Michael O'Hare

Among the many amazing things the gods of irony and absurdity have showered upon us in the last decade or so, I have to score serious discussion of a gold standard for money very high. Many years ago an economist friend explained that Marx’s labor theory of value was correct, but trivially correct, because there […]

Once upon a time, a fair number of very rich people had a sense of obligation to the society in which they did so well, including both children of wealth who learned about philanthropy and maybe a duty to stand for office along with the difference between a sheet and a sail and which side […]

Now would be a good time to have a charitable thought for pundits, bloggers, opinion columnists – yes, and policy professors – for whom the last month has been incredibly challenging, harder than any time in the last decade. When the world behaves like a parody of grownup affairs, and people with positional authority are […]

But, boy, do they tread a fine line. First up is the no-tax pledge Grover Norquist has frightened scores of cowardly Republicans (and the odd Democrat) into signing. I can make a case, if not an airtight one, that taking the oath of office as a rep or senator without forswearing a vow of this […]

Always something new out of San Francisco: we are pleased to amuse you currently with an initiative to outlaw circumcision of boys under 18. Circumcision is a millenia-old conventional practice among Jews and Moslems, and widespread otherwise, so there’s a lot of accumulated experience with it. The science is pretty solid that it doesn’t affect […]

I just encountered a peer-reviewed scientific paper whose authors announce, as their centerpiece finding, that because they couldn’t show A to be correlated with B at a 5% significance level, A is therefore uncorrelated with B. The correlation coefficient in their sample is about .2. This error is at the Stat 1 level; wrongwrongwrong. So […]

KQED aired a nice reflection on our dog park. It’s very hard to spend time there without smiling a lot. Some dogs, like pugs and X-doodles, just have a direct line to the human smile reflex, but all the dogs are in heaven and show it. Dogs are made to run, so being off-leash causes […]

One of the pleasures of living in the East Bay is the off-leash dog park at Point Isabel, where we will go with ours later today. On the way home, the devil has placed a temptation. If there’s a parking place in the shade, we can stop at Costco and load up on staples at […]

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund accused of sexual assault and attempted rape of a hotel maid, is experiencing the presumption of innocence at the heart of the American system of criminal justice. When he goes to trial, it will be up to the DA to prove the charges before he […]

My post on Florida State’s sellout to a right-wing foundation deserves some more general, and less snarky, reflection on several aspects of the deal. A distinctive, possibly unique, feature of the way Americans do our collective business, noted by de Tocqueville almost two centuries ago and long predating the tax preferences for charities and donors […]