I have accumulated quite a list of fun sites. So far I have protected CT readers by only posting these occasionally. But I have so many now that I think I am going to make it a weekly feature. As additional warning, I have created a little button to signal these posts. The point of the button is to note: you have been warned, I take no responsibility for the amount of time you end up wasting due to clicking on these links.

Planarity Flash Game

Your job is to reposition the nodes so the links do not overlap. After posting a link to this on the SOCNET mailing list yesterday, a friend of mine remarked: “LOL! That is why we have software Eszter!”. Afterward, a serious discussion about visualization software ensued. Who says games are just for wasting time?

After level 10 I decided it was time to get back to work. [UPDATE: I’ve now gone to level 13, see link to images in the comments section.] That amount of game time made me start seeing the dots and lines even when not at my computer. You have been warned.

Tuesday may not be the best time to post such links, I realize, maybe I will make it a weekend feature in the future.

This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of “The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521609097/junius-20 , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!

The usual suspects are getting exercised again about the fact that the “BBC’s guidelines”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/war/mandatoryreferr.shtml tell its reporters not to use the word “terrorist” as part of a factual report unless it is in the mouth of someone else. Melanie Phillips goes one better and “accuses them of censoring”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001320.html Tony Blair’s use of the word:

bq. The BBC’s censorship of the ‘t’ word gets worse and worse. In his statement to the Commons today, the Prime Minister repeatedly referred to terrorism. BBC Online’s account of this speech excised those references almost entirely, with only one reference in a quote to ‘the moment of terror striking’.

Perhaps she should have checked whether Blair speech is “reproduced in full on the BBC website”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4673221.stm , as it is, before sounding off.

From the (not at all anti-American) “Daily Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/12/nusaf12.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/07/12/ixportal.html :

bq. All 12,000 American airmen based in Britain have been banned from going near London because of the bombings.

bq. The directive, issued on Friday, indefinitely bans USAF personnel, most of them based at the huge airfields at Lakenheath and Mildenhall in Suffolk, from going inside the M25.

bq. Families of the servicemen and women are being “highly encouraged” to stay away, too.

bq. While Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, was boarding an Underground train yesterday and declaring that “we don’t let a small group of terrorists change the way we live”, a USAF spokesman said the ban was “a prudent measure”. Its aim was to ensure “the security and safety of our airmen, civilians, their families and our resources”.

bq. Westminster city council accused the Americans of playing into the terrorists’ hands.

UPDATE: The “ban has now been lifted”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4673987.stm .

Rove fired from Bush Sr’s ’92 campaign over leak to Novak. Karl Rove was fired from the 1992 re-election campaign of Bush Sr. for allegedly leaking a negative story about Bush loyalist/fundraiser Robert Mosbacher to Novak. Novak’s piece described a meeting organized by then-Senator Phil Gramm at which Mosbacher was relieved of his duties as state campaign manager because “the president’s re-election effort in Texas has been a bust.” Rove was fired after Mosbacher fingered him as Novak’s source.

More on MyDD.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Haedro: Socrates, it hurts when I do this.
Socrates: Can I suggest that you don’t do that?

Plato, Philosophy Phunnies

Chris has done a good job of capturing much of the commentary on the London bombings, but I’d like to point out one more ignoble classification. I’m going to pick on Michelle Malkin. It’s certainly not an exclusively right-wing thing, but she’s a professional writer who really ought to know better.

I’m going to assume that Ms. Malkin would have heard about the attacks around breakfast time. By lunch, she had worked through sorrow, anger, grief, and gotten to the healthy point of dumpster-diving. She had taken the time to troll the comments at Democratic Underground and Daily Kos to collect the most appalling, indefensible comments by such pillars of the left as “plcdude”, “talex”, “pyewacket1”, and “TheSnorp”. (Et tu, TheSnorp?) This post was helpfully titled “THE 7/7 ATTACKS: REACTIONS FROM THE AMERICAN LEFT”, and earned her 36 trackbacks.

What’s the point of this? I understand that there are plenty of chuckles to be had by visting Bedlam at Free Republic or Democratic Underground, and occasionally there’s a geniune point to be made. (For example, I thought that No More Mister Nice Blog wrote an interesting post that isn’t just a freakshow.) But I’d suggest that the exact same post (“DERANGED RANTERS RANT”) has been written enough times by now. On a slow day, it’s just hackish and unconvincing; the response, “what about FR/LGF/DU?” always remains the same. But on a day of tragedy, it’s really inappropriate, and it would do us good if we would just knock it off.

UPDATE: I almost forgot Roy Edroso’s response to Michelle Malkin: “DU-oh! I’ma run out and gather me some Free Republic quotes in retaliation. That’s the secret of the blogosphere: it’s self-incorrecting.”

With the decline of the tech boom, we saw the death of a number of remarkably good professional comedy sites, such as Suck.com, Modern Humorist and Timmy Big Hands (no link, alas). (I still email around MH’s preview of Radiohead’s Kid A every once in a while.) Gelf Magazine has conducted a funny meta-interview with two of the founders of Modern Humorist, possibly better known from the VH1 show Best Week Ever. They’ve interviewed John Aboud, then let his co-founder, Mike Colton, mockingly comment over it, Mystery Science Theater-style. Check it out.

