January 2004

Tina Fetner waxes Tocquevillian about her participation in the Iowa Caucuses:

bq. Well, I did it. I participated in the glorious process that is the Iowa Caucus. It was my first time, and I was so excited about this down-home version of participatory democracy. What a pile of crap it turned out to be.

I watched “North By Northwest”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/ again last night and was struck more than I had been before by the boldly modernist style the film projects. The texture of the film is wonderful: the future we were promised and never had. The opening title-sequence in which the titles are aligned with the straight lines of an international-style skyscraper with New York taxis reflected in the windows is really striking (the Seagram building?). And Roger O. Thornhill and Eve Kendall (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) throughout project a thoroughly enviable lifestyle that is sharply at variance with other images of the 1950s. In fact the whole film (1959) has a taste of the optimistic side of the 1960s about it: the NASA–Expo 67–white-heat-of-technology–007 side. That optimistic image of the future is something I grew up with: children’s comics like Look-and-Learn painted a picture of future cities in which we’d all be whizzing about in our personal aeroplanes (those who weren’t travelling by monorail of course). That isn’t exactly what is happening in North by Northwest, but rather a projection of of what the future might be like if the world of North by Northwest were the present (a TV in every hotel room in 1959!). Architecture and design do the work: from that opening sequence, through the United Nations (clean, sharp lines) through the exquisite train ride from New York to Chicago, through the scene in the cafe at Mt Rushmore (such a clean Scandinavian feel) to the Frank Lloyd Wright-style house at the end. Fantastic.

Patrick Belton, over at “OxBlog”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/, has this “analysis”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_01_18_oxblog_archive.html#107465452760080391 of President Bush’s State of the Union address:

bq. If the amount of time given over to a single idea reflects its relative importance in the State of the Union speech (a reasonable assumption), then the most important themes in tonight’s speech, in descending order, are: the need to commit adequate resources to the military for the war on terror (87 seconds); that government will act against single-sex marriage (84 seconds); the administration’s commitment to strengthening families and religious communities, and to combat juvenile use of drugs (78 seconds); the government’s commitment to education and excellence for each child in America (72 seconds); that the world without Saddam is a better and safer place (69 seconds). The closing matter took 78 seconds, centered around the idea that we are living in historic times.

So, at least on this view, what we should take away from Bush’s speech is roughly: we live in historic times in which our major priorities are fighting terrorists, gays and atheists. And who says there’s no culture war in America?

UPDATE: While I’m at it, the funniest moment in the speech had to be when Bush said:

bq. Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year.

bq. (APPLAUSE)

A big bonus for the speechwriter who left a fat pause after that sentence!

The competition among Weblog competitions is heating up; in the last two months, we’ve had Wizbang’s “Weblog Awards”:http://wizbangblog.com/poll.php#BGB poll; the “Warblogger”:http://www.rightwingnews.com/special/warblogger2003.php awards, the Koufax awards at “Wampum”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/ and now the “Bloggies”:http://www.fairvue.com/?feature=awards2004. It’s all very confusing: which competition should you be paying attention to? To help answer that question, I’m proposing the Best ‘Best Weblog of 2003 Competition’ Competition. I’m sure that y’all can come up with appropriate categories and nominees – in order to start the ball rolling …

*Most egregious award decision*
The winner by a mile: Wizbang’s “Best Overall Blog” award for _Little Green Footballs_. In fairness, this isn’t Wizbang’s fault; I imagine that thousands of slavering trolls from LGF’s comment section were clambering over each other in their frenzied efforts to cast their vote for the Dark Lord. Like a scene from the siege of Minas Tirith. If LGF were really the best overall blog on the Internet, I’d want to give up, right away.

*Vote early, vote often award*
A number of hot contenders for this one – lots of fishy business of one kind or another in various competitions. “Dive into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ at the very least deserves special mention for his script ensuring that anyone who clicked on the Wizbang awards from his site would find themselves willy-nilly “voting for him”:http://wizbangblog.com/archives/001268.php.

*Awards competition that is most likely to be any use*
A tie between the Koufax awards, and the Warblogger awards, I reckon. Given the vast diversity of blogs, it makes much more sense to concentrate on a limited section of the blogging community than to try to cover the whole gamut. Readers are more likely to find new blogs that are of interest to them among the nominees, which is presumably the point of the exercise.

*Most glaring omission*
Why the hell has “The Poor Man”:http://www.thepoorman.net/ not gotten a nomination in any of the broader competitions?

Update: Andrew Northrup does a perfect blog-post on the State of the Union speech within moments of its ending, “as if to prove my point …”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002291.html#002291http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002291.html#002291

The US administration defends the rights of its citizens to be untroubled by discomforting information. Why? Do they think people will listen to WHO? Question for those who know more about this than I do: does obesity cost governments money all things considered, or does it save them money by causing earlier death resulting in lower claims on social security/pensions etc?

Just by way of a quick follow up to a post from last November, today’s Guardian reports that US Pharma is still pushing hard to label and defeat as protectionist the bulk drugs buying power of the Australian government. Worryingly, it sounds as if Australian PM John Howard may blink.

