Kieran Healy

“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.”

Don Luskin may be the “stupidest man alive”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000216.html, but this is small beer compared to John Lott, whose career strives to maximize a three-variable function defined by stupidity, error and sheer bad faith. Whenever you think there are regions of this space that he could not possibly explore further, “he proves you wrong”:http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/02/lotts_correction_policy.php.

# I hope next year Burger King Corporation just make a pile of 2 million dollar bills and set it on fire, rather than taking the roundabout method of pointlessly wasting money they opted for this year.
# I am at a loss to understand commercials like the Diet Pepsi one, where the can of Pepsi gets a record contract from P. Diddy, etc, etc. How do those even make it out of a creative’s sketchbook?
# If the denial of the Seahawks’ first quarter touchdown was the correct call _and_ the awarding of the Steelers’ first second quarter touchdown was the correct call, then we’re obviously living in a world where I’m going to win the Nobel Prize for Physics next year. I’ll start writing my speech.

“Brett”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/03/friday-fun-thread-rock-out/#comment-142750 just left the one hundred thousandth comment here on CT, at least as far as I can tell. Not bad for a couple of years work. Making the estimate precise is tricky because of the bad old Last Days of Movable Type when comments were often left in duplicate or triplicate (or worselicate) because the software couldn’t keep up. A further complication is the spam we routinely get. I’m confident there is basically no spam in our comments, as we’ve always aggressively weeded it out, but while it sits in the moderation queue waiting to be deleted it gets a comment id number and so makes the total tick up by one. The difference between the number of comments in the database and the ID number of the latest comment tells you how much spam we’ve gotten (and deleted) since March of 2005, when we moved to WordPress. As of now, it’s almost forty three thousand.

At any rate, a hundred thousand comments is a lot of chatter from the chattering classes. Thanks to all our readers and regular commenters for their contributions.

“WTF???”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/doogal/trailer1r/

Doogal? Zeebad? What? Then there’s “this”:http://www.the-magic-roundabout.com/ which seems to suggest that it was perpetrated on the U.K. last year.

Catching up with the talk about the State of the Union address, I noticed the President’s complaints about “human-animal hybrids” have “attracted”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_02/008128.php “some”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/02/president_panders_to_antimanim.php “commentary”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_01_29_atrios_archive.html#113880272560367200. P.Z. Myers “pointed out”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/02/president_panders_to_antimanim.php that scientists are working toward producing a model system for Down Syndrome (i.e. a genetically-engineered mouse with human genes), and that this might further understanding of the condition in people — a worthwhile goal. But we should bear in mind that there’s _already_ a real, live human-animal hybrid creature in widespread use today. Its job is to slave away producing a substance that millions of people use routinely. That substance is “insulin”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin. Virtually the entire commercial supply these days is produced by “genetically modified e-coli bacteria that contain human DNA”:http://www.littletree.com.au/dna.htm, live in a fungal substrate and secrete human insulin. I take it that the President isn’t planning to put every Type I Diabetic in America into hypoglycemic shock. I don’t think it would be a popular policy plank.

I learned yesterday via a local newspaper report of the existence of the “Vatican Observatory”:http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/VO.html which, surprising as it may seem, is exactly what it sounds like: the astrophysics research division of the Catholic Church. While its “headquarters”:http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/Headq.html are at Castel Gandolfo (the Pope’s Summer home) in Italy, it’s based here in Arizona at the “Mount Graham Observatory”:http://mgpc3.as.arizona.edu/. There, a bunch of Jesuits operate the “VATT”:http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/vatt-observer.html, the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope. I think that’s just fantastic — like something out of Phillip Pullman. Is it too much to hope for the Vatican Superconducting Supercollider, which would once and for all resolve the question of how many angels would be killed if a stream of particles were smashed into the head of a pin?

