December 2003

I’ve occasionally mentioned that my lovely fiancee is a professional writer. She has been successful enough to hire some assistants and create a full-fledged corporate communications company, FrogDog Communications. It’s a terrific accomplishment.

Their webpage is up, and there are so many reasons to visit.

* GAZE upon the lovely visage of our adorable toy fox terrier, Ramona!
* WIN $100 by entering the “What is a FrogDog?” contest!
* HIRE her company for your corporate communications needs!

(That’s enough promotion. – Ed.)

So the French are a bunch of lazy, Jew-hating communists whose new best friends are Arab terrorists. Right?

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I’ve been reading Amartya Sen’s magnificent “Development as Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385720270/junius-20 this week. A more bloggable books would be hard to find: startling facts and insights jostle one another on every page. Even when you already know something, Sen is pretty good at reminding, underlining and making you think further about it. So this, for example on the life prospects of African Americans:

bq. Even though the per capita income of African Americans in the United States is considerably lower than that of the white population, African Americans are very much richer in income terms than the people of China or Kerala (even after correcting for cost-of-living differences). In this context, the comparison of survival prospects of African Americans vis-a-vis those of the very much poorer Chinese or Indians in Kerala, is of particular interest. African Americans tend to do better in terms of survival at low age groups (especially in terms of infant mortality), but the picture changes over the years.

bq. In fact, it turns out that men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups. Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to that of the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than then even poorer Indians in Kerala. So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from _relative_ deprivation in terms of income per head vis-a-vis American whites, they are also _absolutely_ more deprived than low-income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages.

Shocking, for the strongest economy on earth to create these outcomes (which, as Sen reminds us, are even worse for the black male populations of particular US cities).

UPDATE: Thanks to Noumenon for “a link to this item”:http://noumenon.typepad.com/noumenon/2003/12/sen_relative_po.html . I closed the comments thread because I didn’t want to spend my weekend fighting trolls. But email suggests that there are some people who have worthwhile things to say so I’m opening it again (though I won’t be participating myself).

The Guardian has “an obituary for Hans Hotter”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/obituary/0,12723,1105316,00.html , the great Wagnerian singer, who has expired at the age of 94. A sad day for all of us happily infected with the Wagner virus. The obit has the following nice anecdote:

bq. When he made a first visit to London after peace had been declared, he saw a headline in the Evening Standard proclaiming “Hotter In London”, and it took him a few minutes to realise that the newspaper was referring to the weather, not to him.

I agree with Jesse. That man is unelectable.

My friend Rob Humenik at Get Donkey! is a volunteer on the Dean campaign. He recently had the opportunity to ride along with some of the press corps covering the Dean rally in Houston. It’s well worth reading:

What was most interesting was hearing them interact with each other. I always had this silly stereotype of journalists trying to scoop each other and keeping their information to themselves, but these guys were the definition of pack journalism. What was scary was that a lot of them didn’t really seem to know what they were talking about regarding some of Dean’s policy stances, things he said at the speech, etc. I got the distinct impression that they were interviewing each other for information (instead of, say, the official campaign spokesman that was in the front seat). Honest to Pete, I heard one reporter ask another “How do you think Dean is doing,” and the other went on to answer how he felt Dean probably wrapped up the nomination when he decided against campaign financing, but the test will be if his appeal extends beyond the base of radical liberal supporters…” The exchange was followed by the sound of fingers typing on keyboard.

Dwight Meredeth and Mary Beth at Wampum are being kind enough to run the 2003 Koufax Awards to recognize the best in left-of-center blogs. I really enjoyed them last year, and I’m delighted that Dwight is volunteering his time again. They’re taking nominations now, so please feel free to contribute.

UPDATE: Because they’re not accepting nominations for their own posts, I wanted to take the opportunity to say that Dwight Meredeth’s post “Tell His Parents”, about Michael Savage’s cruelty about autism, is one of the very, very few blog posts that I’ve gone back and re-read months later.

Later on today, the magnificent Gus Hosein, will be logging in to CT and giving us his impressions of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Gus is a key figure in a global community of privacy activists – the people who say “huh? you mean what?!” to the proliferation of government initiatives that “seek to balance” the “dynamic equilibrium” between privacy and security in this post 9/11 world.

