Kieran Healy

David Kopel “has a post”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_11_20-2005_11_26.shtml#1132694542 about the origins of the Thanksgiving hymn “We Gather Together”:http://www.centrofriend.it/thanksgiving/we_gather_together.htm. (Originally Dutch: a “Nederlandtsch Gedenckclanck,” which is a phrase I could say all day.) It put me in mind of the stuff I learned when growing up in Ireland. Much of it was pretty thin gruel, like the execrable “Christ be beside me”:http://www.know-britain.com/hymns/christ_be_beside_me.html. But there were a few standouts — mostly leftovers from the pre-Vactican II fire-and-brimstone era. Chief among these was “God of Mercy and Compassion”:http://romaaeterna.web.infoseek.co.jp/romanhmn/rh216.html. Nothing like hearing a bunch of eight-year-olds cheerily singing lyrics like “See our saviour bleeding, dying / On the cross of Calvary / To that cross my sins have nailed him / Yet he bleeds and dies for me.” Clonk! Clonk! Clonk! Do you hear those nails going in? Do you?

To offset this, though, when I was in fifth class our teacher, Mr Buckley, read us Frank O’Connor’s small masterpiece, “First Confession,” which put a more humane face on the whole thing. My view of religion was never quite the same afterward.

Then, to crown my misfortunes, I had to make my first confession and communion. It was an old woman called Ryan who prepared us for these. She was about the one age with Gran; she was well-to-do, lived in a big house on Montenotte, wore a black cloak and bonnet, and came every day to school at three o’clock when we should have been going home, and talked to us of hell. She may have mentioned the other place as well, but that could only have been by accident, for hell had the first place in her heart.

She lit a candle, took out a new half-crown, and offered it to the first boy who would hold one finger — only one finger! — in the flame for five minutes by the school clock. Being always very ambitious I was tempted to volunteer, but I thought it might look greedy. Then she asked were we afraid of holding one finger — only one finger! — in a little candle flame for five minutes and not afraid of burning all over in roasting hot furnaces for all eternity. “All eternity! Just think of that! A whole lifetime goes by and it’s nothing, not even a drop in the ocean of your sufferings.” The woman was really interesting about hell, but my attention was all fixed on the half-crown. At the end of the lesson she put it back in her purse. It was a great disappointment; a religious woman like that, you wouldn’t think she’d bother about a thing like a half-crown.

You can “read the whole thing”:http://hrsbstaff.ednet.ns.ca/brownle/first_confession_by_frank_o.htm in the space of a few minutes. Vintage publish “a good edition”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394710487/kieranhealysw-20/ of O’Connor’s short stories.

Over at Volokh, “Todd Zywicki says”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_11_20-2005_11_26.shtml#1132593329,

bq. Scott Adams now has a blog, known apprpriately enough as “Dilbert Blog”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1132593329.shtml … I also see that Mr. Adams has also already had the misfortune to “cross paths”:http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2005/11/intelligent_des_1.html with the blogosphere’s most infamous Lysenkoist. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mr. Adams.

The link goes to Adams’ version of a spat he (Adams) has been having with “PZ Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/, of _Pharyngula_. Here is “Myers’ version”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/open_thread_adams_edition/. But what I really want to know is, under what description of reality does PZ Myers (a biology professor at the University of Minnesota at Morris, and tireless rebutter of creationist and Intelligent Design arguments) qualify as a “Lysenkoist”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism, let alone the “blogosphere’s most infamous Lysenkoist”? Does Todd have evidence that Myers fakes his scientific research? That he believes that species can be changed through hybridization and grafting? That he thinks genetics is a bourgeois pseudoscience? Or maybe Todd is suggesting that any scientist with left-leaning political views is, _ipso facto_ some kind of fraud, and Myers is our most prominent example? I honestly have no idea what Zywicki is trying to say here.

*Update*: Todd has suddenly and silently updated his post. It now reads, in part, “I also see that Mr. Adams has also already had the misfortune to cross paths with one unpleasant corner of the blogosphere.” In addition, he has silently deleted three or four comments (including one from me) that called him on the smear he was making. I guess anyone could mistakenly type “Lysenkoist” when they meant “unpleasant.” Your self-correcting blogosphere at work. At least he saw that the charge was indefensible, I suppose.

