USHA RODRIGUES ON THE PRIVATE TRADING MARKET: “When does a company get too big to stay private?” She discusses the “shadow” market that has sprung up for companies like Facebook, which have not yet gone public, but in which every legal tool of interpretation is being brought to bear by people looking to get in. I recently heard Professor Rodrigues give a riveting talk at UVA law school on related topics. The Conglomerate, where she and others post on business law issues, tracks these questions very well. Things like the Skype acquisition, Facebook, and more.
Archive for 2011
May 11, 2011
SEVEN DEAD AFTER 5.3-MAG EARTHQUAKE HITS SPAIN.
SANDEEP GOPALAN in the international edition of the WSJ: Why it matters whether Washington puts out a firm and clear view of how it sees the legality of the OBL killing. I’m not the only one harping on this topic; Gopalan puts the case better than I’ve managed to do. ”
But first, the popular question: Who cares?
Osama bin Laden was responsible for the most heinous act of terror in modern history. Only lawyers and their sophistry could defend human-rights protections for someone who displayed so little humanity. Right?
These arguments may seem obvious to most, but disquiet in legal circles has been growing after the initial euphoria following bin Laden’s death. It is quickly becoming apparent that the “who cares” retort will not wash, that Washington must establish a proper legal basis for having killed bin Laden. By doing so the U.S. could not only deconstruct the myth that an unarmed bin Laden was an innocent who was killed unjustifiably; it could also negate the jihadi narrative about Western hypocrisy: that we are no different from the terrorists. In what could be bin Laden’s last hurrah, Washington has yet to make its case, and the Obama administration is rapidly losing the narrative.
(Via Hot Air.)
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION on the undergraduate admissions process: What the admissions deans say about this year, as things wind down, students make their final decisions, wait lists are wound up. Someone mentioned that professors don’t really take an interest in the business model of the higher education business until they have a college-applying kid. That’s exactly right in my case; I’m paying attention now. The CHE does a good job of covering the business model, remarkably neutrally given that it is an industry newspaper. But far and away the most useful book for parents in the throes is Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U. As he says, there is nothing in the life of a teenager that the college admissions process does not corrupt.
BRITAIN’S ANDREW ROBERTS on the sneers, jeers, and contempt in his country at the United States for taking down OBL: I am frequently asked these days by academics and policy professionals on why I keep harping on the need for the Obama administration to forthrightly defend the legal-policy legitimacy of its OBL killing. They tell me I’m getting all worked up over something that is merely surface froth among chattering class types, around for one news cycle and gone. I think they’re wrong; it matters because legitimacy matters, and legitimacy is partly a matter of being willing to set the public baseline for debate, rather than letting others set it for you. I know this because I’ve run NGO campaigns before; others, like former State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger, know this because they’ve been on the receiving end. Secretary Clinton, call your lawyer.
JUST SAY CELL NO to Barack Obama’s hard cell:
President Obama could soon have the ability to personally text message every single cell-phone-toting American -— whether they like it or not — with “critical emergency alerts” under a new federal program that civil libertarians and political opponents say is a Big Brother-like intrusion posing a high risk of political abuse.
Federal officials in New York yesterday unveiled the three-tiered emergency alert system that would blast messages about Amber Alerts, impending weather disasters and terror threats to mobile devices.
Cell-phone users could opt out of most alerts if they want to, but not the texter-in-chief’s presidential pages.
“It’s like the state rep sending out mailings about how wonderful they are,” said Tad Kasperowicz of the Quincy Tea Party. “President Obama says,’Here come the high winds and the thunderstorms’ and it’s not really an emergency, but, hey, he gets his name out to every cell phone in the area. I can see that. Absolutely. There’s potential for abuse there.”
Gee, ya think?
RELATED: Reason TV notes, “Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants to control your smartphone.”
There’s a lot of that going around these days.
PERHAPS A BIT OF JUSTICE for the Rwandan genocide—in Wichita, Kansas, of all places.
NLRB AND BOEING: “The NLRB hands the Republicans a potent issue,” Jennifer Rubin writes at the Washington Post “Frankly, this is one case the Democrats better hope they lose, that is if they want to deprive Republicans of a boffo campaign issue and keep in play in 2012 some important right-to-work states.”
RELATED:
Like I said in early 2009, you and I have a rendezvous with scarcity…
WILL OBAMA MAKE A PLAY FOR THE LONE STAR STATE, or is he just messing with Texas?
RELATED: “And the award for the most ridiculous poll sampling goes to…”
UPDATE: Texas will certainly be in play if the GOP follows “David Kahane’s” advice on who to nominate.
CHANGE: “I will be shorting US bonds,” Veteran investor Jim Rogers “said on Wednesday he plans to short US bonds and sees more currency turmoil in the markets this fall,” CNBC reports:
Bonds in the US have been in a bull market for 30 years, Rogers said.”In my view that’s coming to an end…the bond bulll market is coming to an end. If any of you have bonds I would urge you to go home and sell them. If any of you are bond portfolio managers I would get another job,” he said.
Addressing one bond portfolio manager among conference delegates, Rogers said: “If I were you I would think about becoming a farmer. You buy land and learn how to farm.”
It could be quite a growth industry in areas that have been heavily stimulated by the government.
ALTHOUSE’S WORST NIGHTMARE: Markdowns on Men’s Shorts.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: WHY NEWT MUST RUN.
Party like it’s 1995!
