Ted Moran and Gary Hufbauer “contemplate the unthinkable”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b1835cdc-d0c0-11db-836a-000b5df10621.html in the _Financial Times_; a world in which the US actually had to live up to basic International Labour Organization standards. [click to continue…]

Tyler Cowen “announces”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/03/libertarian_ron.html : “Libertarian Ron Paul is running for President”. Well who am I to intrude on the private arguments of a sect of which I’m not a member? But following “the link”:http://www.smallgovtimes.com/story/07mar12.paul.official/index.html Tyler provides I read

bq. He supports controls on immigration and increased use of visas for skilled workers.

In other words, Paul is one of the many Americans who styles himself “libertarian” but actually stands for libertarianism for US citizens and the use of state coercion against outsiders. Instapundit-libertarianism perhaps, but libertarianism? I don’t think so.

Tyler Cowen has a “pretty interesting essay”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/03/11/tyler-cowen/the-paradox-of-libertarianism/.

The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism. Many initial victories bring later defeats. I am not so worried about this paradox of libertarianism. Overall libertarians should embrace these developments. We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal. … We need to recognize that some of the current threats to liberty are outside of the old categories. I worry about pandemics and natural disasters, as well as global warming and climate change more generally (it doesn’t have to be carbon-induced to be a problem). These developments are big threats to the liberty of many people in the world, although not necessarily Americans. The best answers to these problems don’t always lie on the old liberty/power spectrum in a simple way. … Intellectual property … Another major problem – the major problem in my view – is nuclear proliferation … In short, I would like to restructure classical liberalism, or libertarianism — whatever we call it — around these new and very serious threats to liberty. Let’s not fight the last battle or the last war. Let’s not obsess over all the interventions represented by the New Deal, even though I would agree that most of those policies were bad ideas.

The essay seems to me to glom together two, quite different theses – that the demand for government increases along with wealth, and that new, complex global problems require more government intervention than most libertarians would care for. Even so, his call for a pragmatic libertarianism seems on target to me (I’d vastly prefer a political debate in which smart libertarians acknowledged that global warming was a major problem in need of a political solution, and contributed insights from their own perspective, to a debate in which many libertarians either minimize the problem or suggest that no real political solution is possible).

The World’s Greatest Shave is an annual fundraiser held in Australia to raise money to support people with leukemia and their families. I’ve decided it’s time to put some skin in the game, for the first time in 30 years, I’m going to shave my beard off. In a gesture of family solidarity, my son Daniel (17) is going to shave his newly-grown beard as well.

The big day is going to be Saturday 17 March. You can visit my profile here to sponsor me. Photos of the aftermath will be posted on my blog.

And I got this cool present:

These are Penguin 60s, the original (orange) series and the Classics, which Penguin brought out in 1995 for their 60th anniversary. (They recently issued a similar series for their 70th, though not in the United States.) When they came out I really wanted the Classics collection, but had no money. I remember there was a certain amount of snotty declensionist commentary on the sort of people who would only spend 60p for excerpts of Civilization rather than reading the originals entire. Well, you can always have The Complete Penguin Classics delivered to your house for a mere $7,989.50 (don’t worry, shipping is free). About 750lbs worth and 77 linear feet of shelving, apparently — according to an Amazon reviewer who actually bought it. If you’re not up to that, just take The American Collection or the 19th Century British Collection instead, which are a bit cheaper.

Right now it’s incredibly hard to read about Suez without thinking about Iraq, and it’s a mark of Peter Hennessy’s confidence that Iraq will long be remembered as a disaster of epic scale that he repeatedly draws comparisons between the two events in his marvelous new book, Having it So Good (UK), (US). The book is a history of Britain in the 1950’s, and I’ll impose a brief review on you later. Suez doesn’t dominate the book, but it is the pivotal moment of the decade if not, in fact, the whole postwar period in terms of Britain’s relationship with the world. And the parallels are striking. In both cases, it is clear that a small handful of policymakers were determined to undermine the targeted dictator, and were not about to be deflected by stupid facts. In both cases democratic scrutiny simply didn’t operate; neither Blair/Bush nor Eden were subject to the kind of hard questioning by their cabinet colleagues that should have stopped them, or at least forced them to act less precipitously. And in each case, as we know only too well in the case of Iraq, neither politicians nor military had any kind of long term plan.

But surely, surely, Suez was nowhere near as disastrous in terms of human carnage? Surely, because the Americans acted so, well, correctly, forcing the Brits to back off, the day was saved, if not for Eden, for the world? Surely my title question is ludicrous? That’s what I’d have thought. (Eszter, at least, might want to read on.)

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Randy Cohen has caught up with CT, and is looking at the issue of whether it is ok to use online information to make judgments about applicants to college (not grad school, as we did). He says it is not. Not to be mean, but his judgement includes an extraordinarily bad analogy:

You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly.

Here I am, writing on a blog, using my own name, hoping that somebody might be stimulated or entertained, or best of all influenced, by what I write, and Randy Cohen thinks that nobody should be reading. The analogy is, in fact, with a diary that I publish and give away for free. I can see there might be a problem with selective reading of blogs (trying to find dirt on someone one wants to reject anyway) and certainly admissions officials should have some sort of protocol for this, but people who make embarrassing comments on their own blog under their own name in public should expect that other people might read and be influenced by them. Writing a diary which one keeps under lock and key seems sufficiently different that anyone who gave a moment’s thought would get it.

