There’s an interesting piece, "Molecular Self-Loathing", in the Oct 1-7 issue of The Economist. On a personal note, the degree of self-loathing programmed into my molecules is, apparently, this: I turn first to Lexington, notice there’s a cartoon of an aging hippie hitchhiking, thumb out; a car with a USA license-plate is passing him by. I read the whole thing. (To save yourself that trouble, do the following: say "He didn’t think that was so groovy", in a Monty Burns voice. Favorite line: "For their part, the Republicans have been trying to get beyond Richard Nixon’s ‘southern strategy.’")

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This is great. Even if there are a few “infelicities”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/noitulove/. I’m just hoping for the day when American bartenders evolve to the stage where they understand how to pull a pint of stout. Out here in Tucson it’s hard to find pubs where such people exist, though there is one place that has Beamish on tap.

Last week “I said”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/03/harriet-the-justice/ I didn’t know anything about Harriet Miers, but figured that while she would certainly be a staunch Bush loyalist, she would likely not be incompetent or a pushover. I think now I was being a bit optimistic, or at least not precise enough. I still think Miers isn’t an incompetent pushover, in the narrow sense that she’s probably pretty good at the job she currently occupies. It’s just that she has no real qualifications at all for a position on the Supreme Court, and there’s no getting around that. “Mark Schmitt”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/10/souter_or_kerik.html gets it right here, by noting the curious parallel to the previous round of nominations to the Appeals Court:

The one and only thing to remember about Miers is that she is totally unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court. … there’s nothing there. Take away the George W. Bush-loyal-staffer aspect of her resume, and there’s absolutely nothing except some modest corporate law-firm and bar-association management, skills that are of no relevance to the Court. …

The reason this is so important to say goes back to the fight over the Nuclear Option and the nominations of Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen last spring. One of the big underlying questions then was whether a judicial nominee’s ideology, even way-out-of-the-mainstream ideology, could be a factor in confirmation. A number of us warned at the time that any deal that let an Objectivist crackpot like Brown go through would set the bar for extremist ideology so low that in effect, ideology could never be a factor.

… And that’s why it’s so important to be frank about Miers’s qualifications. Miers is to qualifications exactly what Brown and Owen were to ideology. She sets the bar so low that if she’s considered qualified, then who — other than, say, Jack Abramoff — is not qualified? If Miers is confirmed, it effectively establishes that neither qualifications nor ideology should be a factor in confirmation.

In the meantime, at least it’s been fun to watch the pseudo-libertarian lawyers suddenly shocked — schocked! — as they realize what everyone else already knows about the Bush administration and its appeasement of the hard right. They cheerfully helped feed the crocodile for the past few years in the hope of being granted a few seats on the bench. (Civil liberties? No problem! Torture? Too unpleasant to discuss publicly!). Now find that they’re the ones who have been tossed into its mouth.

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Tim Worstall gets us past that pesky NYT paywall to link approvingly to a John Tierney column arguing that the way to encourage energy conservation in the US is not to fiddle with standards but to raise prices. Broadly speaking I agree. At a minimum, getting prices right is a necessary condition for an adjustment to sustainable levels of energy use. Nevertheless, the rate of adjustment and the smoothness with which adjustment takes place can be greatly enhanced by the adoption of consistent pro-conservation policies, or retarded by the adoption of inconsistent and incoherent policies.

This is as good a time as any to restate the point that, given a gradual adjustment, very large reductions in energy use and CO2 emissions can be achieved at very modest cost. Rather than argue from welfare economics this time, I’ve looked at the kind of adjustments that would be needed to cut CO2 emissions from motor vehicle use (one of the least responsive) and argued that price increases would bring this about over time, without significant pain.

Nicholas Gruen has some related thoughts

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Today sees “yet”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4312110.stm “another”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16825259%255E2703,00.html “round”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/unmasked-the-real-shakespeare/2005/10/05/1128191785837.html of stories about a claim to have discovered the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Today’s candidate is Sir Henry Neville. A book claiming he is the author is about to be released by Brenda James and William Rubinstein.

