March 2005

Bill Gardner notes an uptick in infant mortality in the US, and links to the National Center for Health Statistics report which tries to explain it. As Bill points out, undertsanding a slight rise in the rate is all very interesting, but not to the point when we know what can be done to lower the rate, even if what we know doesn’t address the sudden (and slight) increase. Here are his suggestions:
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I was pretty sure that I was on the right side of the betting odds when I predicted a few days ago that the FEC was going to have to start thinking about how blogs fit into the current regulatory system, but I didn’t expect to be proved right this quickly. “Stephen Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/03/thanks_you_sena.html has more.

Here in Brisbane, we’re not really up with which fork you should use first and so on, so I was concerned to this piece from the New Statesman by Nick Cohen (reprinted with the usual delays in Australia by the Financial Review)

I think you can smoke in the Groucho[1], but you can’t in Waitrose or at any Islington dinner party I’ve been to in the past decade. The social taboo against smoking is becoming absolute, in the middle classes at any rate … it is social death to put a cigarette in your mouth, not to stuff cocaine up your nose.

I’m obviously out of touch here. Last time I checked the etiquette manual was de rigeur to go to the bathroom to snort cocaine, and to go out to the porch to smoke. But now I fear total embarrassment at my next middle-class dinner party: obviously I should have the cocaine served at the table. Can anyone give me more details here – are individual salvers the way to go, for example, and is it OK to ask guests to bring some of their own?
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Lots of post ideas stacked up, so time to clear them by just publishing my notes:

Lessons from the Argentinean crisis and default, with applications to the current state of the US economy

• Massive devaluations work

(this could be part of a series including “Lessons from the UK experience, Lessons from the Asian crisis, the Mexican crisis etc etc etc)

Thoughts on current developments in Lebanon

• The important thing to note is that when the USA acts alone, a hundred thousand people die. When it stands together with France, putting the rogue state on notice that it can’t depend on its historic friends, we win without firing a shot. And this is a victory for unilateralism in foreign policy?

An introduction to Linear Algebra for Econometricians, pitched at a level which ought to allow you to read a graduate-level econometrics textbook

• X’X means a sum of squares
• (X’X)^-1X’Z is a linear regression of Z on X
• Most of the rest you can pick up from context.

That’ll do for the minute, cheers.

I have left the bitter “Sonoran desert”:http://www.desertusa.com/du_sonoran.html behind and am in balmy Chicago for a “conference about body parts”:http://www.law.depaul.edu/institutes_centers/health/pdf/body_parts.pdf. Packing my suitcase, I realized that I’m going to have some trouble keeping my own body parts at a reasonable temperature: where are all those Winter clothes I used to own? Didn’t I live in New Jersey and Connecticut for years? So I just brought everything I had.

The conference should be interesting. Mainly lawyers and bioethics people, along with some economists. I am the token sociologist. I’ll be talking about some work I’m doing on organ procurement rates in seventeen OECD countries, so obviously I am on the panel titled “The Battle Between Bioethics and Religion.” As it happens, my friend “John Evans”:http://sociology.ucsd.edu/faculty/EvansJ.htm wrote “the book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226222624/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ on the battle between bioethics and religion. The final score was Bioethics 3, Religion 1.

Kieran says that in the ‘battle between bioethics and religion. The final score was Bioethics 3, Religion 1.’ This, I would say, was about the score in last night’s Wifeswap: Leierwoods 3, Patricks 1. The Patricks changed their own behaviour more than the Leierwoods did — a lot more. The Leierwoods would have won by more if only they hadn’t raised their son to be a bumptious clever clever, who spent the entire show trying to prove to American conservatives that liberals are a bunch of know-it-all insensitive bastards.
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The latest “New Left Review has a piece by Perry Anderson”:http://www.newleftreview.org/NLR26501.shtml on the thinking of Rawls, Habermas and Bobbio on global order and justice. Since I’m busy teaching Rawls’s “Law of Peoples”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674005422/junius-20 at the moment, I thought I’d give it a read. The article has all the classic Anderson hallmarks — the arrogant pronouncement of judgement from on high, the frequent lapses into Latin, a will to the most unsympathetic reading possible. Typically, Anderson is incapable of reading his targets in any other way that as providing pragmatic cover for the American hegemon. On the one hand he seems to adopt the stance of high principle against the unwitting tools of US power whose every argument is accounted for in terms of their personal history and psychology, but on the other it seems hard to know where the critical principles can be coming from since it is hard to see how, on Anderson’s world-view, principles can ever be anything other than the residue of power politics as false consciousness.

The central charge against Rawls and Habermas is that of providing left philosophical cover for Western intervention in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. In Rawls’s case, this is because Rawls argues in general terms that “outlaw states” which violate human rights and threaten their neighbours cannot claim immunity from intervention from liberal states. Does Anderson advance a counter-argument to the effect that the state sovereignty of such regimes is inviolable, or that considerations such as those adduced by Rawls are insufficiently weighty to over-ride such considerations? No, of course not. Anderson wouldn’t stoop to construct such an argument: for him, all that counts is the interest of powers.

Two examples which especially annoyed me of Anderson misresepresenting Rawls to his readers are below the fold, no doubt others could be found.
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I’m reading Ronin Ro’s Tales To Astonish, about "Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and the American comic book revolution." So far I’m not finding it clearly written. Of Jack "Jacob Kurtzberg" Kirby’s early days:

It was a difficult time to be a twelve-year old boy. Everywhere, kids were forming gangs. Kids on Suffolk Street became the Suffolk Street Gang and fought the Norfolk Street Gang. Then they fought Irish and black gangs. Some of his peers started running with the well-dressed mobsters hanging around the neighborhood. If he couldn’t become an actor, Jacob figured, he’d do this, too, or become a crooked politician, like the ones he saw holding conferences and spending money in neighborhood restaurants.

