My son Alex, who plays under the name Alexander Thomas (“myspace page”:http://www.myspace.com/alexanderthomasmusic) , plays the “theremin”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin (and then puts the output through various electronic boxes). As well as playing various gigs round the country, he’s also just had “a session on BBC Radio Bristol’s BBC Bristol Introducing programme”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p001mhrq . He plays three pieces as well as talking a little bit about the instrument (the first is just after 30 minutes in). The session should be available for the next seven days.

“Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/246918.php is a little uncertain about Jerry Nadler’s “proposed measure”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/246918.php to reform the pardons process.

in addition to always being leery of fiddling with the constitution, I don’t know if I like the idea of changing the pardon power. I think it’s an important safety valve in our constitutional system. If it’s been a problem, rather than changing the constitution, maybe we need better presidents.

Looking more closely at what “Nadler is saying”:http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/nadler_plans_constitutional_am.php, it seems to me that there are two distinct elements. One is the suggestion that the President not be allowed to pardon members of his/her own administration. This, I suspect, is the bit that Josh is leery of – I imagine that his thinking is that in a country where the prosecution is highly politicized (as in the US), the benefits of having the President able to overturn politically-driven prosecutions may outweigh the benefits. This, I think can be argued either way. But I can’t see any very good argument against the second, admittedly more tentative element of Nadler’s proposal – that the President’s power to pardon be restricted during his/her final months in office. As we saw most notoriously with “Clinton”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/11/presidential_pardons_will_bush.html, presidents may possibly have a strong incentive to pardon people in the closing months of their administration, because they won’t have to pay a significant political price for it. This creates real problems of democratic accountability, in an area where the arguments for political discretion seem relatively weak (e.g. if the claim is that the power would be used primarily to overturn bogus political prosecutions, then there shouldn’t be much of a legitimacy hit for pardoning people earlier in the President’s term). So is there any good rationale why the President shouldn’t be constitutionally forbidden from issuing pardons say, during the interregnum after November 4 and before the new President takes office?

!http://www.themonkeycage.org/pardons.gif!

The UW School of Medicine and Public Health has just adopted a new grading policy; for first year students it has gotten rid of public letter grades, replacing them with a Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory division. You can read a bit about it here. In fact, the students do get assigned letter grades, but these do not appear on their transcript. The Wisconsin Association of Scholars asked me to participate in an event at the School this week, where we would simultaneously discuss the new policy (the Dean of the School was on the panel) and launch Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education edited by my colleague Lester Hunt, who also spoke (adapting part of his really excellent summary afterword to the book). I adapted a bit of my chapter for the book in my talk (it also overlaps with this post announcing the book — the repetition isn’t too extensive though), but also said what I think about the new policy. I thought I’d post the talk partly because the panel was not so well attended, largely because it was one of those suddenly very cold Wisconsin evenings (my father-in-law, fresh from Iraq, did attend, but slept right through my talk!). The text is below the fold. I should add that my sense is that the W.A.S. set up the event partly because some people were very skeptical about the policy; I think that once people had heard the Dean all were convinced that it was sensible.

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The great David Horowitz campaign against evul academics has reached Australia, and has even occasioned a Senate inquiry. It was a load of fun. The report is good reading, as is the minority report by the Liberal (= conservative down under) Party Senators who called the inquiry in the first place, but lost control following their election defeat last year. A snippet suggests that those involved knew how to handle Horowitzism

From the committee’s perspective it appeared as
though it was to be called on to play its part in a university revue. The submissions,
the performance and the style – to say nothing of the rhetoric – presented by some
Liberal Students suggested a strong undergraduate tone. The ‘outing’ of Left and
purportedly Left academics and commentators (masquerading as academics as we
were told at one hearing) was in keeping with this tone. None of those outed objected.
Some appeared flattered to be named in the company of others more famous

The list of leftist academics is, I must admit, a sore point. I never located the full list (the links on the inquiry website were skew-whiff) but clearly I wasn’t on it. What does a leftist have to do to get noticed in this country?

My friend Josh Glenn has a new book, The Idler’s Glossary [amazon]. An acquaintance of mine, Mark Kingwell, wrote the introductory essay. And Seth did the illustrations. (I love Seth.) The whole svelte, 3.7 x 6 in. unit would slip snugly into someone’s X-Mas stocking, mayhap.

It’s a glossary: entries on absentmindedness and acedia through to working-class hero. (Shouldn’t there be an entry for ‘zzzzzz’? With no gloss? I think that might have been an elegant way to end the book.)

