On the basis of not paying particularly close attention but listening to what Australian friends had to say, I’d formed a generally positive impression of Australian PM Kevin Rudd. Now I see that Rudd has been stupid enough to “weigh”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7492579.stm into “a controversy”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23979363-601,00.html about the artistic depiction of child nudity with the following comment:
bq. “Frankly, I can’t stand this stuff …. We’re talking about the innocence of little children here. A little child cannot answer for themselves about whether they wish to be depicted in this way.”
I can’t wait for the Australian government’s prosposals for banning the appearance of child actors in soap operas and TV advertising on similar “couldn’t consent to thus being depicted” grounds!
The image in question can be seen “here”:http://www.artmonthly.org.au/ . (Perfectly safe for work in my opinion, but what do I know.) Chillingly, “Officials have said they will review the magazine’s public funding.” Of course there may be questions about whether art magazines should be publicly funded at all, but if they are to be, then this seems an crazy reason to withdraw the case.
(Incidentally, a relative of mine works with someone who was on the front cover of Led Zeppelin’s _Houses of the Holy_, no doubt the Australian Childhood Foundation would have been up in arms about that too on the grounds of possible “psychological effects in later years” — there don’t seem to be any.)
For Europeans, one of the really disconcerting things about visiting the United States is the size of the meals. Ok, there’s the phenomenon that the restaurant staff will let you take home what you don’t or can’t eat (and that’s an idea that many Europeans feel uncomfortable with), but there’s still the fact of the sheer volume of stuff that gets put on your plate. It seems it wasn’t always this way. Via someone in my del.icio.us network, I came across “this article on how portion sizes have changed”:http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22178/49492-portion-size–now in the US over the past twenty years. And not only are American meals bulkier, they’ve also increased two or three times in calorific value. That can’t be good.
There are all kinds of games you can play with this List of Top 100 Public Intellectuals, including Watch People’s Heads Explode! As a guest here I believe myself entitled to say, really? No Timberites? Tchah.
The stated criteria: “Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.” The large number of Iraq-war supporters would seem to suggest “influence … far beyond the borders of their own country” hugely outweighs “distinction in their particular field.”
So I’m about 50 minutes into the ABC Pennsylvania debate, and it’s like its being run by some crazed syndicate of Newsmax, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh – stupid talking point question after stupid talking point question, and so far not even a hint of interest in e.g. actual policy debates . All I need is for the moderators to ask _either_ the ‘So, Barack Hussein Osama, do you want to tell the American people about what you REALLY learned in the madrassa,’ or ‘Hillary Clinton, many Americans are concerned that you are secretly a lesbian? What do you have to say to them?’ question and I score the full house. I mean, what the fuck?
Via John Gruber comes news that the already somewhat odd augmenting of U.S. currency with larger typefaces and random bits of color has taken a horrible turn. Behold the new five dollar bill.
The new additions to this bill, apparently intended to increase legibility and accessibility, were made by my daughter, who is four. Or possibly by Harold and His Purple Crayon. Actually, as the folks at Hoefler & Frere-Jones point out, this monstrosity is in fact “the work of a 147-year-old government agency called the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It employs 2,500 people, and has an annual budget of $525,000,000.”
Meanwhile in Britain, the design for their new line of coins was selected after an open competition and is the work of a 26 year-old designer who hadn’t tried his hand at coin design before.
I’m pretty sure I last saw one of these while playing Half-Life 2, but now it appears to be walking around New England somewhere. Just look at how it reacts about 40″ in when the guy gives it a kick.
There’s been a marked increase in the harassment of photographers by the police, quasi-police, security guards and suchlike since 9/11, and the UK is no exception. Photographers have been (illegally) forced to delete pictures by officious police and have been told plain untruths about what the law says on the matter. A recent “anti-terrorism campaign”:http://www.met.police.uk/campaigns/campaign_ct_2008.htm even has posters with the legend “Thousands of People Take Photos Every Day. What if One of Them Seems Odd?”, and invites the public to involve the constabulary. Since photography is a hobby that disproportionately attracts slightly nerdy loners, lots of photographers “seem odd”, but they ought to be spared this sort of attention!
Now Austin Mitchell MP, himself a keen photographer (and “a past victim”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4291424.stm of such behaviour), is taking a stand, and has introduced “an early day motion in the House of Commons”:http://edmi.parliament.uk/EDMi/EDMDetails.aspx?EDMID=35375&SESSION=891
bq. That this House is concerned to encourage the spread and enjoyment of photography as the most genuine and accessible people’s art; deplores the apparent increase in the number of reported incidents in which the police, police community support officers (PCSOs) or wardens attempt to stop street photography and order the deletion of photographs or the confiscation of cards, cameras or film on various specious ground such as claims that some public buildings are strategic or sensitive, that children and adults can only be photographed with their written permission, that photographs of police and PCSOs are illegal, or that photographs may be used by terrorists; points out that photography in public places and streets is not only enjoyable but perfectly legal; regrets all such efforts to stop, discourage or inhibit amateur photographers taking pictures in public places, many of which are in any case festooned with closed circuit television cameras; and urges the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers to agree on a photography code for the information of officers on the ground, setting out the public’s right to photograph public places thus allowing photographers to enjoy their hobby without officious interference or unjustified suspicion.
