Just this morning I was contemplating how horrible it must be for the people who suddenly lost their homes in the fire around Lake Tahoe. By the afternoon I was watching firefighters from my office window battle flames on Stanford’s hills.

I was sitting at my desk already unable to work having just received word about the death of Peter Marris, Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at UCLA, dear husband of Dolores Hayden who was a fellow Fellow at CASBS this year. The two of them had to end their year at the Center early, because Peter was sick, but I don’t think any of us expected things to escalate so quickly.

Unable to concentrate on work, I turned around to look at the beautiful view from my office. I spotted some big red flames. Soon I realized that a large area around it was completely black with smoke and flames on the periphery. Eventually sirens and helicopters appeared, as did firefighters. Some of the smoke was now white not just black, apparently a good sign. But not all the black smoke disappeared and an hour later there was still much activity. I went to an event and by the time I got back to my office, another hillside was completely black (see the difference in the left area of the two photos above).

How quickly things can change.

Ezra Klein “asks”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/06/economists-in-t.html

This is one of my perennial bafflements, but the lack of suggestions on my request for political science blogs reminds me how odd the robust representation of economists in the blogosphere really is. Between Tyler Cowen, Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, Max Sawicky, Dani Rodrick, Greg Mankiw, Kash Monsori, the folks at Angry Bear, and all the other econobloggers out there, a fairly broad channel has arisen for publicizing and popularizing relevant economic research in the political sphere. Not so with relevant political science research, even as it it would seem, if anything, more relevant. Why have economists taken to the blogosphere in so much greater numbers, and with so much more apparent success, than practitioners of other disciplines that also intersect with contemporary politics?

and the blogosphere “delivers”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/polsci/, sort of. I’ve set up a blog to link to new political science papers that are likely to be of interest to a general audience (where ‘general audience’ denotes the kinds of people who read Ezra, CT, Dan Drezner’s blog etc). At the moment, it consists of nothing more than abstracts of interesting papers and links to them. I hope over time to do a bit more than that (but not for a couple of months; I also have a book to finish over the summer). This is intended to be somewhat more specifically pol-sci focused than _Political Theory Daily Review_ (now at “Bookforum”:http://www.bookforum.com) but also to appeal to people who aren’t cardcarrying political scientists. Please feel free to email me suggestions for papers to link (I know that there are a fair few political scientists who read CT, including a couple of journal editors; send me stuff and if it’s appropriate, I’ll happily link to it). Such suggestions should include the abstract or other relevant info for the paper, the bibliographical details, and, of course, the URL. Feel free also to make suggestions as to how the site can be improved (it’s rather barebones at the moment, but will get a little prettier over time).

Over the next five days, the Guardian is publishing “their list of the top 1000 films ever”:http://film.guardian.co.uk/1000films/0,,2108487,00.html , in alphabetical order. Naturally, being the Guardian, they manage to screw up before getting past “A” through the shocking omission of “All About Eve”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042192/ , without which no such list can be taken seriously. I’m sure our commenters will spot other similar outrages as the week unfolds.

Henry’s given all you need to know about the recently concluded EU treaty negotiations. It strikes me that this would have been an excellent occasion for a march with the classic chant of moderates everywhere:

WHAT DO WE WANT? A REASONABLE COMPROMISE !
WHEN DO WE WANT IT? IN! DUE! COURSE!

Because I have no talent for or interest in it, I have been putting off dealing with my garden — or yard, as we say in America. Although the landscaping is now on the domestic agenda, it may have been a serious error to wait so long. Because, over the past few months, this … thing … has grown up with astonishing rapidity by the side of my house, next to the A/C unit. It has become known as The Triffid. It is now about ten feet tall. Here’s a set of pictures showing its leaves and little tubular yellow flowers in more detail. It has recently acquired a little brother a few feet away.

For those of you who don’t know, I live in Tucson. Given how little water we have falling out of the sky around here, it disturbs me that anything so ugly could grow quite so big, quite so fast. (I feel the same way about Phoenix.) My question to the more horticulturally informed amongst you is, What the hell is it? And when the answer is, inevitably, “Giganticus Weedus Noxiensis,” tell me what combination of axe, chemicals and Wagner will be required to get rid of it.

_Update_: Another victory for the “Digital Barbarians”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/21/neo-luddite-quasi-mandarins/ of the LazyWeb. Correctly identified within three comments as Tree Tobacco, _Nicotiana Glauca_, and subsequently followed by helpful information on how to deal with it (and likely consequences of ignoring it).

