February 2006

I m pleased to see that “Norman Geras is linking”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/02/going_over_yond.html to “an interesting essay by David Carithers on Steve Earle”:http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2005/carithers.htm . The essay links Earle to the pragmatic tradition, and especially to Emerson. Though the essay verges on the pretentious, it is certainly worth a look. As Geras mentions:

bq. Section II of Carithers’ essay is about Earle’s opposition to the death penalty. He discusses two of his powerful songs on the subject, ‘Billy Austin’ from The Hard Way, and ‘Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song)’ from Transcendental Blues.

As Geras doesn’t mention, section III of the essay is about John Walker’s Blues, Earle’s disturbing meditation on the fate of the 19-year-old John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban”. If I recall correctly, Earle’s own son was the same age at the time, a fact that gave Earle a different perpective on the calls for vengeance and retribution that were widespread after Lindh’s capture.

In the comments to Kieran’s incendiary post, christine asks a clever trick question:

Hugh Laurie in House or Hugh Laurie in Blackadder?

The answer, of course, is

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Andy Hamilton on this week’s _News Quiz_, quoted from memory: “What gets me about these hardline clerics in Iran and Iraq is how they think Sharia law should apply over here. How would people in Iran feel if they woke up one morning and found that Lambeth Council had wheel-clamped all their cars?” (“Or invaded,” one is alas tempted to add. But it was a good joke all the same.)

Incidentally, Radio 4’s _The News Quiz_, when set against NPR’s execrable _Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me_, joins the long list of cultural objects that serve to illustrate the difference between Britain and the United States. Others include _The Office_ (UK) vs _The Office_ (US), _Yes Prime Minister_ vs _The West Wing_, and so on.

I’m puzzled by the veep shoots lawyer on a quail hunt thing. I figure it’s gotta be Karl Rove sending a message to the base. But what? Then I read about Cheney’s penchant for avian mass slaughterfests and I vaguely remembered … Aha! I don’t think Kieran is right to quote Ezekiel …

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CNN reports:

Cheney accidentally shoots fellow hunter. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion [Harry Whittington, a millionaire attorney from Austin] during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.

I have an image in my mind of what the standoff was like. Cheney is grimacing. Whittington is staring down the barrel of a pellet-loaded shotgun.

*Cheney*: Wanna know what I’m buyin’ Ringo?
*Harry*: What?
*Cheney*: Your life. I’m givin’ you that quail so I don’t hafta kill your ass. You read the Bible?
*Harry*: I’m a lawyer. What do you think?
*Cheney*: Good point. But there’s a passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the donors through the valley of porkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost loopholes. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my campaign contributors. And you will know I am the Unitary Executive when I lay my vengeance upon you. I been sayin’ that shit for years. Especially at chicken suppers hosted by Militias. And if you ever heard it, it meant your ass. I never really questioned what it meant. I thought it was just a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before you popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some cartoons this mornin’ made me think twice. Now I’m thinkin’: it could mean you’re the evil man. And I’m the righteous man. And Mr. Shotgun here, he’s the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of porkness. Or it could be you’re the righteous man and I’m the shepherd and it’s the world that’s evil and selfish. Especially Al Qaeda and Saddam. And Iran. Also France. Maybe I’d like that. But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is you’re the big donor. And I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m tryin’, Harry. I’m tryin’ real hard to –”
BANG!
*Cheney:* Ah, goddammit!
*Harry*: Arghhh! My face! You shot my face!
*Cheney*: Somebody call Rove. We’ll say he fell while eating a pretzel on a mountain bike or something. It’s worked before.

*Quail-o-mat Update*: “Firedoglake”:http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2006_02_12_firedoglake_archive.html#113979161048562241 quotes from some more in-depth descriptions of nature of the hunting they were up to when this happened Cheney favors. In terms of required difficulty and skill, think of what these guys were doing as “hunting” in the same sense that you might go hunting for a donut on the way to work tomorrow morning. Benj Hellie “accurately describes”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/guest_bloggers_hellie_and_wilson/index.html the ill-fated trip (Cheney’s, not the donut quest) as “less a hunting trip than a visit to an all-inclusive bird murdering theme resort.” It’s astonishing that the VP was able to hit something _other_ than one of the hundreds of tame birds released for his shootin’ pleasure.

*Only Peppered but Still in the ICU Update*: “More reasonable questions from firedoglake”:http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2006_02_12_firedoglake_archive.html#113984118736473358 on what exactly happened. Interesting to learn that Cheney always has an ambulance on call.

I’m teaching Plato’s Republic, Book I – you know, all the Thrasymachus ‘justice is the advantage of the stronger’ stuff. I give ’em a bit of Thucydides, the Melian debate. Rub on a smudge of Machiavelli. I’d like to be able to recommend or select from some contemporary readings about realism – in the IR sense, not the ‘I believe in abstract objects’ Platonic sense. I know there’s a ton of stuff, but I want something clear, lively, not too hard, not too long, and preferably available online. Suggestions?