I know Gus from my time at LSE. Henry knows Gus from a book project in internet governance being organised by Ernest Wilson. I know Ernest Wilson from a conference organised by the 21st Century Trust. Eszter knows Gus too. How, we don’t know yet. Did somebody say something about networks?

Anyway, welcome to Gus. He’ll be blogging here over the next day or so with his thoughts on the WSIS.

“Eugene Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2003_12_07_volokh_archive.html#107107377078741002 blogs on an interesting biathlon, involving both chess and boxing, two competitive endeavours that are usually pursued in isolation from each other. There’s some fictional precedent though; the eponymous hero of Maurice Richardson’s _The Exploits of Engelbrecht: Abstracted from the Chronicles of the Surrealist Sporting Club_ proves to be a dab hand at both activities. Engelbrecht is a boxer by profession, and like all Surrealist boxers, he’s a dwarf who fights clocks. Grandfather clocks to be specific (they fight dirty). In a succession of short stories, Engelbrecht also shows his prowess not only in beating clocks to a standstill, but at a variant of chess (in which the pieces are Boy Scouts and nuclear weapons), at kraken wrestling, at pike fishing, at Surrealist golf (the first hole is several thousand miles long), and at Plant Theatre. In my favourite story, Engelbrecht plays in the Earth vs. Mars rugby game; the Earth team is several thousand strong, and features such luminaries as Friedrich Engels, Origen, Nebuchadnezzar, Attila the Hun, the Venerable Bede, Luther, Ethelred the Unready, and Judas Iscariot. Heliogabalus, Bishop Berkeley and Aubrey Beardsley score for Earth; Engelbrecht wins the game at the last moment by cunningly concealing himself inside the ball.

The book came out first in 1950; I’m awaiting delivery of a first edition, and you can’t have it. Sorry. You can however, purchase the “Savoy Books”:http://www.abel.net.uk/~savoy/HTML/engelb.html edition, which I also own, and which is handsomely illustrated by Ronald Searle among others. You can even browse the “first chapter”:http://www.abel.net.uk/~savoy/engel.pdf for free on their website. But you should, as they say, read the whole thing. Wonderful stuff.

Gary Farber has a thought experiment posted about a mandate requiring Congressional districts to be drawn to create districts that are as competitive as possible.

That is, the goal in drawing district lines would be that all districts be as evenly divided between likely Republicans and Democrats as is predictable. You know, the opposite of the way gerrymandering has been functioning, overall, since the days of Eldridge.

It’s obviously not going to happen, but it does set one a’thinkin.

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If the situation in Iraq is going to work out, it will be because of people like these.

The photos are well worth a look. The crowds don’t look huge, but it’s awfully hard to estimate crowd size from photos on the ground. In addition, the Iraqi demonstrators had to take a serious risk of being targeted as “collaborators” if they attended. (It’s also interesting to see firsthand how much of Baghdad could be mistaken for Los Angeles or Houston.) It does the heart good to see them.

First off, excuse the strange author name – an essential for a blogger whwo can’t be trusted to remember her own login while on the road.

As CT tries hard to keep its faithful readers up to date on all the news that’s new and improved, I am blogging from the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva. I’m here for work, so in the interests of keeping my job, I won’t be blogging about the really juicy political bits. But at an event like this, there’s so much going on that at least I can give a flavour of what it’s like.

apologies in advance – this is on the hoof!

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I’m suprised that none of the blogs that deal with British left sectariana have linked to “George Monbiot’s column yesterday”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1102779,00.html . I know George says daft things from time to time (and there’s a factual error about the Royal Society in this very column) but pointing out the genealogy of Spiked!, the Institute of Ideas, LM Magazine etc etc and the links between the various swivel-eyed neolibertarian technoenthusiasts who are the former Revolutionary Communist Party seems like a public service that should be performed every so often. (Especially now they all have “proper jobs” writing columns for the Times and fronting think tanks.)

I’ve put up a post on my other weblog on the general subject of anti-war leftishness. I’ve put it over there rather than on CT because it’s fair to say that there are a number of different schools of thought among CT contributors on the general subject of war, and it seems unfair to use the CT brand for views that not everyone might stand behind. Cheers.

Update: And now I’m going to hang it on the reasonably topical peg of this Christopher Hitchens interview.