But thoughts of the future had to wait. For now, he had to maintain his reputation and look out for his brother, David. Their mother wanted David to wear nice clothes, but velvet pants, a lace collar, and shoulder-length curly blond hair (at the height of the Depression) had made the kid a perpetual target. Five years his junior and over six feet tall, David was stocky and tough, but no match for the street-hardened gangsters stepping up to confront him. David did what he could when the gangs attacked, but sometimes Jacob would leave school, see his brother under a pile of opponents, and leap at them with both fists swinging.

Lessee: David, aged 7, over six feet tall, stocky, dressed in … Can you even BE stocky if you are over six feet tall? I’m getting a Little Lord Fauntleroy Smash! vibe off this. Gangs of New York era tyke, Bruce Banner, after inheriting a fortune and being exposed to gamma radiation, is taken by "Dearest", to live with … It’s the sort of thing only Kirby could dream and draw. [If Mary Pickford is unavailable, I think ‘Dearest’ could be a sort of ‘Motherbox’, like Orion has got.] The gangs, the kids, the bizarre monstrosity. Clearly Kirby grew up with it all.

Kirby dating Roz: "Her father worked in a factory as a seamstress on women’s dresses." Now this is not clearly wrong. See this definition. But I think ‘worked sewing womens’s dresses’ would avoid the problem.

On Jack Kirby’s war experience: "War was a series of events." That’s right up there with "And, inevitably, the years passed."

Still, I’m such a Kirby fan. I’m enjoying it despite the stylistic lapses.

Now that the link between MMR jabs and autism have been debunked for the tenth time, could people please start having their children vaccinated? Because when their child gets a mild case of rubella, and then comes in contact with a pregnant woman her child may suffer from fatal or debilitating birth defects? Thanks.

Scientists have examined rates of autism among children in Japan, where the MMR vaccine was withdrawn in 1993. They found that the number of children with autism continued to rise after the MMR vaccine was replaced with single-shot vaccines.

I have to say that living in a place where any random person on the street might have arrived from a polio-endemic part of India the night before really focusses the mind. I like to take my children to rural Indonesia, too. I’m ready for extra shots. Sign me up!

As an alien who will presumably have to apply for residence in the US one of these days, I found “this post at TalkLeft”:http://talkleft.com/new_archives/009897.html somewhat disturbing.

bq. Homeland Security is requiring immigrants in 8 cities who are in the process of applying for residency to wear electronic monitoring ankle bracelets 24/7.

bq. These people have never been accused of a crime. There are 1,700 of them to date. Homeland Security says monitoring will prevent those ordered deported from running and hiding. But, a 2003 Justice Department report (pdf) blamed inadequate record keeping by immigration officials as the reason for problems deporting non-detained aliens.

I’m ever so glad the GOP is such a strong supporter of small government and individual liberty.

More seriously, it’s times like this that I think “Adam Morton”:http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/~amorton/moral.html may be right – our complacency about the morality of institutions of citizenship and borders could very well look like a serious moral shortcoming when history casts its judgment on our era.

there’s something a little Borgesian about this “mathematical anecdote”:http://mindofwinter.blogspot.com/2005/03/viva-la-revolucion.html from ‘Mind of Winter’ (found via “Chad Orzel”:http://www.steelypips.org/principles/2005_02_27_principlearchive.php#110977081518935637).

bq. … Zygmund posed Calderón a question and the puzzled Calderón replied that the answer was contained in Zygmund’s own book Trigonometric Series. Zygmund disagreed: what transpired was that Calderón only ever read the statements of the results, preferring to give his own reasoning and proofs… . One of these proofs gave a highly original answer to Zygmund’s question. This originality was to be the hallmark of Calderón’s work in the years to follow.

In my “Locke in Modern English”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003289.html thread below, commenter Gordon writes in exasperation:

bq. Jeez, what next? Maybe a rap version?

A leading British political philosopher, whose identity I am sworn not to reveal, submits the following by email:

bq. Me and you’s equals on this earth.

A challenge to others to do better?

Recently Scott Soames wrote “two”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/069112244X/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 “books”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691123128/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 on the history of philosophy from 1900 to 1970. “Richard Rorty’s review”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n02/print/rort01_.html of these books in the _LRB_ has attracted quite a bit of attention among philosophers. A reply by Soames has been printed, but apparently it was cut down quite a bit for space reasons. So a “full version”:http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~grussell/SoamesonRorty4.pdf of Soames’s reply (warning: PDF) has been put on the web. I expected I’d be rather sympathetic to Soames’s side of this debate, but actually I thought Rorty got in some surprisingly good points, the most central of which were about my primary area of research, vagueness.
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There is a philosophical tradition, most prominently associated with Quine, that includes among its core commitments the following two claims.

# The things that best scientific theory quantifies over exist
# Among the things that exist, there do not exist spooks or souls or certainly not _imaginary friends_

So it would be a little troubling if best scientific theory started quantifying over imaginary friends. But “some say that’s what will happen”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1427987,00.html?gusrc=rss. The Quineans will have to find some way to paraphrase away the imaginary friends without paraphrasing away the benefits, should the benefits be genuine.