Readers in the UK could “email their MPs”:http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ and express their support for Mitchell’s stand, they could also email Mitchell himself. Since it seems to be the trendy thing to do, I’ve also set up “a Facebook group in support”:http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=11479308155 .
Both World War I and World War II lasted for four years. We fought vast empires with organized armies and navies with tanks, airplanes, and submarines, yet it took us only four years to defeat them. … World War III, which began on September 11, 2001, has been going on for nearly seven years now, but there is no end in sight. There are no clear signs that we are winning the war, or even leading in the game. … Why isn’t this a slam dunk? It seems to me that there is one resource that our enemies have in abundance but we don’t: hate. We don’t hate our enemies nearly as much as they hate us. They are consumed in pure and intense hatred of us, while we appear to have PC’ed hatred out of our lexicon and emotional repertoire. We are not even allowed to call our enemies for who they are, and must instead use euphemisms like “terrorists.” … Hatred of enemies has always been a proximate emotional motive for war throughout human evolutionary history. Until now.
Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine that, on September 11, 2001, when the Twin Towers came down, the President of the United States was not George W. Bush, but Ann Coulter. What would have happened then? On September 12, President Coulter would have ordered the US military forces to drop 35 nuclear bombs throughout the Middle East, killing all of our actual and potential enemy combatants, and their wives and children. On September 13, the war would have been over and won, without a single American life lost.
“Decent left” columnist Nick Cohen, “writing for Pajamas Media”:http://www.pajamasmedia.com/2008/03/why_brits_dont_fall_for_obama.php , and explaining the alleged fact, that, unlike continental Europeans, the British are not keen on Obama:
bq. A more convincing explanation to my mind is that European support for Obama is tied to levels of anti-Americanism, and despite all Bush has thrown at them, the British are not as anti-American as the continentals have become.
And the test of how anti-American people are? It is whether they support, retrospectively, Israel’s bombing of Saddam’s nuclear reactor:
bq. At a recent meeting in London Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer, elegantly calibrated attitudes to the US. He spoke all over North America and Europe and whenever the subject of an aggressive foreign policy came up he asked audiences whether Israel had been right to take out Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. In America, virtually everyone was in favor. Whatever their politics, they reasoned that a totalitarian regime was about to get the bomb and, obviously the West should stop it. In Germany, virtually everyone was against — “even the hawks are pacifists,” he said. In France, audiences split 80 per cent against, 20 in favor — “which was good of the 20 per cent considering Chirac had built the reactor in the first place.” In Britain, people divided evenly.
As I was sitting around the faculty lounge this morning, staring vacantly into space and dreaming of summers filled with golf, <a href=”http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/if-only-id-realized-there-was-such-an-easy-solution-to-all-this-work-piling-up-in-my-office/”>a busy colleague</a> brought <a href=”http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/stop-pushing-yourself”>Mark Bauerlein’s latest blog post</a> to my attention. It’s a response to a <a href=”http://s.wsj.net/article/SB120425031647901841.html?mod=most_viewed_leisure24″>recent <i>Wall Street Journal</i> essay</a>, it’s about faculty workloads, and it’s rather skeptical of reports about faculty workloads:
<blockquote>We have seen, indeed, many books and articles on the subject, such as Profscam by Charles Sykes, and when people hear about a 2-2 teaching load that means 6 classroom hours a week for 28 weeks out of the year, they wonder what all the complaining is about.
But Professor Kelly-Woessner maintains, “Our average workweek is 60+ hours. And unlike a regular job, where you come home at 5, we’re grading well into the evening.”
Hilzoy, “rejoicing the departure”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/02/ding-dong-the-w.html of the truly odious William J Haynes II, provides this mind-squirbling story from Haynes’ earlier career.
In this amazing brief, Haynes argued that bombing a nesting site for migratory birds would benefit birdwatchers, since “bird watchers get more enjoyment spotting a rare bird than they do spotting a common one.” Moreover, he added, the birds would benefit as well, since using their nests as a bombing range would minimize “human intrusion”. The judge’s comment on this novel line of argument: “there is absolutely no support in the law for the view that environmentalists should get enjoyment out of the destruction of natural resources because that destruction makes the remaining resources more scarce and therefore more valuable. The Court hopes that the federal government will refrain from making or adopting such frivolous arguments in the future.” (pp. 27-8)”
I once voiced my suspicion that Fafblog had retired because nothing, not even an entity with the godlike powers of the Medium Lobster, could out-lunatic Norman Podhoretz. I was wrong. William J Haynes II could out-lunatic Norman Podhoretz without raising a sweat. Sadly, the Medium Lobster isn’t even in the race.
Belle, “at her and John’s other place”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2008/02/nasty.html, describes the argument of a quite startlingly horrendous post at NRO’s _The Corner._
The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation?
Unfortunately, I imagine that this is only the start …
The wacky world of software licensing visits my inbox:
The newest version of SPSS cannot leave the country according to our current licensing agreement and US Export laws. Additionally, graduate students are not legally allowed to work on laptops (regardless of ownership) that utilizes the university site license. As a result, we are imposing a hiatus on SPSS installations on laptops and on any system that will leave the country until this can be resolved. Anyone who is leaving the country with a UA laptop, please contact us to remove the software before you leave to ensure software licensing and export conditions are met.
They’re trying to fix this absurd state of affairs, but the Contracting Office apparently signed off on the original site-license agreement. If you’re using SPSS in the first place you need to reconsider your plan for your life, but still.
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.
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.
