Here’s an Ad from Amazon’s front page, designed to sell the drug “Adderall”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adderall.

The sketch writes itself, I suppose. Thank you for calling 1-800-GOT-ADHD. Please listen carefully as our menu of options has recently changed. If you have questions about ADHD diagnosis, please press hey, have you ever put a bunch of Mentos in your mouth and then drunk some Diet Coke? I did that once and it was a blast. I want to go outside.

I’m sorry. I’ll get my coat.

Oliver Clement Brighouse Mothersname was born this morning (Wednesday) at about 8.40 central time, by C-section. At 8lbs he has the smallest birthweight of our children, much to his oldest sister’s joy. Both he and his mother are doing well.

He’ll have two adoring sisters and parents who want him (even if they had a hard time figuring out a name). My greatest wishes for him are that he gives and receives a great deal of love, happiness and laughter in his life, and that he has the self confidence that enables him to find his own way while treating others kindly. A life-long enjoyment of Round The Horne, Bob Newhart and a facility with Unwinese would be big bonuses. His sisters will work on those.

I had a close encounter with the Reaper this summer. I don’t know exactly how close, but closer than I’d like. He was waiting on a winding hill road in south east Ohio, keeping an appointment with an 18 year old kid who was driving too fast and on the wrong side of the road. Seeing me coming the other way in my Camry he thought he spotted a twofer, and got greedy. What was the chance that I’d be a middle aged man who drives like an old granny but has reactions honed by spending my teenage (pre-helmet) years standing at silly mid-off (because I was too fat to be put anywhere else)? I slammed on the brakes, remembered that I’d just doubled my life insurance, hoped my daughter would be fine, thought about what a nice life I’ve had, and waited.

There’s such a thing as overreaching and the reaper departed wicket-less, succeeding only in causing a few injuries, a fair amount of pain, and making a mockery of this old post. The upshot is along with the adoring sisters and the perfect mother, Oliver Clement gets to have a father. And a minivan. (But not, regrettably for him, the name Reginald).

I get to see him and his sisters grow up. They are materially comfortable, and no gifts you might offer to him will make us better parents, which is what they need. But if you did feel like celebrating our delight in his birth, you could do what I did tonight: pour yourself a glass of fresh grapefruit juice, listen to The Goons with your kids, and make a small, medium-sized, or, best of all, large donation to Oxfam (UK, Aus, elsewhere).

People have been asking me to comment on the recent riots in Budapest so I thought I would say a few words. First, a necessary caveat. I don’t follow Hungarian politics closely.* In fact, I don’t follow Hungarian politics much at all. I could probably write a whole separate post as to why not, suffice it to say that I don’t live in that country for a reason (or two or three) and years ago I decided that it was simply not good for my blood pressure to keep track of events. So I don’t. That said, when something especially noteworthy happens, I am curious to know what it is and will go to Hungarian sources instead of relying on various international reports. I’ve read up on recent events a little bit so here is a quick summary.

Politicians lie. Yawn. The twist here is that apparently many Hungarians naively assumed that they don’t. Worse yet, Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány was caught on tape saying that his party lied a lot before the elections last Spring. To clarify, the instigator of the riots was not some public speech the Prime Minister made in the last few days. Rather, someone taped and recently leaked a discussion [link to Hungarian text] he had with a a few top people about 180 of his party representatives back in the Spring.

The level of honesty in his comments is naive, refreshing and scary all at the same time. Imagine if you could give some magic potion to a president or prime minister of your choice that would lead the person to talk about his/her actions and policies from the last few years completely openly and eagerly. It could result in some frightening and fascinating speeches. And who knows where that would lead.

Hungary’s got a lot of problems. The main point of Gyurcsány’s speech was that it was time to fix at least some of them. Yes, the irony is that the point of the speech was to say that it was time to stop the lies and make some difficult, but important changes.

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A couple of days ago, in passing, I referred to the president of the United States at our Dear Leader. This has caused some hyperventillation. Just to clarify: The idea that the US and North Korea are in any way similar in polity or social structure never crossed my mind.

That sort of thing is, rather, a right-wing specialty: Gibberish about “totalitarian political correctness” of the Democratic Leadership Committee, etc. is a convenient way for crazy people to signal one another, so they can meet to discuss their shared feelings of persecution.

No, my intended parallel was between the men, not the regimes.

At that level, the element of sarcastic excess, while open to misinterpretation, came pretty close to bordering on the obvious: In each case, a personally unaccomplished and otherwise altogether unimpressive son, guided by his father’s old retainers, makes his country look both terrifying and ridiculous to the rest of the world.

