May 2005

There’s been a minor “controversy”:http://www.chriscmooney.com/blog.asp?Id=1774 recently over Naomi Oreskes’ literature study in _Science_. Oreske found that of 928 paper abstracts on climate change, taken from the ISI database, precisely none disagreed with the consensus view that anthropogenic climate change is real. Now Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University says that after searching the same database, he’s found 34 article abstracts that “reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the “the observed warming over the last 50 years.”” Peiser wrote a letter to _Science_, putting forward his alternate findings, which Science declined to publish; in Peiser’s view using “a contrived technicality as an excuse.” This has gotten some “attention”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ixworld.html from the Telegraph, which hints at skulduggery and low standards in high scientific places.

Now, however, Tim Lambert has gotten Peiser to cough up the goods – the 34 (now, for some mysterious reason, 33) scientific abstracts that cast doubt on anthropogenic global warming. Tim is “inviting readers”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/science/peiser.html?seemore=y#more to go through the abstracts, and record their own conclusions. My take after reading them: the claim that Peiser’s 33 abstracts “reject or doubt the view …” is completely unsustainable. There’s one undoubted rejection of the anthropogenic case (no. 27) – but it comes from that well-known arbiter of peer-reviewed scientific neutrality, the ‘Ad Hoc Committee on Global Climate Issues’ of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. There are a few others that could be construed as scepticism (the explicit ones appear to be either outdated or else personal views), but the vast majority of the papers that Peiser cites don’t even begin to make any general arguments about global warming, let alone claims that the anthropogenic argument is bogus. Abstracts no. 12, 13 and 25 aren’t even _scientific research_; they appear to be postmodern inquiries into the construction of scientific authority. If I’d been asked (while wearing my hat as a member of GWU’s Center for International Science and Technology Policy) to review Peiser’s letter and evidence for possible publication in a peer-reviewed journal, I’d have rejected them summarily, and made some fairly warm comments in my rejection letter. I’d have done exactly the same if it had been making the opposite argument (that is if Peiser had used similar evidence to argue that there was support for global warming). Simply put, I don’t think Peiser’s evidence even begins to provide proper support for his claims. But, in fairness to Peiser, he’s made the evidence that he’s using publicly available, so you can go over to Tim’s place and take the taste-test for yourself.

Nearly a week has passed since I endured the finale of Phyllida Lloyd’s Ring for the “English National Opera”:http://www.eno.org/home/index.php . I wrote up earlier episodes on CT, so I ought to complete the job. Kathleen Broderick was just amazingly good as Brunnhilde and the orchestra — under the direction of Paul Daniels — played very well. But producer Phyllida Lloyd should be shot, or worse.

Wagnerphobes are going to be mystified at the complaint that a production of the Ring was silly. “Isn’t it always?” Kieran might say. Well, up to a point. This production of Twilight of the Gods was really very silly indeed, but also trite, one-dimensional, incoherent and offensive. I have no objection to modern dress productions of opera or Shakespeare, to radical changes of location or period. That’s fine. If a producer can give us a new insight into a work of art, or make it come alive for a modern audience, that is ok by me. But this wasn’t anything like that.

It was gratuitous and exploitative. (This was signalled before the performance even started by the programme, which contained photographs of the Twin Towers burning, a severed hand amidst post-Tsunami debris, and cows being burnt in Britain’s last episode of foot-and-mouth disease.) The culmination of this urge to grab hold of any random news image or bit of popular culture for shock value was the portrayal of Brunnhilde as a suicide bomber in Act 3. In between we were treated to Siegfried as rhinestone cowboy and Brunnhilde as Judy Garland (opening of Act 1) and Hagen as game-show host (wedding in Act 2). Why does Judy Garland metamorphose into a Palestinian suicide bomber?! I have absolutely no idea.

Utter crap.

A few weeks ago, in the midst of the – um – mis-communication over his debate with David Horowitz, Michael Bérubé speculated:

I think we’re finally getting to the real reason David hates professors so much. It has nothing to do with our salaries or our working hours: he hates our freedom. Horowitz knows perfectly well that I can criticize the Cockburns and Churchills to my left and the Beinarts and Elshtains to my right any old time I choose, and that at the end of the day I’ll still have a job – whereas he has to answer to all his many masters, fetching and rolling over whenever they blow that special wingnut whistle that only far-right lackeys can hear. It’s not a very dignified way to live, and surely it takes its toll on a person’s sense of self-respect.