Right, the philosophy of idleness. First, I will note that Kingwell and Glenn have diametrically opposed theories of boredom. Kingwell quotes a passage from a Kingsley Amis novel: “My wife accuse me of thinking her boring. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that this might be because she’s boring … To her mind, her being boring is a thing I do.” Kingwell takes the husband’s side, but Glenn goes on to take the wife’s: “Go ahead and blame your dull companions, but being bored [a slang term that appeared among London’s smart set in the late 18th century, perhaps derived from the French for ‘triviality’] is your own fault. It’s the state of being too restless to concentrate, while too apathetic to bust a move.” Which, come to think of it, is a pretty stable Kinglsey Amis formula.

So who’s right: Kingwell or Glenn? In philosophical terms, if a tree is boring in the forest, and there is no one there to be bored by how dull Nature is … ? In Humean terms, is boringness a matter of (we shouldn’t say ‘gilding and staining Nature with our sentiments’) dulling and drearing Nature with our sentiments. Or was existence already dull and drear when we lay down on it?

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Via Leiter, this disturbing story about gnomes being banned from a church cemetery. This is the CofE: it seems a bit ironic that a church that not long ago had Bishops openly doubting whether God exists is so adamant about the non-existence of ‘real’ gnomes.

The excellent Broader, Bolder Approach Coalition has a nice “gotcha” for David Brooks here. In the first piece he endorses pretty much exactly the approach that the broader bolder coalition has outlined; in the second he criticises the coalition and supports instead, the Education Equality Project (you know, the Al Sharpton one that John McCain supports) which was, as far as I can tell, set up specifically to oppose the broader bolder approach that he advances in his first article. Good stuff.

“Philosophy professor forgets to attend his own sell-out lecture on duty”:http://www.richmondandtwickenhamtimes.co.uk/news/3938645.Professor_forgets_/ .

Talking of the 70’s, I just finished Kenneth Morgan’s biography of Michael Foot (UK). When I was about half way through, I told a good friend that it made me think worse of Foot, and this despite the fact that Morgan himself, while appropriately critical, is obviously a huge admirer. Now I’m done with the whole life (well, nearly the whole life, surely) I think better of him.

The book is full of surprises – even if some of them are ones that you vaguely knew before, but hadn’t really believed. His friendship with, and sponsorship by, Beaverbrook, was just the tip of an iceberg. I didn’t know that Foot became, in later life, a close friend of Ian Gilmour. I did, somehow, know that he was a friend of Enoch Powell’s, but it is surprising nevertheless, and what is particularly surprising is that they seem to have become friends, on Foot’s initiative, shortly after the “rivers of blood” speech (Radio 4 had a very good evaluation of Powell last year, during which the son of some Tory MP told about how his parents, previously good friends of Powell’s, turned Powell away from the door the day after the speech, and never spoke to him again, which indicates just how unacceptable the speech was). They collaborated closely both on defeating House of Lords reform (Foot wanted it abolished, not turned into a House of place-men), and, obviously, opposing entry to, and then staying in, the EEC. Another close friend was Randolph Churchill, who twice challenged him in Devonport; they became friends, apparently, during the first campaign, when Foot and Jill Craigie would frequently give Churchill rides back from events where his Conservative election workers, who disliked him, had abandoned him. The second campaign was, apparently, vicious, and yet the friendship remained solid. A lifelong Republican, who has refused any and all honours, he became friends with the Queen when he was party leader, and also with the Queen Mother, who apparently admired his good sense in wearing his donkey jacket to the Cenotaph for the Remembrance ceremony. There’s better still: some MI5 report is quoted as saying the Foot, Benn, Mikardo, Driberg, Heffer, Hart, Castle and David Owen were “Labour MPs who are believed to be Communists and are in positions of influence”. Brilliant.

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I started blogging just under five years ago, and for the first few months, I kept marveling at my brand new toy.  The record of this marveling, unfortunately, is still in the blog archives for all to see: there are entire posts that read, <i>Whoa!  Check it out!  Somebody responded to something I wrote!</i> and <i>d00d!  Twenty thousand readers in one month!  Inconceivable! This Inter-net is an amazing thing!</i>  Yes, I really did hyphenate “inter-net.”  It was supposed to be really funny, you see, like something from the early twentieth-century issues of <i>The Onion</i> in <i>Our Dumb Century</i>.  Because whenever I want to suggest in shorthand that someone my age or older is clueless about new technologies, I refer to the “auto hyphen mobile,” after <i>Our Dumb Century</i>’s “auto-mobile,” and . . . oh, never mind.