I missed this over the weekend, but here’s Garrison Keillor tearing a strip off of Bernard-Henri Lévy and his book about America. (The San Francisco Chronicle “liked it a bit better”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/29/RVGHUGQ7341.DTL&type=books, but only a bit.) Based on Keillor’s review, it sounds like BHL has a case of the disease that Bruce McCall brilliantly parodied in his travelogue “In the New Canada, Living is a Way of Life.” That article (which I’ve “talked about before”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/01/13/how-peculiar/) is written in the prose characteristic of the cultural tourist/feature writer touring around Russia, c.1982 for _Readers Digest_: serious, curious, with an outsider’s eye for paradox and an uncanny ability to miss the point altogether.

_Update_: I should add that I’m not taking Keillor’s review as gospel here. I’m a big fan of cross-national comparative work, but it’s hard to do it right. Keillor is pretty snide, and the substance of his criticism (that people over here are just ordinary, decent, straight-talking folks, working hard and doing the best they can, etc, etc) is itself a typically American trope. There’s a sub-Tocquevillean comparison to be made here, if we stretch things a bit. Lévy is a French writer and minor philosopher who behaves in the flamboyant manner of a major American media celebrity, while Keillor is a minor American media celebrity who would prefer to be taken seriously for his writing and down-home philosophy. So naturally they hate each other.

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Any society that can make _both_ John Tyler Bonner’s “The Ideas of Biology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486424197/kieranhealysw-20/ and “The Evolution of Complexity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691084947/kieranhealysw-20/ available to me for two dollars each on sale has to have something going for it. On the other hand, Kevin Trudeau’s “Natural Cures ‘They’ don’t want you to now about”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0975599518/kieranhealysw-20/ still cost eighteen bucks, and rather more copies of it were available.

Via “Max”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/001917.html comes a Washington Post column on The Realities of International Relations by “Robert Kagan”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/13/AR2006011301696.html who apparently is a “transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund.” But not, it seems, a transpacific one:

bq. China’s (and Malaysia’s) attempt to exclude Australia from a prominent regional role at the recent East Asian summit has reinforced Sydney’s desire for closer ties.

Eugene Volokh “is already on this”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_15-2006_01_21.shtml#1137628916, but I caught a segment “on the radio”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5162955 about the “UCLAProfs.com”:http://www.uclaprofs.com, the site founded by some recent political science grad “dedicated to exposing UCLA’s most radical professors,” people who are engaged in “brainwashing” their students, an activity “described”:http://www.uclaprofs.com/profs/piterberg.html as “about as hard as shooting fish in a barrel.” The idea that professors exert a vise-like grip on the pliable minds of their students is a dubious one at best. But frankly, the notion that cardigan-wearing lefties can out-compete the cornucopia of brain-cleansing goods and services on offer in the city of Los Angeles strikes me as wholly implausible.

What most irritates me about the site is that it will probably play to the persecution complexes of some of the people on the list, which will lead them to make comments about Joe McCarthy and Fascism, which is exactly the kind of reaction UCLAprofs.com wants. The best thing about this otherwise lame project is its black-fist rating system for the radicalism of professors (three fists out of five shown here). Political Science prof Mark Sawyer had the right idea with “his profile”:http://www.uclaprofs.com/profs/sawyer.html — he wrote in to complain, saying “I now have tenure … I have been away from UCLA for 2 1/2 years at Berkeley and Harvard. I have been active though in the anti-war movement etc. So I feel I deserve 5 fists.”

But apart from the fist innovation, UCLAprofs.com is pretty badly written, poorly designed and completely fails to hit its target, as most of the “radical causes” it cites (disapproval with President Bush, opposition to the war in Iraq) are in fact at present majority positions in the United States. It doesn’t come close to the delicious heights of “Discover the Network”:http://discoverthenetwork.org/default.asp, let alone “Discover the Nutwork”:http://homepage.mac.com/jholbo/nutwork/. So I’m afraid that on my personal scale of 1 to 5 McCarthys (also shown here), UCLAprofs.com receives a derisive half a McCarthy, a new record low. It would have gotten a zero except for the superb self-parodic line in the article “There’s Something About Petitions”:http://www.uclaprofs.com/articles/petitions.html where the author says “The list also demonstrates that a large number of UCLA professors are ardently in favor of affirmative action, and just as ardently opposed to conservative legal nominees, even opposing fellow alumni like Justice Janice Rogers Brown.” That’d be _Judge_ Brown, incidentally, not Justice, whom we all know and love for her “excellent speeches”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/05/janice-rogers-brown-revisited/. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to supervise the students who are presently washing my collection of Che Guevara t-shirts as part of an in-class research exercise.

