A recent study purports to show that resumes with ‘black’ names on them are less likely to lead to an interview than those with ‘white’ names. I won’t quibble with the selection of names, other than to note that both of the Leroys I know (one first name, one middle) are white.

What bothers me about the study is how one-dimensional it is. I have a strong hunch that the prejudice is not so much against ‘black’ names as against unusual names of any kind. It would have been easy enough to rule out my hypothesis if the scholars involved had widened their selection of names to more than the two lists, ‘white’ and ‘black’.

To be specific, I strongly suspect that stereotypically southern (white) names like Bubba, Zeke, Elmer, Vernon, Bettie Lou, and Lou Ann are at least as discriminated against by prospective employers as Jamal and Takesha, at least in northern cities. Any non-standard Biblical name probably doesn’t help: David and Benjamin are (I imagine) OK, Jeremiah and Hezekiah far less so. I also suspect that really old-fashioned non-Southern names are also harmful: Mildred, Millicent, Gertrude, Agnes, Henrietta, Cyril, Barnaby, Julius, Clyde. The comments are open (though moderated) for further suggestions.

If the authors of the original study are looking for a topic for a sequel, they are welcome to this one. All I ask is a laudatory mention in the first footnote.

The first time I heard the Waco Brothers’ song “The Wickedest City in the World”, I was surprised to hear that the city was Chicago. Not that I had a specific alternative candidate in mind - I just thought that Chicago, while definitely in the Top Ten of wicked cities, was surely not Number One, even among American cities. Lately, I’ve come to realize the Waco Brothers were right, at least on this point.

However, I cannot recommend the song without reserve, because it also contains these lyrics:

I am just a hog,
falling off a log.
Vote for me, or I will kill your dog.

Those may not be the worst lyrics ever written, or even the worst lyrics on my iTunes, but they’re definitely among the Top Ten in that category. (Really bad lyrics usually keep a song entirely out of my music collection.)

Megan McArdle writes:

The economy is at best heading into a soft patch; at worst it is going into the second dip of a double-dip recession.

This is not the worst possibility, rather the middle one of three. McArdle’s dichotomy should be a trichthotomy, split three ways (not a ‘trichotomy’: that would be the act of splitting hairs). As some of her commenters point out, we may be well on our way into a full-scale depression. I have seen no sign of bottoming out, much less recovery, either temporary (in a double dip) or permanent. To put it another way, she and others have wondered whether this recession will be V-shaped (short and sharp, which is good), U-shaped (protracted, and not-so-good), or W-shaped (double-dip, even worse). There are other letters in the alphabet, and other characters in the HTML character set. Rather than one of these:

V - U - W

I wonder whether we might be looking at a drop to a permanently lower level, with no recovery:

L

or perhaps a continuous downhill slide:

\

or perhaps a steep drop with no visible bottom:

⌉

As with ice cream, a double dip is a pleasant prospect, compared to many of the alternatives.

Long War Journal reports that Al Qaeda’s Brigade 13 has established a website. I assume the NSA, CIA, DIA, and other organizations unknown to the general public are already competing to see who will be the first to hack into it and find ways to acquire (or insert) damaging information, but there’s another approach worth trying, which they may or may not have thought of. When you misspell the name of a very popular website, or type “.com” when it’s actually an .org or .net or .gov site, you often find yourself at a site run by parasites who will try to sell you porn or something. Why not do something similar with the Al Qaeda 13 site?

I don’t know what the common spelling errors of Arabic-speakers are, but it would be useful if someone hostile to Al Qaeda bought up all the domains likely to be visited by clumsy-fingered fans of Al Qaeda. What should be done with those domains? I can think of more than one possibility:

1. Porn sites featuring Osama Bin Laden and partners of both genders, all ages, and more than one species, are one obvious possibility, but unsubtle.
2. Straightforward argument might work in some cases. If thousands of alcoholics were looking for name-brand liquor sites on the web, some percentage would misspell the names. (Being alcoholics, this would be a fairly high percentage.) If those who did so found themselves at Alcoholics Anonymous websites, some (much smaller) percentage would no doubt stick around to read the message and some (even smaller) percentage might take it to heart and stop drinking, or try to. Something similar might be worth trying with Brigade 13.
3. As a variation on the preceding, it might be more effective to provide a site that looks like the real site, but will gradually lead the unwary user to pages more and more likely to make him doubt the competence, the courage, the piety, and even the sanity of Brigade 13 and its leaders.
4. Best of all, if it can be done, would be a site identical to the Al Qaeda Brigade 13 site, except that it has some carefully-hidden methods to track visitors and see who they are, who they know, and where else they go. I’m not sure how much information a site can get from its visitors, though I am sure that it partly depends on how much information they are willing to give. Even stealing the credit card numbers of Al Qaeda supporters could be considered a good thing. Does the real site sell T-shirts? I don’t read Arabic, Al Qaeda gives me the creeps, and I don’t want to be on some CIA list, so I haven’t gone to look at it. Perhaps Julian Assange would be willing to post stolen terror-fan credit-card numbers on WikiLeaks.
5. Once the operators of the real site figure out what’s going on and warn their visitors, the game gets really interesting. The fake sites could all claim to be the real site and warn visitors away from the real site and all the other fake sites, pointing out all the little details that make each of the others an obvious CIA plant, while tooting their own horns and causing confusion and doubts among the faithful. Having the most idiomatic Arabic insults and obscenities would count for a lot. Do our intelligence services have linguists who can handle this?

