Giulini’s recording of The Marriage of Figaro was, I think, the first opera CD I ever bought. It remains one of my better choices. He died the other day at 91, and “there’s an obit in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1507333,00.html .

A remarkable admission from “Valery Giscard d’Estaing in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/international/europe/15france.html?hp :

bq. A crucial turning point for the fate of the constitution in France came last March, Mr. Giscard d’Estaing said, when he phoned Mr. Chirac to warn him not to send the entire three-part, 448-article document to every French voter. The third and longest part consisted only of complicated treaties that have already been in force for years.

bq. He said Mr. Chirac refused, citing legal reasons. “I said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it,’ ” Mr. Giscard d’Estaing said. “It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text.”

“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002117.html pre-empts a post I’ve been toying with writing for the last couple of weeks by discussing the usefulness of Douglas Adams’ “Somebody Else’s Problem Field”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEP_field to the understanding of international politics. There’ve been books on Star Trek and International Relations Theory, Harry Potter and International Relations Theory etc, etc. Why hasn’t somebody written the Hitchhiker’s Guide to International Relations? Adams made far punchier contributions to the understanding of IR than either Rowling or Rodenberry; not only the SEP Field, but the Babel Fish theory of the effects of globalization.

bq. The Babel fish, said the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

bq. The poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

The President of Cornell, Jeffrey Lehman, resigned in somewhat mysterious circumstances at the weekend. Lehman was the first Cornell alum to be President, and it had seemed like he was treating this as a job for life. But after just two years he has jumped off the ship, in his words because the “Board of Trustees and [he] have different approaches to how the university can best realize its long-term vision.” This isn’t maximally plausible. The best story on the background to Lehman’s departure is by “Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/06/13/cornell. I suspect there is still a bit more to this story to come out.

At Samizdata the other day, “Natalie Solent wrote”:http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/007640.html :

bq. In Milton and Rose Friedman’s “Free to Choose”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156334607/junius-20 it says:

bq.

Of course, an egalitarian may protest that he is but a drop in the ocean, that he would be willing to redistribute the excess of his income over his concept of an equal income if everyone else were compelled to do the same. On one level this contention that compulsion would change matters is wrong – even if everyone else did the same, his specific contribution to the income of others would still be a drop in the ocean. His individual contribution would be just as large if he were the only contributor as if he were one of many. Indeed, it would be more valuable because he could target his contribution to go to the very worst off among those he regards as appropriate recipients.

bq. I have a question for all the protestors planning to give up their time and money by going to Edinburgh for the G8 summit. Why is what you are doing better than just giving your spare money to the poor?

Later in comments to the same post she adds:

bq. They could do both: go to Edinburgh and give their spare money away. That’s all their money above what is required for subsistence, of course, because by their own account the Third World is poor because they are rich and money transfer is the way to correct that situation.

[click to continue…]

• Transparent screens [I don’t remember how I found this one, probably on del.icio.us somewhere]
• Human tetris [mpg] [thanks]

:-)

Two interesting articles in the _Chronicle_.

“Peter Monaghan”:http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=wz7n53ufckak2an9dpxwljgfo82kc7t7 on film and the difficulties of dealing with Heidegger’s legacy.

and “John B. Thompson”:http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i41/41b00601.htm on the problems of academic publishing, considered from a sociological perspective.

Two interesting articles in the new issue of the “Boston Review”:http://bostonreview.net/. “Joe Carens”:http://bostonreview.net/BR30.3/carens.html makes a political-theoretical argument that we have an obligation to grant citizenship to most immigrants and their children. “Jennifer Gordon”:http://bostonreview.net/BR30.3/gordon.html argues on practical grounds that those who want strong trade unions should be in favour of granting citizenship rights to undocumented immigrants. She writes about how these workers are exploited in sweatshop situations, and how the threat of alerting immigration authorities is used to enforce compliance and to squash union membership drives. On the one hand, this means that the workers who are most vulnerable to exploitation and most in need of union representation are extremely hard for unions to reach. While new forms of protection – worker centers – have sprung up, they’re structurally disadvantaged and only cover a small number of undocumented immigrants. On the other, the existence of a large working population which has no choice but to accept the conditions that they are offered weakens the bargaining power of organized labour more generally. As Gordon writes:

bq. A serious attack on the very worst work in this country will require immigration reform to allow undocumented workers to legalize their status, removing the greatest source of their vulnerability to exploitation; a genuine commitment to enforcing the worker-protection laws that currently languish on the books; and a significant investment in new forms of organizing—including worker centers.