The point is that sometimes, the internet really is an amazing thing, in which you write <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/wandering_back_in/”>a blog post</a> that takes issue with Peter Singer’s characterization of the capabilities of people with Down syndrome, and then find, a few weeks later, an email from Peter Singer in your inbox.  Last month, Singer wrote to say he’d come across my post about the <a href=”http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/cdconference/”>SUNY – Stony Brook Cognitive Disability conference</a>.  He said he was delighted to hear that my son Jamie has a wide range of abilities, intrigued to learn that Jamie understands a range of theories about why humans eat some animals and not others, but sorry that neither Jamie nor I appreciate Woody Allen movies — though he admitted that the recent ones have been disappointing.

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I’ve been puzzling over this “post”:http://www.stephenbainbridge.com/index.php/punditry/kmiec_as_ambassador_to_the_holy_see/ by Steve Bainbridge for a few days. Steve vigorously denounces a suggestion by Michael Winters that Douglas Kmiec be appointed ambassador to the Vatican, saying that such an appointment would be an insult to the church.

I take it that, as a general rule, one should not choose ambassadors whose appointment will insult the country to which they are credentialed. One would not expect Obama to appoint a known anti-Zionist as ambassador to Israel, for example. Yet, while Winters and other pro-Obama US Catholics might delight in tweaking the Holy father by appointing Kmiec as ambassador to the Vatican, it would be tantamount to sending Norman Finkelstein to Israel. Doug Kmiec chose to turn his back on a life time of support for conservative and, in particular, pro-life causes to endorse Barack Obama. … Since the election, Kmiec has further angered pro-life Catholics by, among other things, his recent love letter of praise for Edward Kennedy. … His main role in public life now seems to be giving cover to pro-abortion rights Democrats. The Vatican has made clear that a Kmiec appointment would be most unwelcome … Obama may have won the vote of a majority of America’s cafeteria Catholics. Even so, to appoint Doug Kmiec as ambassador to the Holy See would be an insult to both the Vatican and to “serious, loyal” Catholics everywhere.

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This article is mostly about the Bush Administration’s rush to put a new workplace unsafety rule in place:

The Labor Department is racing to complete a new rule, strenuously opposed by President-elect Barack Obama, that would make it much harder for the government to regulate toxic substances and hazardous chemicals to which workers are exposed on the job. The rule, which has strong support from business groups, says that in assessing the risk from a particular substance, federal agencies should gather and analyze “industry-by-industry evidence” of employees’ exposure to it during their working lives. The proposal would, in many cases, add a step to the lengthy process of developing standards to protect workers’ health.

Because we all know businesses oppose cumbersome federal regulations, right? Except when they can be made maximally cumbersome, and thus wholly ineffective. But the best part of the article is later:

The Labor Department rule is among many that federal agencies are poised to issue before Mr. Bush turns over the White House to Mr. Obama. One rule would allow coal companies to dump rock and dirt from mountaintop mining operations into nearby streams and valleys. Another, issued last week by the Health and Human Services Department, gives states sweeping authority to charge higher co-payments for doctor’s visits, hospital care and prescription drugs provided to low-income people under Medicaid. The department is working on another rule to protect health care workers who refuse to perform abortions or other procedures on religious or moral grounds.

Other rules under review include an OSHA rule that CEOs be allowed to kick a small child, kitten or puppy at least once per day or after particularly stressful meetings; a DoE directive encouraging nuclear power stations to seize public school playgrounds for temporary waste processing; and the permenantizing of a Department of the Interior Program allowing pilots of fire-fighting aircraft to practice drops in the off season in built-up areas using otherwise idle stocks of waste engine oil, sewage or medical waste as needed.

I have a Bloggingheads on the Mumbai attacks with Sumit Ganguly, an expert on Indian politics at University of Indiana. Since Sumit, unlike me, knows a whole lot about the background and likely consequences, the format is more like an interview than a dialogue. Click below to see it (or “here”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/16195 for the home site).

To Bristol’s Victoria Rooms last night for a fine performance of Mahler 6 by the University Orchestra. The moments when the hammer strikes in the final movement were visually, as well as musically, dramatic. Chatting afterwards, I learnt that the conductor had made a special trip to west London, to collect the hammer and its accompanying table. It is a great big mallet like-thing with a very long shaft. It turns out that there’s a special Mahler 6 hammer, there’s only one in the country, and orchestras hire it as necessary. So you couldn’t perform two Mahler 6s on the same evening in different parts of the UK, at least not with _the hammer_. Does each country have a dedicated Mahler 6 hammer as the UK seems to?