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Michael Crichton has made millions by writing mass market thrillers that either regurgitate partially understood scientific factoids, or pander to the nasty little revenge fantasies of male white middle-managers. He’s not averse to spicing his novels up with a hefty pinch of racism (the ‘Fu Manchu’ in a three-piece suit Japan bashing in _Rising Sun_) or sexism (in the rather revolting Disclosure). All in all, it’s rather surprising that Caltech should have asked him to deliver a prestigious lecture. The content and tone of that “lecture”:http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html, however, aren’t surprising at all. The speech – which argues that global warming is pseudo-science – is as specious a bit of argumentation as I’ve seen in a while.

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“The Colloquium in Legal and Social Philosophy”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/seminars/seminars_2004.php at University College London’s School of Public Policy looks very interesting this spring, with papers from Frances Kamm, G. A. Cohen, Jo Wolff, Cass Sunstein and others. (And the papers are downloadable too). First up is Frances Kamm (NYU) on ‘Failures of Just War Theory and Terrorism’.

The “African Cup of Nations”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/default.stm kicks off on Saturday with the host nation Tunisia taking on Rwanda. Most of the groups look fairly predictable, with Tunisia set to top A, Senegal B, Cameroon C and Nigeria D. Having said that, if there is a “group of death” then D is it, with Nigeria, Morocco and South Africa all battling it out. I’ll be rooting for Senegal in the hope that El-Hadji Diouf and Salif Diao recapture their form and bring it back to Merseyside (well you never know). What a great sport, where some of the world’s poorest nations are better than some of the wealthier ones.

is another man’s freedom fighter. Today’s New York Times carries a gushing apologia for Gerry Adams, in the form of a book review, and a more obsequious or dishonest piece of selective memory I have not seen in a long time.

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Worth reading:

“Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/01/florida_taliban_3.html on a story that should be getting a lot more play; how a Florida Judicial Nominating Commission has been asking potential judges whether they’re “God-fearing.”

“Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000065.html on Seabiscuit versus Elmo the Banana Slug.

“Mrs. Tilton”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000261.php on long-haired wastrels and the end of conscription in Germany.

“Chris Brooke”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000251.php on British Conservative party deviationism.

“Ken MacLeod”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#107396002535502694 on Marxist sectarianism. Ken namechecks the British and Irish Communist Organization, a defunct grouplet that I’ve always been fond of for their ability to argue themselves from one position to its radical opposite (viz. from a 32 county solution to the Northern Ireland problem, to advocating the region’s full integration into the UK).

Since CT has a decent-sized readership, I’m appealing for help to try to get hold of a copy of a biopic about Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the Swiss director Claude Goretta. The title is “Les Chemins de l’Exil”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077322/ and it appeared in 1978 and was, I believe, broadcast on the BBC. All my googling has drawn a blank, and contacts have come up with nothing. But if someone out there has a copy or knows how to get hold of one, drop me a line at chris-at-crookedtimber.org.

Via The Big Picture’s Barry Ritholtz, CNN has an interesting article about which Democratic presidential candidate Wall Street might prefer. You’ve got to love the lead:

A recent study from the University of California at Berkeley, published in the October issue of the Journal of Finance shows that between 1927 and 1998, the stock market returned approximately 11 percent more a year under a Democratic president versus safer, three-month Treasurys. By comparison, the stock market only returned 2 percent more a year versus the T-bills under Republicans.

(Dwight Merideth had a marvelous series of posts on this subject called “Just For the Record”, by the way.)

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Bush’s support from the “investor class” is far from monolithic. A Money magazine poll of “investor class” voters, however defined, revealed that only half planned to vote for Bush. And while Republicans got more in donations, they didn’t get that much more.

The piece goes on to detail:

* the Republican vs. Democratic donations of some of the largest major financial institutions.
* the positions re: corporate governance, taxes, international outsourcing, of the major Democratic candidates that would affect the investor class. (There’s a lot there I didn’t know- Dean used to be a stockbroker? Edwards is the only guy who would require expensing of stock options? Wow.)
* non-crazy quotes from Don Luskin about prominent Democrats.

It’s short and well worth a look; go to it.

Over the last year, those of us who were against starting the particular conflict in Iraq which took place in the second quarter of 2003, have taken an awful lot of criticism from those of our fellow left-wingers who supported it. Which is fair enough; robust debate is important. But it is a bit much to be accused of supporting the murder of innocents, by people who know perfectly well that you don’t, because you refuse to lend your voice to an already deafening clamor of approbation for a policy which you didn’t support, still regard as misguided, but which happened to have some favourable consequences. For example.

I personally have a very great antipathy to loyalty oaths, but am never happier than when discarding principles in order to fight dirty. So, it’s sauce for the gander time.

I hereby question the “left” credentials, and indeed the commitment to democracy, of anyone who takes the government side against Katharine Gun. Saddam’s gone and nothing can bring him back. Whatever happens in Iraq, happens. The war was fought and cannot be unfought. All that turns on this case, is whether someone who is aware that the government is trying to do something in private which they would not dare to do in public, has the right to blow the whistle. If you think that Ms Gun deserves to go to jail, then all I can say, mes amis is examine your conscience.

[EDIT] Just to emphasise that this is my own personal view, rather than the “party line” of CT. I’ve not discussed it with any other contributor and suspect that a number of them won’t agree.