I’m sure this is fundamentally immature of me, but the new Republican National Convention logo set off a train of associations in my head (and prompted me to spend half an hour doing some basic Photoshop work to bring these associations to the foreground). More artistically talented readers than myself are invited to submit their own interpretations (Michael Froomkin has a copy of the original image at “this post”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2007/10/subliminal_seduction_gop_style.html).

“Richard Williams in the Guardian”:http://sport.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,,2186554,00.html

bq. Had things turned out differently, one of the seats in the press box in the Stade de France last Sunday night might have been occupied by a 79-year-old Argentinian newspaperman whose own rugby career was blighted by asthma. He would have been recording the success of his fellow countrymen in reaching the last four of the 2007 Rugby World Cup for the first time.

“A report in last Sunday’s Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2185461,00.html carries the news of the death of André Gorz and his wife Dorine in a suicide pact. Gorz was a kind of Cassandra of the left: in the 1968 _Socialist Register_ he published a piece telling us that the great era of revolutions was over. Just a few months later he was ridiculed as May 68 unfolded. But he was right. In the early eighties he published _Farewell to the Working Class_. Absurd! we all thought, as the striking British miners seemed to reaffirm the transformative power of the industrial proletariat. He was righter than we were. And he started thinking about green issues when the rest of the left thought of all that as a petty-bourgeois indulgence. Again, he saw more clearly than most of us did.

Suppose that you see the divide between private and state schools as the major institutional instantiation of educational inequality (to forestall objections from our American readers I should say that such a vision seems deeply mistaken in the US, but entirely reasonable in the UK). How would you address it? One way would be to abolish private schools by law, a demand that has occasionally been considered by the very far left in the UK, though nobody has really explained how it would work. My guess is that smart people could work out the effects of a sudden increase in the state school population of 7%; I doubt that much of the expertise in the private sector would come along. Another way would be to tax private schooling (or at least remove charitable status). I once calculated the real effect of removing charitable status, which worked out at about 5% on school fees. High enough taxes to make a real difference seem to me abouot as politically feasible as abolition.

So there must be a third way, right? A smart and politically savvy policymaker would reorganise the state sector so that it could accommodate former private schools with ease, and then use a combination of guilt-tripping moral suasion and concrete incentives to persuade existing private schools, one by one, to join the state sector on equal terms. There’d be no hoo-hah, and you wouldn’t get any credit from the left, but you’d have found a way to entice the expertise the private sector has into the state sector, and, maybe, some of its clientele. You might even, eventually, be regarded as a visionary by your former critics. Or, maybe, you just wouldn’t care about that; you might even find their criticism of you as a right-winger who favours market solutions and is friendly to elitism as an asset. I’ve hesitated to say anything about this for fear of undermining Adonis with implicit praise, but now that the enormously more influential Mike Baker has pointed out what’s going on, I can at least link to him. Story here; Mike Baker (excellent as ever) here.

This bit of quote-fu from Matt Yglesias “nails it”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/red_baiting.php. Go read.

Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi at “VoxEU”:http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/596.

Our point is that the goals that are traditionally held dear by the European left – like protection of the economically weakest and aversion to excessive inequality and un-earned rewards to insiders – should lead the left to adopt pro-market policies. What has often been the norm in Europe from the 60s until recently – heavy market regulation, protection of the status quo, an enormous public sector which rewards not the very poor but the most-connected and requires highly distortionary taxation, universities which often produce mediocrity in the name of egalitarianism (while the very rich get a good education anyway, somehow) –all end up decreasing efficiency and justice at the same time. … A good example can be found in the labour market. In Italy, Spain, and France, the labour market is split. The young are hired with temporary contracts which offer no social security and no prospects. When the contract expires, the employer opts not to renew it, so as not to run the risk of having to convert temporary hires into permanent employees who would de facto immediately acquire the right never to be fired. Reforms that eliminate this duality by making the entire labour market flexible with an appropriate scheme of unemployment compensation would not only reduce unemployment but, most importantly, would favour the really poor and the young entry-level workers.

[click to continue…]

The dollar will collapse no later than one week from today. As of noon on October 15, you will not be able to buy a loaf of bread for $100,000. That’s the optimistic scenario. The crash may come sooner than that. It might be Thursday. It sounds like Thursday will be bad.

Yeah, things are heating up again in LaRouche-land. The Youth Movement kids haven’t been out in force singing on Capitol Hill much over the past two or three months. But it’s clear that supporters are now being pushed into a frenzied state, more even than usual. At the website where ex-members get together, plans are being made to send one true believer a loaf of bread as soon as the deadline for disaster passes.

