If there is one firm rule I have in life, it is never to make an important decision in February. (For those in the southern hemisphere, I advise caution in August.) February is the darkest of months, especially in Brussels where we haven’t seen sunshine in 5 months and an outbreak of killer smog is felling 30 people a day, or so they say. In February, the only rational response to circumstances is obviously to chuck in the job and emigrate. Which I’ve done. Twice.

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Seems like Fukuyama’s “After Neoconservatism” piece could use a comment box. Let me make a few remarks. I posted something muddled last night at J&B about skepticism about social engineering, an issue Fukuyama discusses. Feel free to drop by and straighten me out. There’s also a connection to my post below. What Fukuyama advocates under the heading ‘what to do’ is worse than unserviceable for the Republican party’s domestic needs. “Effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action;” “we are serious about the good governance agenda.” These are hardly phrases to conjure with, if what you are conjuring is an image of Democrats as untrustworthy on foreign policy. Fukuyama’s quote from pre-Iraq Kagan is excruciating: “It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power.” That was then. But you don’t feed the base big slices of humble pie. It still gets red meat, surely.

Jonah Goldberg:

There is also the philosophical problem. Bush has done real violence to the principle of limited government with all of his talk about how the government has to move when someone is hurting and his aim to leave no child behind. Some of his programs are, I think, easily defended on the merits. But that doesn’t change the fact that as general philosophical issue, Bush has conceded that the government is there to help in a way Reagan never would have. Sure, Reagan made exceptions to his general anti-government position. Sometimes they were pragmatic, sometimes they were legitimate exceptions (conservatives aren’t uniformly opposed to all government interventions), and some times his deviations were hypocritical, at least in the eyes of some. But such hypocrisy was the tribute conservatives must sometimes pay to politics. Bush has conceded much of the fundamental ground to liberals when it comes to the role of government. Now the argument about governmental problem solving is technical – "will it work?" – rather than principled, "is it the government’s job?"

Kevin Drum (channeling Bruce Bartlett’s forthcoming book, Impostor):

The charges leveled against the president were familiar: reckless spending increases, out-of-control deficits, relentless pandering to business interests, and a deliberate and willful contempt for policy analysis. The Bush White House, it argued, judges legislation not by whether it’s conservative or liberal, but solely by whether it will gain the Republican Party a couple of percentage points of support among some voting bloc or other. Principle is nothing. Politics is everything.

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Let’s get those creative juices flowing. The Hayward Gallery is hosting Dan Flavin: A Retrospective (this seems to be the one that was at Chicago’s MCA recently) and has a fun interactive site to go along with it. You can create your own light installation dedications and add them to the pool. You can view other people’s here.

If you send yourself a copy of the image you create then you’ll have a URL to it like the one for the image above. Feel free to post a link to your creations in the comments.

I’ve always thought that an economist is someone who understands opportunity cost. If there is one thing a first-year undergraduate economics course should teach, it’s an understanding of this concept. So it’s alarming to discover that most members of a sample drawn from participants in the profession’s most important conference are not, at least by my definition, economists.

Via Harry Clarke, I found this paper by Paul Ferraro and Laura Taylor (guest registration or subscription required). Ferraro and Taylor presented their volunteer subjects with this question:

Please circle the best answer to the following question:

‘You won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you would be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan. Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer. Based on this information, what is the opportunity cost of seeing Eric Clapton?

(a) $0
(b) $10
(c) $40
(d) $50.

Take some time to think before looking over the fold

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Yesterday’s “Economist”:http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5526708 and “Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/704faaf2-9f59-11da-ba48-0000779e2340.html have uncannily similar stories about the reasons for Berlusconi’s political success.
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“Lakshmi Chaudry”:http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2485/ has an interesting piece in _In These Times_ on whether or not blogs can revolutionize progressive politics. Interesting – but, I think, based on a flawed premise. Chaudry’s argument, as I understand it, is that blogs aren’t going to be able to fulfil their promise of creating a vital new progressive movement, based on the netroots, unless it becomes more internally diverse, embracing women, minorities and (something which not many people focus on) people from the working class. Lakshmi seems to buy in, at least in part, to the argument that blogs can be an

bq. inherently democratic, interactive and communal medium, with the potential to instantaneously tap into the collective intellectual, political and financial resources of tens of millions of fellow Americans to create a juggernaut for social change.

