Via Andrew Sullivan (and Hit and Run) this fine, fine video. You have to watch the whole thing, because it really grows on you. I agree with scruffy hipster Julian Sanchez: “Anyone who can watch this and complain about the pernicious effects of cultural globalization has no soul.” Finally, a Numa Numa dance video for the generation that grew up 30 seconds ago.

This is a very fun NYT Science Times article about one Norman I. Platnick, who has “discovered more than 1,200 new spider species, several dozen new genuses and a couple of new families.” In addition, he has been a major contributor to cladistics, “a method of sorting organisms based on the evolutionary features they share, all derived from their closest common ancestor.” I have to say that spiders freak me out; my nightmares often feature the banded-legged garden spiders of my South Carolina youth, totally harmless but swiftly enlarging through the summer to the size of my small spanned hands. Needless to say, equatorial rain forests have got some damn big spiders as well. I can recall an early morning hike through the small remaining section of primary rainforest in the Singapore Botancial Gardens, during which I saw the two biggest spiders of my life in high webs. Like, really big. Much bigger than tarantulas in the Carribbean, say. I spent the rest of the walk with my hand outstretched in front of my face; what if I were the first one along this path? Still, I have always been willing to catch even big wolf spiders under a glass, then slide a piece of paper beneath it, and throw them outside. I hope the arachnidae appreciate that. And hey, at least I don’t live in Australia! (This reminds me of the Terry Pratchett novel The Last Continent. Death and his butler attempt to retrieve information about the poisonous creatures of “Four Ecks” and are nearly crushed under an avalanche of books. Once they have decided to ask about the non-lethal animals a single sheet comes fluttering down from a high shelf, bearing the legend: “some of the sheep”.)

Today’s Guardian has “this”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/students/tuitionfees/story/0,12757,1600221,00.html?gusrc=ticker-103704 :

bq. Doctors today called for a change in the law so that graduate medical students do not have to pay fees of up to £3,000 a year upfront.

Which to my mind sits somewhat ill with “this”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4373519.stm :

bq. Accountants believe average GP pay will burst through the £100,000 barrier this financial year for the first time.

Just to emphasise, that’s _average_ GP pay.

My putting in the third consecutive CT post on the Bernanke appointment is exacerbated by the fact that it’s only a quick link, but redeemed by the quality of the link. As always, Max Sawicky has his priorities in order:

Best of all is the passing over of the obnoxious Martin Feldstein, who will have to content himself with endless attacks on Social Security from his bunghole at Harvard University

It’s true. Feldstein’s work on Social Security has been, by and large, disgracefully bad (in particular, his claim that SS reduced private saving was based on an error in a computer program; Brad DeLong rather coyly says that these days Feldstein “prefers to stress other points” but he has never really retreated from this claim) and I hope Max continues reminding the world of this fact forever.
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I’ll leave it to John Q to “comment”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/24/bernanke-appointed-us-fed-chairman/ on the upcoming Bernanke era at the Fed. But the “New York Times article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/business/25profile.html?hp&ex=1130212800&en=c3800de0e066c491&ei=5094&partner=homepage about his appointment is funny:

*White House Gamble Pays for a Princeton Professor*

Even before President Bush named Ben S. Bernanke as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers this spring, Mr. Bernanke decided to gamble. He sold his home in New Jersey last year and told friends that, instead of returning to a tenured professorship at Princeton University, he was taking a chance that President Bush would elevate him from obscurity as a Federal Reserve governor to a top political appointment.

The gamble paid off.

It’s Nerves of Steel Bernanke! He takes the chance of selling his lovely home in a prime Princeton location — at the peak of a huge real estate bubble! He bets that he will be appointed to the Fed, bravely facing the bleak and frightening possibility that — should Bush choose someone else — he would be snapped up by the top-ranked economics department of his choice. He knows no fear!