I don’t think much of most conspiracy theories which require that an improbably large number of people to keep a lid on some explosive piece of information forever. However, I could just be the victim of availability bias. Obviously, in the event of a successful conspiracy, I’d never hear about it.

I point this out, not to rip anything from today’s headlines, but as an excuse to quote this jewel from a book full of jewels, David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace. Lord Kitchener, the general beloved by the British people for his successes in extending the empire in Egypt and India, had done a poor job directing British military strategy in World War I. Since his popularity made him impossible to fire, he had been sent on a trip to Russia. Kitchener was among the casualties when the ship hit a German mine. It shouldn’t have happened:

The departure route of the Hampshire had already been plotted, but should have been changed. Naval Intelligence, which earlier had broken the German radio code, intercepted a message to the German minelaying submarine U75 in late May. It indicated the the submarine was to mine the passage that the Hampshire intended to follow. Two further intercepts confirmed the information, as did signtings of the submarine. In the confusion at British headquarters at Scapa Flow, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, the British naval commander, and his staff somehow failed to read or to understand the warnings that Naval Intelligence sent to their flagship. (At a court of inquiry that convened later in 1916 to look into the matter, Admiral Jellicoe succeeded in hiding the existence of these intelligence warnings, which were revealed only in 1985.)

The Poor Man has produced the finest PowerLine parody this side of paradise.[1] However, as Brad R. notes in the comments, there’s no beating the masters at their own game:

The Senate is poised to apologize for its failure to enact anti-lynching legislation between 1890 and 1952. Why didn’t the Senate act?

In the past, efforts to pass such legislation fell victim to Senate filibusters despite pleas for its passage by seven presidents, among others, between 1890 and 1952.

I suppose Senator Robert Byrd, widely known then as a former Kleagle, better known today as the “conscience of the Senate,” participated in some of those filibusters. Do you suppose he will oppose the current resolution, and explain that the filibuster is a pillar of democracy? No, probably not. I suspect the Senate Democrats will keep their “conscience” under wraps for this one.

UPDATE: As several readers have pointed out, Byrd isn’t quite that old–he was first elected to the Senate in 1958. So his personal involvement with the filibuster didn’t begin until the Civil Rights era. The point, of course, remains valid nevertheless.

[1] This is awfully good, too.

I arrived at work today to find that my PC wouldn’t start: a corrupted registry. The guy from tech support quickly reached the conclusion that he’d have to do a complete reinstall of the system. Luckily, most of my work files are stored on the departmental server (which gets backed up daily) and all incoming emails are automatically forwarded to a gmail account (so I have copies). Still, a lot of software had gone and, crucially, my setups for Firefox and Thunderbird. Luckily, I had read about “MozBackup”:http://mozbackup.jasnapaka.com/ on the “Lifehacker”:http://www.lifehacker.com/ site and had backups of all my settings. Download it now: it has saved me hours of hassle.

EU Foreign ministers decided today in Luxembourg to recognise Irish as an official language of the European Union. Why, oh why? I won’t rehearse last year’s arguments for how pathetic and grasping this makes us look. But I will ask; how many of our MEPs now plan to change from using English to Irish in the European Parliament?

The only sensible part of the Fine Gael press release – which mostly gloated that a concession made by Fianna Fail in 1972 had been won back – was the following; “We must not be deflected from the challenges and difficulties facing the Irish language, as indicated by recent surveys and reports, and regardless of its status at EU level, preserving the language has to begin at home.”

Pity they didn’t think of that before chomping rudely into this piece of overdone pork.

Robert Lemieux has an “interesting analysis”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/06/lochner-comes-to-canada.html of the decision of the Canadian Supreme Court to strike down a Quebec law forbidding the sale or purchase of private health insurance. I’m not sure if the _Lochner_ analogy isn’t a little strong, but this does seem to be a worrying precedent, whatever the substantive merits of the decision.

bq. Every day, though, I see in the faces of men around me the longing that led me to the reservoir that night, and every day I shudder at the thought that one of them could have been sent to further my indoctrination. I turn away from their stares, I do not return their kind words, and I petition people in power to recognize the grotesque threat among us.

“Matthew Cheney”:http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/06/indoctrination.html stakes a strong claim for the office of Elder Tentacled Abomination in the Order of the Shrill.