*Second Update*: Todd “explains his actions a bit further”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_11_20-2005_11_26.shtml#1132593329 in an update. From a post PZ Myers links to, it seems Zywicki’s animus toward Myers all goes back to an “earlier”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/the_conservative_counterattack_ho_hum/ “argument”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1120775700.shtml they had about evolutionary psychology.

John Murtha says “get out of Iraq now”:http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/pa12_murtha/pr051117iraq.html. C&L has “the video”:http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/11/17.html#a5913, which has a lot more powerful commentary in addition to the content of the statement. Personally, I’d like to see Dick Cheney tell Murtha (who spent 37 years of his career in the Marine Corps) to his face that he’s “losing his memory, or his backbone”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/17/cheney/.

So there’s this ad for Guinn– never mind. Check out this “ad for Sony TVs”:http://www.bravia-advert.com/, filmed last July in San Francisco. It consists of an awful lot of bouncy balls — about a “quarter of a million”:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/index.htmlavailable, in fact — bouncing their way down a hilly street. It looks great and is much more soothing than “high-speed drives through the streets of Paris”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/10/sacre-bleu/. There’s a sixty-second version for “high-“:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviacommhigh.html or “low-“:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviacommlow.html speed connections, and a three minute version, also for “high-“:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviaextcommhigh.html or “low-“:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviaextcommlow.html speed connections. You need Quicktime 7 for the high-speed versions. [Via “Alan”:http://www.schussman.com/.] If you prefer your lunchtime entertainment to take the form of puns on my surname, read “a brief interview with me”:http://blogometer.nationalJournal.com/archives/2005/11/1117_the_source.html on The National Journal’s “Hotline”:http://blogometer.nationaljournal.com/.

When I read a while ago that “Judith Miller”:http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/10/31/i-dont-wear-pjs/ was set to give the keynote speech at the launch party of “Pajamas Media”:http://pajamasmedia.com/, I honestly thought it was a joke. (Pajamas Media is soon to be renamed, is set to launch tomorrow, and is kind of holding company for a “large and somewhat varied collection”:http://pajamasmedia.com/pj-profiles.php of mostly conservative bloggers.) But now one of their recruits, Dan Drezner, “confirms that it’s true”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002417.html. He seems a little queasy about it, and I don’t blame him. I’m not sure what Pajamas Media is supposed to be all about (and I’m “not the”:http://rogerailes.blogspot.com/2005_11_13_rogerailes_archive.html#113206774093987333 “only one”:http://www.thepoorman.net/2005/11/14/bunched-pjs/). It might be meant as a conservative “Huffington Post”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/, binding its generally conservative contributors into a common online outlet. Or it might be a looser association of independent sites — some sort of syndication network meant to generate advertising revenue. In either case, I don’t quite see where the money is going to be raked in from an initiative like this, but what do I know? I have to say, though, that if I were in Dan’s shoes I think I’d have said no to the invitation, and certainly have hit the eject button by now. They have some smart people on board (like Dan himself), but seeing as Charles Johnson (of Little Green Footballs) is running the show and the likes of “Michelle Malkin”:http://pajamasmedia.com/pj-profiles.php?p=2005/11/michellemalkincom_michelle_mal.php have joined the “Editorial Board,” the whole thing reminds me of an apparently lavish buffet at a dodgy restaurant: there’s plenty on offer, and maybe some of it looks good, but there’s also a rancid smell in the air that won’t go away.

Via “Jamie Zawinski”:http://jwz.livejournal.com/ comes “C’était un Rendezvous”:http://www.jerrykindall.com/2005/11/07_cetait_un_rendezvous.asp. A short and very fast film:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur. No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

The film has been “remastered and released on DVD”:http://www.rendezvousdvd.com/. You can watch the whole thing “here”:http://www.bsdunix.ch.nyud.net:8090/public/rendezvous20_04.mov. (Big download: about 34MB.) Bump it up to full screen mode or twice the normal size to get the full effect. The middle third of the film, when he’s right in the middle of Paris, is just unbelievable, as he runs six or seven red lights, screams around garbage trucks and narrowly misses several pedestrians as he flies down narrow, cobbled streets. Apparently there are all kinds of stories about the film, including whether the director did the driving himself in his own car. Having just watched it, I’d happily insinuate I could drive like that, too.