Couple days ago I posted some fine metaphysical poetry and extremely witty self-criticism by Conrad Aiken at the Valve. I like Aiken very much. (One of our commenters mentioned that Eliot praised him as "il miglior fabbro", but someone else noted he also called Pound that. So maybe he just carried around a whole tray of that one at parties.) There’s also a family friendship on Belle’s side. Warings and Aikens have been friends for generations, apparently.

Anyway, I’ve been reading poems from Aiken’s second book, Turns and Movies (1916), long out of print. One couplet – and that’s pretty much it – from "All Lovely Things" sometimes gets quoted, from the end of this stanza.

All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
And youth, that’s now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.

Since the book’s public domain, I’m tempted to make a nice CC edition. Be a bit of work. But here’s a start: the title poem, which you won’t find intact elsewhere on the web, although you will find bits. It’s got a certain something. "In Turns and Movies he willfully sacrificed his ability to write in smooth involute curves for a dubious gain in matter-of-fact forcefulness." Of the title poem in particular: "although immature and uneven … at least a crude vitality." So writes Conrad Aiken. I agree the metaphysical stuff he wrote later is better. But if Art Spiegelman decided he wanted to illustrate something like The Wild Party again, he could do worse that this. (You could really do a Batman and Robin-inspired number on part xii, "Aerial Dodds".)

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Ed Felten reports that the Secure Flight initiative (a successor to the much ballyhooed CAPPS II system for grabbing and processing data on airline passengers) has been mothballed, “$200 million later”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=974.

bq. Today, airlines are given a no-fly list and a watch-list, which they are asked to check against their passenger lists. … The 9/11 Commission recommended keeping the lists within the government, and having the government check passengers’ names against the lists. A program designed to do just that would have been a good idea. …There would be privacy worries, but they could be handled with good design and oversight. Instead of sticking to this more modest plan, Secure Flight became a vehicle for pie-in-the-sky plans about data mining and automatic identification of terrorists from consumer databases. As the program’s goals grew more ambitious and collided with practical design and deployment challenges, the program lost focus and seemed to have a different rationale and plan from one month to the next.

Felten was on the initiative’s advisory committee; he knows that whereof he speaks. But the Secure Flight story speaks to a wider set of issues. There’s a whole host of government initiatives at different stages of development and deployment which apply data mining procedures to big databases in order to identify potential terrorists, including, most notoriously, the illegal NSA program. As far as we can tell, they all have one important feature in common – they _don’t work._ The NSA program generated an awful lot of “calls to Pizza Hut”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2006/01/index.html#008883 but not very much in the way of actual leads. The real positives are overwhelmed by the false ones. There are uses for data mining in law enforcement, but the notion that it can somehow magically spotlight the terrorists is wishful thinking, given current technology.

This gets obscured in current debates – both the proponents of these programs (such as Poindexter and his mates), and their opponents (such as the ACLU) have an interest in hyping them up. The killer argument against them isn’t that they’re a bad tradeoff between privacy rights and security (although they are). It’s that they suck up hundreds of millions of dollars, and don’t contribute anything worthwhile to our security in the first place. Big data mining initiatives are the Star Wars program of the information age. A massive waste of money and time.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/26513 and “the Poorman”:http://www.thepoorman.net/2006/02/11/we-need-to-improve-our-circulation-in-serbian/ have already pointed out what a staggeringly stupid contribution “Andrew Sullivan recently made”:http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/02/blackmail.html in the wake of the Great Cartoon Debacle. But something that boneheaded may need more than one or two blows of the mallet in order to crack. Sullivan is appalled to see the head of Hezbollah “threatening”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11251690/ to “defend our prophet with our blood, not our voices,” as if threats of violence like this were anything new from that department. He insists that it “is outrageous to be informed by a crowd of hundreds of thousands that the West must give up its freedoms in order to avoid violence.” Well, of course it is — but it’s also a lot of posturing, and Sullivan obliges by striking a pose in return. He then gives us the inevitable non-sequitur: “I’m relieved to see that this moment has forced some very hard thinking on the left.” Matt has “already covered”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/26513 why this is bollocks. But then he goes on to employ one of the favorite tropes of this genre of bullshit, the anonymous liberal correspondent with second thoughts. “Another liberal reader,” he says, emails to say that

I’m honestly starting to suspect that, before this is over, European nations are going to have exactly four choices in dealing with their entire Moslem populations — for elementary safety’s sake: (1) Capitulate totally to them and become a Moslem continent. (2) Intern all of them. (3) Deport all of them. (4) Throw all of them into the sea.

