I don’t know whether a definitive bean-counter’s verdict has yet been ventured on the costs and benefits of London’s Congestion Charge, but I’m in favour of it anyway, partly because that nice Paul Krugman was kind enough to write a very clear description of the economic case for road-pricing which I found pretty convincing, but mostly because as a resident on the edge of Zone 1, I can now walk to work without choking on the traffic fumes. Hoorah.

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This bit from the “New York Daily News”:http://www.nydailynews.com/news/story/356814p-304125c.html

bq. Cheney and Libby spend hours together in the course of a day, which causes sources who know both men very well to assert that any attempts to discredit Wilson would almost certainly have been known to the vice president. “Scooter wouldn’t be freelancing on this without Cheney’s knowledge,” a source told the Daily News. “It was probably some off-the-cuff thing: ‘This guy [Wilson] could be a problem.'”

has a rather obvious “historical analogy”:http://www.kensmen.com/catholic/customschristmasx.html, although the language of “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” has a better ring to it than the sub-mafioso “this guy could be a problem.” Still, I don’t imagine we’re going to see a public ceremony of repentance and ritual scourging any time soon.

Via “Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_10_16.php#006771.

Apparently Sir Ian Blair has no plans to resign. This is good news because, when combined with his statement that he wasn’t going to resign in the immediate aftermath of the Menezes shooting, it raises his “Galbraith Score to 2. It might even be as high as 3 if he said he wasn’t going to resign after he was caught trying to arrange a cover-up of the independent inquiry into the shooting. The trigger score is four, remember (it’s derived from the JKG quote “Anyone who says four times that he won’t resign, will”) so there is plenty of hope that we will be rid of the authoritarian, careerist oaf soon.

I’m pleased to see that reactionary gadfly Peter Briffa, a playwright himself, has “a better appreciation”:http://publicinterest.blogspot.com/2005/10/im-afraid-i-cant-share-my-fellow.html of Harold Pinter’s merits than most of his co-thinkers. (Actually, I doubt Peter has any co-thinkers, but you know what I mean.) The Pinter-reaction prize for unintentional self-reference goes to Christopher Hitchens, who is “quoted by Oliver Kamm”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/hitchens_on_pin.html as writing:

bq. Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.

Indeed, Christopher, indeed.

I see via “one of John H’s other incarnations”:http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/conservatives_in_academe/ that Mark Bauerlein is under the charming misconception that it’s a bad idea for aspiring sociologists to work on “the debilitating effects of the European welfare state” if they want to get their dissertations accepted. It’s always a good idea to, like, familiarize yourself with debates among “prominent sociologists”:http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/pu/workpap/wp05-2/wp05-2.html and other “social scientists”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521613167/qid=1129588238/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_8_1/202-1419967-7463003 before making these grand pronouncements. But at least Bauerlein’s error gives me an excuse to link to this “work in progress”:http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~ss10/Downloads/SJ.doc by Margarita Estevez-Abe and Glyn Morgan, which argues against the European welfare state because of its institutional inflexibilities. Morgan and Estevez-Abe say, correctly, that certain European welfare states have some very dubious features, perpetuating gender inequality among other things. They argue instead for a normative standard based on a capacity for a wide-ranging individuality, which in turn requires a strong degree of _institutional flexibility_. That is, institutions should be able to accommodate a wide variety of lifestyle and career choices, rather than assuming, say, that women should confine themselves to the home and motherhood. [click to continue…]

Brian Leiter is on sabbatical and seems to be enjoying a stint in London, most of the time, anyway. Welcome to our city, Professor Leiter, I hope you have fun while you’re here.

Oh, and by the way, you’re right both about the belly-buttons and the buffoon, but try to have closer to the correct change in supermarkets, it’ll make your life so much easier.

If you support a legal right to abortion, you should read Russell Arben Fox’s careful and nuanced argument against his fellow abortion-opponents who support the right to abortion. If you think there is no right to abortion, you also might want to read his argument. Here is the interesting post by Hugo Schwyzer to which he is responding; and here is a response to Russell from the excellent djw.

Ok, this was all discussed 3 weeks ago, but I am the slowest blog-watcher on the web. Comment there, not here.

It’s good news that violence during the Iraqi constitutional referendum was less than during the previous election. Higher turnout among Sunni voters also seems good, except insofar as they seem to have decisively rejected the proposed constitution; I don’t know what that portends for future political unity. That said, Jim Henley made me laugh today:

Looks like the Iraqi Constitution is going to pass. Hopefully people will be able to read it soon too. After that the Iraqi Hamilton, Madison and Jay can write pithy essays about why people should (have) vote(d) for it. At the very end of the process the first colonist touches ground on the shores of Iraq.

It does seem a bit strange for people to be voting on something they have never seen. It’s late Wittgenstein voting! I’ll vote for your beetle if you vote for mine! Seriously, mine has awesome iridescent wings and stuff! No, you can’t look.