With respect to the issue of self-respect, here’s the giveaway: think about how often Horowitz complains that the intellectual left doesn’t take him seriously, doesn’t read his books, and so on. What’s weird about this, you’ll probably have noticed by now, is that American left intellectuals are just about the only thinkers who pay any attention to Horowitz at all.

I’ve tried to do my part by not paying attention to him as much as possible. But I did read the Chronicle’s article about him (previously subscription only, now free – I think). [Update: The Chronicle circulated a special link to make this article available free.] There were several chuckles, some of which others have noted –

“For 20 years, when I have written books on the left, the left has ignored me,” he says. “It’s just what Stalin did to Trotsky.”

He claims he would make more money as a liberal, too, “at least three times,” what he earns now. According to the center’s most recent available tax form, Mr. Horowitz received an annual salary of $310,167 in 2003. He declines to give his current income, but in addition to his salary, Mr. Horowitz receives about $5,000 for each of the 30 to 40 campus speeches he gives each year.

“Someone would have made a film out of it [his autobiographical Radical Son] if I was a leftist,” he says bitterly.

Bérubé’s speculation receives some support: “If he were liberal, he contends, he could be an editor at the Times or a department chairman at Harvard University.” And the author summarizes Horowitz’s outlook this way: “While he wants desperately to be included in the academy — for professors to assign his books and invite him to speak in classes — he seems eager to punish it, in part, for turning a cold shoulder to his work.”

But the real news to me was this tidbit:

The academic bill of rights may have its genesis back in Mr. Horowitz’s grade school, but it really started to take shape after a December 2002 meeting with some fellow Republicans in New York. He met with Thomas F. Egan, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York System; Peter D. Salins, the system’s provost; and Candace de Russy, a member of the board, to discuss the problem of leftist indoctrination in college classrooms and how to solve it.

“I was among sort of friends,” Mr. Horowitz says. “It allowed me to think aloud.”

No surprise that Candace de Russy recently urged the SUNY Board to adopt a version of Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights.” I can’t wait until our own aggrieved creationists come out of the woodwork.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown is back in the news, with “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/05/the_fortas_fili_2.html and various members of the “Volokhs”:http://www.volokh.com discussing her promotion prospects. Henry has already “noted her fondness”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/04/happy-days/ for self-help guru Sam Beckett. Below the fold I reproduce a post of mine from 2003 about “Brown’s rant”:http://www.constitution.org/col/jrb/00420_jrb_fedsoc.htm — there’s really no other word for it — to the Federalist Society, delivered at the University of Chicago Law School in 2000. Mark Schmitt links to a “similar outing”:http://www.communityrights.org/PDFs/8-12-00IFJ.pdf from around the same time. She should have taken it on the comedy club circuit.

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Quickly quickly, here’s my prediction. I’m using vote shares from the IG betting market, because I think that “The Wisdom of Crowds” probably works quite well for mass estimation problems like this, but maybe not so good at projecting the results of its mass estimation onto a difficult electoral college problem. So I’m working on the assumption of 32.5% Conservative, 37% Labour and 24% LibDem and using my own Allocated Regional Swing model, documented here last week.

That gives me the following seat predictions:

Labour: 388
Conservative: 190
LibDem: 53.

Labour majority 130, and presumably Blair decides that it was a referendum on the war (and the lying about the war) after all.

Note that the LibDems get royally screwed by first-past-the-post; they get a swing of 5% and pick up three seats. I have a really ace triangle plot showing this but I don’t know how to upload images on the new WordPress site (Update: thanks Henry!)

I’ll do a proper post after the election explaining how I got it so wrong. Meanwhile, below the fold is my list of possible seat changes; it’s longer than Martin Baxter’s, but this is mainly because the list is drawn from a slightly different model; I wanted one as long as would be possible consistent with my overall predictions to be a bit more interesting.

