I held out for the new iMac and now it’s here! (Unfortunately, Belle’s cute little white Macbook just up and died. Poor thing was only 16 months old. Motherboard dead. Battery toast, too. Repair cost: roughly the same as replacement cost. Sigh.)

Some people are laughing at wingnuts who are ‘going Galt’ by signing up for Medicare early. Me, I think it’s wonderful that the right is discovering the joys of solidaristic (well, sort of) strike action. So much so that I’m asking readers to encourage the leaders of this movement (Facebook group¹ – I hope but don’t know whether this link will work for everyone) to take the obvious next step.

The ‘Go Galt, Go!’ Manifesto

We proudly salute “Dr. Helen,” Glenn Reynolds, and Michelle Malkin, for identifying the only possible response to Barack Obama’s victory – ‘going Galt.’ By withdrawing their creative and intellectual achievements from the economy and stopping tipping waitstaff, the schmibertarian right can surely bring the parasites and Democrats to their knees. We look forward to these three thought leaders striking the obvious first blow, by refusing to blog for the ungrateful masses and withdrawing to a secret compound until the world capitulates to their demands! Only a universal wingnut blogging strike can bring the moochers to their senses. John Galt lives!

¹ We also have a Crooked Timber group by the way.

From the New York Times editorial page, and on the day when we’re expecting the International Criminal Court to hand out its decision on whether to indict Omar al-Bashir for genocide (or for a lesser charge of crimes against humanity) in Darfur, the two opposing points of view on the role of the ICC set out pretty clearly.

Update: the warrant’s out. Five counts of crimes against humanity and two of war crimes (specifically, ordering attacks against civilians, and pillaging). But, no genocide charge (the warrant might be amended later to include genocide but this one doesn’t have it). Moreno-Ocampo was very insistent on this six months ago, but it was widely thought at the time that it looked like overreach and apparently the court has decided to stick with what it can definitely prove. More discussion perhaps later.
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Washington, DC — Responding to Republican charges that President Obama’s proposed budget includes $8 billion for a high-speed, magnetic-levitation train that “<a href=”http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_03/017129.php”>will deliver customers straight from Disney . . . to the doorstep of the moonlight bunny ranch brothel in Nevada</a>,” Democratic leaders today unveiled plans for a “<a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOV6siQOwYc&feature=related”>Love Train</a>” that will join “people all over the world.”

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The Online Photographer reports that the firm of Franke and Heidecke is going out of business – perhaps permanently. That’s very sad news, for they are the firm that launched the famous Rolleiflex brand in 1929. As it happens, I bought a 1932 Rolleiflex Standard that I bought in a junk shop in Wales last year. I’d actually seen it a year before. The owner had spotted me with a camera and asked me whether I was interested in the Rollei. At the time I declined, but regretted it as I thought back to the beauty of the image in its ground-glass screen. So I was amazed, when I went back, to find it still unsold and snapped it up. I keep meaning to write a post about what you could, pretentiously, call the “phenomenology of technology”. The Rollei feels so different to a modern digital camera: since it is a twin-lens reflex, you hold it at waist level and look downwards; like other film cameras you don’t get the instant satisfaction of digital – you have to wait and see what came out; and since you have a mere 12 shots on 120 medium format film, you can’t just snap away and select for the best. There’s also the fact that is is a superbly made object. How many other machines made in 1932 still work, and work pretty well. Vorsprung durch Technik, I suppose. Here’s a photograph I made with it:

From the Chronicle of Higher Education

Brigham Young University has rejected an appeal from a student who had completed all the requirements for a degree but saw his diploma withheld last year after he published Men on a Mission, a calendar of buff Mormon missionaries without shirts, the Associated Press reported.

The student, Chad Henry, was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns the university, over the calendar last July. In September he was told that, to receive his degree, he would need to be reinstated as a member of the Mormon church.

Which reminds me that anyone who hasn’t read Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s wonderful account of how she came to be excommunicated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints really doesn’t know what they are missing.

I am looking forward. . . .

<a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/tuesday_potluck/”>On the bus home from Philadelphia a few weeks ago</a>, I had an Important Insight.  It was an insight borne of decades of driving and my last couple of academic gigs, which (because of their locations far from airports) have entailed traveling in shuttles and buses and vans and town cars and rickshaws.  And I’ve decided to share it with you, just because (and just below the fold).

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People who liked the John Martyn song I posted, or who are just mourning his loss, might want to listen to this loving tribute to the great man on Mike Harding’s show.[1] So many great songs it seems a shame to pick one out, but listen to the end, and hear him do “Singing in the Rain”. Sorry, I only noticed this today; it’ll go offline in about 24 hours.