Where she disagrees with lefty blog evangelists is in her belief that:

bq. any such strategy is unlikely to work if those in charge of crafting it—be they bloggers, politicians or so-called netizens—show little interest in expanding the reach of the progressive blogosphere to include the largest, most diverse audience possible. If the blogs are unable to bridge the class divide online, there is no reason to think they can create a grassroots movement that can do so in the real world.

This seems to me to be based on the flawed premise that blogs can be the heart of a genuine mass-movement, with appeal to working class voters as well as politics geeks. Blogs are still an elite phenomenon, with a relatively low readership among non-elites. There are a lot of inflated numbers being thrown around – the most “convincing estimate”:http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB111685593903640572-fCzpdsaoZQ6NyRKcqCtIKD0afZE_20060531.html?mod=rss_free that I’ve seen suggests that the biggest political blog around, the Daily Kos, had less than 1% of the readership of the New York Times in the middle of last year (it has probably grown since). Blogs are politically important, not because they are the nucleus of a mass movement, or a new form of radical democracy, but because they are read by journalists, federal law clerks, political activists and others who may then be influenced by them. While Chaudry is right that the blogosphere needs more diversity, this isn’t because a greater diversity of voices among bloggers is likely to make blogs more appealing, say, to working class voters. It’s because blogs do sometimes frame political questions for the media, and to the extent that they’re mostly written by white college educated males who are interested in technology, they’re liable to skew politics a but in favour of the interests of aforesaid college educated males, and against the interests of other groups with different priorities. It seems to me that political blogs are a little better than print media or TV at, say, taking trade unions seriously, but not so much that we should be patting ourselves on the back or anything.

Last we heard from Andrew Sullivan, he was “hyping up the danger”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/11/the-papers-continue-fatuous/ of clerical thugs being able to blackmail western democracies into dismantling themselves. I suggested that, insofar as civil liberties were being eroded, this was something elites in these countries were doing to themselves. Now I see that he’s come up with an example from (noted democracy) Russia of, in his words “How Muslim Blackmail Works”:http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/02/how_muslim_blac.html. One of Russia’s leading Muslim clerics said that anyone planning to turn out for a gay pride parade in Moscow “should be flogged”. The parade was canceled, and QED says Sullivan. Except that, as “Cathy Young argues”:http://cathyyoung.blogspot.com/2006/02/hyping-muslim-peril.html the news reports actually show a more complicated picture. The short version is that rather than being canceled in response to this pressure it was vetoed by the city government, and the muslim cleric was joined in his opposition to the parade by the Mayor, the local Russian Orthodox Bishop and others. Astonishingly, Putin’s Russia turns out not to be such a haven for free speech, civil society or popular dissent. Who’d have thought it?

I was gonna complain about a post that was up … on this blog … about Democrats are traitors. Hell with it. It went like this.

Yep, that’s how it went. I nabbed the graphic from ‘dial B for blog’. Which is good, but not as funny as this, on a day to day basis.

JAAIS is short for Jane-Austen-Adaptation-Inauthenticity-Syndrome. Sufferers can be of either sex, though most are female. The symptoms are a craving to see the latest TV or film adaptation of a Jane Austen novel, accompanied by anticipatory worries that “I bet it is going to be awful”. If the victim watches the adaptation at home, perhaps on a rented DVD, she feels the compulsion to keep up a commentary on the inauthenticity of the costumes, performances, location and on unwarranted departures from the original novel. “Mr Bennet was never at that ball!” or “They would never have done _that_ !” or “She’s far too old!” are standard remarks. There is no known cure.

I had to help someone suffering from a particularly bad case of JAAIS last night. When we then played the “alternate US ending” to “Pride and Prejudice”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414387/ — the awful extra syrupy gooey ending that was demanded by test audiences in Des Moines — I thought I was going to witness a seizure! No doubt the special super-schlocky ending was inflicted all over North America, so that even unsuspecting Canadian JAAIS sufferers were caught.

My wife forwarded this sequence of photos that are doing the rounds, headed “Irish Salvage”.

No doubt eagle-eyed Irish Timberites and readers will be able to point out that the truck is of a make used exclusively in the UK, or that the superscript on the manifest is of a type not found in the Irish localisation of MS Word.

Update: As expected, too good to be true. The second spill is faked. Still, it’s pretty funny.