Don’t get me wrong: I think Bernanke is a good guy, and he was the obvious choice for the job. I just like the way the Times is spinning it. If anything, the fact that he can make a decision with no real downside look like a bet-the-farm gamble suggests he has what it takes to chair the Fed.

Ben Bernanke has been appointed to replace Alan Greenspan, who’s been Chairman of the US Federal Reserve for just about as long as I can remember (the Volcker squeeze was in the early 80s, so he hasn’t been there forever, but it often seems that way).

Bernanke was the obvious candidate, but there was always the possibility that Bush would decide to mend fences with the base by appointing some obscure* supply-sider a la Harriet Miers.

Bernanke’s appointment suggests a general bias towards an expansionary monetary policy . He was prominent in saying that the Fed would not tolerate deflation, and could print money if necessary. More recently, he’s taken a very relaxed view of the US current account deficit, seeing it as the inevitable counterpart to a ‘global savings glut’. I agree with him on the first point but not on the second; there’s a significant risk that the wheels will fall off the entire policy, leading to a rapid depreciation of the dollar and an uncontrolled increase in interest rates.

Market movements were consistent with this analysis (stock prices went up, the dollar fell and the 10-year bond rate rose), but weren’t very big, suggesting that no-one is expecting really big changes.

* This is a redundancy, as there are no prominent supply-siders in the US economics profession. That is, not in the sense of supply-side popularised by Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffers, although Mundell shares the supply-side liking for a gold standard. Almost all economists are supply-siders in the sense that they think attention should be paid to the supply side of the economy as well as the demand side.

“Noam Scheiber”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=3075 has a brilliant plan.

bq. Our boss, Peter Beinart, has a theory about how to undercut the conservative punditry’s assault on the mainstream media: coopt it. The basic idea is that most of the conservative animus toward the MSM comes from feeling spurned by it. If that’s true, then the easiest way to fix this would be for establishment media institutions to hire lots of bright young conservatives. … I agree. But that George Will column Jason linked to earlier suggests another reason why the mainstream media might want to start hiring conservatives, at least conservative opinion journalists: It would allow conservatives to say and write what they actually think, which is usually both interesting and important. As Ryan Lizza noted last week, many of the conservatives who’ve spoken out against George W. Bush lately–people like Bruce Bartlett and David Frum–have done so at considerable risks to their livelihoods. That’s because the conservative “movement” is incredibly centralized and hierarchical. People who work at conservative think tanks or receive conservative foundation money, even people who work at conservative media outlets, risk having the plug pulled if they deviate too far from the party line.

But then “I would say that, wouldn’t I”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/01/affirmative-action-for-campus-conservatives-a-modest-proposal/. Entertaining as it is to see something like my April 1 squib recycled as a quasi-serious plan of action, it can’t compete with Chris’s experience last year, of being (perhaps unintentionally) “directly”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/12/17/the-real-threat-the-the-life-of-the-nation/ “plagiarized”:http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2004_12_01_archive.asp#110333522580034888 by William Gibson. Now that’s real geek street-cred.

It hardly seems sporting to take another poke at Maggie Gallagher, the best-refuted woman in the blogosphere. So I won’t. Still, her Volokh posts reminded of something I read recently …

Roads To Ruin, The Shocking History of Social Reform, by E.S. Turner. (Published in 1950. You could google up a used copy for yourself somewhere. Amazon hasn’t so much as heard of it, although other curious titles tempt. Past the age of 90, the man’s most recent publication was … four days ago.)

The book’s theme:

It is a salutary thing to look back at some of the reforms which have long been an accepted part of our life, and to examine the opposition, usually bitter and often bizarre, sometimes dishonest but all too often honest, which had to be countered by the restless advocates of ‘grandmotherly’ legislation.

