Et Cetera

It’s that time of the year again: the “King William College General Knowledge Paper”:http://www.kwc.sch.im/gkp.html has arrived. It’s the kind of quiz that exists at a point just (or far) beyond the production possibility frontier of a space defined by your fondness for crossword-puzzles and your stock of cultural capital. If previous years are anything to go by it’s designed to be google-proof, but you’re in with a shot if you can guess the theme that unites all the questions in each section. Have at it. (The Great Miracle, incidentally, is scoring more than, say, 20 points.)

“Scott McLemee”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/12/01/mclemee wrote a little while back about reading Colin Wilson as a teenager.

bq. But I have a certain fondness for that novel [Wilson’s _The Philosopher’s Stone_], having discovered it during Christmas break while in high school. It set me off on a fascination with Wilson’s work that seems, with hindsight, perfectly understandable. Adolescence is a good time to read The Outsider. For that matter, Wilson himself was barely out of it when he wrote the book.

I too had a Colin Wilson thing when I was a teenager; something I’m a little embarrassed about today. But nowhere near as embarrassed as I am about the “Erich von Daniken”:http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/uvwxyz/vondaniken_erich.html phase I went through when I was ten or so. Which seems a nice topic for a weekend discussion thread. What is the most embarrassing book that CT readers idolized when they were teenagers or pre-teens? Painful confessions welcome.

Via a page devoted to Swedish dance bands of the 1970s, I happened upon “Eurobad 74”:http://www.omodern.com/Eurobad/euro.html “an exhibition of Europe’s worst interiors of 1974”. I have no idea what the horse is doing in #4, nor why the child is lifting the woman’s mini-skirt in #11, but it is indeed hard to imagine interiors much worse than these, even in 1974.

Two interesting articles in the Financial Times this morning. First, this “piece”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6228d682-62d8-11da-8dad-0000779e2340.html on the use of league tables to assess school performance in the UK does a decent job of talking about the limits of statistical measures.

bq. while quantitative targets and performance indicators may seem like an advance on vague aspirations, their apparent clarity is an illusion. … But statisticians warned of a more basic flaw. … each figure is based on a limited sample, and thus inherently uncertain. … The sample-size problem has since been found to undermine league tables for other institutions whose performance is calculated from small numbers, such as fertility clinics. In common with school league tables, they often show dramatic changes in rankings. These are often taken to signal dramatic change in performance. In reality, they are merely expected random variation in the quoted performance level – an effect that would be made clear if error bars were included.

Second, the “WHO says that it’s going to stop hiring of smokers”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/528a65e2-6297-11da-8dad-0000779e2340.html to promote its campaign against tobacco use. This is both idiotic and anti-liberal. There’s a decent case to be made for banning smoking in the workplace, because of the externality costs that smoking imposes on non-smokers. There’s no case whatsoever to be made for discriminating against smokers who don’t impinge on others’ health by refusing to hire them in the first place. The British print version of the article has a quote from ASH, the UK anti-smoking lobby group, criticizing the decision as not being “a very good way of tackling the issue.” Clearly, they’re worried – and rightly so – that this is going to be a public relations disaster.

An addendum to the previous post: when Zywicki says that:

bq. I think this cultural temperament may reflect itself in a anti-elitist streak rebelling against the arrogance of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary and a humility in the face of the common-sense of citizens as reflected through democratically-elected legislatures.

he’s setting himself up for more trouble than he’s bargained for. Consider this “recent NYT article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/06/opinion/06gewirtz.html?ex=1278302400&en=0e5fac7774080327&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss.

We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was the most inclined, voting to invalidate 65.63 percent of those laws; Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, was the least, voting to invalidate 28.13 percent. The tally for all the justices appears below.

Thomas 65.63 %
Kennedy 64.06 %
Scalia 56.25 %
Rehnquist 46.88 %
O’Connor 46.77 %
Souter 42.19 %
Stevens 39.34 %
Ginsburg 39.06 %
Breyer 28.13 %

One conclusion our data suggests is that those justices often considered more “liberal” – Justices Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens – vote least frequently to overturn Congressional statutes, while those often labeled “conservative” vote more frequently to do so. At least by this measure (others are possible, of course), the latter group is the most activist.

