Belle found this one in her stocking this morning. I think Santa selected wisely.

Russell says all names are really just disguised descriptions. So why shouldn’t that be a perfectly grammatical title? We haven’t read it yet, but the series sounds intriguing: [click to continue…]

Via Chris Brooke comes the sad news that Andrew Glyn has died, apparently from a brain tumour that was diagnosed only recently, and was inoperable. The only obit I can find so far is at Socialist Unity blog. I realise that a good number of our readers must have known him, so I’m sorry to be the one who brings the news. I didn’t know him, but our circles intersected a good bit, and mutual friends and acquaintances always spoke very warmly of him. So I always imagined I would meet, and enjoy chatting with, him someday.

It has always been a bit difficult for me to take Peter Firth seriously. Its not his fault. Tess of the dUrbevilles was a set book for my A-level English syllabus, and serendipitously Polanski’s Tess was released while we were studying it. I went with a friend who was, in fact, dating a teacher at the time (but would occasionally get me to go out with her as cover, which I was happy to do). Unfortunately, as Angel Clare appeared on screen she shouted out “Ooh, look, its Scooper from the Double Deckers”, to my mortification, but the delight of the rest of the audience (several of whom said “Oh, yeah, look, so it is”). (Recognise him?) The phrase comes into my head pretty much every time he comes on screen in MI-5/Spooks, which is inconvenient at best, beating out even the wierdness of seeing him teamed up with Jenny Agutter again after so many years.

Fortunately, you can’t see him on the radio. All last week he appeared in a series of wonderful and moving radio plays about the life of Jesus, based on Luke’s gospel (Firth plays Peter). I nearly skipped them, thinking “well, I know the story, what’s the point of listening again”. What a mistake that would have been: brilliant writing, acting, and producing, with an all-star cast (Firth, in particular, is excellent). I was rivetted. If you have five 45 minute breaks in the next few days, this is the only way to use them. The first play will go offline Monday, the second on Tuesday, and so forth, so you’d better get listening. Better than anything the TV writers who are on strike were producing when they weren’t. And if you’re lucky nobody will shout “Oh, listen, its Scooper from the Double Deckers”.

It’s the Winter Solstice. Ancient Celtic mummery is tedious — woo, I am teh Morrigan! — but that shouldn’t distract you from the fact that Newgrange is one of the wonders of the world, and never more than at this time of year. Here’s a reprint of an old post of mine about it.

Newgrange is a megalithic tomb in County Meath’s Boyne Valley, in Ireland. It is more than five thousand years old. Built around 3200BC, it is five hundred years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza and about a thousand years older than Stonehenge. When it was rediscovered in 1699, it looked like an ordinary hill. It was properly excavated beginning in 1962, when archaeologists thought it was a particularly fine example of a passage grave, but nothing more. Then, Prof. M.J. O’Kelly of U.C.C. discovered the roof box, a small opening in the hill above the passage entrance, which led to a shaft that ran to the chamber at the center of the tomb. He had an idea about what it might be for. On the morning of December 21st 1967, O’Kelly sat in the central chamber and, as the sun came up, saw the first rays of the rising sun run down the shaft and strike the floor of the chamber.

Newgrange is a clock. The shaft leading out to the roof box is precisely aligned so that on the morning of the Winter Solstice the first light of day will run directly into the middle of the tomb. Or, at least, it was precisely so aligned. It is so old that changes in the Earth’s orbit have affected its operation. When it was built, the sun would have struck the back wall of the chamber, rather than the floor, and the light would have remained in the chamber for about four minutes longer than it does now. It was very accurate. The people who built Newgrange knew what they were doing.

A society — a civilization, if you like — is a hard thing to hold together. If you live in an agrarian society, as the overwhelming majority of people did until about two hundred years ago, and you are on the western edge of Europe, few times are harder than the dead of Winter. The days are at their shortest, the sun is far away, and the Malthusian edge, in Brad DeLong’s phrase, is right in front of you. It’s no wonder so many religious festivals take place around the solstice. Here were a people, more than five millennia ago, able not only to pull through the Winter successfully, but able also to build a huge timepiece to remind themselves that they were going to make it. It’s astonishing.

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_.

What happens when a bunch of Harvard pol-sci grad students, with, in Dan Drezner’s “words”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003646.html, too much time on their hands, decide to make their own version of ‘The Office’?

It works pretty well (a) because _there really aren’t all that many differences_ between academic politics and the office politics of a paper manufacturer, and (b) because while scholars don’t necessarily make great actors, we _do_ have that ‘not quite comfortable in our own skins and trying to make meaningful conversation but having it filled with awkward pauses’ thing down cold.