Now I’m off to vote (LibDem, if anyone cares. Sorry Dobbo, you’re a really nice guy but you’re not standing for the Frank Dobson party. You’re standing for the Labour Party and that means Blair).
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Readers of BoingBoing will have heard about this a while ago, but mashup artist extraordinaire ccc has done an amazing Beatles mashup album called Revolved (scroll down for a bittorrent link). I was just listening to it and I had to share it with all of you, because it is so very fab and gear. The Taxman track is great; it combines Beck’s New Pollution with The Jam’s Start (which, of course, just rips off the bass line from Taxman, but hearing them together is funny). You should check out his other tracks, too.

In more depressing news, I met an actual real-live defender of torture last night. I mean, I know they’re out there because I have to read all the incredibly stupid and irritating comments threads, but it was still weird. His metric of sucess involved 99 innocent people being tortured for every one guilty jihadi who then gives up the goods on some plot which would have killed many people (not clear if this was he fabled nuke scenario or your more run of the mill bombing). And he seemed so normal otherwise! For an English guy who reads LGF all the time. I was really polite too; clearly I wasn’t drinking enough, though when I woke up this morning that wasn’t my first thought.

N.B. Please talk about mashups in this comments thread. Please. You too, jet. C’mon, McSleazy vs. dsico, who’s your man?

UPDATE: You know, there are all these famous mashups out there that don’t seem to be available anymore, like Conway’s “Lisa’s Got The Hives”, or some of that Frenchbloke stuff, or Soundhog? I can’t believe that the basic illegality of the whole thing could possibly be compounded by some enterprising CT reader emailing me some mp3’s. Just thinking out loud, here.

If I’m not confused by timezone differences, today is election day in Britain and the outcome seems pretty much a foregone conclusion (I haven’t checked the omniscient betting markets, I must admit). So, I’ll look at a more trivial question. If the British government wants to increase voter turnout, why don’t they hold elections on Saturdays instead of Thursdays?

I looked into this question in the case of the US, and there’s a complicated historical explanation, but the central point that, at the time Tuesday was chosen as a polling day, the standard working week was six days, and Sunday was excluded for religious reasons. So it didn’t really matter which day was chosen.

But in an economy where, even with a 24-7 service sector, Saturday is a day off for most people, it seems like a much more convenient choice. For a bunch of reasons, I can’t see the US ever making a change like this[1]. But in Britain it would be easy, and presumably modestly beneficial to Labour, which could therefore push such a change through Parliament any time it wanted.

fn1. First, the US is very conservative in relation to traditions of this kind. Second, although it had an excellent record on this issue up to the 1960s, the Republican party now routinely opposes measures to increase voter turnout.

I’m off to “UCLA”:http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/ tomorrow to give a talk to their “Comparative Social Analysis”:http://repositories.cdlib.org/uclasoc/trcsa/ group. Provided, that is, I don’t get “shot”:http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/11541089.htm “on”:http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/state/20050503-1615-ca-freewayshootings.html “the”:http://www.latimes.com/news/local/state/la-me-freeway4may04,1,1550122.story?coll=la-news-state&ctrack=1&cset=true “way”:http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=716475 to campus.

Need some good news?

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) — Authorities arrested the nation’s most-wanted militant, the head of al-Qaida operations in Pakistan who had a $10 million bounty on his head, and said Wednesday they now were ”on the right track” to catch Osama bin Laden.

Abu Farraj al-Libbi, who allegedly orchestrated two assassination attempts against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was arrested after a firefight on the outskirts of Mardan, 30 miles north of Peshawar, capital of the deeply conservative North West Frontier Province, the government and security officials said.

Via praktike, who has more.

Two blogospheric manifestations of Beckett. First, Maud Newton links to an old piece in the Guardian, defending the critically panned novel, _Mercier and Camier_ as a good starting-point if you want to start reading Beckett. While I agree, I think that his early novel, _Watt_ is even better; it’s a sort of evolutionary missing link between Flann O’Brian and Beckett’s own later work. Some very fine jokes; I especially like the railway porter who is both “stout” and “bitter.” If you start by reading Beckett’s earlier novels, you’re more likely to get and enjoy the less obvious (but still real) comedy of his later work. _Waiting for Godot_ is a very funny play if you’ve got a particular sense of humour.

But if you really want to find out about the brighter side of Beckett, you need to ask Janice Brown. Mark Kleiman gives her grief for perverse reading and misattribution in this widely cited (and rather scary) speech, but by far the best bit is her stirring closing paragraph, in which she puts Beckett to work ladling out some Chicken Soup for the Conservative Soul.