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If you live in the US and receive public television you might want to watch Making Schools Work tonight (9-11, 8-10 Central). If you do watch it, and want to use the comments below to comment about it, please go ahead.

Update: Well, I’ll get the ball rolling, if possible (though see comment 1 below, which predates this update).

I was at once impressed by the show and irritated by it. Impressed, because the makers seemed to have gone to real trouble to understand the character of the reforms they were describing, and to present the lived experience of going through those reform. I knew a good deal of what was presented, but by no means all, and learned a lot more than is possible from the kind of study I do.

But irritated for two reasons.

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The Senate is likely to vote on John McCain’s anti-torture amendments tonight. U.S. residents, please call your Senators today and politely encourage them to vote Yes on Senator McCain’s anti-torture amendments, which would codify the existing guidelines and prohibiting cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Human Rights First recommends the following talking points:

– I am calling to urge my Senator to vote YES on Sen. McCain’s amendments tonight.
– These amendments will ensure our troops will get the guidance they desperately need.
– The Senator has a moral and legal obligation to ban cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.
– These amendments will draw a much-needed line between appropriate interrogation techniques and the horrible abuses I’ve read about in the papers.

Many thanks.

Public announcement: I’m giving a lecture on blogs, “Welcome to the Blogosphere: How Blogs are Changing Politics,” next Tuesday (October 11), from 6pm-8pm. The venue is GWU’s Elliott School, Suite 602, 1957 E St. NW, Washington DC. There’ll be a reception afterwards. No RSVPs are necessary; CT readers are especially welcome.

My draft review of Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity is below. Comments much appreciated, and thanks to commenters on earlier posts on this topic.

Update Lots of great comments, thanks. This will improve the final version a lot, and is one of the ways in which blogging works really well for me. Keep ’em coming.

I’ve finally received my copy of Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity, which was posted to me by its American publisher six weeks ago …

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Review of _Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy_
Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Yale University Press 2005

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written a distinctly unusual book. Political scientists don’t often write books that take sides in political arguments, and when they do, they usually don’t do any better at it than common or garden pundits. It’s hard to combine the attention to detail and to careful argument that academics are supposed to have with a passionate concern for the results of the fight. _Off Center_ (available from Amazon “here”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&camp=1789&tag=henryfarrell-20&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0300108702/qid=1128460939/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1?v=glance%26s=books%26n=507846 ; Powells don’t seem to be stocking it yet) pulls off both. On the one hand, it is very clearly the work of people who have thought carefully and hard about how politics works. There’s a depth of analysis here that’s completely absent from the common or garden partisan bestseller-wannabe. But on the other, it doesn’t pull its punches. Hacker and Pierson have no compunctions in arguing that the current Republican hegemony is dangerous, and needs to be rolled back. (rest of review below fold)

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Give ‘em any rule, they’ll break it…