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“A bill”:http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/legtext/47leg/2r/summary/s.1331hed.doc.htm presently working its way through the state legislature here in Arizona proposes that universities and colleges be required to “provide a student with alternative coursework if the student deems regular coursework to be personally offensive,” that is, where “a course, coursework, learning material or activity is personally offensive if it conflicts with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion.” The “Arizona Daily Star”:http://www.azstarnet.com/allheadlines/116146 and “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/17/ariz have more. Although Arizona is home to the Grand Canyon, the bill was prompted not by evolutionary theory but by “Rick Moody’s”:http://www.twbookmark.com/authors/96/195/ novel, _The Ice Storm_. No, really. Someone didn’t like the description of the wife-swapping key party in the book, which you will recall from the book and film is not exactly full of admiration and cheerful praise for the well-balanced people participating in it. (And even if it were, etc …) “There’s no defense of this book,” said State Senator Thayer Verschoor ==(R)==, “I can’t believe that anyone would come up here and try to defend that kind of material.” (I heard recently that a book by some filthy-minded Irish guttersnipe containing graphic descriptions of bowel movements, urination, masturbation and sexual intercourse is on the syllabus of many college English courses. I can’t believe that, either.) Senator Jake Flake (R – Snowflake. No, really) partly disagreed, but mainly I wanted to mention that his name was Jake Flake, of Snowflake, AZ.

Since I’ve been teaching at the University of Arizona, my feeling is that my undergraduate students have been personally offended mostly by the reading and writing requirements for my courses. So in the (hopefully) unlikely event that this legislation passes, maybe I’ll have to provide an alternative “No Work/Sleep All You Like” option for them.

Following on from Kieran’s “post about British and US TV”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/13/turnabout-is-fair-play/ the other day, I started thinking about the best “TV miniseries/drama serial”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_miniseries ever, by which I mean just the best drama series telling a story over a limited number of episodes. My list of five contains four British examples and one German. Maybe I’m just parochial, but maybe this is a format the British excel in and the Americans don’t. That’s my hunch. So here’s my list (with annotations). Post rival suggestions in comments.

1. “Heimat”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087400/ . Does this count? It is long by miniseries standards, but Edgar Reitz’s story of the the Simon family and the village of Schabbach from the end of the First World War to the 1970s is simply the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV. The sequels, Heimat 2 and Heimat 3 are also pretty good, and some think Heimat 2 the best of the three. They’re wrong, but non-culpably so.

2. “The Edge of Darkness”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090424/ . Mid 80s nuclear drama set in Britain as policeman Bob Peck goes after the killers of his daughter (Joanne Whalley) with help from rogue CIA man Joe Don Baker. Eric Clapton soundtrack with frequent playings of Willie Nelson’s “Time of the Preacher” thrown in (the daughter’s favourite record). Tense, paranoid, and secured Peck his role in Jurassic Park.

3. “The Singing Detective”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090521/ . Who could watch the pathethic Hollywood remake after this? Michael Gambon, Joanne Whalley (again!) and a sense of growing incredulity that the plot can actually come together. Complete with Dennis Potter’s trademark use of music and song as the key to the unconscious. His best work.

4. “Our Friends in the North”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115305/ . Currently being shown again in the UK. From 1960s idealism, through local government and police corruption, vice, and the miner’s strike. Christopher Ecclestone and Gina McKee both superb.

5. “Traffik”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096716/ . Why did they ever make the crummy Hollywood version with Douglas and Zeta-Jones? Lindsay Duncan gives an ice-cold performance as the wife as the various threads come together in the UK, Germany and Pakistan. Shostakovich’s 8th String Quartet as the backing music.

I note the dates for these are 1984, 1985, 1986, 1996 and 1989, suggesting the 1980s as a golden age for the format. I might have included Bleasdale’s “Boys from the Blackstuff”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083689/ (1982) or “GBH”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101104/ (1991) on a different day.

Observed in the wild, from a book I was reading this morning:

bq. Adam Smith … opens _The Wealth of Nations_ with an unlikely peon to a pin factory.

Sounds like the first few scenes in a Dickensian novel — the unlikely peon (because, as will be revealed later, he is really the heir to a large fortune) is sent by his bitter guardian to work cutting, drawing and polishing pins. Or, seeing as it’s Smith, doing only one of these things.