An interesting report at IHE:

The words “social justice” appear in a glossary of terms that the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education uses as an example of what programs might consider using when evaluating a teaching candidate’s “disposition” and classroom readiness.

Supporters of a traditional curriculum have argued that evaluating students based on their commitment to social justice is an inherently subjective practice with ideological undertones. Late last year, the National Association of Scholars filed a complaint with the Education Department saying the accreditor encourages standards that violate students’ First Amendment rights.

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I surfed over to the Daily Telegraph’s “obits page”:http://tinyurl.com/qxxoc , looking for someone who wasn’t there, and was struck by the way in which the headline writers dispassionately express the achievements of the dead. So

bq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — Jordanian terrorist associated with bombings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq.

is immediately followed by

bq. Raymond Davis, Jr — Physicist whose proof that the Sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions won him the Nobel.

Almost as if proving the sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions and beheading hostages were just different ways of spending one’s life. Sadly, I also learned that “Billy Preston is dead”:http://tinyurl.com/oas9n aged only 59.

A “transcript”:http://world-o-crap.com/blog/?p=42 from World O’Crap, with Tim Russert and panelists Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Satan (“Call me Bob”) and Jesus Christ. A taste:

*Russert*: Mr. Christ, what do you say to accusations that you’re opposed to fighting a battle to bring about the end of all life on Earth because you’re an Anti-Semite?

*Jesus*: Well, first of all, I’d like to point out that I myself am Jewish—

*Ann Coulter*: Yeah! Just like George Soros. Another Jew who somehow figured out a way to avoid crucifixion.

*Jesus*: I WAS crucified! (DISPLAYS WOUNDS IN HANDS)

*Michelle Malkin*: Why don’t people ask him more specific questions about the nails in his hands and feet? There are legitimate questions about whether or not they were self-inflicted wounds.

*Russert*: What do you mean self-inflicted? Are you suggesting Mr. Christ crucified himself on purpose?

*Michelle Malkin*: Did you read the book by Barabbas and the Golgotha Veterans for Truth? Some of the thieves who were actually crucified have made allegations that these were self-inflicted wounds.

*Jesus*: I did not NAIL MYSELF to the cross!

Richard Garner provides some nice howlers about Shakespeare from 14-year-olds. Worth showing to your own 14-yr-olds, perhaps:

a pupil dealt with Macbeth’s three witches and the appearance of the dagger used to kill Duncan by saying: “Macbeth had been smoking up and imaged them all.”

Macbeth, on hearing of his wife’s death, according to one pupil,”goes into full-on soliloquy mode”. Another says that the Scottish noble gets his revenge because “as my mum always sez ‘wot goes around comes around'”.

I’ve deliberately not quoted the best ones.

“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.newamerica.net/templets/Documents/print.cfm?pg=article&DocID=3095&Prt=Yes has a good article in this month’s _The American Prospect_, which is now available on the New America Foundation’s website. He argues that we’re probably seeing a secular shift to a more partisan and polarized politics, with less emphasis on bipartisan coalition building, and more on party coherence. The interesting bit is his take on interest group politics.

bq. It has become an article of faith on Democratic blogs such as DailyKos that progressive interest groups betray their own causes by sometimes endorsing Republicans. The Sierra Club and NARAL endorsements of Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee have been particular points of controversy. But it’s not that NARAL and the Sierra Club are idiots. Up to now, it made perfect sense for them to endorse Chafee. You reward your friends, especially when they have stood up to pressure from within their own party. But at a certain point, rewarding friendly Republicans crosses the line into desperately trying to prop up a few so that you can still seem bipartisan—at the price of legitimating a majority whose highest priority after tax cuts is the evisceration of environmental regulation.

While I agree with Mark’s conclusions, I suspect that there’s more going on here than he mentions. Another reason why progressive interest groups might want to endorse Republicans occasionally is because this increases their bargaining leverage vis-a-vis Democrats. If you want to get Democrats to take your agenda seriously, it helps to be able to make credible threats that you’ll support the other guys unless you get your way. One way to underline the seriousness of your threats is occasionally to endorse moderate members of the opposing party. If Mark is right (I think he is), then the ability of progressive interest groups to make these threats will shrivel away as moderate Republicans lose office. Hence, such groups are likely to lose a lot of their clout. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all interest groups are going to lose out. I suspect that interest groups which draw their bargaining leverage from threats to support more ‘orthodox’ candidates in primaries, along the lines of Grover Norquist’s crowd on the Republican side, are going to do quite well under the new system. If so, then these will further weaken incentives towards bipartisanship, and help reinforce party discipline on both sides of the divide.

(Link via “Political Theory Daily Review”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/ )

It’s getting lonely for the denialists. According to the Sierra Club, even pollster Frank Luntz, author of an infamous memo urging Republicans to exploit doubt on global warming, has jumped ship.

More interesting perhaps is Tyler Cowen, who concedes that

It is by now pointless to deny that global warming is man-made to a considerable degree.

but is very pessimistic about our ability to do anything about it. (via Brad DeLong)

Since such pessimism is inversely correlated with faith in markets to achieve adjustments to changing prices (and since Tyler is generally pretty optimistic about the capacity of markets to do almost anything), I find this quite surprising. Given a reasonable long-run elasticity of demand for C02 emissions, there’s every reason to suppose that very large reductions in global emissions could be achieved in the long run at a welfare cost of only a few percentage points of world GDP.

With all this talk about fun books, it’s time for me to write a post about Jeremy Blachman’s new book Anonymous Lawyer. Better yet, I even have a copy to give away courtesy of the publisher, so this time I’m holding a contest with an actual prize. Yipee.