Crooks & Liars links to that fine old Smashing Pumpkins video, “Tonight, Tonight”: the George Méliès, “Le Voyage Dans La Lune” homage.

Anyway, if you’ve never seen the Méliès original, you should be aware YouTube has got it, too (part 1; part 2) – the 14 minute epic; the first science fiction film.

Purists take note. What we’ve got here is a hybrid version: round about minute 11, when the the first selenite appears, the voice-over indicates that “the fantastical being rushes at the astronomer, who defends himself”. Obviously this is from the digitally remastered Lucas edition of 1904. In the film itself – unremastered, 1902 material – it is clear the astronomer strikes first, aggressively exploding the alien with his umbrella.

Oh, hey! The Internet Archive has a free, downloadable, higher quality version. If you’ve never seen this landmark of cinema, check it out.

Via Shakespeare’s Sister, word of what sounds like an urban legend, though evidently it’s for real. But like many urban legends, it’s also a cautionary tale. An Atlanta TV station, doing a hard-hitting story on the new whole-wheat donut from Krispy Kreme, used an image someone in the art department probably grabbed online shortly before going on the air:

(You can watch the video at ShakeSis.)

Ordinarily I would expect this to have been discussed at Romenesko by now, but so far don’t see anything. All the more surprising given the nonstop debates there in 2003 over nuances of the journalistic ethics involved in covering the opening of Krispy Kreme stores as news.

Suggestion to the Poynter Institute, which not only hosts the Romenesko news blog but sponsors workshops and seminars for editors and reporters: Devote a course to the perils of Google Images, and soon.

Tyler Cowen has a “new post”: which clarifies “why he objects”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/03/agreeing_on_uni.html to pro-union legislation.

Labor-run firms are common in law, book agency, real estate, landscaping, and many other sectors; we even see them in airlines. When labor in charge creates more value, labor starts its own firms or buys out the capitalist or buys greater control rights. Growing capital markets make these evolutions easier all the time. Cooperatives, which are governed by consumers, also are found. Mutuals, non-profits, and yes unionized firms are common too. I heart all of these organizational forms. Keep in mind that if both workers and customers will be better off, yes it probably can happen; it is naive to think that liquidity problems are the major issues preventing workers from enjoying greater control rights. In the short run, the mental model of the left-wing bloggers is a bunch of janitors trying to get better working conditions but opposed by employers. In the longer run what is striking is the competition across different organizational forms. It doesn’t always make sense to give labor residual control rights over capital goods, or the right to halt production.

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The Times has published a really quite bad piece of science journalism on the subject of the Lancet study. When the topic is sampling theory, your heart really does sink when you see something like this:

Several academics have tried to find out how the Lancet study was conducted; none regards their queries as having been addressed satisfactorily. Researchers contacted by The Times talk of unreturned e-mails or phone calls, or of being sent information that raises fresh doubts.

Yes indeed, out of the population of people with outstanding questions, none of them have had their questions resolved.
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It’s probably getting on towards bedtime in the Netherlands, so Ingrid may not have seen that Michael Brintnall, executive director of APSA, has “responded in comments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/03/07/papers-for-sale/#comment-189268

The annual meeting papers are not meant to be sold, and All Academic is taking them down. It was a mistake that caused them to be up for sale at that site, and we regret it. … The papers are on-line at www.politicalscience.org as part of the PROl initiative. This is an open-access site, operated as a collaboration of APSA and a large number of other political science associations. It’s an extension of APSA’s PROceedings site, where papers are posted for each annual meeting, and it brings together scholarship from a host of other annual meetings too. It’s a good place to search for early scholarship, and I encourage you to use it. All-Academic is the contractor that we use to set up the site. There was some recent confusion about their including our papers in their own for-sale data base. None of the papers from the politicalscience.org project is meant to be at the All Academic site for sale and they are removing them. … I hope this hiccup with All Academic doesn’t fuel any cynicism about making early scholarship like this available on an open access basis – it’s the purpose of the politicalscience.org project, and it’s what academic discourse is about.

This seems to me to be a perfectly gracious response and explanation. As noted in comments, I would like to see APSA consider a different technology – politicalscience.org’s current system has session specific links, which means that e.g. bloggers can’t easily link to interesting political science papers. A system with permalinks like arXiv would allow for much better circulation of political science papers in the general public conversation. But that’s a topic for a different day.

Via “Jim Henley”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2007/03/07/6058 I see there’s a “challenge”:http://www.slumdance.com/blogs/brian_flemming/archives/002515.html from Brian Flemming:

bq. If you are a blogger who was active in March 2003, link to that month’s archive and write an entry called ‘What I was wrong about in March 2003.’

“Gene Healy”:http://www.affbrainwash.com/genehealy/archives/021991.php comes out looking pretty good. “Glenn Reynolds”:http://instapundit.com/archives2/003000.php maybe not so much. Amongst other things in March 2003, I turned thirty and got married. I was on my honeymoon in San Francisco when the war began. Here are “all my posts”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/03/ from March 2003 (in pages of ten). I was wrong about how long it would take Saddam’s regime to collapse. And I was wrong in thinking that the option of bailing out fast was perhaps more likely than that of the U.S. taking on the role of occupying colonial power. But, not to put too fine a point on it, I was pretty much fucking right about everything else. Below the fold, some representative selections. All emphases in the original, as we say in the ivory tower.

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Julian Sanchez “is right”:http://juliansanchez.com/notes/archives/2007/03/foley_room.php. That is all.