RSS FeedWeekend Birdery: Reviled Geese
Branta canadensis is not widely beloved. These geese can be troublesome honkers and, weighing about 9 pounds, pose serious risks to human aviation when their numbers are unchecked.
Still it was a bit of a surprise to learn that 400 of them were trapped and exterminated from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park a few weeks ago. Now it turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg. NYT reports:
Officials plan to reduce the number of Canada geese in New York State by two-thirds, eventually trimming the population to 85,000 from 250,000, according to a report prepared by several city, state and federal agencies.
The reduction is part of a larger plan that also calls for the near halving of the Canada geese population in 17 Atlantic states, to 650,000 from 1.1 million.
That’s 165,000 condemned geese in New York and 550,000 overall. I resisted the title variant “Weekend Murdery,” tempting though it was, because I didn’t want to suggest that the wildlife-control professionals are bad people, or even that the goose-control program is necessarily bad policy, even if it seems a bit extreme. Also, unlike some bird populations on the Gulf coast (with whose catastrophic situation I contrasted the goose-control program in a previous post), Canada Goose populations are not seriously threatened by these exterminations, even at this scale. “Some 2.6 million Canada Geese are harvested by hunters in North America, but this does not seem to affect its numbers,” according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Still, I’d imagine that the assured survival of the species would be cold comfort for the hundreds of thousands of individual geese slated for extermination, if they knew what we had in store for them.
Hat tip 10,000 Birds.
Judicial Nominations
The American Constitution Society has a new website tracking judicial nominations. It’s called judicialnominations.org. You can see bench vacancies and seats where nominations are pending. There are 98 current vacancies in the federal courts across the country and another 21 upcoming retirements. Yet there are only 49 pending nominees—which means that, no matter how broken the confirmation process is in the Senate, the administration and perhaps the entire Democratic legal community bear some blame for the failure to fill the vacancies. For whatever reason—probably too much vetting all around, says Jonathan Bernstein—the President just hasn’t offered up nominees or applied serious or thorough enough pressure to get the Senate do its job.
This Week in Posterior Analytics
We at Organon would like to recognize Jonathan Chait for excellence in the application of Aristotelian logic in public discourse for his post yesterday describing the fallacy of Affirming the Consequent. Chait sketches the form of the fallacy like this:
If A, then B.
B.
Therefore, A.The first two parts (if A, then B, and B) can be true. The fallacy comes in concluding that A is true.
He then breaks down an example from a recent post by Joe Klein at Time’s Swampland:
If [A] Gingrich is running for office, then [B] he will act dumb and angry.
[B] Gingrich is acting dumb and angry.
Therefore, [A] Gingrich is running for office.
The problem is treating material implication (If A, then B) as if it were material equivalence (B, if and only if A). As Chait explains:
Klein proceeds to elaborate that Gingrich will occasionally say something rational when not running for office. Even if we assume that this is true, this is a far weaker claim than saying that Gingrich will exclusively say rational things when not running for office. And that strong claim is necessary to infer that Gingrich is running for office from the fact that he said something dumb and angry. My view is that Gingrich says dumb, angry things constantly and without regard to electoral ambitions. [Ad hominem summation censored.]
Clearing the Brush, Trimming the Hedge
The Wall Street Journal provides this chart to show the projected effects of the two parties’ proposals regarding the renewal of the Bush tax cuts:
Via Yglesias.
The Mandate Is Not a Tax, But the Penalty Is
The Obama administration has been accused of contradicting itself by denying that the individual mandate is a tax and then arguing in court that it is a constitutional exercise of the taxing power. Igor Volsky counters:
The mandate is not a “tax” in the sense that its primary purpose is to raise revenue even though it meets the legal definition, which is somewhat different than the popular understanding of that term. As Ian Millhiser tells me, conservatives obviously think “that they have caught Obama in some grand contradiction because he uses one meaning of the word ‘tax’ in one context and his lawyers use another meaning of that term in a legal brief, but the word ‘tax’ has an unusually broad meaning in the constitutional context — it can include nearly any provision that adds money to the federal treasury.”