“Judith Miller resigns her position at the Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/10/business/media/10paper.html, in a deal that’s been under negotiation for a couple of weeks, apparently.

The “Kansas Board of Education”:http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/11/08/evolution.debate.ap/index.html has approved new standards that mandate the teaching of “Intelligent Design” (which I’ve always thought should be called “Paleyontology”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Paley) in science classrooms. According to CNN, in addition to mandating that students be told that some basic Darwinian ideas “have been challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology,” the board also decided to help themselves to a bit more, too:

bq. In addition, the board rewrote the definition of science, so that it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena.

Priceless. Unfortunately they didn’t adopt my suggestion that science be further redefined to include sitting at home drinking a beer and watching the game on TV. This would have greatly enhanced my weekend contributions to science.

Over at Volokh, the “puppy blood”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/13/taking-a-stand/ is flying again. This time, “it’s Juan Non-Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1131321731.shtml who defends “America’s network of secret, overseas torture centers”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644_pf.html against the vicious charge that they resemble Soviet gulags:

bq. I would like to underline my ultimate position: Not every mass murder is comparable to the Holocaust. By the same token, not every secret detention is comparable to the Gulag. In my view, the overuse of such comparisons undermines our ability to recognize the varying magnitudes of various evils. Such hyperbole deadens the sensitivity to moral distinctions in public discourse. Again, I am not excusing the conduct of our government. Some of the allegations are quite serious and, if true, merit condemnation, but that does not make Gitmo and other U.S. facilities equivalent to the Soviet Gulag.

Nice to see a fine legal mind at work on such a hard problem. How difficult is it to enumerate the differences between what the U.S. is doing at the moment and what the Soviets did? Let’s see. Millions of people are not being spirited away to labor camps in Siberia. Whole segments of society are not being brutally annihilated. Dick Cheney doesn’t even speak Russian! QED, they are not gulags.

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On a couple of long plane flights this week, I read Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: The Power of Place, the second volume of her biography of Darwin. (I haven’t read “Volume One”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691026068/kieranhealysw-20/.) I strongly recommend it. Three things stood out for me.

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I just finished reading Doormen, by “Peter Bearman”:http://www.iserp.columbia.edu/people/faculty_fellows/bearman.html. It’s a study of the residential doormen who work in the building’s of New York’s Upper West and East sides. A fairly restricted topic, to be sure, but the book is a small gem: the kind of sociology that takes a particular job and investigates it in a way that derives quite general lessons even as it delves into the specifics.

Appropriately, _Doormen_ was featured in the New Yorker recently, though the article didn’t convey the flavor of the book all that well. To get a better sense of it, you can “read an excerpt”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/039706.html from the chapter about the twists and turns surrounding the all-important Christmas bonus. In _Micromotives and Macrobehavior_, Thomas Schelling remarks that “not all ellipses are circles,” meaning that not all systems of interdependent, decentralized interaction are markets. He uses the example of people trapped in a cycle of Christmas-card sending. Figuring out the bonus is one of life’s ellipses, too, though a more complex one:

The optimal position for each tenant in the bonus sweepstakes is right at the top of the pile, but within close range of the others’. Little is gained from being in the middle; aside from avoidance of the bottom. The bottom quartile of the distribution is obviously exactly where tenants do not want to find themselves. The dilemma is that it is impossible to know how to position oneself without learning about the expected behavior of the other tenants. And this is why, around Thanksgiving, tenants start to position themselves to learn what their fellow tenants are intending to do. Eventually, they will have to start talking.

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Speaking of “website gadgets”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/26/map-of-ct-readers/, yesterday I tried out “Library Thing”:http://www.librarything.com, a service that lets you catalog your books online. Think of it as “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com for your books. About 70 percent of the books in my office are already in a “Delicious Library”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/11/13/delicious-monster/ catalog, which Library Thing can import, so I uploaded the lot. Like Delicious Library, the most obviously useful feature of a catalog is as yet unavailable — namely, the ability to do a full-text search on the books you own. Something like Amazon’s Search Inside. Maybe in the future there will be a way for applications like this to talk to Search Inside or “Google Print”:http://print.google.com/.

