prior probability

Now that I have completed my summer session teaching duties, I will be free to focus on my research and writing for the rest of the summer. Among other things, I am writing up a new paper tentatively titled “The Leibniz Conspiracy” (about which I will be blogging about in the next day or two), and I am reading the following works:

1. Jim Garrison, On the Trail of Assassins: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Murder of President Kennedy, available here. Since my wife and I visited the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in May (a museum devoted to the events of Nov. 22, 1963 in Dallas), I have immersed myself in the Zapruder film and JFK conspiracy theories. Along with the movies “Parkland” and “JFK”, this is the third book I have read on the subject since the month of May!
2. Richard Jeffries, Subjective Probability (The Real Thing), available here. Given my “conversion” to Bayesian methods and subjective probability about a decade ago, I am now turning my attention to Jeffries’ work in this area.
3. Cynthia Saltzman, Plunder: Napoleon’s Theft of Veronese’s Feast, available here. The author and book cover are pictured below. I ordered this book on the strength of Tyler Cowen’s recommendation (see here); my copy of this book arrived yesterday, and I am already on Chapter 2.
4. Gregory Stock, The Book of Questions, available here.
5. Nic Van Til, The Commercialization of Outer Space, available here.

In addition to “No me queda mas“, another one of my favorite Selena songs is her 1995 single “Fotos y recuerdos.” Alas, I was disappointed that this beautiful song was not featured for some reason on the recent Selena series on Netflix.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for Epsilon.

This beautiful painting is by Ethiopian artist Makeda Bizuneh (circa 2013).

The Chinese government is committing cultural genocide against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province (East Turkestan), detaining approximately one million people over the past five years, subjecting them to abuse and “re-education” and forcing them to denounce their religion. See here, here, here, and below:

In a previous Throwback Thursday I featured my 2005 paper “Deconstructing Darwin.” Today, I want to feature my 2008 paper on “A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Impasse over Puerto Rico’s Status,” which is available here via the magic of SSRN. In my 2008 paper, I model the century-old debate over the Island’s future political status as a truel: a three-person, sequential, random-order standoff among Puerto Rico’s three major political parties, the PDP, the PIP, and the PNP, in which no single player is able to eliminate the other two players. To learn more about truels, check out this Riddle of the Week via Popular Mechanics.

Here are the opening two paragraphs of my paper on “The Law of Self-Ownership” (footnotes omitted):

“When undercover police officers arrested Ana Isabel Castro-Garcia (pictured below, left) and Brenda Stephanie Mata (middle) in Laredo, Texas for working from their homes in violation of local lockdown orders, Jose Baeza Jr., an investigator with the Laredo Police Department said, without any sense of irony or shame, ‘These two ladies were not even licensed beauticians. There’s a health issue at hand.’ Similarly, when Dallas salon owner Shelley Luther (also pictured below, right), who presumably did have a license, was sentenced to seven days in jail and ordered to pay a $7,000 fine for refusing to shut down her beauty salon in violation of local shelter-in-place orders, Dallas Civil District Judge Eric Moyé told her, again with no sense of irony or shame, ‘The rule of law governs us. People cannot take it upon themselves to determine what they will and will not do.’

“The irony here is that it was the judge in the Luther case and the police in the Castro-Garcia and Mata cases who violated the most universal and sacred of our laws–the law of self-ownership–and who should arguably be thrown in jail for their abuses of power. Specifically, the property rights of all three women were violated by these shameless Texas authorities. In summary, although State governments do have the general police power to enact measures to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their residents, this paper will explain why such governments must comply with the Takings Clause whenever their police-power enactments significantly interfere with a person’s self-ownership rights.”

I nominate all the State and local government officials who took people’s labor rights during the pandemic without the payment of just compensation. In a nutshell, my thesis is that labor is property and that lockdown orders thus constitute a taking of property under the Takings Clause. I sketch my simple theory of Lockean lockdown takings in my most recent paper “The Law of Self-Ownership,” which is available here via SSRN. Below the fold is the table of contents of my paper: