Henry

“Spencer Ackerman”:http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/michael-ohanlon has a nice hit-job on Michael O’Hanlon at the _Washington Independent_ (which is rapidly becoming indispensable) which makes me wonder who the foreign policy community is that should be disavowing him.

Michael O’Hanlon is a Brookings Institution defense expert who doesn’t actually know anything about defense. He does, however, know how to be a reliable barometer of what very-slightly-left-of-center establishment types believe should be said about defense. … If anyone in the foreign-policy community respects O’Hanlon, I haven’t met him or her. … Today in the Wall Street Journal, O’Hanlon’s got yet another tendentious op-ed, in which he bravely subdues yet another straw man on the left. …Harder to understand is how the foreign-policy establishment doesn’t put him out to pasture.

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I’d be interested to know more about why the President of William and Mary was told that his contract wouldn’t be renewed; from what this “IHE story”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/13/nichol says, it sounds pretty terrible.

Gene R. Nichol resigned immediately Tuesday as president of the College of William & Mary, days after being told that his contract wouldn’t be renewed. In leaving Nichol issued a blunt attack on those alumni and conservatives who have sought his ouster, defended his stances in a series of controversial decisions, and accused board members of seeking to offer him a “substantial” sum of money to publicly state that he wasn’t losing his job for ideological reasons. … Even while defending the board’s conduct, the chair acknowledged the potential for the controversy to hurt the college by giving the impression (false, the chair said) that alumni or legislators can get a president canned at William & Mary. … the board voted days after some legislators urged the trustees to get rid of Nichol, citing his willingness to let a controversial art exhibit appear on campus. … Nichol … defended the right of students to play host to the exhibit. …substantial progress in efforts he started… to increase student aid, attract more diverse students, and hire a more diverse faculty. … state political leaders have focused much less on those issues than on the controversy that to many defined Nichol’s presidency — a dispute over a cross he had removed from a prominent campus building. Vocal alumni critics have been pushing for Nichol’s removal since the cross fracas started. They have been met by strong defenders, particularly among student leaders and some professors. … Nichol was accused of being hostile to religion, with critics going out of their way to tell reporters that he had done legal work for the American Civil Liberties Union, as if that would make his views clearly wrong.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/super_osama_kulfa_balls.php is amazed that you can buy a coconut-flavoured candy called ‘Super Osama Kulfa Balls’ in China. There’s worse to be found in every German supermarket that I’ve ever been in …

The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/09/business/09nocera.html?_r=2&oref=slogin has an interesting piece on the efforts of J.K.Rowling to stop a Harry Potter lexicon from being published, on the grounds that it ‘hijacks’ Rowlings’ name and work.

So long as the Lexicon was a free Web site, Ms. Rowling looked kindly upon it. But when Mr. Vander Ark tried to publish part of the Lexicon in book form — and (shudder!) to make a profit — Ms. Rowling put her foot down. She claims that she wants to publish her own encyclopedia someday and donate the proceeds to charity — and a competing book by Mr. Vander Ark would hurt the prospects for her own work. But more than that, she is essentially claiming that the decision to publish — or even to allow — a Harry Potter encyclopedia is hers alone, since after all, the characters in her books came out of her head. They are her intellectual property. And in her view, no one else can use them without her permission.

“There have been a huge number of companion books that have been published,” Mr. Blair said. “Ninety-nine percent have come to speak to us. In every case they have made changes to ensure compliance. They fall in line.” But, he added: “These guys refused to contact us. They refused to answer any questions. They refused to show us any details.” _They fall in line._ There, in that one sentence, lies the reason Mr. Falzone and his colleagues have agreed to help represent RDR Books. And it’s why Mr. Lessig decided to start the Fair Use Project in the first place.

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“William Skidelsky”:http://blog.prospectblogs.com/2008/02/08/the-four-lives-of-john-gray/ at the Prospect(UK)’s blog.

I was somewhat surprised, perusing today’s Independent, to be confronted, in the “5-Minute Interview” slot, with a picture of the philosopher John Gray, under the headline “Not many people know that I have a wellness centre… Upon looking more closely, I was reassured to see that the subject of the interview was not, in fact, John Gray the philosopher, but John Gray the author of the bestselling self-help book, Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The paper had simply made a mistake, and plucked the wrong John Gray from its photo archive. … In addition to the philosopher and the self-help author, there’s also John Gray the multi-millionaire founder of the Spearmint Rhino chain of strip clubs (and husband of a former porn star), and John Gray the American Christian comedian. Which leads me to think that they should all agree to do each others’ jobs for a week, and film the result: the resulting reality TV series would surely be a huge popular hit (title, anyone?)

This is indeed an amusing thought. However, couldn’t you do very nearly as well with a show that confronted the various philosophers who have the name John Gray with each other’s intellectual positions? I’m personally aware of John Gray the Millsian liberal, John Gray the post-Millsian liberal, Rawlsian John Gray, John Gray the green conservative, John Gray the German Christian Democracy-style _Sozialmarkt_ advocate, John Gray the sort-of social democrat, and John Gray the nihilistic Ballardian. I can’t deny that a couple more may possibly have popped up since the last time I checked. The _Chronicle_ published “an article”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=H2jBsJtDbCFsN3fsszjCpdk46bKqWqFt recently by Carlin Romano, which perpetuated the common misconception that these were all the same person, but it simply couldn’t be so; no one man could contain such multitudes. I imagine that this has to be another photo-archive mistake.

CT readers who have been around for a long time may remember a “couple”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/12/trahisons-des-clercs/ of “posts”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/16/witchfinders-general/ I wrote in response to Eugene Volokh way back in 2005, asking for instances of prominent “commentators mak[ing] egregious claims that a substantial section of those who opposed the war are, in fact, rooting for the other side.” Now, CT readers came up with quite a number of ripe examples, but if there were still a Golden Eugene [UPDATE: since Eugene has since described Romney’s comments as ‘over the top’ in an update to his “original post”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_02_03-2008_02_09.shtml#1202406769 on the topic, it’s a bit unfair to name the award after him] award to be handed out, I think I’d be giving it to Mitt Romney for “this claim”:http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/02/romney_staying_in_race_would_h.php in his forthcoming concession speech.

“If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Now I suppose that he’s not quite saying that Clinton and Obama _support_ the terrorists; merely that they’re going to surrender to them (perhaps he’s even prepared to concede that they would surrender America to the forces of evil with reluctance and heavy hearts). But he’s also the Republican also-ran, who might have been an outright winner in a slightly more favourable political climate. You don’t get much more prominent than that. Also implicit iis that Mike Huckabee, if not quite a terrorist-surrender-monkey, is surely a terrorist-surrender-monkey-enabler as long as he stays in the race and delays the anointment of McCain. Finally, I understand from reliable sources that this isn’t even the _creepiest part of the speech._ The Republicans are a very, very messed up political party.

This is just by way of a short announcement that I’m rolling up my political science paper weblog, and instead doing a bit more active political science-y blogging over at “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org along with my GWU colleages John Sides, David Park and Lee Sigelman (to whom thanks for inviting me along). This is the kind of thing that I hoped the political science weblog would turn into anyway, when I had more time, so it makes sense to join efforts with what has become a very active group blog (several hundred posts in the few months that it has been in operation). Anyway, my first post is up there now – a “piece looking at”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/02/conservative_and_liberal_blogg.html Eszter and her colleagues’ findings that conservative blogs are more likely to have substantive responses to liberal blogs than vice-versa, and why this might be.

There are some books that mankind was never supposed to read. From a review by Pete Rawlik in the most recent issue of the _New York Review of Science-Fiction._

Over the years, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos has been melded with a multitude of other genres by a bevy [sic, even though the article then goes on to list eight writers] of authors … Marion Zimmer Bradley and Esther Friesner have adeptly created Cthulhu romances …

The mind squirbles. But not as much as it does at the revelation (which I saw somewhere on the Internets in the last few weeks, meant to blog, and forgot about) that Henry James and H.G. Wells once seriously discussed collaborating on a novel set on the Red Planet. “A Princess Casamassima of Mars” or somesuch. There is that famous James story about the popular author and the literary one who swap places, which I’ve always presumed (without ever bothering to look it up) is based on the James-Wells relationship. Finally, changing the subject back to Lovecraft, “Ross Douthat”:http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/01/hope_for_the_hobbit.php argues that it’s a good thing that Guillermo del Toro is being signed up to do _The Hobbit_, as he, like Peter Jackson, understands how to make digital special effects seem tactile and organic. I’m not entirely sure that this is true of Jackson – while Gollum was awesome, some other bits of digital wizardry in the LOTR trilogy seemed pretty lame; the movie’s Balrog was yer standard roaring demon, instead of Tolkien’s own evocative if difficult-to-film shadow among flames, and the skeleton-ghosts in the Paths of the Dead looked as though they had staggered off the leftovers shelf of Pirates of the Caribbean. However, it’s certainly true of del Toro – _Hellboy_, in addition to being a criminally underrated popcorn movie has the best pastiche-Lovecraft sfx that I’ve seen to date – the squamousness of the tentacle-things is _sans-pareil._

I’ve got nothing much in the way of predictions (as I’ve noted before, I’m not that kind of political scientist) but feel free to chat in comments as results come in from Super Tuesday …

My long “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/31/delong-scott-and-hayek/ from a couple of months ago on James Scott’s _Seeing Like a State_ and Brad DeLong’s review of it enjoyed a temporary revival when Brad “republished”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/12/delong-smackd-1.html it in his ‘DeLong Smackdown’ series. But I got a bit of grief from one reader, who thought that I had given Scott far too easy a ride. Which is probably true – while I admire the book, I do have many disagreements with it, which I would have gotten into if I had been reviewing the book proper, rather than arguing against Brad’s interpretation. One such disagreement popped up when I was reading it again for class a couple of weeks ago, together with John Brewer’s _The Sinews of Power._¹
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From “Three Quarks Daily”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2008/02/selected-minor.html.

