidth caps and “quality of service” adjustments.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Breitbart:

I have heard it said by some fellow liberals that Breitbart was in fact a good person, that his public persona was not the same as his private. This kind of praise is so broadly true of most controversial public figures as to be meaningless. And it is irrelevant. Breitbart may well have been an excellent father and a great friend but that is not why we are talking about him. We are noting his death because of the impact he had on our politics and our conversation. It must be said that that impact was for the worse. Any talk of his private life, is an attempt to change the subject and avoid discomfiting truths.

It is wholly appropriate to be sorry that Andrew Breitbart died. But in the relevant business, it is right to be sorry for how he lived.

The guy was an serial liar who had a widespread, toxic, and corrosive influence on public discourse. While I’m rarely glad to see or hear that anyone has died, it’s a bit much to read the laudatory blogospheric outpouring about what a great and important person Breitbart was, and even moreso the hand-wringing over the fact that not everyone is lining up to sing his praises.

So there was another GOP debate last night. Aside from the constant stream of commentary that was flying by on Twitter, I didn’t pay much attention to it. NPR, however, had some coverage this morning, and played a snippet of Romney and Santorum fighting with another over who had the better record regarding earmarks.

After a somewhat rambling and not entirely unreasonable response from Santorum about good earmarks v. bad earmarks, Romney came back with this gem (from CNN’s transcript of the debate):

ROMNEY: I didn’t follow all of that, but I can tell you this — I would put a ban on earmarks. I think it opens the door to excessive spending, spending on projects that don’t need to be done.

I think there are a lot of projects that have been voted for. You voted to the “Bridge to Nowhere.” I think these earmarks, we’ve had it with them.

Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the fact that earmarks are, as John King pointed out before asking his original question, a vanishing small portion of the total federal budget. Let’s also ignore the fact that “earmarks” mostly tend to be money spent on stuff in other people’s Congressional districts, certainly not the obviously necessary funding for your local development project.

No, let’s just focus on this question: How the hell would a President “put a ban on earmarks”? Am I missing something? They are part of legislation considered and voted on by Congress. Is there any option for the President aside from vowing to veto any bill that contained anything he considered an “earmark”?

I learned on the radio this morning that today is Buddy Tate’s birthday. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that until today, I did not actually know who Buddy Tate was. That situation has now been remedied

They YouTube pickings are somewhat thin, but here’s a sample:

Fortunately, Spotify has a better selection, although still not particularly large.

I guess the promise of online advertising is supposed to be that, by looking at my cookies and tracking my browsing habits, marketers will be able to show me ads that are relevant to me. That sounds great! Sign me up!

On the other hand, we get dire predictions that this sort of tracking will allow evil and all-powerful corporations to track and predict our every movement. “While we would like to offer you the position, I’m afraid we can’t due to the website you visited last Tuesday night…”

Unsurprisingly, reality seems to be somewhere in the boring middle. I bought a new Roku box last weekend, and now I see ads for Roku everywhere I go. Good work, guys–advertising dollars well spent!

Following up on the previous post, the Times article about the Room 237 documentary reminded me that it had been a number of years since I’d actually sat down and watched The Shining. With a 4+ hour flight ahead of me, I put it on my iPod and watched it while flying to, appropriately enough, Denver.

A few things struck me while watching the movie this time around. First, it probably would have been better with someone who was *not* Jack Nicholson. While I know how things are going to turn out from having both seen the movie before and having read the book, there really just isn’t any question from the start that Jack Torrance is a tightly bottled lunatic. Nicholson is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a subtle actor–his scenery-chewing is entertaining and frightening, but I think the effect would have been greater had he been able to turn it down a few notches in the early scenes. As it is, watching him grin and ape and arch his eyebrows, I find myself wondering how anyone else in the movie wouldn’t have recognize immediately that Jack Torrance is bad news.

That’s not to say his performance isn’t good. In particular, I was impressed by the scene where Danny goes back to their room in the hotel to get his fire truck and finds Jack sitting on the bed (he’s supposed to be sleeping). Jack calls Danny over to sit down next to him on the bed–the audience knows Jack is already losing his mind, so we’re on edge about what he might say or do to Danny. Instead, Jack hugs him, and for a few minutes, we see a father who loves his child and seems to be trying to find a way back to sanity. Just as we’re starting to feel safe with the scene, and edge begins creeping back into Jack’s questions and answers. Nicholson slowly dials up the crazy, and with it, the tension. It’s an incredibly unnerving scene, and a great performance by Nicholson.

The other thing I realized while watching the movie this time around is that Wendy Torrance deserves a lot more credit than she tends to get as an early example of the Final Girl. Most of that credit usually goes to Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween. Wendy spends the first half of The Shining trying to put a good face on things, and I’ll admit that her “Gee whiz, this place sure is great, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any place so great!” lines start to grate on my nerves faily early on.

As Jack starts going over the edge and Wendy starts to realize how bad things actually are, though, she’s surprisingly resourceful and resilient. Sure, she’s always about five seconds from completely losing her shit, but in her situation, who wouldn’t be? She hangs on to the baseball bat, knocks Jack out, and then has the presence of mind to lock him in the storage room instead of just running away.

I still feel bad for Scatman Crothers’ Dick Halloran. Pays for his own airfare, rents a Snow-Cat, drives all the way up to the Overlook Hotel in a blizzard, and then gets unceremoniously whacked in the chest with an axe for his troubles. His role in the film is more or less that of a plot device–he explains to the audience that Danny has “the shine,” and then he serves to get get a spare Snow-Cat to the hotel so that Wendy and Danny can escape at the end. Aside from that, he could be dropped from the film and have no real impact on the story.