My paternal grandmother, who was born in 1908 and died in 1988, used to have this collection of three postcards (?) up on her wall. I recently saw it at my parents’ place and requested that I take it with me so I could put it up in my home. It reminds me of my grandmother whom I loved dearly (and whom, as you can probably tell from the above dates, I knew for all too brief a part of my life). On the back, my grandmother wrote: Graz 1926-27. There is also some hard-to-read handwriting on the front that you can see on the image. Only recently did I stop to look at the pictures individually. For me, their entire meaning comes from my memories associated with them as a whole.

I like this Flickr set of album covers reimagined as Pelican paperbacks:

Also, I have an invented a test. First, view this image. Now check under the fold for the answer. [click to continue…]

Here’s something I didn’t post about last week because CT was so intermittent that I just didn’t get around to it. Megan McArdle responded to my critiques of her. Well, responded might be too strong. Reacted. She spends so much time speculating deeply about my apparently quite shallow motives that she doesn’t really get around to considering my argument. [click to continue…]

I think I sort-of knew many of the facts that Elijah Wald recounts “in this piece in the Financial Times”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/eeca345e-8de1-11de-93df-00144feabdc0.html . Still, knowing and putting-together are two different things. You couldn’t listen to 78s as “background music” because even with an auto-changer, you’d have to get up every 15 minutes – hence the importance of radio if you wanted a soundtrack to other activities. Why did jazz singers such as Billie Holiday record such a wide repertoire of “standards”? They were packaging the hit songs of their day for a particular audience (with other singers styling for other market segments). Wald’s account also makes sense of other matters that seem incomprehensible to modern music fans. Wald doesn’t discuss this, but we are often surprised that great singers of the past died in poverty and obscurity and are buried in unmarked graves (Bessie Smith, for example). But Wald’s emphasis on the contemporary importance of the song rather than the singer helps to explain how this could have happened. We might prize the iconic performances of the time, but back then there were lots of jobbing singers churning out multiple versions. Interesting enough to make me order a copy of Wald’s new book, _How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ’n’ Roll_.

Well with Australia 133 for 8 and 199 behind at tea on the second day, I’m a bit late starting this. If I’d posted last night it would have been to berate a mediocre England – what a difference a day makes. Is Broad the new Flintoff? Can Australia yet pull it back? Comment away.

“Felix Salmon”:http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/08/19/the-economics-of-tattoos/ yesterday on the economics of tattoos:

Drewbie left me a comment this morning talking about people interviewing for jobs and not getting them, just because they had visible tattoos. I can well believe it. But at the same time, precisely because of this discrimination, I tend to both expect and receive much better service from people with visible tattoos. … Businesses with tattooed employees are signalling to me that they have better service, and as a result I’m more likely to try them out.

By coincidence, I’m reading Diego Gambetta’s new book, _Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate_ (Powells, Amazon, B&N), which has a lot to say about signalling via tattoos and other forms of visible self-mutilation. Gambetta argues that criminals often cover themselves with tattoos precisely because they ruin the criminals’ prospects to go straight; they allow the criminals to signal “that defection would be not so much unprofitable as impossible.”

Self-binding can also take the form of self-branding as found, for instance, in South African prisons:

bq. Erefaan’s face is covered in tattoos. “Spit on my grave” is tattooed across his forehead; “I hate you, Mum” etched on his left cheek. The tattoos are an expression of loyalty. The men cut the emblems of their allegiance into their skin. The Number [the name of the hierarchical system in Pollsmoor prison] demands not only that you pledge your oath verbally, but that you are marked, indelibly, for life. Facial tattoos are the ultimate abandonment of all hope for a life outside.

Neal Stephenson, in _Snow Crash_, proposed an America in which the collapse of government led communities to brand criminals faces’ with brief descriptions of their criminal tendencies, so that others in different communities would know to give them wide berth. Gambetta’s logic suggests that branding, whether voluntary or involuntary, could sometimes be in the criminal’s self interest – it serves as a costly signal of type. More generally, I’m enjoying the book a lot – the best bit so far is Gambetta’s lovely theory of incompetence as a signalling mechanism in Italian academia. Recommended.