Hysterics love hyperbole. But not all hyperbole is hysteria.

Via “Jeremy Freese,”:http://jeremyfreese.blogspot.com/2006/09/and-you-thought-astrosociology-was.html a paper by Alan Gerber and Neil Malhotra called “Can political science literatures be believed? A study of publication bias in the APSR and the AJPS.” Here’s the main finding.

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Well now the Honderich’s “The Real Friends of Terror”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/09/19/honderich-on-terror/ has gone out, I’m free to post, and, to be honest I thought it was simply awful. The whole thing was a showcase for Honderich’s fatuous “principle of humanity”, as called in aid of the proposition that the Palestinians have a “moral right to their terror”. This “principle”, which is presented as a pathbreaking step in moral philosophy, is basically just Honderich’s pet list of 6 essential components of human flourishing coupled with the suggestion that we have duty to take all rational steps necessary to bring them about. So think Sen and Nussbaum (similar list) plus a heavy dash of consequentialism. The programme consisted largely of archive footage of the aftermath of terrorist acts coupled with Honderich interviewing a few talking heads: Jenny Tonge (the Lib-Dem peer), Brian Klug, Helena Kennedy, Riz Mozal and a UK-based Palestinian academic (Ghada Karmi). The central theme was that all recent terrorism, 9/11 and 7/7 included, were basically caused by the failure of the US and UK to restrain what Honderich calls “neozionism”. The whole shoddy programme was further worsened by Honderich intoning portentously in his Canadian baritone “this I believe” in connection with a series of eminently dubitable propositions.

(Update: slight edit in the light of email.)

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Via “PZ Myers”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/09/its_such_a_quick_read_too.php, “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? The Graphic Novel”:http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/whats_liberal_about_the_liberal_arts1/.

As a guest of “The Philosophers’ Magazine”:http://www.philosophersnet.com/ I went to an advance screening of Ted Honderich’s programme “The Real Friends of Terror” in C5’s “Don’t Get Me Started”:http://www.mydigiguide.com/dgx/wbl.dll?a=6&h=49&PID=22132 series last night. The showing was followed by a panel discussion. I’ve been asked not to write about the content of tonight’s broadcast before it is shown, so I won’t. Regular Honderich-watchers won’t be surprised either by the content of the programme or by my reaction to it, but I won’t post more until after it goes out at 19.15 this evening on Channel 5 in the UK. This post is just to alert interested viewers. The “programme description”:http://www.mydigiguide.com/dgx/wbl.dll?a=6&h=49&PID=22132 refers to Honderich as “Britain’s leading moral philosopher”. I guess there’s room for disagreement about that claim, and much else.

Update: re-reading this post, I guess someone might get the impression that the panel discussion will be broadcast. That’s not the case: a transcript will appear in a future issue of TPM.

Pessimism seems to be a newly popular theme in American cultural discourse. Having written a bit about worst-case scenarios, I was interested to get a review copy of Karen Cerulo’s Never Saw It Coming: Cultural Challenges to Envisioning the Worst. Perhaps because I’m naturally optimistic by temperament, I’m finding Cerulo’s relentless pessimism a bit annoying, and, not coincidentally, finding a lot to disagree with in the book.

One point particularly struck me. Cerulo claims that “positive asymmetry” is demonstrated by the fact that, in theology and art, Heaven is given a detailed and appealing description, while hell is described only in vague and non-specific terms. She mentions, as an illustration of the latter point, an etching inspired by Dante’s Inferno.

My recollection of Dante is that the descriptions of Hell, and the various categories of sinners, were detailed and intricate, making the Inferno a fascinating book, while Purgatory was less distinctly graded and the Paradiso was unreadably dull. I haven’t read Paradise Lost or Paradise Regained, but I get the impression that the same is true. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but I thought this was one of the standard criticisms of religious art – Hell and the Devil are made much more interesting than Heaven and Hell.

Cerulo focuses mainly on paintings, and maybe she’s right on this score, but even here I’d hazard a guess that the work of Hieronymus Bosch is much more widely reproduced than any detailed representation of Heaven.

There has been already quite a lot of discussion about children’s well-being on CT in recent years, but not so much in political circles in most countries. But this might be changing, after the “open letter on childhood”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/12/njunk112.xml&site=5&page=0 about which “Chris Bertram wrote”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/09/12/that-letter/ last week. In the UK there is now the “Archbishop of Canterbury”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5354998.stm warning about a child crisis, and “the children’s society”:http://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/ asking children, young people, parents, professionals and other adults “to submit their own views”:http://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/what+we+do/The+good+childhood+inquiry/call+for+evidence/Call+for+Evidence.htm about what makes for a good childhood.