Super Tuesday Surprise: Leading Minsk Newspaper Endorses Candidates in US Presidential Race

… From Belaruskija Naviny (translated by the Belarus Information Agency): Minsk (BIA) 1 February, 2008–

In America, there are not strong leaders like Aleksandr Grigorevich Lukashenko, who come into power, and stay in the power. The only president in American history to have held on his power more than two terms was Franklin Roosevelt. And he was cripple! He stayed long because of war-time situation, not strength. But every four years, the parties make their best effort. This year, because of failed war in Iraq and weak leadership of George W. Bush, the American people are going in for politics like never before in their history. … What choices are the Republican and Democratic parties offering them?

At this present, the Republican (“Grand Old”) Party has three candidates in competition: the Christian retail-store magnate and “healthy life-style” advocate Mike Huckabee, whose business practices were subjected to critique already in American independent cinema production “I Heart Huckabee” (2005); Mitt Romney, governor of State Utah and elder of Mormon church, which until Lukashenko’s bold measure against foreign missionary-activity was responsible for the common sight on the streets of Grodno and Brest and Vitebsk of clean and polite young Americans, speaking Belarusian like mother tongue, and promoting their heretical sect to our villagers like we were pagan Indians; and finally, John McCain, senator of City Phoenix and number-one opponent of current president George W. Bush within Republican party.

The Democrats have now only two candidates who stand to chance against this powerful phalanx: Barack Obama, senator of City Chicago and nephew of Saddam Hussein; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, organizer of popular solidarity-building women’s breakfasts for discussion of hair-hygiene and of place of woman in American politics, and only official wife of number-one enemy of Serbs and all Slavic peoples, Bill Clinton.

(for more on Hillary Clinton’s role in creating ‘polyclinics’, Barack Obama’s surprising failure to promote sport, leisure, tourism and patriotic games, and the key question of why _shouldn’t_ Mike Huckabee eat pigs’ legs in aspic and goose-fat on craquelins, go to 3QD).

This “bit”:http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/01/speaking-truth-without-power/ in the NYT made me wonder whether the writer had any clue what he was talking about.

But notwithstanding this stunning success, this week’s withdrawal by John Edwards, coming a week after the departure of Dennis Kucinich, means that both of the preferred presidential candidates of the liberal blogosphere are now out of the race.

followed by some speculations as to whether

like all outsider movements, [the blogosphere] identifies with the underdog. This year that meant support for Mr. Kucinich and Mr. Edwards in the Democratic race, and Ron Paul in the Republican contest.

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The _New York Times_ has a story suggesting that Bill Clinton cozied up to Kazakhstan president Nursultan A. Nazarbayev in order to help out a big donor to the Clinton Foundation.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton. … the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent. … Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

… Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects … monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers …In a statement Kazakhstan would highlight in news releases, Mr. Clinton declared that he hoped it would achieve a top objective: leading the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which would confer legitimacy on Mr. Nazarbayev’s government. “I think it’s time for that to happen, it’s an important step, and I’m glad you’re willing to undertake it,” Mr. Clinton said.

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Worth reading (and blogging about if I had more time):

Lane Kenworthy on “the (il)logic of the new Laffer Curve“.

“Ezra Klein”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=01&year=2008&base_name=what_edwards_meant and “Jonathan Cohn”:http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/01/30/why-john-edwards-won.aspx on John Edwards’ withdrawal from the race.

“Ricardo Hausman”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/28b464a2-cf50-11dc-854a-0000779fd2ac.html on the curious inconsistencies between the macroeconomic advice that Washington Consensus folks doled out to east Asia, Russia and Latin America, and what the same people are saying today about the so-called sub-prime crisis.

“Gideon Rachman”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f7aa8626-be00-11dc-8bc9-0000779fd2ac.html is skeptical about economic freedom will indeed produce political freedom in countries like China and Russia (I’ve been meaning to blog about this essay for a couple of weeks, but have been swamped with other commitments, and am realizing this is unlikely to change soon …).

“Eric Rauchway”:http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=a8c2e4ae-387c-4e0a-b942-1d0a05b0d94d on Findlay and O’Rourke’s _Power and Plenty_ (a book that will probably be finding its way onto my IR syllabus next year).