A dollar is not very much money. A billion dollars is a lot of money. Twenty billion dollars is an awful lot of money.

For most people reading this (though not for Bill Gates or for the billion or so people living on a US dollar a day or less), these statements should seem pretty obvious.

But all of these can be (and have been used as) different ways of measuring the same thing. If every Australian receives, or pays, a dollar a week, the total amount is very close to a billion dollars a year. And if you have a cash flow of a billion dollars a year, and your interest rate is 5 per cent, the present value of that cash flow (the amount of extra wealth you would need to generate the flow) is twenty billion dollars.

It’s easy to stretch this gap even further. A dollar a week is about fourteen cents a day. And, if we looked at the US (about 300 million people), or the entire developed world (around a billion people, depending on your definition), the total would be that much larger. Fourteen cents a day for everyone in the developed world has a present value of one trillion dollars.

The fact that the same flow of money can be presented in such radically different ways, and that each of them is appropriate in certain contexts, is one reason public policy debates get confused.

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Via “Duncan Black”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_12_16_archive.html#8988643053421061421, Mark Halperin comes up with a “doozy of a metaphor”:http://thepage.time.com/halperins-take-on-drudge-and-the-endgame/.

Why is Drudge highlighting the McCain story, but has not touched other political hot potatoes that are swirling in the ether?

Those potatoes, turning this way and that as eddies and currents in the aether pull at them, heated to the boiling point by its luminiferous qualities. It’s almost as good as David Brooks’ famous “depiction”:http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html?hp of the Kossacks as squadrons of rabid, venom-unleashing command-lambs. Any other nominations for the most hilariously mangled metaphors and bad political writing of 2007? Halperin sets a high standard, but there must be other competitors out there …

Santa came a little early this year. The single most exciting possibility in American politics remains, of course, the idea that Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA might emerge from the underground to campaign for the office of President of the United States. Alas, my appeal to him to do this has so far gone unanswered.

Instead, all we’ve had lately is a very long speech in which Chairman Bob talks about himself in the third person. What’s necessary is “a culture of appreciation, promotion, and popularization around the leadership, the body of work and the method and approach of Bob Avakian,” he says. Well, sure. But first you sort of need a reason to call a press conference. This is where the 24 hour news cycle is your friend. From a single spark….

In the meantime, Mike Ely, a former editor of the RCP newspaper, has come out with a cogent and thorough critique (pdf) of Avakian’s recent writings and the entire cult(ure) around him.

All irony to the side, I must say that this is a pretty interesting document, and so is the rest of Ely’s website. It is clearly the work of someone whose Maoism comes by way of Godard and Badiou as well as the RCP’s idiosyncratic Gang of Four-ism. For those who are interested in that kind of thing, it is the kind of thing they will find interesting. Thanks to Santa’s elves for bringing it to my attention.

I’ve made you some free X-Mas cards and gift tags!

Printables!

Just like the ones your kids alway waste the good paper on! So there’s never any when you need it! But before I give you the download links, I have some explaining to do.

The world is filthy with X-Mas cards, says you. Well, I think mine are rather special and nice. They are based on visual elements extracted from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1904). A very famous and beautiful work. Wikicommons has some lovely pictures. You know what I like best about that cover? (Thanks for asking, and feel free to click for larger.)

I like the fact that ‘Leipzig und Wien’ is in a sans serif font. Somehow that makes it perfect.

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I guess it would be fun to have a best-of-2007 thread. The trouble is, of course, that it turns out when you look closely that many of the things that you thought came out in 2007 actually came out earlier. But I’m going to ignore that, if paperback came out in 2007 (for example) that’s good enough for me. So here goes – an entirely perverse personal selection (nominate your own in any category you like in comments).

Film: Das Leben der Anderen. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s portrait of East Germany under the thumb of the Stasi. Not released in the US and the UK until 2007, so it counts.

Novel: David Peace, The Damned United. (Paperback in 2007). No doubt utterly incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t around in England at the time, this is a novelised day-by-day account of Brian Clough’s short tenure at Leeds United, as seen from inside Clough’s brandy-sodden head. Utterly brilliant.

Biography: “The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R.S.Thomas”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1845132505?ie=UTF8&tag=junius-21&link_code=as3&camp=2506&creative=9298&creativeASIN=1845132505 , by Byron Rogers. I blogged about it “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/03/the-man-who-went-into-the-west/ .

