I’m going to close up this blog, since I haven’t found much time to contribute this semester. The purpose of the blog was to give perspective Pepperdine Public Policy students a look at what kinds of things students are interested in. I hope I contributed to the cause. If you’ve got any questions about the SPP program at Pepperdine, email me at tvchurch@pepperdine.edu.

If you’re really dying to read my stuff, follow me at Twitter (@tvchurch) or on Google Reader. I may also put up a few posts at my old blog, RedWhiteMaizeAndBlue, in a not-technically-affiliated-with-Pepperdine sort of way.

I hit 6,000 impressions since October of last year. The NCAA post continues to generate page views. I’ll be doing a much more comprehensive post about it this March.

Thanks for reading.

It’s already October. Unbelievable.

Why I blog:

There is a painful non-convexity in academic research.  Only really good ideas are worth pursuing but it takes a lot of investment to find out whether any given idea is going to be really good.  Usually you spend a lot of time doing some preliminary thinking just to prove to yourself that this idea is not good enough to turn into a full-fledged paper.  Knowing that most ideas are unlikely to pan out there is an incentive not to experiment on new projects.

That’s from CheapTalk. I started blogging years ago with the understanding that my audience was three of my nerdy friends. For me, blogging is a way to bookmark cool ideas and fix them in my mind by getting them down on paper.

A few articles that caught my eye:

1) Here are two great posts on inequality (Scott Sumner) and (Will Wilkinson). Sumner in particular talks about what inequality statistics fail to measure. Wilkinson’s paper “Thinking Clearly about Economic Inequality” is a classic and *must read* you are going to discuss inequality. There have to be measures of inequality out there that take into account the factors Sumner mentions. Does anyone know of any?

2) Should we engage flawed institutions like the UN Human Rights Council? A report highlighted by David Bosco says:

The overall message from the General Assembly is clear: The Obama administration’s re-engagement in UN human rights diplomacy has persuaded some non-Western countries to rethink their positions. But, in general, the drift away from the West continues, and core disagreements will continue to split the UN membership in the years ahead.

He notes: “They argue that the emnity that the Bush administration generated masked a broader trend against liberal internationalism at the U.N. and a shift toward a strong defense of sovereignty.”

I fear that the costs, in the short term, of sitting on the UNHRC vastly outweigh the eventual benefits from reforming the organization through engagement.

3) The Nobel Prize may highlight China’s human rights problems.

4) Bad news in the Ukraine about political liberalization? Alex Brideau says maybe not.

Haven’t been blogging much because school started back up, and I’ve continued doing research from this summer at the Hoover Institution. More on that later.

I’ve been away from the Internet for a while. Here’s what caught my eye while catching up:

1) A talk on complexity and diversity by Scott Page. Professor Page was a terrific professor to have at Michigan – whip smart and very funny. However much you can watch, do it. Make it to his talk ~7:50 on genetic selection, at least. Update: I’ve watched most of the talk while catching up on my reading. Terrific.

2) Keith Hennessey’s very informative post about what White House economic advisors do. Seriously, read this article just to get a feel for how the White House staff operates in relation to one another.

3) P!=NP? I remember James Somers teaching me about the P=NP problem back when we were sophomores in college, but not much else (James is currently offering 3:1 odds that the proof doesn’t actually contribute to the P=NP problem).

4) The incredible children of the H-1B visa. We need more of them.

5) Iranian politics is much more complicated than just Ahmadinejad.

France’s lower house of parliament has voted to ban burqas. This article says the vote was 335-1. Incredible. And then the part where they try and make it seem like it has nothing to do with religion:

It refers neither to Islam nor to veils. Officials insist the law against face-covering is not discriminatory because it would apply to everyone, not just Muslims. Yet they cite a host of exceptions, including motorcycle helmets, or masks for health reasons, fencing, skiing or carnivals.

I was unaware that Spain and Belgium are also considering bans.

Does anyone know how many Muslims are in the French parliament? The bill goes to the Senate in September. I imagine it will receive near unanimous support there as well? Hopefully it will be ruled as unconstitutional.

Mosab Hassan Yousef isn’t going to be deported from the United States. Yousef, son of one of Hamas’s founders, wrote Son of Hamas, about his time spying for the Shin Bet in Israel on Hamas. Read the book if you’ve got time. It’s a fascinating look into Hamas, Fatah, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel. It’s also crazy how long he spied for, what he was able to prevent, and how long he stayed in prison to maintain his cover.

What I cannot believe is that the Department of Homeland Security wanted to deny him asylum. I don’t know how the nuts and bolts of asylum work, but couldn’t Yousef have appealed to his Shin Bet friends to vouch for him?