Another longish extract from my book project. Corrections and suggestions of all kinds are welcome. I’m also thinking it might be good to have a website where it’s possible to look at, and comment on, all the draft chapters, but I suspect people prefer the atmosphere of a comments thread. Any thoughts on this?

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John Holmes the UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs has a nice tribute to the UN workers who died in the Baghdad Bombing of 19 August 2003, six years ago today. he notes that ‘On this day in 2003, the UN offices in Baghdad were blown up by a truck bomb, killing 22 humanitarian workers and dedicated professionals, among them Sergio Vieira de Mello, a lifelong humanitarian who had saved lives and reduced suffering in some of this planet’s toughest places.

In remembrance of this tragedy, today is the first World Humanitarian Day, an opportunity to reflect on the remarkable achievement that when crisis strikes today, it is taken for granted that aid workers will be on the scene within hours.‘

I had turned down a job with the UN mission in Iraq to go to Afghanistan a few months beforehand, and several of my former colleagues from Kosovo were among the dead and injured that day. Since then I have lost count of the number of friends and colleagues who have been killed, maimed, kidnapped or emotionally traumatised in the course of their work.

Holmes notes that: ‘The number of conflicts around the world has shrunk over the past 20 years but the humanitarian fallout of conflict remains appallingly high. The kind of internal conflict we see so often is particularly ruinous for civilian lives and livelihoods.

Long-running conflicts in Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the occupied Palestinian territory and Somalia continue to affect millions. The humanitarian operation in Darfur – the largest in the world and now in its fifth year – struggles to provide assistance to 4.75 million civilians.‘

Given the news of another massive attack in Baghdad today and the continuing rising death toll in Afghanistan, it might seem wrong to single out aid workers for special mention, since we do after all volunteer to go to such places. However, I think that there is a debate to be had about the changing nature of aid work, how it is become politicised and what could be done to make it more effective according to our core humanitarian principles of independence, impartiality and neutrality.

Two book reviews I’ve done on netroots related stuff that may be of interest to CT readers.

First, a “review”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=do_the_netroots_matter for _The American Prospect_ of Eric Boehlert’s and Matthew Kerbel’s books on the netroots.

But the netroots’ discomfiture isn’t mere pique. Nor is it simple anger that Obama has broken his promises to roll back the security state that developed over the previous eight years, although this is surely important. The real worry for the netroots is that Obama is undermining their particular blend of online politics. He has taken the parts of netroots politics that he likes (online organizing and fundraising), while dumping the parts that he doesn’t (a strongly confrontational politics and emphasis on bottom-up decision making). There isn’t much room for the netroots and vigorous online partisanship in Obama’s plans for the future of the Democratic Party.

I think I would modify this a bit now, given the interesting stuff happening around pressure to keep the public option in healthcare reform, but would still stick by my fundamental claim about the basic tensions between the administration and netroots and their allies.

Second, a piece for “Times Higher Education”:http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=407101&c=1 on Matt Hindman’s book on digital democracy.

bq. As his book title suggests, Hindman puts paid to some of the most pernicious myths of democracy and the internet. Lazy libertarian arguments that the internet was going to create radically empowered individuals, an “army of Davids” that would topple government and so-called “mainstream media” with a few well-aimed missiles are simply unsustainable. So, too, are some of the hazier left-wing claims about how the internet would foster “extreme democracy”. The internet is creating new forms of social organisation, but they have their own kinds of hierarchy. And in many cases the old hierarchies are co-opting the new ones. In the US, traditional media and think-tanks are hiring prominent bloggers. Few major bloggers are still independent, and those who are, are mostly trying to create their own miniature media empires. Still, stupid claims for the democratic benefits of technological pixie dust may be too tempting a target. Hindman’s focus on the bad arguments of internet evangelists leads him to make some over-reaching claims of his own.

Comments or criticisms welcome on either or both …

Amnesty has just published a good report and action. It calls ‘for the immediate release of 285,000 innocent civilians – including an estimated 50,000 children – being held in cramped and squalid camps in the north of Sri Lanka.’ 