I agree that there’s not really a contradiction in the administration’s position, but I don’t think the best explanation is that there’s ambiguity in the meaning of “tax” between the political and legal contexts. A better explanation is that those who think there is a contradiction have failed (a) to distinguish between the mandate and the penalty for not complying with it, and (b) to appreciate the difference between a tax and an exercise of the Taxing power.
First, a mandate is not the same thing as a penalty for not following it. Here, the penalty for failing to maintain adequate health insurance is in fact a tax. The mandate itself is not. In general, taxes are compulsory, paid to the government, and do not directly secure specific benefits in exchange for payment. Compliance with the mandate, by contrast, involves payments to private entities (for those not covered by a public plan), in return for the specific benefit of insurance. What’s more, the mandate does not really compel anyone to do anything. Rather, it sets up a system of tax-preferential treatment for those citizens who responsibly maintain adequate health insurance. You can choose not to comply, though you will have to pay more taxes. That is, you will be required to pay a monetary penalty in an amount computed on your annual income-tax forms and collected into general revenues by the IRS. You will receive nothing directly in return for your payment—not a mug, not a beer cozy, and not health insurance.
Second, not everything Congress enacts under its Taxing power is a tax. Tax exemptions and tax credits, for example, while deceptively prepended with the word “tax,” are not taxes. When the law requires that a tax be paid only under certain conditions, the conditions under which no tax must be paid cannot properly be described as a tax. The tax code is riddled with such conditions.
The PPACA minimum coverage provision (the “individual mandate”) simply specifies the conditions under which certain tax payers will not be subject to an additional tax burden (the “penalty”).
More on Singular “They”
Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log explains how usage of the singular “they” works and why it is grammatically sound. The discussion was prompted by a statement made by President Obama during the Henry Louis Gates affair in Cambridge last year. Obama said:
. . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.
Pullum explains:
Obama was trying to make a general claim about the stupidity of arresting some person x when there was already proof that x was in x‘s own home. The x in this paraphrase is intended as what a logician would call a bound variable. The issue at hand is which pronoun to use when expressing the same content in English. Now, Obama wasn’t intending to limit himself to the claim that arresting Professor Gates was stupid. Doubtless he would think that arresting Harvard president Drew Faust in her own home, if she got snippy after she had shown her driver’s license, would also be stupid — unless she had clearly committed an arrestable crime. And in contemporary Standard English, with antecedents like somebody or everyone or any citizen, people typically use the pronoun they for “bound variable” meanings in this sort of syntactic situation.
Strunk and White baldly assert that this is an error. They simply say don’t use they with syntactically singular antecedents like somebody. They don’t give a reason; and it is pretty clear they didn’t know anything much about the literary evidence that they has been grammatical and normal with singular antecedents for six or seven centuries. Strunk and White are just wrong about Standard English syntax, here as nearly everywhere else where they deal with grammar in their book The Elements of Style.
Of course, you have a perfect right to hold the opinion that they with a singular antecedent seems distasteful or ugly to you. In that case I would advise you not to use it. But don’t call it a grammatical error, because it clearly isn’t one, and never has been. Don’t say that it betokens a breakdown in our ability to tell singular from plural, because it doesn’t.
(Formatting in original.) So, the next time someone gets snooty about singular “they,” you can tell them that they are out of touch with six or seven hundred years’ worth of accepted usage.
Weekend Wordery: Singular ‘They’
Language Log thinks the singular ‘they’ is “just not that big of a deal.”
Weekend Birdery: Murder, But Not of Crows
Weekend Birdery has become awfully morbid lately, hasn’t it? Anyway, Jonathan Franzen has a piece in the July 26 issue of the New Yorker (abstract here) reporting on yet another theater of avian-hominid conflict in which the hominids—okay, just homo sapiens—reveal a whole new level of outrageous conduct. It seems that the human inhabitants of Europe—particularly the island-dwelling peoples of Cyprus and Malta—have an unshakeable penchant for killing (and eating) staggering numbers of songbirds. Franzen writes:
Every spring, some five billion birds come flooding up from Africa to breed in Eurasia, and every year as many as a billion are killed deliberately by humans, most notably on the migratory flyways of the Mediterranean.
