An Un-republican Form of Government

In 1987, the California Sheriffs Association sponsored a bill in the state legislature to ban its electoral competition. Since then, only current or recent members of the law enforcement establishment have been allowed to run for Sheriff in California.
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It is as if prosecutors had banned their main electoral opposition by getting the legislature to pass a law against defense attorneys running for District Attorney, requiring all candidates to be members of the prosecutor’s office. Somebody ought to sue.

That somebody is me.

There is much else of interest.

Thursday I had dinner with Madhu Kurup at Amarin, a Thai restaurant in Mountain View which neither of us had tried before; he didn’t comment on his, but my dish (spicy chicken with cashews) was quite satisfactory.

If you read his flattery of me, remember that it takes two to make lively conversation.

I found his Livejournal (incidentally he looks nothing like the photograph) indirectly: my log shows hits from four ‘friends’ pages which carried his report. It’s a bit of a shock to dip into foreigners’ informal writings in English but peppered with strange words; it makes me worry that my own writing might be made unnecessarily obscure by local jargon. What is the right balance? Does anyone whose English is weak read my site?

I took Madhu’s suggestion to try Google Sets on my favorite music. I found that it helps to pre-filter my entries; if the initial set is too diverse, the narrow result is nothing and the broad result is effectively useless.

Oh dear: John Lott, scholar-darling of the Gun Lobby, may be dirty. (Julian Sanchez of Cato broke the story.) I hope the Gun Lobby (statist-speak for all of us who don’t buy the victim-punishing dogma of Feinstein, Schumer, Brady et al.) will have the sense to disown him if necessary. On the other hand, of course, despite the ‘Mary Rosh’ affair I hope the sunlight will ultimately show his work to be clean.

The worst outcome of this matter – coming on the heels of the Bellesiles scandal – would be to discourage serious social scientists from looking at gun issues, leaving nothing but a war of slogans.