Here are a couple of photos taken from about six months ago of the camps as they were being built:

 

And here are two from about the same day of the ‘no-fire zone’ a few miles away:

And here is a picture which I think shows the refugees leaving the war zone and being escorted to the camps.

You can see in the first photo the emblems of a humanitarian agency.  The second photo shows the barbed wire surrounding each camp.  These were, and are, effectively concentration camps (in the original meaning of the word), and so the dilemma was whether humanitarian agencies should have helped to build and administer them? 

The next two photos show the conditions that the people who are now in the camps were previously suffering.  Thousands died either from direct shelling, or starvation and disease, in the space of a few months.  Should the aid agencies have done more to publicise what was happening or spoken out louder for a ceasefire – even if it meant getting thrown out of the country or arrested? 

Finally, should the agencies have allowed themselves to be used in part of a counter-insurgency campaign by the Government of Sri Lanka in which over a quarter of a million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes – which is a prime facie violation of the laws of armed conflict?

The other relevant bits of law here are the provisions in the Geneva Conventions which permit humanitarian agencies to ‘offer their services’ to state parties but also require them to remain strictly neutral during conflicts (Despite what is sometimes asserted there is no legal ‘right to humanitarian assistance’ and nor are governments ‘obliged to allow’ access to civilians by humanitarian agencies during non-international conflicts) and the humanitarian imperative, which says that the alleviation of human suffering comes before other considerations.

Governments may suspend certain rights during public emergencies – such as liberty and freedom of movement – but are constrained both in what they can do to captured combatants, and other prisoners, and how they treat civilians under their control.  Governments may on no account torture people or carry out summary executions, starvation is prohibited as a weapon of war and military forces must attempt to distinguish between military and civilian targets, are prohibited from attacking purely civilian targets and must subject all attacks on military targets which may result in civilian casualties to a principle of proportionality.  People charged with criminal offenses have a right to a fair trial.  The International Committee of the Red Cross has a recognized role in ensuring that these provisions are upheld in practice and so the denial of access to screening facilities or detention centres are issues of legitimate concern from a humanitarian or human rights perspective.

So what would you have done if you had been working for an aid agency in northern Sri Lanka over the past six months?

You are all wondering what Kieran is so damn sorry about (in his characteristically sociological and defensive way.)

Well. Here is a picture of our orbiting server, taken around 1910 A.D. (common era, if you prefer, you atheist.) An estimable flying fortress – sort of a cross between a siege engine and a bat. That’s to keep out spam. (Since siege towers were once called belfries, I deduce that this is a belfry bat.) No doubt it performed excellently in wind-tunnel tests. But, to make a long story short … over the weekend it crashed. And comments were, as it were, ‘crushed’ under the ‘weight’ of all that ‘wood’ and ‘canvas’. (source: Flickr.)

But if that’s what our server looks like, you ask: Whatever does the internet as a whole resemble, eh, riddle me? It is, now that you ask, a sort of ‘City of the Future’, circa 1925:

Now get back to work! All of you!

I think everything should be back to normal now. We ran out of various stuff. I blame society.

The current working title for the book is Zombie Economics: Six Dead Ideas that Threaten the World Economy (suggestions for a better subtitle are welcome) and that requires a new intro.

Also, I’ve come to the view that “market liberalism”, as opposed to “economic liberalism”, is a better name for the viewpoint, based on the efficient financial markets hypothesis and other ideas criticised here, that has dominated policy thinking in recent decades.

Any thoughts on these points, or the revised intro, would be most welcome.
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Dead at 94.

A year ago I was going through a Les Paul phase and posted a nice round-up of YouTube items. It’s fantastic stuff. I suggest you take 10 minutes to remember the father of rock and roll – well, he sort of was. There’s a whole documentary you can watch. I love the idea of idea of this guy with the future of music planted in his head, touring around as Rhubard Red. I love all that corny old stuff with Mary Ford. Corny and elegant and kinda nerd-brainy, and beloved by geniuses for what he let them do. Les Paul. Not a bad life.