[1] One of the great irritations of later life, more confirming evidence in this broadcast, is the dawning realisation that Phil Collins might be a nice chap — and one with real discernment.

I know, readers, sometimes it seems that we at CT are determined to continue discussing Rawls vs Cohen on the requirements of justice until our last reader has been driven into screaming insanity, but have faith – this is empirically relevant stuff.
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David Brooks has been getting a lot of flak for this column (which is a follow up from this one a week earlier).

We [moderates] sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. … But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. … a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor … an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new. … U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment … All the costs will be borne by the rich and all benefits redistributed downward. … U.S. … skeptical of top-down planning. … U.S. has traditionally had a relatively limited central government. … Obama … actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. …The first task will be to block the excesses of unchecked liberalism. … up to moderates to raise the alarms against these ideological outrages. … moderates will have to sketch out an alternative vision. This is a vision of a nation in which we’re all in it together — in which burdens are shared broadly, rather than simply inflicted upon a small minority.

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Five.
I especially liked this:

A newspaper columnist once told of her shock when, having struck up a rapport with a man over dinner, she was told at the end of the meal he had no vacancies for friends. He was operating a “one-in, one-out” policy. Six months later she received a card stating he was now available for friendship.

There’s a lot of fretting about Facebook in England these days, because it is creating attention-deficient friend-flators. When Henry announced that he had joined and pressed the rest of us to, someone criticized him for assuming that it was reaching a critical mass just because he, and his friends, had joined. I, by contrast, assumed that it was about to go belly-up because I had joined (I’m the classic late-adopter, as evidenced by my recent desperate bulk-buying of cassette tapes and tape players before they stop making them because the rest of you have started using ipods). That was a while ago, but I’ve got to tell you that its days are now definitely numbered, because not only has my wife joined but, worse, I just became friends with the mother of one of my secondary school friends.

The blogospheric response to George Will’s recycling of long-refuted talking points on climate change (a good summary here) has produced lots of insights into the way the mainstream media (particularly the Washington Post) works, and some reasons to be less regretful about its seemingly inevitable demise.

I was particularly struck by the opening statement in the latest contribution of WP Ombudsman Andy Alexander who states:

Opinion columnists are free to choose whatever facts bolster their arguments.

Really? Where I come from, citing supporting evidence and ignoring the existence of directly contrary evidence is called “cherry-picking” (when we are being polite).

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The Telegraph reports that Ed Balls suggests that school admissions lotteries may be scrapped because they are unfair. I’ve dug around to find the actual speech, but can’t find it anywhere, and don’t entirely trust the report (or the Observer report, which makes him seem less hostile to lotteries) to have gotten the issues exactly right. The “twins” argument (that lotteries split up twins into different schools) is terrible — it is easy to build a sibling rule into a lottery (and that is what, for example, the Milwaukee voucher program lotteries have). This argument is pretty bad too:

“The issue of lotteries is causing some concern to parents around the country,” he said. “I have sympathy with the view that a lottery system can feel arbitrary, random and hard to explain to children who don’t know what’s going to happen and don’t know which children in their class they’re going on to secondary school with.

It is having the kid rejected, and having her go to a school other than her friends, that is the problem here, not the lottery — it’s an inevitable feature of school choice, and in fact has been with us since 1944 (the 11-plus lottery was abolished in lots of places after a while, but even in comprehensive LEAs friends got split up to go to religious or single sex schools, or just to some other school that had a nicer swimming pool, at the whim of their parents).

Can anyone point me to the whole speech, or explain what is really going on?

(It’s nice to see, by the way, that the Tories plan to abolish the lotteries — give power back to the state provider, where it belongs, that’s what I say.)

How do schools with disadvantaged populations beat the odds? England’s Chief Inspector of Schools just released a report examining a group of schools that do and analysing what they have in common:

* They excel at what they do for a high proportion of the time
* They prove constantly that disadvantage or not speaking English at home need not be a barrier to achievement
* They put students first, invest in their staff and nurture their communities
* They have strong values and high expectations that are applied consistently and never relaxed
* They provide outstanding teaching, rich opportunities for learning and encouragement and support for each student
* They are highly inclusive
* Their achievements happen by highly reflective, carefully planned and implemented strategies
* They operate with a very high degree of internal consistency
* They are constantly looking for ways to improve further
* They have outstanding and well-distributed leadership.

This is exactly what you’d expect from the school improvement and effectiveness literature. I’ve been reading a lot of this lately, and what is surprising is how much convergence there is on this. You might think that having achieved such a high level of consensus it would be easy to move into some sort of policy promoting such schools. But it’s not so easy.

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