Auditors find that the Bush administration violated the law by paying Armstrong Williams to push No Child Left Behind.	Elliot Abrams pled guilty to withholding info about his knowledge of Iran-Contra. Pardoned by Bush I, appointed by Bush II to senior position on National Security Council.	The Bush administration’s top federal procurement official, David H. Safavian, arrested after accused of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.	Bush appointee Thomas A. Scully fined $85,000 for threatening to fire a subordinate if he complied with requests to provide cost estimates Medicare bill. Scully was later tapped as chief surrogate on Medicare policy for Bush re-election campaign.	Karl Rove told Time Magazine’s Matt Cooper that Joseph Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA while she was still working as a covert operative.
Former Connecticut Gov. John Rowland convicted of accepting perks and lying about it.	Current Ohio Gov. Bob Taft indicted on four criminal misdemeanor counts for failing to report more than 50 gifts and outings.	Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher under investigation for illegal hiring, even after preemptively pardoning all staff members under indictment.	Former Illinois governor George Ryan begins trial on bribes-for-licenses charges.	Mike Foster, former Louisiana Governor and George W. Bush’s LA campaign chair, fined for failing to report $155,000 in payments to David Duke to use his mailing list in two campaigns.
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay faces (as of this writing) three indictments for money-laundering, conspiracy to commit money-laundering, and conspiracy to violate election laws.	House Ethics Panel rebukes DeLay twice in one day, for asking federal aviation officials to track down Texas Democratic representatives, and for conduct that suggested political donations might influence legislative action.		Feds investigate DeLay’s office for illegally soliciting travel and other favors from Jack Abramoff.	House Ethics panel rebukes Tom DeLay for offering a political favor to then-Rep. Nick Smith (R-Mich.) in exchange for his vote on Medicare bill.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist faces questions for apparent insider trading of stock in family business.	Ohio Rep. Robert Ney accepts trip from Abramoff in violation of House rules; official explanation doesn’t hold up.	Business partner of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff questioned about mysterious quarter-million dollar payment to the murderers of Konstantinos “Gus” Boulis after Boulis refused to sell them the SunCruz cruise ship business.	Randy “Duke” Cunningham will not seek re-election; under investigation for apparent sweetheart real estate deal with a defense contractor.	Jack Abramoff and former DeLay press secretary Michael Scanlon investigated for bilking their Indian-tribe clients out of $66 million.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and emcee of “Justice Sunday”, fined $3000 for attempting to hide payment of $82,000 to former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke for his mailing list.	The former head of a New Hampshire Republican consulting group pleads guilty to jamming Democratic telephone lines during the 2002 general election.	The vice chairman and former treasurer of the Massachusetts Republican Party arrested on federal money-laundering charges after he allegedly deposited thousands of dollars in drug profits in a Brockton bank for a jailed client.	Manuel Miranda, who resigned in disgrace for obtaining unauthorized access to confidential Senate Democratic documents, was later hired as the head of ethics committee for the conservative Coalition for a Fair Judiciary.	Paul Gourley elected Chairman of College Republicans after signing letters in a fund-raising campaign that misled seniors into thinking they were giving to the campaigns of President Bush and other top Republicans.

Thanks to the Carpetbagger Report.

The message I got as a graduate student was basically this: “Don’t publish anything unless it is outstandingly good, or in a high reputation journal, and even then don’t publish much”. I suspect this was slightly anachronistic even then (not complaining: it worked for me). So I have recently revised my advice to students; I mildly encourage publication (though stick to the advice that it should be pretty good). And, of course, the reputation of journals, which matters a little after tenure, and more before, matters enormously in pre-job search. But how do you know which have the good reputations?

While, thanks to the Gourmet report, potential graduate student have a pretty good sense of the reputation graduate schools have in the profession, it is much harder for existing graduate students to have a good sense of the reputation that journals (which they might choose to publish in) have. My guess is that they rely on their advisors’ judgements. But these judgements are likely to be less than fully informed. For myself I have distinct preferences within my own field, but have no idea whether they have shared. At the top it is pretty clear — Ethics and Philosophy & Public Affairs enjoy great reputations. I like the Journal of Political Philosophy for its more eclectic coverage than you get in PPA (or in Political Theory) and I also like Social Theory and Practice (not least because STP has provided great referee’s comments on my submissions, and copy-edited my publications beautifully). But are graduate students better advised to publish in those journals than in, say, Legal Theory, or Law and Philosophy or Economics and Philosophy? I’ve no idea, and nor have I any idea, really, how to find out. Except by asking the readers of CT, and by respectfully suggesting to Brian Leiter that there’s a missing market here…

“President Bush”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/politics/politicsspecial1/04cnd-bush.html?ex=1286078400&en=711421a7ed5d1c4d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss today:

bq. Mr. Bush also sent a clear signal that he would resist, on grounds of executive privilege, providing senators documents related to Ms. Miers’s work in the White House. … “I just can’t tell you how important it is for us to guard executive privilege in order for there to be crisp decision-making in the White House,” Mr. Bush said.

Just can’t. Because of what I said about crisp decision-making, you see.

Obit here.