IN PRAISE OF STRAWMEN: At the Duck of Minerva, an observation that strawmen arguments have legitimate uses. After all, what can get dismissed as a strawman argument might well be an idealized or abstracted form of a whole series of particular arguments with a common structure. Or we might use an abstracted form of the argument to sharpen the debate, even though it leaves out many subtle qualifiers in a first approach to the argument. I rather agree.
Update: Some further qualifications from Stacy McCain, with which I also agree. There is a question of good rhetorical judgment here. There are strawman arguments that are just that. I just mean to say, let’s not burn the [?] along with the Wickerman … I’m not sure what exactly to stick in the brackets, but you get the idea.
The brilliant historian Yaacov Lozowick points to a book that looks very interesting indeed: Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
I don’t know much about the ongoing war in the Congo other than the fact that it makes the Middle East look like Canada by comparison. Millions of people have suffered and died there in silence. Few go there to report on it, and even fewer agitate to do anything about it.
Why Darfur captures the attention and passion of so many while the Congo does not is a mystery, though I think it’s partly because hardly anyone is even aware that the Congo is a war zone at all, let alone the worst one in the world. Maybe this book will help a bit. Maybe. Anyway, I ordered a copy.
MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLOODING: This is the AP wire story. I don’t have much understanding of levees, rivers rising and cresting; I grew up in an arid region of California and have never lived near the great interior rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri, or the Ohio River valley. But our thoughts are with those in the downstream path. Update: Given how little I know that geography, I am taking the liberty of posting a long email from someone who is actually there, and thanks for sending. Posted below the fold.
MORE AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: I agree entirely with Michael that Amnesty is becoming downright creepy. But I’d add that it faithfully reflects its membership base. I talk about the moment in which Amnesty decided to affirmatively switch gears from human rights to, well, All Things Globally Progressive and Then Some in this short academic book review.
More generally, the main human rights organizations face an unsustainable dilemma [corrected, per guest ed. Michelle Dulak Thomson]. On the one hand, merely converting all supposedly “progressive” values into claims of human rights, which means economic, social, and cultural claims that make “human rights” a mile wide and a nan0-inch thick. And, on the other hand, the gradual capture of the language and international machinery of human rights by Islamic states and their agendas, in which human rights is gradually converted into a language for suppressing criticism of Islam.
The effect of the former is, ironically, not to make more progressive agenda items more enforced as actual rights, but instead merely to show that anything can be framed as a right – and so to hand it over as a rhetorical language to the illiberalism of the Muslim world and its most influential states. The dominant human rights monitors, meanwhile, gradually turn into being elite global managers of a human rights agenda amounting to the endorsement of “global religious communalism,” the first tenet of which is the denial of free speech. (I myself recommend the Human Rights Foundation, which is currently holding the Oslo Freedom Forum.)
ORIN KERR ANALYZES health care mandate appellate argument: Judges seemingly unpersuaded by activity/inactivity distinction, he says, discussing yesterday’s oral argument. More discussion at Volokh.
OH, AND HEY, YOU CAN FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER now if you’re into that sort of thing.
There are lots of other good Middle East feeds, too, including my old friend Noah Pollak, one of the main “characters” in my book
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL is becoming downright creepy. Its radical Islamist partner, Cageprisoners, gruesomely “lynches” President Barack Obama on the Internet.
Amnesty shamefully fired feminist Gita Sahgal last year for criticizing the organization’s relationship with that terrorist-supporting outfit, but she was right then, and she’s even more right today.
CITY JOURNAL’S CALIFORNIA EDITION: Someone might already have mentioned this, but it is the go-to place for analysis of the California political economy. Scary stuff.
IN THE MAIL: The Winds of Khalakovo.
THE DARK NIGHT OF ISLAM: Michael Knox Beran writes:
The last six months have proved a climacteric in the history of Islam. An astonished world has witnessed the deposition of rulers in Egypt and Tunisia, revolts in Syria and Libya, the intensification in Iran of a struggle between President Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei, and the United States’ imposition on Osama bin Laden of a wild but under the circumstances salutary justice.
Yet however tumultuous the events may be, Islam seems unlikely to undergo the reformation its most generous hearts and intelligent minds desire. The revolutions in the Arab states more nearly resemble the abortive ones of 1848 than the successful ones of 1989: Only the identity of the ruling cabals is likely to change. Osama is dead, but his cult and myth live on. He has already been enrolled by many Muslims in the register of their martyrs, while others piously approach his house in Abbottabad as they would a reliquary shrine.
Read the whole thing. It’s also worth flashing back to a question Mark Steyn asked in 2005: “What if we’ve already had the reformation of Islam and jihadism is it?”
It wasn’t just Seventies Bryn Mawr Muslims who were “moderates”. So were, comparatively, Muslims all over the world. The Sudan’s always been a nutty joint but you’d have had a harder time convincing anyone to jail an English schoolmarm over a teddy bear 50 years ago: The Prophet’s authoritative cuddly-toy suras date back all of 20 minutes. In 1950, a young Pakistani emigrating to Scotland or Canada would have received an education different only in degree, not (as now) wholly foreign in kind and ever more resistant even to the possibility of assimilation. One can detect similar trends in Indonesia, Singapore, the Central Asian stans, the Balkans – and among the de-assimilationist third generation Muslims in western Europe.
Even in photos, backward runs the progress until reeled the mind. Where it all ends knows (somebody’s) God.