Franzen describes how the birds are captured in Cyprus using “lime sticks: straight switches, about thirty inches long, that are coated with the gluey gum of the Syrian plum and deployed artfully, to provide inviting perches, in the branches of low trees.”
Female blackcaps caught on a lime stick
Others are ensnared in nets, and some are shot. Some are destined to be caged and sold as pets on the black market; many will wind up as someone’s dinner. Blackcaps, a common European warbler (pictured here), are a traditional delicacy in Cyprus.
Hunting and capturing songbirds is mostly outlawed all over Europe, but enforcement can be somewhat lax, particularly in countries where the locals feel that conservation laws have been imposed by foreign outsiders from the EU without sensitivity to their local traditions.
Jars of pickled songbirds
Photos from 10,000 Birds.
Penetrating Observations: Grim Reaper Edition
- Researchers using DNA analysis are “85% sure” they’ve identified the remains of Italian painter Caravaggio (1571-1610) in a small church in Tuscany. And it seems that Caravaggio, an artistic genius with homicidal tendencies, probably died from conditions exacerbated by lead poisoning resulting from heavy exposure through his paints. From the levels of lead in his bones, the exposure would have been enough to cause or contribute to his famous behavioral problems. Hat tip: Ed Yong.
- Christopher Hitchens doesn’t drink nearly as much as we all think he does. But he’s still a tragically good example of the conclusion of this recent study: we humans are getting “better” at making decisions that may kill us.
- Caffeine can kill you too…if you consume a whole lot of it at once. Calculate how much of your favorite beverage will kill you here. Via Mind Hacks.
- Even salsa can kill you! Well, no, not really. But salsa-borne bacteria can make you sick, and you could potentially die from that. Anyway the CDC says outbreaks of food-borne illness from salsa and guacamole rose to 3.9% of all food-borne outbreaks in 2008, up from 1.5% in the late nineties. Via Food Politics.
- Aeschylus (524–455 B.C.), Greek tragedian who orchestrated epic dramas of fates, furies, and the meaning of justice, apparently died from a cranial injury when an eagle dropped a turtle on the playwright’s bald head, probably mistaking it for a rock upon which to crack open the turtle’s shell. Via Mind Hacks.
Your Money and Your Life Expectancy
This chart from Ezra Klein shows that improvements in life expectancy in recent decades have been disproportionately enjoyed by those in the top half of income brackets.
Klein, Drum, and Yglesias discuss the implications for raising the retirement age for Social Security.
How to Be President in 25 Words
Deliver prosperity, create jobs, and raise incomes; avoid wars, but when you fight them, win them; respond effectively to national disasters; keep clear of scandals.
Via the Monkey Cage.
Conflating Legal and Political Arguments
In my post yesterday, I criticized Robert Pear’s Sunday NYT article for eliding commerce power arguments into taxing power arguments in his discussion of the lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. Igor Volsky quotes me and adds a point about conservatives trying to make hay out of President Obama’s insistence that the mandate is not a tax while invoking the taxing power as a source constitutional authority for the mandate. Volsky isn’t convinced that the charge of inconsistency has merit; nor am I.
But I suspect that, with respect to their short-term political outlook, conservative leaders are playing this rather shrewdly. And while those of us who support healthcare reform may find it extremely vexing, there’s nothing wrong with conservatives glossing over some fine legal distinctions to score political points with their crowd.
My complaint though is with the framing of Pear’s NYT article, which I found misleading (albeit moderately, in the scheme of things). It doesn’t draw a clear distinction between the legal issues, and it doesn’t clearly distinguish legal issues from political ones.
I’ll follow up on some related points when I have more time.
