I got an email today from Phillip Coticelli at Africa Fighting Malaria pointing to a study by Donald Roberts (PDF), showing that DDT has a repellent effect in addition to its toxicity. The key finding is that that three out of five DDT-resistant Aedes aegypti mosquitoes avoid huts sprayed with DDT. Roberts argues that this is a reason for preferring DDT to alternative pesticides such as dieldrin. A few points about this are worth making
* First, it’s good to see AFM acknowledging the fact of pesticide resistance, which primarily accounts for the abandonment of large-scale attempts to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes with pesticides. The libel put out by people like Steven Milloy and AFM founder Roger Bate[1], in which it is suggested that the failure of the eradication program was due to a mythical ban on DDT imposed at the behest of environmentalists, who callously caused millions of deaths, depends critically on ignoring resistance.
* Second, although the study is new, the claim is not. Roberts has been arguing the importance of repellent and irritant effects for a long time. And while the reporting of this study suggests that these benefits are unique to DDT, other work by Roberts has found that permethrin and deltamethrin are just as effective in this respect.

How does this relate to the general debate over the use of hut spraying as a strategy to fight malaria?

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All this harshing on Michael Ignatieff for his ponderous, air-filled essay on Iraq reminded me of a characterization of him I’d read a few years ago. I couldn’t remember the source, only the phrase. But Google remembers:

bq. The staff of BBC2’s late Late Show used to have a little joke about one of its presenters, Michael Ignatieff. Everyone knows what an idiot savant is: someone who appears to be an idiot but in fact is a wise man. Well, Ignatieff was a savant idiot.

Yes, I know that’s not really what an idiot savant is, but you get the point.

From Glenn Loury’s “excellent article”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR32.4/loury.html in the new _Boston Review_ on why there are so many people in US prisons, and why so many of these people are black.

… something interesting seems to have been going on in the late 1960s regarding the relationship between attitudes on race and social policy. Before 1965, public attitudes on the welfare state and on race, as measured by the annually administered General Social Survey, varied year to year independently of one another: you could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing their attitudes about race. After 1965, the attitudes moved in tandem, as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950–1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966–1996.

Late, I know. But I thought I’d wish it, and provide a link to my recent radio appearance (with Daniel Schor, no less) on Here on Earth (July 4th show here). They asked me to talk about patriotism, in the light of the recent (and very surprising — I was shocked anyway) revelations that the CIA has sometimes engaged in nefarious activities in pursuit of the national interest. The question was “how can one be patriotic if one’s country has done such terrible things?” I have written abut the impropriety of promoting patriotism and national sentiment generally, so it was curious to be talking about the conditions on a morally clean patriotism, and in fact I drew extensively on Eamonn Callan’s recent paper “Love, Idolatory, and Patriotism” (PDF) (obviously in the vernacular). I was caught off guard by the presenter starting me off by asking me to respond to a caller who had said something especially irritating, and I was excessively harsh in response, but hope that I pulled back enough to seem more reasonable.

Not so long ago, in a discussion on Iraq the question came up of what various people would have predicted at the outset of the US Civil War. It seemed to me that all with the possible exception of Sherman, would have grossly underestimated the length and bloodiness of the war, and that all would have predicted easy victory for their side. Of course, rather than speculate, I should have checked Wikipedia. Fortunately, William Tecumseh Sherman was the featured article yesterday, and includes Sherman’s judgement.

You people of the South don’t know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don’t know what you’re talking about. War is a terrible thing!

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You can help! I’m giving a brownbag talk at UW Madison’s Center for the Humanities in December, and the administrator, despite knowing me well enough to know that I have no aesthetic or design sense at all, has asked me for an image to go on the poster for my talk. The title is “What so great about the family anyway?”, and the description is as follows:

The phrase “family values” is often associated with a conservative political agenda, and liberals, committed as they are to ideals of personal freedom, have tended to shy away from being judgmental about the different familial arrangements people choose. Recent work in egalitarian political philosophy has focussed on the moral justification of the family; what “family values” are actually justified? Harry Brighouse will talk about this work, showing that there is interesting common ground between some conservatives and some egalitarians, and will discuss the significance of abstract theorising about values for family policy.

So far, we have between us come up only with three flippant ideas, based on very quick googling, but worth sharing: the Reagans; the Bushes; and these guys. Any better ideas? In deference to my lack of good sense, it would be kind to flag flippancy.

August is the time for our annual household argument about Jesus Christ Superstar. We’re all fans (apart from #3 whose tastes are not yet his own), but disagree about its meaning. Before elaborating on the disagreement I should make a preemptive strike against two charges – the charge of liking Andrew Lloyd Webber (can’t stand anything else he’s done, not even Joseph, which I had always thought I liked until hearing it recently) and the charge of snobbery that response naturally prompts (I’m a snob about some things, no doubt, but when it comes to culture I revel in my lower-middle-browness).

The disagreement is basically this. My wife thinks that JCS is fundamentally anti-Christian, because it presents Judas as the most sympathetic character, and Jesus as vain and rather directionless. I disagree – Judas is, indeed, presented with the maximum sympathy compatible with Christianity, but ultimately his failing is a lack of trust in a power and mystery that is beyond his understanding. Jesus? Well, when I watch the movie (a very good deal at the moment, more on that later), and even when I listen to the soundtrack, I can sort of see her point. But my reading of Jesus Christ Superstar was a response not to the movie or soundtrack, but to the original concept recording.

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Kip Manley directs us to a very worthwhile discussion of the ‘intentional fallacy’ and ‘bad readers’, Helen Vendler and Plato’s “Euthyphro”. I’ll just dunk you in the middle: [click to continue…]

I saw “Tom Russell”:http://www.tomrussell.com last night, for the third time in the last two years, and he was simply marvellous. Funny, crotchety, gritty, and (this hadn’t struck me so much before) with a wonderfully strong and clear voice. He played some new material, together with stuff from recent albums and some of his songs that others have covered on an album he’s reluctant to call a “tribute”: Wounded Heart of America. Like the old stuff, the new featured the usual cast of characters: cowboys, Mexicans, Welsh sailors etc, all superbly observed and changed to suit audience and place. And there were the usual anecdotes about Bukowski, Rambling Jack Elliot, etc., together with some reminiscences I hadn’t heard before (on his experiences in Nigeria during the Biafran war).

(Sometimes when going along to hear an act with others, I feel slightly unsure of their reaction: I like this but maybe they won’t, and I can see why and I might feel the urge to explain or say that X was better last time. No such worries with Russell: if someone doesn’t like him then there’s something wrong with _them_ .)

Russell is on tour in the UK at the moment, and you can catch him in Newcastle tonight, in Edinburgh on Saturday and in London next Monday (along with a bunch of other places in between and afterwards).

Autogoogling, as you do, you find out interesting things about namesakes around the world. My most prominent namesake is Canadian terrorism expert Tom Quiggin, who is a good source of information on quite a few topics. Now, Technorati tells me, he has a blog His opening posts seem very promising

Why Bush Has it Wrong
Intelligence and the Moral High Ground

“Bruce Bartlett”:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/08/yet-more-cont-b.html is advocating the introduction of Value Added Tax to America. This is a perennial proposal on the right, but it doesn’t appear to ever gain much political traction. The obvious reason why is that VAT is unpopular because it’s a regressive tax (the more people earn, the less they pay). However, this doesn’t explain why European countries which one would expect to be more attracted to progressive taxation systems have VAT, often at quite high levels.

Former CT guest blogger (and current GWU colleague and friend of mine) Kimberly Morgan has written a nice historical paper (Word file “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/morgan_prasad.doc )with Monica Prasad looking at how the US came “to have a tax code that is on many levels more hostile to capital accumulation than its peers” while France “which in some opinions has “never really been won over to capitalism” ” found itself relying on taxes that hit workers and consumers unusually hard. Simplifying drastically, she and Prasad argue that it can be explained by timing. Industrial capitalism arrived in the US before a real national state came into being, while the state preceded capitalism in France. The weak state in the US, and the willingness of business to ride roughshod over consumers, “led to an intense public interest in disciplining capital, which underpinned a movement toward income taxation that would punish capital and the wealthy.” In France, in contrast, well-founded fears of state intrusion led French citizens to fear direct taxation, and tax advocates to work against “fiscal inquisition” and the further expansion of the state into private life. This left French left-wingers ambivalent about the virtues of income taxes, so that a state crippled by war expenses had to turn to a sales tax to raise money. If this is right (and they provide a lot of historical evidence), some of the verities of left and right about France and the US should be turned on their head (this is one of the reasons why it’s a fun paper, for values of fun that include ‘detailed historical institutionalist arguments about causation.’)

Matt Yglesias “takes issue”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/blaming_the_ivory_tower.php with Michael Ignatieff’s _New York Times Magazine_ “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05iraq-t.html?ex=1343966400&en=cb304d04accc6df8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss about why he screwed up on Iraq. [click to continue…]

Someone has gone and collected some numbers (or, rather, has finished the job started here and, before that, here).

Caveat: I know not who ‘Largo’ is, nor what Phreadom is all about (but they have a Friends of Ron Paul thing in their sidebar). The data is collected from here, hence verifiable (I assume). It turns out Ron Paul is the candidate who has collected the most financial contributions from military personnel (across all branches; presently serving and retired.) I’ll pass along the totals, going just far enough down the list to give us our major players: [click to continue…]

I’ve been following the Peak Oil debate with a mildly sceptical eye for some time, and it struck me a while ago that despite high prices, global oil output hadn’t grown much, but hadn’t declined either. I came up with the innovative description of our current position as “Plateau Oil“. If I had bothered with Google, I would have noticed that the International Energy Agency had offered the same description two weeks earlier. And if I’d thought about for more than a couple of seconds, I would have realised that the supply of topographical metaphors is so limited as to make this a forced move (Australians use “Tableland” to describe the same landform and there’s also “Mesa”, but Mesa Oil is taken, and “Tableland Oil” sounds silly)

Anyway, why are we (apparently) observing Plateau Oil and what does it mean?

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