Indeed. Perhaps some day the JournoListers Cabalists will open their eyes and look around, stop being totally dependent on warm nourishing bland liquid food provided to them just for opening their mouths and looking cute, and learn to crap out in the yard instead of making a mess for the grownups to clean up.

Speaking of messes, I think the worst thing in the JournoList reaction to the stupid rumors about Trig Palin is Brad DeLong’s repeated suggestion (pages 9 and 10, messages posted on 8/30/08 at 8:12pm and 10:18pm) that Trig might have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome rather than Down’s Syndrome, and that that would shift “the balance of probabilities” to Bristol being his mother. Apparently, he’s quite comfortable making gratuitous accusations of teenage alcoholism against someone who’s never done him any harm. Or perhaps the worst thing is that no one else on JournoList objects to his FAS messages: it’s hard to decide.

The stupidest (though not the worst) thing in the latest e-mails is that more than one of the JournoListers (which ones? who cares? they’re all the same) can’t understand why McGovern had to dump Eagleton as his running mate when it was revealed that he had spent time in mental hospitals and been given electroshock therapy. Let’s see: we have someone with a 30% chance of succeeding to the presidency (14 of 47 VPs so far have done it), who had been hospitalized for mental problems three times and given electroshock treatment twice, all in the previous twelve years, and who would as president have primary access to the means of starting a world-wide nuclear war. What could possibly go wrong? The fact is that a severely depressive or mentally unstable person, an alcoholic, or a drug addict may make a fine senator, but cannot be trusted as president. We need someone who is ready at any time to make sensible, sober, sane decisions, even when awakened by the proverbial 3:00 A.M. telephone call. How could any educated person not know that severe depression disqualifies someone from being president of a nuclear power in the nuclear age?

In Reason, Peter Suderman (þ InstaPundit) writes that the Federal budget is “in terrible shape”, and none of the 212 comments (so far) notes that that’s like saying the Passenger Pigeon is “endangered”. There is no federal budget, because Congress hasn’t bothered to pass one, and has no plans to pass one. Shouldn’t newspapers and other media have running clocks labeled “It is XXX days past the deadline, and Congress still hasn’t passed a budget”?

I read somewhere a few weeks ago that New York state legislators hadn’t been paid since April (I think it was), since they hadn’t passed a state budget, but that they will be paid in full once they do. It seems to me that we need a similar law for federal legislators, but without the retroactive part. Why should we pay them if they can’t, or won’t, do their job?

I also wonder if it would be possible to adjust their pay for the size of the deficit. If they pass a budget (or don’t pass it) in which federal income is only covering 60% (or whatever) of federal outlays, why should Congressmen get more than 60% of their salaries? Of course, the problem is to avoid giving them incentives to destroy the economy with (e.g.) massive tax increases in order to safeguard their salaries. Perhaps their salaries should be inversely related to total outlays. Of course, the even larger problem would be convincing them to pass laws that would punish them for not doing their jobs. For that, an amendment to the Constitution might be needed. How humiliating would that be, to Congress and the nation as a whole?

In The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru quotes some leftie as saying that Sen. Webb’s recent editorial “made him sound like a mossback from the last century” and demanding that Webb “get his head out of the last, sad epoch of covert racist talk and join the rest of America in the 21st century”. The last century was only ten years ago! Is social progress that fast? Is the Clinton administration now a byword for Mediaeval repression? Was the George W. Bush administration the greater part of the new Age of Enlightenment? Or are some lefties working from talking points issued more than ten years ago, when “the last century” referred, much more plausibly, to the 19th? I wonder if any of them are still using faded mimeographs.

Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Big Lizards’ sophomoric humor is apparently contagious.

A Volokh Conspiracy post puts me in mind of Suetonius. Jonathan H. Adler reports that the White Castle hamburger chain says that “a single provision” of the recently-passed health insurance reform bill “will eat up roughly 55 percent of its yearly net income after 2014″. In the comments many people sneer at the claim, insisting that White Castle is run by greedy plutocrats who could easily afford the new expenses and are simply lying about the costs of the bill.

That reminded me of a favorite saying of the emperor Domitian. As Suetonius put is (Life of Domitian 21):

He used to say that the lot of princes was most unhappy, since when they discovered a conspiracy, no one believed them unless they had been killed.

Let’s hope we don’t find out how bad the health reform bill is only after it has killed off White Castle and other useful corporations, large and small.

According to Patterico, Hillary Clinton wishes the U.S. could be more like Brazil. At least she’s talking about the country. I mean, she is talking about the country, isn’t she? Her boss seems to want to make the U.S. more like Brazil.