First, a few words about the book. (Disclosure: I was Jeremy’s TA for a class in college and have been in touch with him over the past few years.) It is in the format of a blog. (But no, uhm, you don’t start on the last page flipping backward.) The story is told through blog posts with email messages interspersed. If you have read the blog Anonymous Lawyer then you will be familiar with the topic and style, although rest assured that the book content is new and not simply a copy-paste of what is already available.

More about the book, a special book-related Web site and contest details below the fold.

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From the weather forecast on the radio this morning: “Highs around 100 until Friday, warming up after that.” I’m looking forward to next month, when I’ll be in Palo Alto.

vance maverick complains: “Could you guys recommend something other than “SF/F” for once?”, and would like some “straight fiction“.

Well, I only read straight fiction recommended to me by Adam Swift and Chris Bertram; my own diet is otherwise restricted to detective novels. Oliver Kamm, however, makes the familiar, and I think absolutely correct, argument that some of these should count as straight fiction. He singles out P. D. James:

they are skilfully constructed stories in which the denouement is always surprising but retrospectively plausible. Unlike the paradoxes of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, where there are infuriating cases of the detective’s revealing that all along he had had more information than the reader, these mysteries are never extravagantly contrived.

Secondly, without being didactic, Baroness James’s novels convey a coherent philosophy of life more powerfully than many overtly political or theological books. Aesthetic judgements are independent of political or religious ones, and of course one can enjoy a book by a writer of different views from one’s own. But Baroness James, for me, is a slightly different case: her Conservative politics and orthodox Anglican faith are far from my own beliefs, but I find nonetheless that they illuminate the personal and social relationships she writes about.

If murders did not occur in her books, she’d be seen as a great writer of “straight” fiction. He goes on:

[These strengths] exemplify her achievement in rescuing English detective fiction from the sub-literate form in which it was cast by the most popular of all crime writers, Agatha Christie

I’ve been surprised recently to discover several mystery lovers who have never read P.D. James, so it is apparently not redundant to recommend her. But I’d also like to recommend 2 other mystery writers with a lower profile.

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I’m writing up a set of explanatory notes to go with Plato’s Republic, Book I. And I find myself unable to fact-check something I found on wikipedia – namely, Cephalus, the old guy we meet right at the beginning, is “an elderly arms manufacturer.” Arms manufacturer? How do we know? And how much do we know? Ship-building, sword-making, what? It would be interesting to know more for a couple reasons. First, it casts Socrates’ whole ‘would you give a madman his weapons back?’ question in a slightly more personal light. Selling weapons to madmen – hey, a deal’s a deal – is the modern complaint about arms dealers, after all. Also, it is ironic that, in just a few years, the war will be lost and Cephalus will have his fortune seized by the Thirty Tyrants; his son Polemarchus will be dead, executed. (This whole war business is a double-edged sword. Profitable, but tricky to handle safely.)

Can any intrepid classicists get me a source for the Cephalus-as-arms-manufacturer fact?

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John has already mentioned that today is special for those who care about that sort of thing. (I’d link to his post if I wasn’t writing this on a somewhat malfunctioning Treo.) I was alerted to the special date by an email from a friend who let me know that he jumped in the shower at 6:06:06am. For those of us who aren’t ready to be doing anything at that hour (including notice the significance of the date and time) and who aren’t too strict about the specifics, another opportunity will arise at 6:06pm. What’s interesting enough for such an occasion? I will be on Broadway in NYC dropping off a friend at his show at 6pm. But so then what?

UPDATE: I’ve fixed the numerous typos in this post now that I have Web access again. I’ve also uploaded what I ended up doing at 6:06pm 6/6/06. In true photogeek fashion, I was just taking a picture.

Havi Carel, a philosopher at the University of the West of England in Bristol who has formerly taught at the Australian National University and the University of York, England, has recently been diagnosed with LAM, a very rare lung disease. She’s taking part in the Bristol Bike Ride (24 miles) on 25 June 2006 to raise money for LAM Action, the UK LAM organisation, and she would really welcome your support. Money that is raised will support research for this under-funded and under-researched disease.

If you want to know more about LAM go to: “www.lamaction.org”:http://www.lamaction.org .

You can donate online by credit or debit card at the following address:

“http://www.justgiving.com/havi”:http://www.justgiving.com/havi

All donations are secure and sent electronically to LAM Action. If you are a UK taxpayer, Justgiving will automatically reclaim 28 per cent Gift Aid on your behalf, so your donation is worth even more.

With today (6/6/6) bearing the number of the beast, my thoughts went back to the most recent scary date 1/1/00 when we were promised TEOTWAWKI thanks to the famous Y2K bug.

Oddly enough, although we seem to be overwhelmed with alleged sceptics on other topics, only a handful of people challenged the desirability of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fix a problem which was not, on the face of it, any more serious than dozens of other bugs in computer systems. Admittedly not all the money was wasted, since lots of new computers were bought. But a lot of valuable equipment was prematurely scrapped and a vast amount of effort was devoted to compliance, when a far cheaper “fix on failure” approach would have sufficed for all but the most mission-critical of systems.

As far as I know, there was no proper peer-reviewed assessment of the seriousness of the problems published in the computer science literature. Most of the running was made by consultants with an axe to grind, and their scaremongering was endorsed by committees where no-one had any incentive to point out the nudity of the emperor.

Why was there so little scepticism on this issue? An obvious explanation is that no powerful interests were threatened and some, such as consultants and computer companies, stood to gain. I don’t think this is the whole story, and I tried to analyse the process here, but there’s no doubt that a reallocation of scepticism could have done us a lot of good here.

Maybe she can get him to guest-blog. Not the guy in the bandanna.