Team: “Bristol RFC”:http://www.bristolrugby.co.uk/index.php , the relegation favourites who ended up in the Guinness Premiership play-offs. (OK, so I’m biased.)

CD: “Gram Parsons Archive vol. 1”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGram-Parsons-Archive-Vol-1%2Fdp%2FB000W1V8DU%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dmusic%26qid%3D1198179063%26sr%3D1-1&tag=junius-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 . Two CD’s of Flying Burrito Brothers performances from 1969 that have been sitting in the Grateful Dead archive ever since. Great performances and unmissable, if you like that kind of thing (which I do).

Blog: “The Encyclopedia of Decency”:http://decentpedia.blogspot.com/, or Decentpedia. Whilst some of us had wasted hours of our time in serious engagement with the “decent left”, Malky Muscular, the Decentpedia’s proprietor, managed to deflate them with highly effective ridicule.

Blog post: Any one of Errol Morris’s “discussions”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one/ of photographic authenticity at “Zoom”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/ .

Time-sink of the year: “Facebook”:http://www.face.book.com .

Project of the year: Project 365, over at “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com , into which Eszter inveigled me, and which gave me a lot of fun.

I’d love to be able to nominate a philosophical paper or book of the year, but I can’t think of anything that’s really knocked me out.

Most people in the political theory/philosophy community probably know that G. A. Cohen is retiring (that’s a verb, not an adjective, as anyone who knows him would know) from the post of Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory. A rather brilliantly prosaic job advertisement is on the Vacancies page at the Department of Politics and International Relations (deadline Jan 7th). There’s a grander job ad here. The holders of the position since it was established in 1944 (a very odd time to be establishing Chairs, I’d have thought) have been G.D.H. Cole, Isaiah Berlin, John Plamenatz, Charles Taylor (not the famous one) and G.A. Cohen (who has held it for quite a bit longer than any of his pedecessors). Very curious who will follow.

The landmark publication of Jonah Goldberg’s <a href=”http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/8245.html”><i>Liberal Fascism: A Sourcebook for Blog Snark</i></a> has set me to wondering: where have I seen this kind of thing before? And then it hit me . . . it’s <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/End-Racism-Dinesh-DSouza/dp/0684825244/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198085685&sr=1-1″><i>The End of Racism</i></a> for the post-9/11 world!

It’s making me kinda nostalgic. You see, back in the 90s, before I became pen pals with David Horowitz, my very favorite wingnut and BFF was Dinesh D’Souza. And with good reason: he was a crossover phenomenon, breaking out of his obscurity in the middle of the Regnery list (in 1984, they published his <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Falwell-Before-Millennium-Dinesh-DSouza/dp/0895266075/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198085961&sr=1-1″>first book</a>, a praise song for Jerry Falwell) and placing a 10,000-word excerpt from <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/102-1488439-0229733?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Illiberal+education&x=0&y=0″><i>Illiberal Education</i></a> in the March 1991 issue of the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>. He followed up the monster success of that book with <i>The End of Racism</i>, a 750-page tome I called, in my review of the book, “the D’Souza <i>Ulysses.</i>” (I can’t believe he never used that as a pull quote. Ingrate.) And the reason <i>The End of Racism</i> leaps to mind as a Goldberg variation, even though there is no clear evidence that Cheetos were involved in the composition of D’Souza’s magnum opus, is that both books rely on precisely the same gambit: just as Hitler and McCarthy have lately emerged as men of the left, their influence on contemporary liberalism descried at last, so too, twelve years ago, did D’Souza show that Franz Boas and W. E. B. DuBois were the <i>real</i> racists. Having established that much, he exposed contemporary liberals for what they really are:

<blockquote>Increasingly it appears that it is liberal antiracism that is based on ignorance and fear: ignorance of the true nature of racism, and fear that the racist point of view better explains the world than its liberal counterpart. </blockquote>

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192 days after the federal elections, the Belgian federal politicians have finally agreed on a government. Yet it is not an ordinary government – rather, an emergency government which will only last for three months. The politicians prefer the term ‘interim government’, but that conceals the fact that the country is still faced with a political crisis. Guy Verhofstadt, who was the prime minister for the last 8 years, has managed to deblock the negotiations crisis and has managed in about two weeks time to form such an interim or emergency government. He will lead the emergency government which will only last for three months and will have two main agenda points. The government’s first task is to deal with some urgent socio-economic and political problems that require the presence of a government will full legal authority (including the authority to decide on the 2008 federal budget). Its second task is to pave the way for the next government which should be formed by the end of March 2008, by starting negotiations about the state reform between the different communities.
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