I’ve been looking again at data from the “Philosophical Gourmet Report”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/, “Brian Leiter’s”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/ reputational survey of philosophers. Here are a couple of scatterplots showing the relationship between the size of a University’s endowment and the reputation of its philosophy department, as measured by the PGR, broken out by Private and Public universities. The red regression line in each panel shows the general association between the two variables. Only data for the U.S. are shown, and not all departments in the PGR are included. (Also available as a PDF file.)

The relationship is pretty strong for Private schools, and weaker for public ones. I believe this is because endowments better index the overall wealth of private than public schools, given that the latter get more money from the state. Of course, much as they would like to, philosophy departments don’t get to spend the whole endowment. But in a way this makes the strong tie between the two more interesting, both when it does obtain and when it doesn’t. NYU stands out. It’s a pretty rich university, but not spectacularly so. Yet it has the top-ranked philosophy department , which we would not expect at all based simply on its endowment. (Rutgers, the top-ranked public school and #2 overall, is also a very interesting case.) When it comes to investing in prestige, philosophers may be a good bet for an urban university. Occasional foodies notwithstanding, they do not take up much space compared to, say, particle accelerators or engineering labs. Also unlike particle accelerators, philosophers are fueled mainly by coffee, beer and small pastries. Rather than reflecting some conscious strategy at the university level, the strong performers might represent the existence either of substantial department-level resources accumulated over time, or the presence of entrepreneurial chairs or administrators who have managed to get their hands on extra money. Conversely, schools like Texas A&M and Yale do not do as well as we would expect on the basis of the overall wealth of the university.

*Update*: Here’s a plot of reputation against per capita endowment (per FTE student). I’ve only shown the private universities because I don’t think the endowment numbers for public schools are that informative. Once again, you can see NYU is a big outlier. Rice also appears as a distinctive observation with this measure. (A “PDF version”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/endow-percap-priv-pgr.pdf is available as before.)

In her hugely successful memoir, Olivia Saves the Circus, Olivia gives a virtuoso account to her school class of how she single-handedly rescued a circus performance (all the performers were sick with ear infections, she claims) by doing everything herself. The book is replete with astonishing but true accounts of Olivia the Lion Tamer, Olivia the Queen of the Trapeze and Olivia and her Amazing Trained Dogs. At the end, Olivia’s teacher suspects something and the following exchange takes place.

In his hugely successful memoir, A Million Little Pieces, James Frey gives a virtuoso account of his life of crime and drug abuse. The book is replete with astonishing but true accounts of Frey getting a root canal without anesthesia, Frey involved in a fatal train accident, and Frey in jail for desperate crimes. At the end, The Smoking Gun provided “detailed evidence”:http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey1.html that Frey’s “memoir” is in fact a highly fictionalized — not to say falsified — version of events. The “following exchange”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/books/11memo.html?ex=1294635600&en=d54d1a2e5fa09232&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss takes place between Doubleday, Frey’s publisher, and the _New York Times_:

Two days after an investigative report published online presented strong evidence that significant portions of James Frey’s best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” were made up, the book’s publisher issued a statement saying that, in essence, it did not really matter. … “Memoir is a personal history whose aim is to illuminate, by way of example, events and issues of broader social consequence,” said a statement issued by Doubleday … “By definition, it is highly personal. In the case of Mr. Frey, we decided ‘A Million Little Pieces’ was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections.”

Olivia would be proud.