Defending the Individual Mandate
Robert Pear has a piece in the Sunday Times about the administration’s defense of the health reform law’s individual insurance mandate. The headline—Changing Stance, Administration Now Defends Insurance Mandate as a Tax—has a bit of a “gotcha” flavor to it, but that’s fair enough. The story itself discusses constitutional challenges under both the taxing power and the commerce power, but it doesn’t leave its readers with a clear sense that these are two separate issues; and it leaves out one obvious but crucial piece of context: the government only needs to win one of the two arguments for the law to be upheld. Congress doesn’t need to act under both the commerce clause and the tax clause to create a valid law. One source of constitutional authority will do. Lack of clarity on that point and conflation of the two constitutional issues may leave readers with the feeling that the law’s challengers and defenders are evenly matched. They’re not.
As I’ve written many times before, the argument that the individual mandate exceeds the commerce power is not frivolous and may even be a close call. The weight of Supreme Court precedents probably favors deference to legislative judgment, but there are opportunities aplenty for the Court to distinguish the issue from prior cases and to articulate a new rule defining the outer bounds of the commerce power.
But while the commerce clause argument gives the mandate’s challengers a leg to stand on, the taxing and spending clause does not. Congress’s power of taxation is limited only by the requirement that any tax laid be conducive to the general welfare; and Congress decides whether a tax is conducive the general welfare. Pear’s article is fine up to this point. But then we get this:
Opponents contend that the ‘minimum coverage provision’ is unconstitutional because it exceeds Congress’s power to regulate commerce.
And that’s followed by Orrin Hatch and various other conservative politicians’ statements about mandates exceeding the commerce power, followed by the administration’s response to the commerce clause arguments. But not another word about the taxing power.
And that’s the problem. The article makes it sound like the administration has the upper hand on the taxing clause (a.k.a., the “general welfare clause”) argument, but the challengers are still in the fight and coming out swinging with their commerce clause argument. But it’s not really like that. Because you can’t answer a general welfare clause argument with a commerce clause argument. And if the government wins on either issue, the fight is over.
What’s more, not only does the article fail to alert readers on that decisive point, it also glides right by this essential observation: that the challengers have no legal argument at all to dispute the validity of the mandate as an exercise of the taxing power.
It’s as if the administration is arguing that Congress can get 2 by adding 1 + 1 or 3 + -1, and the challengers are responding that negative numbers don’t count.
Weekend Wordery: Political Dictionary
Want to know who the copperheads were? The mugwumps? Shivercrats? And what about the Blue Dogs, the Yellow Dogs, and dog-whistle politics? Rubber chicken circuits, lame duck sessions, fishing expeditions? Aardvarking? Astroturfing? Franking privileges, sine die, or psephology?
If so, Taegan Goddard’s Political Dictionary may be just the thing for you.
Hat tip: Jonathan Bernstein.
Weekend Birdery: Not Good for the Goose
It has been upsetting for bird lovers to see images of gulf birds coated in oil and to watch the casualty counts climb. As of its July 16 report (pdf), the Fish and Wildlife Service had collected 2,095 dead birds in the Gulf spill region—823 of which were visibly oiled. Another 1,174 visibly oiled birds have been collected alive.
The loss of birds and other wildlife as a consequence of the spill has been tragic, as everyone agrees, but at least they weren’t killed intentionally. One can’t say the same for the massive numbers of Canada Goose that have been corralled and gassed in New York City recently. Nearly 400 in Prospect Park alone were herded to their death last week (they were molting and couldn’t fly away), and another 1,235 were likewise exterminated last summer in different locations around the city.
The geese are believed to present a danger to air travel in the area. And in the wake of the Flight 1549 incident, the city has been determined to cull geese populations within 7 miles of the airports. There is some dispute, however (according to this NYT story), about whether local New Yorker geese pose the same danger as migrating, tourist geese.
Anyway there are better ways to control populations of geese. Relocation and release would be more comforting, but it’s not an option; the Canada Goose, Branta canadensis, has proven so adaptable to human environs that it has made itself into a pest all across the continental United States. Nobody wants more of them. But more humane alternatives like egg addling are available—alternatives which are probably much cheaper and more environmentally friendly than sending hundreds of adult geese to suffocation chambers, double-bagging their carcasses, and dumping them in a landfill.