The “paperless office” is one of those catchphrases that gets bandied about for a while, only to disappoint and eventually be used in a purely derisive way. As Wikipedia says, it has become ‘a metaphor for the touting of new technology in terms of ‘modernity’ rather than its actual suitability to purpose’. The death of the phrase was cemented by a 2001 book, by Sellen and Harper “The Myth of the Paperless Office”. Here’s a good review from Kirk McElhearn.

This book wasn’t a snarky debunking but a fairly sophisticated analysis, pointing out that a sensible analysis of task requirements could allow a significant reduction in paper use. But it was the title that stuck. No one would ever again refer to the paperless office with a straight face.

Six years later, though, looking at my own work habits, I find that I have virtually ceased to use paper, in all but a couple of marginal applications.

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Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s plan to ban alcohol and pornography in indigenous communities has, unsurprisingly, attracted world wide attention. Probably inevitably, the framing of the issue in the international press is largely in terms of civil liberties versus intervention, and this is also the frame preferred by Howard himself.

The situation in many remote indigenous communities, and in camps on the edge of rural towns is so bad that concerns about civil liberties are unlikely to trump any policy that has a serious chance of improving matters. Not only is unemployment high to universal and abuse of drugs and alcohol, with the associated violence and crime, chronic but recent reports have shown high rates of child sexual abuse. Howard’s rhetoric suggests that what is needed is drastic intervention, and a willingness to slay the sacred cows that have dominated policy in the past.

In fact, the situation is far more complicated than that.

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And to imagine there are people who think the Interweb cannot contribute to the advancement of human knowledge…

How many times have I seen the Bugs Bunny cartoon in which Bugs squares off against a baseball team called the Gashouse Gorillas? And how many times have I taken in the joke advertisements lining the walls of the baseball stadium?

So why did it take me this long to notice that one of the ads is for something called Filboid Studge? I knew the Warner Brothers animators at Termite Terrace were a smart bunch, but extra kudos are in order for the gag writer who managed to work in a nod to Saki, aka Hector Hugh Munro.

I never would have caught this Edwardian allusion, helpfully glossed in suitable detail by Steven Hart.

It appears that General David Petraeus, who recently announced that the US is once again liberating Iraq, is a reader of William Tenn. Tenn’s classic story The Liberation of Earth in which two alien races, the Dendi and the Troxxt, repeatedly liberate Earth from each other, was published back in 1953, but has, sadly, never lost its relevance for long. The ending, if I recall correctly, has the planet’s remaining inhabitants gasping for air but taking consolation in the reflection that no planet in the history of the galaxy had ever been as thoroughly liberated as Earth.

UpdateA discussion over at my blog reminded me of a point I meant to make. There’s nothing in Tenn’s story to rule out the possibility that the Dendi (or maybe the Troxxt) are telling the truth when they claim to be the galactic good guys (at least relatively speaking). Unfortunately, to those being liberated, it doesn’t make much difference.

I’d started to write a short post responding to the first of Michael Gorman’s “essays”:http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/author/mgorman on the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ blog about the Eclipse of Reason in the Age of the Internet, but given up. However enjoyable the shoddiness of Gorman’s reasoning and grotesque luxuriance of his metaphors (the new digital barbarians are associated in succession with creationists, global warming deniers, Maoists, hive mind wannabes, dirty Haight-Ashbury hippies, and some sinister Borg-like collective), it was hard to get into it with a piece of which nearly a quarter was an extended rejoinder to our old friend, Some Dude in a Comments Section Somewhere. Thankfully, Scott has “taken up”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/06/20/mclemee the grim task of responding from his berth at _Inside Higher Ed_. This bit towards the end seems to sum it up nicely:

The tone of Gorman’s remedial lecture implies that educators now devote the better part of their day to teaching students to shove pencils up their nose while Googling for pornography. … But the idea that new forms of media require training in new kinds of literacy hardly counts as an evasion of the obligation to cultivate critical intelligence. Today the work of acquiring knowledge on a given subject often includes the burden of evaluating digital material…. let’s not pretend that such nostalgia is anything but escapism at best. What really bothers the neo-Luddite quasi-Mandarin is not the rise of digitality, as such. The problem actually comes from “the diminished sacredness of authority,” as Edward Shils once put it, “the reduction in the awe it evokes and in the charisma attributed to it.”