The FP/Prospect poll on top public intellectuals “has been published”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3260 . Not much there that is worthy of comment. Nearly everyone on the list has made a contribution which is either totally ephemeral, or which will simply be absorbed into the body of human knowledge without leaving much trace of its originator. Ideas from Sen, Habermas or Chomsky will survive in some form, but nobody will read _them_ in 100 years. And the rest will be utterly forgotten — or so I predict. Anyway, without further ado, I invite comment on who were the top public intellectuals of 1905. You can comment on either (a) who would actually have topped such a silly poll in 1905 or (b) with hindsight, who turned out to be the top public intellectuals.

Just to get us started — and to cross reference “John’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/17/the-winter-palace-and-after/ earlier — “Trotsky”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trotsky has to be a strong contender under both (a) and (b): Chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet, a major contributor to subsequent events, and still very very readable (My Life, 1905). Over to you …

Three new-ish academic blogs that are particularly worthy of attention.

Dan Solove has moved from Prawfsblog to “Concurring Opinions”:http://www.concurringopinions.com/

Tony Arend in the Dept. of Government at Georgetown University now has an “international law blog”:http://explore.georgetown.edu/blogs/?BlogID=2.

Spencer Overton, together with several other black law professors, has set up “Blackprof.com”:http://www.blackprof.com/.

All recommended.

Now is as good a time as any to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1905. This upsurge of revolt against Czarism was the occasion of some of the most tragic and inspiring scenes in the revolutionary drama: the “Bloody Sunday” march to the Winter Palace, Trotsky’s leadership of the St. Petersburg Soviet and the Potemkin mutiny. The revolution seemed likely to prove successful when the government agreed to a parliamentary constitution (October 17 in the Julian calendar), but once the threat was over, the autocracy reasserted itself, and the Duma was reduced to a talking shop. Less than 10 years later, the Czarists took Russia into the Great War, leading directly to nearly two million deaths and indirectly to many more.

The lesson drawn by many was that peaceful reform was hopeless: this inevitably pushed the most determined revolutionaries, Lenin and the Bolsheviks to the fore, and for much of the 20th century, they appeared to many to have history on their side. After 100 years, however, it is as clear as any historical fact can be that Bolshevism (or, perhaps more accurately, Leninism) has been a complete and catastrophic failure.

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Well, a fruitless trip into Hodges Figgis in Dublin this weekend yielded nothing more than the news that George R.R. Martin’s next installation to the Ice and Fire series is delayed by several more weeks. Two younger Farrells – Annaick and Eleanor – have been haunting the place asking when A Feast for Crows will finally arrive. Don’t feel too sorry for them, though. When George R.R.R. himself was in town a few months ago, the girls ended up going out for a very pleasant dinner with him and his missus.

Anyway, the email below arrived this morning:

We thought you would like to know that the following item has been sent to:

Maria Farrell
…
using International Mail.

Your order #026-7258405-0413217 (received 31-May-2005)
————————————————————————-
Ordered Title Price Dispatched Subtotal
————————————————————————-
1 A Feast for Crows (Song of Ic £14.09 1 £14.09

————————————————————————-
Subtotal: £13.29
Delivery Charge: £4.98
Total tax: £1.10
Total: £19.37

Which is a bit bloody cheeky of them as they’re now selling the book at a 40% discount to people who didn’t pre-order it!

Tim Lambert has done very good work over the years keeping people honest on the John Lott “More Guns, Less Crime” thesis and on the Lancet study. However, his work on the strange subculture of DDT loons also deserves a bit of publicity.

Basically, there are lots of people out there, mainly the same sort of people who are fans of Stephen Milloy’s “junkscience.com”, who believe that “liberals and environmentalists” are responsible for the deaths of over 50 million people in the third world from malaria because they banned DDT in the 1970s, because they read the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. This charge is rubbish from start to finish … as in, DDT wasn’t banned in the 1970s, and using DDT is usually not the best way to prevent malaria. Tim’s DDT archive has the whole damn story.

Why are people so keen on DDT? Don’t know. There’s no compelling economic interest in treating the stuff as if it were a panacea; it’s a commodity chemical which is banned as an agricultural pesticide (in order to avoid creating resistant mosquitoes and compromising its use as an antimalarial) and which has only a niche demand as an antimalarial (because pyrethroid-treated mosquito nets are usually a more cost-effective prevention method). All I can think of is that claiming that environmentalists are responsible for millions of deaths in the third world is a handy way of slagging off environmentalists. One has to say, looking at the calibre of human being pushing the DDT argument in Tim’s archive, for them to cry crocodile tears over the genuine problems of the third world while doing nothing to ameliorate them, simply to fight a domestic political battle, would not exactly be out of character. Nice one Tim for exposing this vile, pernicious rubbish.

Q: “‘Why are conservative Republicans, who control the executive and legislative branches of government for the first time in living memory, so vulnerable to the phenomenon of criminalization?'”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=6211&R=C74716908

A: Because there seems to be prima facie evidence that prominent conservative Republicans were up to their “eyes”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/11/AR2005081101108.html “in”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/03/AR2005100300190.html “criminal”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/05/AR2005100502030.html “activities”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/14/AR2005101402076.html.

Number 1,411 in a series of easy answers to unnecessarily complicated questions (with apologies to “The Poor Man”). Hat tip: “Laura Rozen”:http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002846.html