Et Cetera

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).

I was driving home from the office this evening (yeah, yeah, I know — I prefer to think of it as Arizona taxpayers getting good value for money) and I saw this enormous Ron Paul Revolution limousine thing go by. It was as long as a semi. Arizona is McCain country, but there are also plenty of libertarians out here, too, and many of them are even opposed to state-sponsored torture. So it makes sense that Paul is doing a bit of campaigning in the vicinity.

Naturally, there’s a website. Now that I look at the photo, it seems that it’s more a glorified pickup-truck camper attachment than a limo as such. It seems like there should be a joke there about Paul’s candidacy, or libertarianism, but it’d probably be too much of a — well, you know.

Jeremy is not the only one working on his Northwestern courses. I am putting the finishing touches on my junior writing seminar syllabus when I glance over at Yahoo! Music and see this (on 80s music random play):

This is generally amusing given the topic of my course (“Adolescents’ Digital Media Uses, Skills and Participations”), but it’s additionally funny since I was just adding an article to the syllabus that appeared in the journal The Information Society.

Stuff elsewhere on the WWW that I would blog if I wasn’t catching a plane to Ireland in 4 hours …

“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_theory_of_change_primary argues that Obama’s bipartisanship is actually a clever strategy for bringing change through.

“Ari Kelman”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2007/12/18/aha/ gives tips to job candidates who’ll be attending the _American Historical Association_ meeting.

“Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/12/trends_in_votin.html crunches the numbers to show that while Democrats are gaining support over time from professionals, business owners are going more and more Republican.

Lots of interesting stuff from “Charles Taylor et al.”:http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/ on religion in the public sphere at the _Immanent Frame_.

Jonah Goldberg’s jacket-copy pronouncement that

bq. The quintessential liberal fascist isn’t an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore

is already passing into legend. In my earlier post I linked to the faculty page of Swarthmore’s Department of Educational Studies. Browsing around, and wanting to learn more about Swarthmorofascism^®, I found some information on the academic program they offer:

bq. The Department of Educational Studies offers students several alternative programs of study. Although the Department does not offer a major, it does provide students with the opportunity to develop a Special Major in conjunction with another department. Students may also minor in Education. In the Honors Program, students may do a Special Major in Education and another field or may do an Honors minor in Education. Students may choose to do secondary or elementary Teacher Certification in addition to or independently of these other options.

So, you can minor in Ed, and you can study it in conjunction with something else. But you cannot in fact have “an education degree from Swarthmore” in the same way that you can have an Economics or Physics or History degree from Swarthmore.

Hundreds more at the Scared of Santa photo gallery. Via Apostropher.

“Neither snowmen nor reindeer nor blinking lights stays these couriers from swift completion of their appointed rounds …”


(From the Parade of Lights this evening here in Tucson.)

Behind the veil at the Google Book Scanning Facility.

This Atlantic Monthly “piece”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/195711/sex-college/ from 1957 on sex and the college girl is quite entertaining, in the ways that you might expect it to be entertaining. My favorite paragraph:

Even more complicated to deal with is the intellectual-amoral type of man, who has affairs as a matter of course and doesn’t (or says he doesn’t) think less of a girl for sleeping with him. He is full of highly complicated arguments on the subject, which have to do with empiricism, epicureanism, live today, for tomorrow will bring the mushroom cloud, learning about life, and the dangers of self-repression, all of which are whipped out with frightening speed and conviction while he is undoing the third button on his girl’s blouse.

Via Matt Yglesias, a headline and subhead from a Newsweek profile of Giuliani:

bq. Growing Up Giuliani: Rudy Giuliani was raised to understand that fine, blurry line between saint and sinner. The making of his moral code.

It seems to me that a line can be fine, or it can be blurry. I’m having a hard time visualizing a fine, blurry line.

This ad has been playing on various PC websites, such as CNET’s Windows Vista Overview page. It’s a very clever use of sidebars and ad banners.

Usage Statistics for Conservapedia.

_Update_: As emerges in the discussion below, this Top 10 is a little too good to be true, and probably reflects efforts to game the system either by critics or other participants in the Conservapedia world rather than the true degree of readership for these particular pages on the site.

Myself and the wife have been watching the second series of _Heroes_, which is finally beginning to pick up after a slow start (although the spunky cheerleader needs to lose the drippy boyfriend _immediately_ ). One of the subplots plays out, strangely enough, among the Cork criminal underclass, or at least the show producer’s idea of same. The accents of these purported Corkonian ne’er-do-wells are nothing short of atrocious. Perhaps it’s understandable that there’s nothing at all resembling an actual Cork accent to be found among them; that might be a bit much to inflict on unsuspecting American television viewers. But there’s not much in the way of _Irish_ accents, full stop. One fella who thinks that Irish people speak like Scotsmen with adenoids, another with standard mid-Atlantic intonations, and a British actress who at least seems to have heard Irish people talking once upon a time, even if her ability to imitate them slips in and out of focus. The nadir was reached when one of the actors pronounced “Slainte” as “slah-in-che” on this week’s show (all they needed to do to get this one right was to do a bloody “Google search”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=k6w&q=slainte+pronounce&btnG=Search). This is all quite unnecessary – I can testify from a considerable personal acquaintance that unemployed Real Irish Actors with Real Irish Accents are not a commodity in short supply.

That said, the problem goes both ways. We also recently saw the first episode of _Spooks_ (MI5 on this side of the Atlantic), a BBC production, which has an abortion clinic bomber whose purported Southern US accent had to be heard to be believed. My wife didn’t even realize that it was meant to be an American accent until I told her (a later episode’s subplot concerning the vast amounts of WTO cash subsidizing the Russian economy did little to add to my estimate of the show’s commitment to verisimilitude). So anyway, I thought that there might be some entertainment value in a thread on Bad TV/movie Accents that you have heard (and good ones too, if you like; the best Hollywood Irish accent by far that I’ve heard was Brad Pitt in _Snatch_ – it approached a kind of incomprehensible Platonic ideal of dense Midlands guttural).

I’m sure this is fundamentally immature of me, but the new Republican National Convention logo set off a train of associations in my head (and prompted me to spend half an hour doing some basic Photoshop work to bring these associations to the foreground). More artistically talented readers than myself are invited to submit their own interpretations (Michael Froomkin has a copy of the original image at “this post”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2007/10/subliminal_seduction_gop_style.html).