Kelly Bedard and Olivier Deschênes have an “article”:http://www.eco.utexas.edu/papers/sem20050422a.pdf forthcoming in the _American Economic Review_ providing strong statistical evidence that service in the US military is bad for your health – but not (only) for the obvious reasons. Even apart from combat mortality, old soldiers tend to die younger; 2 million veterans from the 1920-1939 cohort (generation) died prematurely. The effects of this, measured in terms of “years of potential life lost,” were roughly as bad as those of the total number of combat deaths in World War II and the Korean War combined. Why so many dead? The authors’ evidence points to one key factor: smoking. During World War II and the Korean war, soldiers were issued cigarette rations, and could buy more cigarettes at subsidized prices. Tobacco companies donated cigarettes to the troops, in part so that soldiers would get hooked on their product, building a long term customer base. Excess veteran mortality after the age of 40 is most pronounced for lung cancer and heart disease, both of which are strongly linked to smoking. Bedard and Deschênes calculate that 36-79% of the excess veteran deaths through lung cancer and heart disease can be attributed to military-induced smoking for veterans from World War II and Korea. The military no longer supplies cigarettes to soldiers as part of their rations. However, tobacco products continue to be sold at subsidized prices at army base PXes. As Bedard and Deschênes argue, this is very bad policy indeed.

(thanks to “Erik”:http://home.gwu.edu/~voeten/ for the link).

Talking-up the good things about the English national character is all the fashion in the wake of last week’s bombs: stoicism, stiff upper lip, mustn’t grumble, etc. As it happens last week I also read Kate Fox’s pop-anthropology participant-observer account of the English. Funny and well-0bserved in parts is my verdict on the 400-odd pages of “Watching the English”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0340818867/junius-21 , though it was getting a bit crass and tedious towards the end. Still, the book has its moments, most of which have to do with class. The most memorable being the ironic-gnome rule:

bq. I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden …. The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was “ironic”. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tounge-in-cheek joke.

bq. But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden — I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as _intrinsically_ amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a “smart” garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class….

bq. The man’s reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that the gnome I had noticed was “ironic” had already demoted him by half a class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper classes would either have admitted to a passion for garden gnomes … or said something like “Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome.” and left me to draw my own conclusions.

Today’s NY Times and Washington Post both carry prominent articles saying London is, and has for some time been, a hot bed of terrorists. Let’s leave aside for today all the arguments about how to fight terrorism in a democratic state. Implicitly blaming London and Londoners for last week’s atrocity is in rather poor taste. Yes, there’ll need to be analysis, discussion and perhaps further refinement of how the UK deals with domestic terrorism. But for today, let’s put the shoe on the other foot. After the 2001 terrorist attacks, people who tried to blame the US for attacks against it were rightly condemned. So let’s have a little equal treatment, please, a little respect. At least till the bodies are buried.

I had to travel to Oxford last Thursday and stayed overnight, so I was, thankfully, away from a keyboard during the initial reaction to the terrorist attacks in London. Catching up on the online and print commentary, there appear to be just three sorts of response. First, there are the people who point out that, though this was a most terrible day for the victims and their families, Londoners (and the British generally) have put up with terrorist bombing campaigns before, and have managed to do so without launching pogroms. I agree with this and haven’t anything to add to it. Second, there are the numerous people who write variations on the “adequacy.org 9/11 standard column”:http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html : Robert Fisk (an especially bad one in the Indie on Friday morning), “Nick Cohen in today’s Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1525172,00.html , and so on. “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ is now showering one adequacy-variant with praise for insight and brilliance whilst castigating the other. This is pointless. Finally, there are the “Eurabia”-obsessed nut-jobs who are falling over themselves to tell us that Ken Livingstone, “whose speech was excellent”:http://no-doors.blogspot.com/2005/07/full-text-of-mayor-livingstones-speech.html , has said and done things of which they disapprove in the past. The Eurabians thereby merely remind us how much they value promoting their nasty agenda above elementary concerns with compassion and solidarity (ditto the egregious “George Galloway”:http://www.respectcoalition.org/?ite=819 btw).

[I think the “excellent John B”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/ probably linked to the adequacy.org piece first]

I blogged “the other day”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/16/pledgebank/ about the “PledgeBank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ project, and, specifically in favour of “one particular pledge”:http://www.pledgebank.com/justonepercent :

bq. I will give 1% of my gross annual salary to charity but only if 400 other people will too.

Time is running out, as this pledge expires on the 23rd of July. So if you thought about it at the time, but didn’t get round to signing on, or would like to now, visit the site.

David Kopel mounts a “questionable defence”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_07_03-2005_07_09.shtml#1120802297 of the changes in gun law that “Silvio Berlosconi” is trying to bring through in Italy. Kopel likes the new law, which by his account allows people to shoot down burglars, even if the burglars don’t present any immediate threat. For him, this is superior to the current law, which requires that defence be “proportional” to aggression (Kopel provides us with a couple of abstract hypotheticals of how the proportionality test might be misapplied, but doesn’t tell us whether these hypotheticals reflect decisions taken by actual Italian courts; I strongly suspect that they don’t). Still, the truly distasteful part of the post is his closing line:

bq. Given Italy’s status as a prime target of al Qaeda, further reform of Italian laws, to enable decent people to protect themselves against sudden attacks, would be eminently sensible.

What exactly would laws of this kind do to stop the kinds of attacks that al Qaeda operatives actually mount in real-world Europe, as opposed to the abstract Europe which exists in the mind of American policy wonks with too much time on their hands? How precisely are they likely to deter terrorists who put bombs with timers on trains? This seems to me to be a rather bizarre and entirely gratuitous effort by Kopel to make his argument attractive by linking it to a current tragedy and future threat to which gun use law is more or less irrelevant.