As of noon today, Eastern time, we are one-third of the way through Obama’s first and (almost certainly) only presidential term. He has done a lot of damage that will take years of effort by better men and women to repair, but nothing he has done so far is utterly irretrievable. It appears that his malevolence is balanced by his incompetence: he couldn’t even manage to impose a dictator on Honduras. Let’s hope the last two-thirds of his term is equally ineffectual.

. . . at this point is to start wearing a fat suit and hope people mix him up with Chris Christie.

Ron Rosenbaum’s Pajamas Media column has been quite a bore lately, with the last ten posts (at least) trashing Tea Partiers and those who fail to denounce them. Now all his links (drop-down, fixed picture, and scrolling picture) have disappeared from the Pajamas front page and the PajamasXpress page. His last ten posts are still available through the direct link, but the comments don’t work, and I don’t see any way to get to the previous posts. (Archive and comment links now lead to the PajamasMedia front page.) I suppose we can always use the Wayback machine.

Oddly, Rosenbaum’s Wikipedia entry does not mention Pajamas Media in either the present or past tense. It does mention a Slate column, and his latest column there is a good one.

I heard on the radio yesterday that Obama plans to sign the Health Care abomination on the South Lawn of the White House this morning. Having the ceremony in public and outdoors seems unwise. Will there be masses of booing demonstrators with clever signs in view (and hearing) of the cameras, or will he use the Park Police and Secret Service to keep disgruntled constituents far away from the ceremony? Perhaps the weather will ‘force’ him to move the ceremony indoors. “A chance of showers after noon” (NWS) doesn’t seem quite enough for that.

I saw Dr. Faustus at the Blackfriars Playhouse this afternoon, and it just occurred to me that it was the most appropriate play for today’s vote in the House of Representatives. Too bad Bart Stupak and his buddies are selling our souls and bodies while they sell their own. (This assumes that my previous post is over-optimistic. We shall soon see, but I’m going to go see Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Blackfriar’s instead of sitting hunched over my PC clicking refresh like a crack-addicted monkey: a much healthier way to spend the evening. It’s being done by the undergraduates of Eastern Mennonite, and starts in half an hour, so I don’t suppose anyone reading this will be going who wasn’t already planning to go.)

Now that Stupak has apparently caved, everyone, right and left, seems to be assuming that Obama’s health care monstrosity will pass the House in the next couple of hours. Are we so sure? What if there really are enough Democrats opposed to it to kill it? They would have a strong incentive to pretend otherwise. If they all tell Pelosi the truth about how they plan to vote, she will delay the vote and keep on pressuring and nagging and harassing and threatening and attempting to bribe them for days or weeks or months, and so will the demonstrators on the other side (but without the bribes), making their lives a living Hell. The only way to end the ordeal is to convince Pelosi she’ll win so she holds the vote tonight. I won’t say it’s probable, but it’s certainly possible that a few anti-HCR Democrats are lying to Pelosi, or slyly misleading her, so they can finally get the voting over with and kill the bill tonight. They could always claim afterwards that they were quite sincere ‘yes’ votes the last time they talked to her but their wives or grandmothers or bishops - maybe even their constituents! - changed their minds between then and when they actually cast their votes. They could even plausibly claim that the horror of the whole degrading spectacle finally got to them and they suddenly asked themselves “What the Hell am I doing voting for this evil monstrosity?” (the bill, I mean, not Pelosi).

We can always hope. Polls have been wrong before.

Update: (11:00 pm)

Well, so much for slim hopes. The monstrous bill passed 219-212. Now it’s time to think about minimizing the damage and planning how to repair it. I wonder if Bart Stupak knows that he will be listed in history books in the same class as Smoot and Hawley? Or perhaps in a worse class, since as far as I know they were well-intentioned but ignorant and incompetent, whereas he must surely know that what he just did was profoundly evil as well as stupid.

If FNMA is pronounced ‘Fannie Mae’ and FHLMC is pronounced ‘Freddie Mac’, shouldn’t IPCC be pronounced ‘Ipecac’? Reading about the IPCC and its chairman has much the same effect on me as drinking syrup of ipecac.

I seldom visit Crooked Timber, and was therefore surprised to see two December threads on Shakespeare (and related topics) that were consistently interesting: Would Bacon’s Hamlet be Hamlet? and A molehill as high as Tenerife. Two commenters on the second post couldn’t resist dragging in Reagan and Nixon and saying stupid things about them, but otherwise the threads are intelligent, informative, and polite — not to mention very long. I would visit the site more often if it had more informal literary criticism and less philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics. I suppose I should stop by once a month to see what turns up.

Iraqpundit is only the most recent blogger I’ve seen quoting Maj. Hasan as saying “We love death more than you love life”. Am I the only one who thought of Men in Black when I first read those words? I’m thinking of the scene where Edgar the ill-tempered hillbilly tells the newly-arrived Bug “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers” and the Bug replies “Your proposal is acceptable” and kills him.

I would feel a lot better about Megan McArdle’s latest post if it were titled “Looking Ahead to Health Care Reform” instead of “Looking Forward to Health Care Reform”. No one I know is looking forward to it.