I think all this debate is great, and I don’t know any country where it’s not at least somewhat needed (the Nordic countries, perhaps?). But here are three thoughts about this debate. First, the social conditions of children vary drastically between countries: for example, in some countries there are concerns that children spend too much time at school, but this is not the case in other countries. Thus, what is an urgent problem in one country might not be an issue at all in another. Second, many of the issues relevant for children’s well-being cannot be discussed in a gender-neutral framework. I don’t want mothers to bear all or most costs for the social changes that are needed for the well-being of children. Thus, the debate on children’s well-being policies needs to be gender-sensitive, and we need to discuss who will bear the ‘costs’ (broadly defined, of course) related to the well-being of children. In fact, these distributive justice issues are not just between fathers and mothers, or men and women, but also between parents and non-parents. Third, rather than moving forward with a haphazard agenda, shouldn’t we first debate what kind of issues need to be discussed? I have my own idiosyncratic list of issues (which includes, among other things, breastfeeding policies, parental leave, parenting classes, urban planning issues, and the inevitable child care question); what issues do you think should be on the agenda of child well-being policies?

I’ve been on the road for the last week or so, gradually making my way by tramp steamer to Australia. By coincidence, I was on “ABC”:http://www.abc.net.au radio’s “Background Briefing”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2006/1740584.htm programme on Sunday, talking about gift and market exchange in the world of human organ and tissue procurement. There’s a “podcast of the show”:http://www.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/bbg_20060917.mp3 available if you want to listen. The topic is easy to treat in a glib or sensationalistic way, but I thought Ian Walker (who wrote and presented the show) did a really good job with it. There’s a lot of good first-hand material from organ and tissue donors, recipients and bankers, alongside stuff from me, “Virginia Postrel”:http://www.vpostrel.com/weblog/ and others.

I’m a little late with this, and others have written about it, but it’s worth repeating over and over again….

The new Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations prohibits the use of specific interrogation techniques including water boarding, electrical shock, burning, beating, mock executions – you know, the usual. The Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence Lt. General Jeff Kimmons clarified during a press conference that “interrogation” refers to “getting truthful answers to time-sensitive questions on the battlefield” and that the manual applies “all detainees, regardless of their status under all circumstances.”

A reporter pointed out that “some of the tactics that were used in particular in Guantanamo Bay … are now prohibited” and asked, “does that limit the ability of interrogators to get information that could be very useful?”

GEN. KIMMONS: Let me answer the first question. That’s a good question. I think — I am absolutely convinced the answer to your first question is no. No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that.

And moreover, any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress, under — through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility. And additionally, it would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used. And we can’t afford to go there.

So just to clarify: we now have empirical evidence from that last five years that “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices” including in the “time-sensitive” circumstances of the battlefield.

Describing an argument with her mum, Laura puts into words the problem I had with David Brooks’s column on Sunday. The column does little more than articulate the conclusions of Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain; the conclusions basically being that there are significant sex-related differences between boys’ and girls’ brains. But, as Laura says:

After I read this article, I thought “and?” And what’s the point, Davie? So, boys and girls are different, But what does that mean. I mean this isn’t a science column; it’s a political and social column on an opinion page, but he never spits it out. Mom and I were fighting over the Brooks’ unstated point.

Mom: Brooks is just saying, “ha” to the feminists who kept telling me over and over in the 70s that you kids were different, because we were messing with them. If only we were more nurturing to Chris, he would like dolls. And I told them they were crazy.

Me: Brooks is also saying something else, Mom. If we’re all just slaves to genetics as Brooks says, then women have to be the moms and dad have to go to the office or war or the soccer field. I think that’s what he’s really saying there, but he’s too chickenshit to get it out.

I don’t know whether to side with Laura or her mum. But that’s the point. Unlike most of you, but I suspect like Laura, I have a real soft spot for Brooks. But in an op ed, shouldn’t you forward an op?

Arguments about DDT have been going on for a long time in the blogosphere and similar circles. These debates typically involve a confusion between two unrelated issues
* The bogus story, popular in rightwing circles, in which the US ban on agricultural use of DDT, inspired by Rachel Carson, is morphed into a global ban on DDT, bringing to an end a previously successful compaign to eradicate malaria
* The real disputes, among malaria experts, about the relative merits of insecticide-treated bednets and spraying of house walls, and of DDT and alternative insecticides.

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