Jesus wept. As it happens, I’ve been re-reading Alan Bennett’s diaries. In an entry written towards the end of the Falklands War he notes:

The papers continue fatuous. Peregrine Worsthorne suggests that, having won this war, our troops emerging with so much credit, Mrs Thatcher might consider using them at home to solve such problems as the forthcoming rail strike or indeed to break the power of the unions altogether, overlooking the fact that this is precisely what we are supposed to object to about the regime in Argentina.

It’s a hollow joke that Sullivan’s blog is graced by a tag-line taken from Orwell — and one about not being able to see what’s in front of your face, at that. Instead of being impressed by the keen eliminationist _realpolitik_ of his idiot correspondents, he’d be better off re-reading Lord Hoffman’s remarks from December 2004 on “the real threat to the life of the nation”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/17/the-real-threat-the-the-life-of-the-nation/. They go double for cartoons. I certainly hope European countries are not about to “capitulate” to demands from some radical muslims that civil society be brought to an end for the sake of the prophet’s honor. (Whether certain newspaper editors deserve a kick in the pants for pointlessly stirring-up shit is another matter.) Nor, I take it, are they about to round up and dump “all of them” (for any value of “them”) into the sea. And if some countries _have_ started down one or other of those roads, it certainly isn’t because some clerical thugs are so awesomely powerful that they are in a position to destroy the institutions of western democracy. You’ll have to look elsewhere to find people with the leverage to do real damage there.

The BBC reports a remarkable find:

A “lost” science manuscript from the 1600s found in a cupboard in a house during a routine valuation is expected to fetch more than £1m at auction. The hand-written document – penned by Dr Robert Hooke – contains the minutes of the Royal Society from 1661 to 1682, experts said.

It was found in a house in Hampshire, where it is thought to have lain hidden in a cupboard for about 50 years. The owners had no idea of its value. It will be auctioned in London next month. …

I always wonder how this kind of thing happens. I mean, I know its possible for very old and valuable books to appear in estate sales and so on, especially when the ones of interest might be hidden amongst hundreds of others or not immediately of obvious worth. But to be unaware of the potential interest of any handwritten manuscript that’s obviously hundreds of years old … I don’t know. Maybe some old homes are just drowning in antiques. And indeed, the report suggests something like this was the case — though in a way that does seem just a bit too formulaic to believe:

It was discovered in a private house where other items were being valued by an antiques expert and it was only as he left that the family — whose identity is being kept secret — thought to show him the manuscript. “The valuer was just leaving when this document was produced from a cupboard,” she said. “All the vendor knows is that the document had been in the family as long as she can remember. She doesn’t know how it got into the family.”

I suppose that once this discovery was made and the valuer was on his way out, he tripped over the hallway rug and noticed that the slate slab underneath bore the inscription “HIC IACET ARTORIVS REX QVONDAM REXQVE FVTVRVS.”

Martha Nussbaum has an essay in the Chronicle (sorry, subscription required [update: try this link, thanks susan]) that draws on her new book Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. The essay concerns “The Moral Status of Animals”. On the one hand, she argues, “The fact that all Kantian views ground moral concern in our rational and moral capacities makes it difficult to treat animals as beings to whom justice is due.” On the other hand, utilitarianism, which does recognize the direct relevance of animal suffering, has other familiar problems, many of which have to do with aggregation. As an alternative, Nussbaum’s capability approach “starts from the notion of human dignity and a life worthy of it. But it can be extended to provide a more adequate basis for animal entitlements than the other two theories under consideration. It seems wrong to think that only human life has dignity.”
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My online bookseller of choice is “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/ rather than Amazon; unlike its larger competitor, it’s union friendly. But sometimes they don’t stock something and Amazon does. Here’s my beef: when Amazon claims that something is “usually available in 24 hours,” my experience is that three times out of four it isn’t. On average, I’d guesstimate that it takes 2-3 days for Amazon to ship something that is supposed to be available immediately. Is this just persistent bad luck on my part? Or do others have similar experiences?

Peter Levine wants to know what parents want their kids to be like. He reports the results of a decade-long survey asking parents what single quality they valued most for their child. The winner by far is honesty. For me, there’s no question: kindness. And you?

It seems that even his familiars must be careful when supping with the devil.

Of whom was this said? And where?

bq. Beneath his leftist pseudo-sophistication X is a manipulative intellectually dishonest person, … and his like masters required to guide the rest of us poor great unwashed to achieve their utopia dream – which is a documented nightmare to date built on hundreds of millions of human corpses.

and

bq. typical Fabian Society International Socialist that will never say a bad word against a fellow leftist such as Noam Chompsky [sic].

Details via “Matthew”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2006/02/oliver-kamm-interview.html .