Freedom requires us to have courage; to live with our own convictions; to question and struggle and strive. And to fail. To Fail. Recently, I saw a quote attributed to Samuel Beckett. He asks: “Ever tried? Ever failed?” Well, no matter. He says, “Try again. Fail better.” Trying to live as free people is always going to be a struggle. But we should commit ourselves to trying and failing, and trying again. To failing better until we really do become like that city on the hill, which offered the world salvation.

This passes beyond misprision into an appalling sort of creativity. What _would_ that city on the hill look like if Beckett were the architect? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Update: small changes following comment from Jacob Levy.

Update 2: title changed following realization that a Bad Pun was trapped in the post’s main body, waiting to be liberated.

Jeff Weintraub (via Normblog) writes a post I have been meaning to write forever. It relates to why I don’t donate [1] to the Red Cross: the International Federation’s refusal to grant the Israeli branch – Magen David Adom – full membership. The post is motivated by this editorial in The New York Times. The author of the editorial explains:

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies includes Red Cross organizations from North Korea, Iran and Cuba, but not from Israel. The reason it gives is that the corresponding Israeli society, Magen David Adom, uses the Jewish star as its emblem and will not adopt the red cross or red crescent, emblems that are recognized by the Geneva Conventions and the international Red Cross movement. Understandably, the Israelis do not want to adopt either of these emblems because they are heavy with religious meaning.

It seems like the issue is all about symbols. But as Jeff Weintraub notes, the opposition to admit the Israeli branch comes from particular countries and reflects more politics than a conflict over images.

Opposition by Red Crescent branches from Islamic countries, including but not restricted to the Arab world, has always been the decisive factor preventing the inclusion of Israel. It is now more than a half-century since the creation of Israel, and it is time for these countries to come to terms with Israel’s existence – not to endorse Israel’s policies, or even necessarily to make peace with Israel (if that seems too radical), but just to accept its existence. If they can’t bring themselves to do this, then at least the international Red Cross/Red Crescent organization should do so.

The NYTimes editorial ends by explaining why it is ironic and troubling for the actions of an organization such as the ICRC to be so politically motivated:

Despite all the talk of emblems, it is politics that have impeded Israel’s entry. That situation puts the Red Cross movement in an unfortunate position. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the arm of the movement that works in conflict zones and visits prisoners, often finds itself urging nations to put politics aside and do the right thing, such as in its current work on behalf of the detainees at the American prison in Guantánamo Bay. It will be in a better position to make these moral appeals when it can show that it is part of a movement that does what is right, rather than what is politically expedient, when it comes to running its own shop.

1. Of course, my actions may well be unfair to the American Red Cross given that it has tried to pressure the International Red Cross to ending its boycott of the Israeli organization. Nonetheless, there are enough other organizations in need of donations that I will continue to channel my support away from ones with strong ties to such overt anti-Israel stances.

“Good 1 — Evil 0”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/4501277.stm

Kimberly Morgan, who guestblogged with us a couple of weeks ago, spoke a little while ago on the BBC World Service about the politics of childcare in Western Europe and the United States. It’s a great interview.

Along with colleagues at Bristol I’ve been busy organising opposition to the AUT boycott, drafting motions, collecting signatures and so on. And I’ve been preparing myself mentally for our local association AGM on the 18th of May, since I’ll have to stand up and argue the case against the boycott. There’s bound to be a range of views on the other side: some will be anti-Israel obsessives but I suspect others will be more moderate. The component of the boycott that is going to have the most support is that of Bar-Ilan University, because of its ties to Judaea and Samaria College which is located in a Jewish settlement in the occupied territories. So what has Ariel Sharon done? He’s pushed a decision through the Israeli cabinet (against Labour opposition) “to upgrade this college”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/571290.html to full university status! I don’t know enough about Israeli politics to be able to “read” this with any degree of confidence, but it sure looks like a move calculated to undermine moderate opponents of the boycott. Perhaps an AUT that can be represented to Israelis as resolutely anti-semitic (and therefore emblematic of a general European disease) is more useful to Sharon than one which renounces the boycott? David Hirsh at Engage (the anti-boycott blog) “has more”:http://liberoblog.com/2005/05/02/ariel-sharon-asks-the-boycotters-to-dance/ .