I can see why the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ has an urgent interest in pushing this line, but I don’t understand why the intellectual standards of argument among its appointed critics is so low (and they aren’t an aberration; I understand that they’ve made somewhat of an effort to publicize these pieces and get them talked about). There’s a quite reasonable and serious case to be made about the flaws of Web 2.0 type technologies (I tend meself to think that these flaws are greatly outweighed by the advantages, but I certainly recognize that they exist and can be quite important). However, I’m not aware of anyone, apart from the odd blogger in the odd blogpost who is making that case in a compelling and sophisticated way (I’d be grateful to be pointed towards any counterexamples by commenters).

As mentioned below, the member states of the EU are starting a new round of negotiations on a replacement for the constitutional treaty that went down in flames thanks to referendum defeats in 2005. Below the break my own doubtless idiosyncratic take as to what is at stake and what is important. [click to continue…]

From school vouchers to stem cell research to racial preferences to torture, the American right bubbles with debate and disagreement, while the left, for all its talk about “diversity,” rarely seems to show any. As National Review’s Jonah Goldberg points out, that may be because “liberals define diversity by skin color and sex, not by ideas, which makes it difficult to have really good arguments.”

This from a Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe op-ed. The thread that runs through these ‘the left doesn’t even know what debate is’ pieces (they pop up every couple months, lo the last several years) is that the authors consistently fail to exhibit any awareness of what debate is. The fact that the Republican base is fragmented and tearing itself apart in various ways is not ‘debate’, per se. Jacoby specifically cites the fact that the Republican party contains both John McCain and Tom “build a wall on the Canadian border” Tancredo as evidence of debate on immigration. I’m supposed to be impressed that the Republicans have a guy who wants to wall off Canada? Not to mention: turning the fact that Republicans can’t agree that torture is wrong into an intellectual virtue is a lame attempt to lipstick the pig. We’re supposed to take the fact that one of the two major parties is addicted to chest-thumping about ticking timebomb scenarios as evidence of its comparative intellectual vibrancy? Why? [click to continue…]

Write a haiku, win a free John Crowley novel! The Overlook Press is reissuing Crowley’s entire Aegypt cycle in paperback, which is convenient because the damn things have been sort of out-of-print and expensive. (So I hope my haiku wins, even though it wasn’t very good.)

Link via Crowley’s blog.

I’m just back from a conference/research trip to Europe, where this recent “piece”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20331 by Adam Michnik in the _New York Review of Books_ was recommended to me by an expert in Polish affairs as an indispensable account of the KaczyÅ„ski regime and its lustration law. Regardless of the underlying debate about whether or not former collaborators should be made to reveal their actions, Michnik’s piece makes for grimmish reading:

But the lustration law was only one act among many in a systematic effort by the ruling Law and Justice party and its supporters to undermine the country’s democratic institutions. Since their election victory in 2005, the KaczyÅ„skis and their governing coalition have attempted to blur the separation of powers in order to strengthen the executive branch they control. … In the ministries and state institutions, numerous civil servants have been summarily replaced by unqualified but loyal newcomers. The independence of the mass media—especially of public radio and television— was curtailed by changes in personnel instigated by the government and by pressures to control the content of what was published and broadcast. The KaczyÅ„ski administration’s efforts to centralize power have limited both the activities of the independent groups that make up civil society and the autonomy of local and regional government. …

Today, Poland is ruled by a coalition of three parties: post-Solidarity revanchists of the Law and Justice party; post-Communist provincial trouble-makers of the Self-Defense Party; and the heirs of pre–World War II chauvinist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic groups that form the League of Polish Families. That coalition is supported by Radio Maryja, a Catholic nationalist radio station and media group that is fundamentalist both in its ethnic Polish nationalism and its commitment to Polish Catholic clericalism…. The Constitutional Court stood up to its responsibilities and, after repeated government efforts to postpone the court’s session and to impeach its judges, it reviewed the new law and found it unconstitutional.

As my informant notes, the KaczyÅ„ski brothers have not themselves indulged in anti-Semitic rhetoric. Furthermore, their distrust and suspicion of the intentions of Germany (more on this when I write about the EU Treaty negotiations) is to some extent justified – the German government has shown itself entirely too willing to sell its eastern neighbours out in order to keep Russian gas flowing. Even so, there’s something decidedly creepy and worrying about their apparent willingness to trample over civil liberties in order to go after their enemies.