Obviously as long as we’re going to have terrorist watch lists, then scrutinizing the visa applications of people on the lists seems like something we should do. But I’m extremely skeptical of the value of increased security at airports. The fact of the matter is that death by terrorist attack is extremely rare. Benjamin Friedman points to Nate Silver’s calculation that in the last decade of US flights, there was one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown.

Under the circumstances, investing additional resources in defending airplanes is unlikely to be a cost effective investment. It’s also worth underscoring the fact that flying in an airplane is much safer than driving. Insofar as stepped-up security makes flying both more expensive and more annoying, and therefore pushes more people to drive long distances, we’re going to cost lives rather than save them. And at the end of the day, you have to understand that terrorists are not going to weaken America by killing us all a hundred at a time with bombs. They do much more to weaken America by induces us to waste money and strangle our economy.

The last point I would make, raised by DanVerg on Twitter, is that even if airplanes were completely secure you could always kill people by detonating a bomb in some other crowded place. For example, you could blow something up in a crowded airport security line.

One of the most important parts of counterterrorism is to try to ensure that our society is robust against the possibility of successful attack. Which is to say that if people are murdered by terrorists we need to mourn them, catch and punish the perpetrators, and move on. We need to keep moving people and goods around the country. We need to keep producing and purchasing goods and services. We need to keep our foreign policy focused on the big picture. Hysteria is the goal of attacks, and it’s a shame to see that goal being served in the name of partisan politics.

I’ve seen both Ezra Klein and Cato’s David Boaz except this exact same paragraph about Chicago Public Schools under Arne Duncan:

Miami, Houston and New York had higher scores than Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Boston, San Diego and Atlanta had bigger gains. Even fourth-graders in the much-maligned D.C. schools improved nearly twice as much since 2003.

I don’t really understand this line of criticism or even why it’s supposed to be damning. I don’t think that anyone ever said that becoming Secretary of Education was like a prize that’s supposed to be handed out to the urban education chancellor who gets the very best results on the NAEP TUDA. Rather, common sense indicates that if you’re going to pick the chief of an urban public school system that you want to find one who’s delivered positive results. And the data shows, rather clearly, than under Arne Duncan Chicago public school kids improved their performance.

Now it’s true that New York City Public Schools under Joel Klein arguably did even better. But if you look back to press coverage of the choice you’ll see that Duncan’s asset over Klein was never based on denying this. Rather, the feeling was that Duncan and Klein have a similar general approach to education policy—an approach that Obama supports—but that Duncan has more of a reputation as a consensus-builder and Klein more as a fighter/bulldozer type. Duncan, consequently, was deemed more likely to be able to build legislative support for a reform program. Many of the other cities that have shown good results in recent years have school systems that are much smaller than New York or Chicago, so their leadership, while impressive, may not have been deemed as qualified to run the federal bureaucracy.

Chester Finn, in the same piece as that critical graf, had a smart take:

“Chicago is not the story of an education miracle,” said Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank in Washington. “It is, however, the story of a large urban system that has made some gains and has made some promising structural changes.”

In education, I think we should be suspicious of miracles. Improving schools is hard. Improving whole school systems is harder. Improving educational outcomes is rendered even more difficult by the fact that things that happen outside the classroom make an enormous difference—school administrators are operating a lever that has limited efficacy. But better schools do make a difference for the kids who attend them, and better school systems make a huge difference for the cities that have them. So improvement is worth seeking, especially non-miraculous improvement that can be scaled-up.

On Duncan, long story short he was the chief executive of a large urban school system that implemented some reforms that had theoretical support behind them and that seem to have led to some real improvements. He’s also someone the president knew personally, whose political style matches Obama’s, and whose reputation suits the administration’s political strategy. That seems like a very reasonable choice to me, though there are also other big city school chiefs who have done a good job and a number of different people around the country who could succeed as Secretary of Education.

Ezra Klein brings some needed nuance to the sausage-analogy debate:

I think this is too kind to sausagemakers. The expression emerged in a more Upton Sinclair-esque era, when sausagemaking really was gross and dirty and unsafe, but producers let all of that go on because it was also profitable to serve a product that had a bit of rat and a bit of a worker’s finger in it. The most profitable way to make sausage and the best way to make sausage are very different, and we’ve got a lot of regulations that try to narrow that gap.

Sound points. However, this is 2009. Even if the expression was apt at the time it was originated, the times have changed. The modern sausage industry is far from perfect (particularly in terms of the ethics and ecological sustainability of the source meat) but it’s providing a basically safe product.

Elsewhere in the post Ezra draws a distinction between “the best way to make sausage” and “the most cost-effective way to make sausage.” I would sort of problematize that. There’s a difference between the way to make the tastiest sausage and the optimal sausage-production method. Cost to consumers is a real consideration. Compromising quality to meet authentic consumer demand for low-cost tasty food isn’t the same as compromising the quality of legislation simply because legislators are too set in their ways to adopt better procedures.

I don’t have the energy to make proper “top whatever” lists of movies and songs and albums these days. Indeed, see me bloggingheadsing about the trouble with such lists. But my general sentiments about 2009 in cinema are very close to what Dave Weigel puts together here.

That said, I have a number of disagreements with his nonsensical tweets of 2009 list. A ladder that stretched all the way to the sun would be a very tall ladder indeed. Hence an extremely wobbly once. Thus, “shake it like a ladder to the sun” means to shake it a lot—there’s no nonsense here. Additionally, “Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, there’s nothing you can’t do” strikes me as a pretty banal lyric. New York as “concrete jungle” is a common metaphor and the sense of limitless possibilities is clear. The insertion of an “of” into the line seems moderately ungrammatical but not at all nonsense. And of course Lady Gaga’s “Ra Ra, ah-ah-ah! Roma, ro-ma-ma!” is a declaration of solidarity with the gypsy (i.e., Roma) people.

Meanwhile, my list of “annoying names by bands that are pretty good of 2009″ is unquestionably led by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, who probably should have called themselves The Pains or Pure at Heart. That said “The Tenure Itch” is a great song title.