In the meantime, Library Thing lets you explore an affiliation network. You’re tied to other users through ownership of the same books, and in your “profile”:http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=kjhealy you can see who overlap the most with. It turns out that the user I’m closest to none other than “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emagd1368/weblog/blogger.html, of the Virtual Stoa. “He”:http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=chrisbrooke and I share 38 titles. This may partly be a size effect, as Chris has more than three times as many books cataloged as I do. But it may also index up our relative closeness in “Blau Space”:http://icc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/13/1/263. Further evidence of affinity in tastes comes from the fact that “Chris’s photo”:http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=chrisbrooke and “mine”:http://www.librarything.com/profile.php?view=kjhealy come from the “same source”:http://www.planearium2.de/flash/spstudio.html.

I’ll leave it to John Q to “comment”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/24/bernanke-appointed-us-fed-chairman/ on the upcoming Bernanke era at the Fed. But the “New York Times article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/business/25profile.html?hp&ex=1130212800&en=c3800de0e066c491&ei=5094&partner=homepage about his appointment is funny:

*White House Gamble Pays for a Princeton Professor*

Even before President Bush named Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers this spring, Mr. Bernanke decided to gamble. He sold his home in New Jersey last year and told friends that, instead of returning to a tenured professorship at Princeton University, he was taking a chance that President Bush would elevate him from obscurity as a Federal Reserve governor to a top political appointment.

The gamble paid off.

It’s Nerves of Steel Bernanke! He takes the chance of selling his lovely home in a prime Princeton location — at the peak of a huge real estate bubble! He bets that he will be appointed to the Fed, bravely facing the bleak and frightening possibility that — should Bush choose someone else — he would be snapped up by the top-ranked economics department of his choice. He knows no fear!

Don’t get me wrong: I think Bernanke is a good guy, and he was the obvious choice for the job. I just like the way the Times is spinning it. If anything, the fact that he can make a decision with no real downside look like a bet-the-farm gamble suggests he has what it takes to chair the Fed.

So by now everyone and his same-sex partner knows that Maggie Gallagher’s “stint at Volokh”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/19/same-sex-marriage-breakdown/ is one long struggle between “her strong argument”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385500858/kieranhealysw-20/ that marriage has many benefits and her “handwaving”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_10_16-2005_10_22.shtml#1129815953 about gay people bringing down the Roman Empire. As I “said originally”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/18/same-sex-marriage/, if you think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you probably believe that same-sex marriage is the least of the threats to civilization-as-we-know-and-like-it. Well, via “Lawyers, Guns and Money”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/10/deep-thoughts-from-land-of-double.html here is “Leon Kass”:http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001154.cfm — Addie Clark Harding Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and The College at the University of Chicago, and Chairman of the President’s Commission on Bioethics — in the first of a three-part series on what’s _really_ wrong with America:

Today, there are no socially prescribed forms of conduct that help guide young men and women in the direction of matrimony … most young women strike me as sad, lonely, and confused … today’s collegians do not even make dates or other forward-looking commitments to see one another; in this, as in so many other ways, they reveal their blindness to the meaning of the passing of time. … Here is a (partial) list of the recent changes that hamper courtship and marriage: the sexual revolution, made possible especially by effective female contraception; the ideology of feminism and the changing educational and occupational status of women; the destigmatization of bastardy, divorce, infidelity, and abortion; the general erosion of shame and awe regarding sexual matters, … widespread morally neutral sex education in schools; the explosive increase in the numbers of young people whose parents have been divorced … great increases in geographic mobility, with a resulting loosening of ties to place and extended family of origin; … and an ethos that lacks transcendent aspirations and asks of us no devotion to family, God, or country, encouraging us simply to soak up the pleasures of the present.

Now that’s more like it. The end of bastardy! The rise of female contraception! Divorce! Sex education! Cars! Maggie Gallagher could learn a thing or two from Leon Kass. If you think society is being dragged to perdition by a bunch of car-owning, pill-popping, body-piercing, career-oriented, degree-granted, sexually confident, frequent-flyer, atheistic sluts then just come out and _say_ it. And the best part is, Leon is just warming up.
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