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Matt Yglesias is “quite right”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/10/23/161832/81 when he says that Scowcroft, Wilkerson and company don’t deserve any kudos for giving the administration a few more kicks when it’s already reeling. But you can also turn this argument on its head – that they’re doing it illustrates exactly how much trouble the administration is in. While DiIulio and O’Neill dissented in the first term, neither were central figures in the administration or in the Republican movement (arguably O’Neill, as Secretary for the Treasury, should have been the former, but he was marginalized from very early on). That far more prominent Republicans* are now knifing each other in the dark tells us that the disciplining mechanisms that made “diIulio recant his apostasy”:http://www.rense.com/general32/shut.htm are breaking down very badly. Key people are calculating that they’ll be hurt worse if they stay on message and go down with the ship than if they try to get their own version of the story out while they can. It doesn’t take Thomas Schelling to tell you that situations of this kind can easily turn into a rush for the exits, as everyone tries to make sure that he or she is the first to get out, and thus perhaps to retain a few scraps of credibility. Not that this is happening yet, or necessarily will. But there’s a discernible atmosphere of deep nervousness among Republicans, which could easily explode into an out-and-out panic, given the right spark.

* Wilkerson isn’t very prominent, but Colin Powell, on whose behalf he is “very likely speaking”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/21/AR2005102101829.html, is.

Update: See also “Matt Welch”:http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2005/10/the_week_of_the.shtml.

The New York Times “reports”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/business/24onion.html?ei=5090&en=b40eb239c3b34014&ex=1287806400&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1130162497-jv9RaBeQrH9+1m446sivmw (hat-tip JD – via “The PoorMan”:http://www.thepoorman.net/2005/10/24/hooray-for-freedom/ ):

bq. You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda – stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.

It is difficult to get a clear picture of what went on in Birmingham (England) at the weekend. But what seems to have happened is that unsubstaniated rumours of a sexual assault by members of a particular minority that was already resented for its local economic success began to circulate, and that vigilantes then felt entitled to attack random members of that group and their places of worship. Two people have died so far. The BBC has “a report here”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4370288.stm , and the Guardian has “some of the background”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,1599126,00.html . A very worrying development.

I found something interesting on Boing Boing yesterday!

For your weekend reading pleasure, my Internet & Society course blog links to 25 students’ class blogs. They are required to blog about their readings (which already leads to some interesting posts), but additionally, several of them have gotten inspired to blog about class-related (and sometimes unrelated) topics above and beyond the required assignments. From interviewing grandparents about their radio uses to reflecting about their obsessions with IT they have covered lots of topics.

Extras have included discussions of the “What Would Jesus Blog” movement, the Facebook banned at a university, Tuvalu’s .tv domain name (also discussed briefly in class once) and frustrations with software installation. One student blogged about a run-in with someone regarding a copied identity on MySpace. Blogger ELVIAJERO has a series on Weekly Musical Leanings. Another student blogged about an upcoming movie that a friend is producing. Some students also get inspired to add images to their posts, which adds a fun component when you’re reading through a couple dozen of these blogs. (And yes, they are careful about not hotlinking and using up others’ bandwidth.)

In case you’re wondering about the curious blog names, I encourage students to blog without their real names for privacy (and in compliance with FERPA guidelines).

I’m sure they’d be delighted to get some comments from people outside of class so if you have a moment please stop by and say hello. That said, many of the comments on the posts are closed due to spam protection we have implemented on their blogs. We use both the auto-close comments plugin for WordPress and an additional spam guard to protect against unwanted junk. I recommend both if you’re a WordPress user.

I caught the “Guinness evolution ad”:http://www.bestadsontv.com/ad_details.php?id=634 (QuickTime movie) when I went to see the (rather excellent) “Sommersturm”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0420206/ last night. (I doubt that cinemas in Kansas will be showing the ad any time soon — or the movie for that matter!)

[Aaargh! It turns out that this is the _third time_ we’ve linked to the Guinness ad on CT (sorry “Eszter”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/10/evolution/ and “Kieran”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/06/noitulove/ ) — we really must start reading one another’s posts!]