Whatever conservative justices are showing here, it sure ain’t “humility in the face of the common-sense of citizens as reflected through democratically-elected legislatures.” But as “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_10_30_atrios_archive.html#113080046968302435 says, the conservative critique of “Judicial Activism” usually reduces down to a rather less impressive sounding hostility to “Judgifying I don’t like.” If Zywicki genuinely thinks that lack of judicial deference to Congress is a fundamental problem, he should take the obvious next step – start pushing for a new Justice along the lines of Ginsburg or Breyer rather than Thomas or Scalia. Need I say that I’m not holding my breath?

Update: “Orin Kerr”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/01/judgifying-i-dont-like/#comment-116641 and others in comments make a good point that I hadn’t considered. To the extent that conservative legal thought is more skeptical of federal law and left wing legal thought more skeptical of state law, Golder and Gewirtz’s analysis (which deals only with rulings overturning federal law) probably stacks the decks. But while this may mean that the snark in my final two sentences was unjustified, it doesn’t give a free pass to conservatives by any stretch. The conservative expressed preference for state law over federal law is hardly unrelated to the fact that (a) the state laws at issue are frequently substantively closer to conservative preferences than are federal laws, and (b) that a strong emphasis on states’ rights makes various forms of economic and political regulation much less feasible in an interconnected economy of 50 states. So too for liberals of course, but the point is that humility in the face of democratic legislatures isn’t the driving force here – it’s calculations about substantive outcomes. The political science literature here has very strong evidence indeed on how judges’ ideologies affect their rulings – Epstein and Segal’s _Advice and Consent_ finds that justices’ ideology is a “remarkably good predictor” of how they will vote on the Supreme Court. And indeed when issues of state law versus federal law collide with the substantive ideological desires of judges, the latter frequently lose, as witnessed by _Bush v. Gore_ which Epstein and Segal correctly describe as a “thinly veiled attempt on the part of the Court’s conservatives to put George W. Bush in the White House.”

Hugh Hewitt’s “outing”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/opinion/28hewitt.html?ex=1288152000&en=53aee2bcf6872884&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss for the New York Times today is very funny.

bq. The right’s embrace in the Miers nomination of tactics previously exclusive to the left – exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources – will make it immeasurably harder to denounce and deflect such assaults when the Democrats make them the next time around.

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.

I was listening to the radio and heard the following observation. It was attributed to Dr William Temple (speaking at a school prize-giving in 1938) and apparently is quoted by Eric Partridge in _Usage and Abusage_:

Spelling is one of the decencies of life, like the proper use of knives and forks. But intellectually, spelling — English spelling — does not matter. Intellectually, _stops_ matter a great deal. If you’re getting your commas, semi-colons and full-stops wrong, it means you’re not getting your thoughts right and your mind is muddled.

This would probably be “Matthew Yglesias’s”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com position, and it nicely splits the difference between prescriptivists and descriptivists. It seems like a useful distinction for everyday use, and the link between syntax and punctuation is much tighter than that between semantics and spelling. I suppose if I had to choose between always having my sentences parse correctly and always spelling every word properly, I’d choose the former.

This is great. Even if there are a few “infelicities”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/noitulove/. I’m just hoping for the day when American bartenders evolve to the stage where they understand how to pull a pint of stout. Out here in Tucson it’s hard to find pubs where such people exist, though there is one place that has Beamish on tap.

As the “Left vs Right”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/28/left-vs-right-pt-cclxi/ infighting continues, I wanted to mention that “my department”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/ is hiring this year, and also point out that Arizona is the ideal location for all your Left vs Right needs. We got “libertarian cowboys”:http://www.azarms.com/ and new age “crystal-and-vortex”:http://www.arizonahealingtours.com/vortex/vortex.html types, cranky Michigan republicans and Minnesota democrats (also cranky) down for the winter, “patio men”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/531wlvng.asp and “mountain bike people”:http://sambabike.org/, “property developers”:http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/currents/Content?oid=oid:66291 and “mariachi bands”:http://www.gigmasters.com/Mariachi/Mariachi_Tucson_AZ.asp, “chollas”:http://helios.bto.ed.ac.uk/bto/deserts/cholla.htm and “chilis”:http://www.chili-pepper-plants.com/, “religion”:http://www.arizona-leisure.com/san-xavier-del-bac-mission.html and “science”:http://www.noao.edu/kpno/, “warthogs”:http://www.dm.af.mil/ and “javelinas”:http://helios.bto.ed.ac.uk/bto/desbiome/javelina.htm. Also great views. (See left. More on “my homepage”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy/.) And even some “skiing”:http://www.go-arizona.com/Mount-Lemmon-Ski-Valley. Enough to keep everyone happy.