No doubt it is an utter and total coincidence that The Washington Monthly will soon publish an in-depth article on recent developments in the organization.
[click to continue…]

There have been quite a few blogospheric discussions about staged war photographs (Iraq, Lebanon) and whether it matters whether they were staged if they reveal the truth. Here’s something to check out when you have a bit of time …. Errol Morris has a blog, “Zoom”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/ at the New York Times devoted to photography. He has now published two parts of a three- (or four-) part essay concerning whether Roger Fenton, one of the earliest war photographers, staged a famous picture of cannonballs on a road in the Crimea, as alleged by Susan Sontag. In “part one”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg-part-one/ , Morris gets the opinion of the curators and art historians on which of two Fenton pictures was taken first; in “part two”:http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/which-came-first-part-two/ he gets his compass out and his feet dirty by going to the Crimea and finding the exact stretch of road. In comments to part one, his own readers offer their solutions to the photographic puzzle. (via “FineBooks”:http://blog.myfinebooks.com/ thanks to PdB.)

I’ve been working a bit on the Political correctness article in Wikipedia and I ran across the best “PC beatup” story ever, starting with a claim from last year that nursery school students in Oxfordshire had been banned from singing “Baa Baa Black Sheep”. Among the ramifications were the foundation of a new political party (with a plug from Harry’s Place), and worldwide circulation leading to a claim in the Adelaide Advertiser that “black coffee” had fallen under a similar ban. Having visited Adelaide recently, I can assure anxious coffee-addicts that this is, like the rest of the story, a load of old bollocks. (I will admit that “doppio” has displaced “double-shot short black” in Australia over the last few years, a boon to addicts like me who are really in a hurry for their fix).

Going back even further, I once ran a contest to find a Mark Steyn column without either a gross error or a distorted or misattributed quotation. There weren’t any entries, though I gave an award to Tim Dunlop for coining the term “Steynwalling” (failure to respond to repeated demonstrations of error). But now thanks to Tim Lambert and TBogg, we have a winner. It’s Steyn himself, who states “incidentally, I stopped writing for the (New York) Times a few years ago because their fanatical “fact-checking” copy-editors edited my copy into unreadable sludge.” (John H has a little bit more fun with Tim’s debunking here)

This time with “Jennifer Martinez”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=413 of Stanford Law School, on international human rights law (she has a fascinating “piece”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR32.5/martinez.php in the new _Boston Review_ on the lessons of nineteenth century anti-slavery courts for modern tribunals). Also, the CHE‘s Footnotes blog has a brief “Q&A”:http://chronicle.com/blogs/footnoted/740/footnoted-qa-henry-farrell-of-crooked-timber with me on blogging and my hidden cult-stud past. I imagine I’ll be taking a break from bloggingheads for a bit after two sessions in rapid succession, so fingers crossed, no more self-promotion posts from me for a while …

Scott Lemieux reads my Brooks-Burke-Oakeshott-Bush piece, and “raises me one“, by finding this “astonishing outpouring” from Brooks’ 2003 archive.

Oakeshott was epistemologically modest. … But the fog didn’t make Oakeshott timid. He believed we should cope with the complex reality around us by adventuring out into the world, by playfully confronting the surprises and the unpredictability of it all. … We can’t know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. … I try to reply to these warnings. I concede that government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. … Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn’t even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq — thank goodness, too, because any ”plan” hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality. I tell Oakeshott that the Americans and Iraqis are now involved in an Oakeshottian enterprise. They are muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions, and learning through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.

I fold. This has to be one of the most deeply and offensively stupid op-ed columns I’ve ever read. I don’t know whether even at the time Brooks was able to convince himself that these claims were true; they read to me as a self-consciously weak effort to cover up for a disaster in the making. As Scott says,

The Iraq War is a case in which Burkean conservatism (or its Foucauldian variants) has a great deal of wisdom to offer, and it’s advice is “it was an extraordinarily stupid idea.” That Brooks tried to turn this theoretical line into a _defense_ of the war tells you what you need to about him.

In rugby’s Darwinian stroke,
Whole countries evolve into jokes:
You’ll see Wallabies cry,
Springboks that fly,
Gaels that suck — and Kiwis that choke.

Douglas Adams really wasn’t a good writer of books. Even the first entry in Hitchhiker’s Guide depends entirely on his ideas, not on his writing. He wrote for TV and radio, and for radio best. Fans will want, then, to listen to the BBC adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (with Harry Enfield in the lead). First episode should stay online until Tuesday night.

We’ve got a new MacBook, after our 7 year old iBook finally gave up the ghost. (I figure that’s a pretty good run for a portable computer.) I have gotten a baffling amount of frankly contradictory advice about battery conditioning from a number of sources. (Weirdly, the documentation says nothing about this. Doesn’t even tell you to charge it fully the first time.) The only thing everyone I’ve asked agrees on is charging fully the first time. But then some people say you are supposed to let it run down fully. Then charge it again fully. Others say it is bad to do that. You are supposed to make sure it retains a middling sort of charge and that the old ions are jostled regularly. Or whatever. Is there any actual knowledge in the world (I would settle for true belief, honestly) concerning how to maintain a mac battery for maximum power and life?