Pun Salad

• I'm unclear on the concept. And I have been for a long time, but fortunately Arnold Kling seems to be thinking about it: Data Ownership.

  Who owns my DNA? You can say that since it is my body, I must own it. But if you think of my DNA as represented in data, things get murky. I do not have the ability to represent my DNA as data—I need a lab to do that for me. I do not have the know-how to draw any inferences from this data representation—I need an expert to do that for me.

  Maybe I have, or should have, rights to control the use of the data representation of my DNA. Perhaps those rights are what we mean by ownership. The right that I think that I want is the right to decide who gets to connect my DNA representation with my personal identity. If you want to build a database to correlate DNA data representations of many people with their disease profiles and other characteristics, while keeping my identity anonymous, you don’t need my permission. But if you want to do anything with my DNA data representation that involves describing it as Arnold Kling’s DNA, then you do need my permission.

  I'm pretty sure I own the data on my hard drive. Everything else gets fuzzy pretty fast.

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• Probably I didn't change mine enough. Bari Weiss hosts a number of guest writers that explain How We Changed Our Minds in 2021. First up is Enes Kantor Freedom, center for the Boston Celtics. Who are, as I type, 16-18, but…

  The first time I came to America, in 2009, one of my teammates at Stoneridge Prep, in Simi Valley, California, was criticizing the president. I was scared for him, because I thought he was going to be jailed. Then he sat down and talked to me about freedom of speech, religion and the press. “Wait,” I said, “you’re telling me a TV channel or a newspaper is not going to be shut down because they are criticizing the regime?” He told me that's not how it works here. I was shocked.

  The thing about freedom is, once you taste it, you want everyone else to taste it, too. That’s why I marched for Black Lives Matter and spoke out for democracy in Hong Kong. It’s why I advocate for Tibetan freedom and safety for Taiwan. It’s why I continue to call out the corporations that talk about social justice but ignore China’s Uyghur genocide. And it’s why, a few months ago, I changed my name. I’m now Enes Kanter Freedom.

  I could start watching Celtics games again.

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• Let's quit. Jerry Coyne looks at a current United Nations exercise: UN launches unprecedented open-ended investigation of Israel.

  The General Assembly of the United Nations has just passed, by an overwhelming majority, a resolution to investigate Israeli war crimes, including those during the last battle with Hamas and Gaza. There will be no investigation of the Palestinian Territories, which is a nonvoting member of the UN, but it too could have been investigated as well for war crimes since they started the last skirmish by firing 4,260 rockets at civilians in Israel, not to mention the ongoing terrorism of and war crimes of Hamas (using human shields, firing rockets from civilian areas to prompt Israeli retaliation that would kill some civilians, etc.)

  The most invidious aspect of this investigation is that it not only singles out Israel (which the UN does repeatedly), but is an open-ended investigation—the first such investigation in the history of the United Nations. You probably haven’t heard about it except in Israeli media, because most of the big media in the U.S. are anti-Israel. There was an article in the NYT in May […]

  But of course time after time the UN issues resolutions against Israel while ignoring countries that have much worse human rights and war-crimes records: North Korea, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Belarus, China, and Saudi Arabia, to name a few.  The obsessive single-minded assault by most of the UN on Israel bespeaks to me widespread anti-Semitism. (Dissent if you want, but keep in mind the countries I’ve just named).

  I'm far from a foreign policy whiz, but I've never seen a convincing explanation of how belonging to the United Nations benefits us.

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• It's that time of year… when there are retrospectives. Some people, like Jacob Sullum, can't wait for the year to actually be over. But anyway, here are The Year’s Highlights in Blame Shifting. Trump, of course, but also:

  A disease that causes fiscal incontinence. Congress and President Biden continued a debt-financed federal spending spree that began during the Trump administration. Although supporters of the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act blamed the coronavirus, most of that law's provisions were only tenuously related to the pandemic.

  Rising prices trigger excuses. Economists warned that spending trillions of dollars on "relief," "stimulus," and "infrastructure" would feed inflation, which by November had reached 6.8 percent, the highest rate since 1982. Biden blamed "profiteering" and said the solution was more spending.

  And more at the link, of course. I'm pretty sure none of that was my fault.

Mrs. Salad and I watched this 1947 free-to-me streamer on Amazon Prime on Christmas evening. If you've already seen It's a Wonderful Life 459 times, it's a good choice. It was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture; it won "Best Sound Recording".

The Bishop's wife, Julia, is played by Loretta Young, married to the Bishop, Henry, played by David Niven. Unfortunately, the Bishop is obsessed with his work, specifically, the construction of a new massive cathedral, which involves a massive amount of time kowtowing to rich benefactors for donations. He neglects his family, he's stressed out, so he does what comes naturally to one in his position, prays for assistance.

And that prayer is answered in the form of Dudley (Cary Grant), an angel. Yes, a literal one. We can tell because he shows up knowing everyone's name, situation, innermost secrets, … and he can perform minor miracles. (The cute special effects are pretty good for 1947.) And it's Cary Grant, so he's utterly charming and witty. So his task is straightforward, and he nudges everyone onto a "better" path. Except… well, I don't know how theologically sound this is, but he gets pretty involved with Julia. To the point that he spends a lot more time hanging out with her than solving Henry's problem. Will he become a fallen angel? (Spoiler: that's not the way to bet.)