Via “Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1127939808.shtml we come across the latest in a “long”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000426.html “line”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000404.html#000404 of nonsense about whether the left or the right has a monopoly on virtue _x_ or vice _y_. (Surely that should be vice _x_. Never mind.) This time it’s “Ann Althouse”:http://althouse.blogspot.com/2005/09/so-what-exactly-did-scorsese-do.html#112792822975605103 chancing her arm:

bq. To be a great artist is inherently right wing. A great artist like Dylan or Picasso may have some superficial, naive, lefty things to say, but underneath, where it counts, there is a strong individual, taking responsibility for his place in the world and focusing on that.

To which one can only say, piffle. In point of fact, _exactly the opposite_ is the case. It’s obvious that to be a great artist is inherently _left_ wing. And why? Because although a great artist like Mozart or Pollock may have some superficial right-wing things to say about their purely individual genius and how they want to forge in the smithy of their soul the uncreated conscience of their race, underneath, where it counts, there is a goddamn parasite constantly sponging off of friends with real jobs and looking for handouts from the Emperor Joseph II, Peggy Guggenheim, the local Arts Council or what have you. QED.

My brother was traveling through Toronto airport last week, and was running a little late. But he was also hungry, so he stopped to get a sandwich. The guy in front of him in the queue took a very long time to order. He began counting out his change very slowly. He asked things like “Is this a quarter?” My brother, increasingly impatient and not in a charitable mood, thought maybe it’s the guy’s first time in Canada, or maybe he’s just an idiot. The guy had an odd bag at his feet that was a mixture of leather panels and silver-lined parachute material. He wore an Irish flat-peaked farmer’s cap of the sort which, when seen on someone under the age of sixty, is guaranteed to annoy Irish people everywhere. These facts lent support to the second theory. Finally, the guy finished counting out his money, slowly gathered his food and his silly bag and turned around to leave.

It was Michael Stipe. My brother said hello. Stipe said hello. Off he went. My brother said the only other thing that it occurred to him to say at the time was “Hey, how’s Thom Yorke? When’s the next _Radiohead_ album coming out?” But he felt this might not have been an appropriate question.

I was trying to think of ways to legitimately work this photograph of Judge into a post, but there aren’t any, really. So here he is anyway, to remind us all of the virtues of carefully weighing your options and making wise choices. Suffice to say that Judge would not approve of torturing prisoners, invading other countries with a minimum of long-term planning, selling stock in insider deals, laggardly hanging about when people need urgent help, or crossing the road without first looking for a safe place and then letting all the traffic pass you. Pay attention to Judge. He knows whereof he speaks. Normal programming will resume shortly.

In my “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/22/latte-ordoliberals/ on Germany a couple of days ago, I coined what I thought was a neologism, “Frummagem.” It was supposed to be a “portmanteau word”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau, combining the name of David Frum, “notorious”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html for his pseudo-argument that the poor need a bit of Donner Party style privation to stiffen their moral backbones, with the word “brummagem”:http://www.brainydictionary.com/words/br/brummagem139356.html, which means something shoddy, second-rate or counterfeit. Therefore, Frummagem: a shoddy and brutal argument for immiserating the poor, after the style of David Frum. To my surprise and delight, I discovered through Google that ‘frummagem’ is actually a real word in eighteenth century thieves’ cant. It “features”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/rodopi/lang/2001/00000036/00000001/art00009 in Richard Head’s contemporary compendium of canting slang, _The English Rogue_, which informs the reader that “frummagem” means to “choake.” Walter Scott uses ‘frummagem’d’ in his novel “Guy Mannering”:http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/scott/walter/guy/chapter28.html to “mean”:http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/s/scott/walter/guy/glossary.html throttled or hanged. In short, a bit of thievish language with violent connotations. Sounds as though I wasn’t far off the mark.