I had a conversation at the weekend where the topic of baby-farming came up. Unmarried mother in Victorian England? Can’t stand the social stigma? No problem, babies disposed of no questions asked …. The full details are in Dorothy Haller’s online essay “Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England”:http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1989-0/haller.htm . A sample quote:

bq. Baby farmers, the majority of whom were women, ran ads in newspapers which catered to working class girls. On any given day a young mother could find at least a dozen ads in the Daily Telegraph, and in the Christian Times, soliciting for the weekly, monthly, or yearly care of infants. All these advertisements were aimed at the mothers of illegitimate babies who were having difficulty finding employment with the added liability of a child. A typical ad might read:

bq.

NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT — The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and moderate allowance from her late husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent’s care. Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.

This ad may have been misleading to the general public, but it read like a coded message to unwed mothers. The information about the character and financial condition of the person soliciting for nurse children appears to be acceptable at first glance, but no name and no address is given. No references are asked for and none are offered. The sum of 15s a week to keep an infant or a sickly child was inadequate, and a sickly child and an infant under two months were the least likely to survive and the cheapest to bury. Infants were taken no questions asked and it was understood that for 12 pounds no questions were expected to be asked. The transaction between the mother and the babyfarmer usually took place in a public place, on public transportation, or through a second party. No personal information was exchanged, the money was paid, and the transaction was complete. The mother knew she would never see her infant alive again.

No doubt this practice flourishes in certain societies today and would do wherever the theocrats get the upper hand. Read the whole thing, as someone-or-other is wont to say.

When the world was young, I wrote a long post about single-payer health care. As it’s the new hot topic, I’ve reposted it under the fold. Enjoy, or don’t.

[click to continue…]

Peter Briffa “passes the latest meme thingy”:http://publicinterest.blogspot.com/2005/04/via-peter-cuthbertson-youre-stuck.html on to Crooked Timber. It’s a good job I never became a major celebrity (it was touch-and-go for a while there) because I am useless with these kinds of questions, and celebrities seem to get asked them all the time. I never know what my favorite _x_ (color, food, piece of music, composer, book, whatever) is; I can rarely remember the right answer to the “What’s the last …?” questions; and I can never think up a good response to the “If you only had …?” questions. This one is no different.

[click to continue…]

John Maeda has some nice visualizations comparing U.S. tax dollars spent on science vs the arts or the Whitewater/Lewinsky Investigations vs the 9/11 Commission. His source is an article in Parade whose print version apparently has much more info than the online one. [via]

If there wasn’t such a stigma attached to being gay for so many, would men really have to be so paranoid about catching up with a male friend? It seems like such an unfortunate waste of energy to tiptoe around these situations. Of course, I understand why I can’t simply say “So what if someone thinks you’re gay even if you are not?” given that it may have implications depending on the circumstances. But that is what’s so unfortunate.

“Lee Scoresby” on blogs:

A recent hypertext trail of posts and comments, which I followed from Obsidian Wings to Jane Galt, sparked some thoughts I’ve been entertaining about another paradigm that might be useful for thinking about at least some of what goes down on weblogs. In brief, the idea is that one things good weblog discussions and postings do is to recreate the important experience of late-night collegiate bullshit sessions.

Discuss, with reference to the larger claims advanced in the original post.

He still believes in progressive taxation; the New Deal; … and, in general, firm and constant opposition to the very frequent efforts of the rich and their agents to grind the faces of the poor. It’s just that he now cordially despises most of the people who proclaim or advocate these things.

…

Since 9/11, reflectiveness and skepticism have gone on holiday from his political writing. Logic and good manners have also frequently called in sick. “Embattled” is too mild a description of his state of mind; it’s been inflamed. Those who returned different answers than he did to the questions “Why did 9/11 happen?” and “What should we do about it?” were not to be taken seriously. They were Osama’s useful idiots, “soft on crime and soft on fascism,” their thinking “utterly rotten to its very core.”

…

On and on Hitchens’s polemics against the left have raged, a tempest of inaccuracy, illogic, and malice.

George Scialabba writes Christopher Hitchens’ political obituary for N+1 magazine.

I’ve been doing some sums following a conversation last week with Daniel and John Band. Tesco, as is well know have just announced “their fantabulous corporate profits”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4435339.stm . They have “639 stores in the UK”:http://www.ethibel.org/profile/uk/tesco_en.html (OK that figure is a couple of years old), and a UK turnover of £29.5 billion. This gives us turnover per store of just over £46 million. UK higher education has, according to “HESA”:http://www.hesa.ac.uk/ , a turnover of about £15.5 billion and 171 “outlets”, giving us a turnover per store of just over £91 million. Chelsea football club — expected to win this year’s premier league — has “a turnover of £92.6 million”:http://www.givemefootball.com/display.cfm?article=4009&type=1&month=8&year=2004 . All of this gives us the useful equation of

1 average university = 1 top football club = two branches of the leading supermarket.

Make of that what you will.

There’s been a lot of discussion of the late Pope, including whether he should be given the appellation “Great”. Historically, the honorific ‘Great’, when applied to monarchs, including Popes, has not meant “Good”. Rather it’s been applied to those who’ve been successful in extending their monarchical power. This is certainly true of Leo and Gregory, the popes currently regarded as Great. Although they’re both called saints, neither of seems particularly saintly to me: rather they were hardheaded and successful statesmen.

In this interpretation of the term, it’s hard to claim greatness for John Paul II. Since he was elected in the late 1970s, the church has lost ground throughout the developed world to secularism, and in Latin America to evangelical protestantism. Although there have been some modest gains in Africa and Asia, they’ve largely been in countries where the church had a strong presence dating back to colonial times.

Claims that the number of Catholics has risen greatly under JPII look dubious to me. This BBC file gives the basis of claims that there are more than 1 billion Catholics, and includes claims for more than 90 per cent of the population of Italy, Poland and Spain, based primarily on baptism. I suspect many of these are either nominal or lapsed.

If there has been growth, it’s largely due to natural increase in Catholic countries. To the extent that anti-contraception teaching has kept birth rates high, I suppose the Pope was partly responsible for this, but the same teaching contributed greatly to the collapse of the church in former strongholds like Ireland.

If you wanted to make a case for greatness for JPII it would be one of a fairly successful defensive action in unfavorable times.

In any case, judging by those who’ve been awarded the title by common consent, beginning with Alexander, Greatness is not a quality I admire much [1]. And if we’re going for Goodness, I think John XXIII would be a more appealing candidate.

fn1. Fielding has great fun with this in Jonathan Wild, the story of the infamous ‘Thieftaker-General’, who became the Godfather of early 18th-century London.

‘But pray, sir, why must I not teach the young gentlemen?’

‘Because, sir, teaching young gentlemen has a dismal effect upon the soul. It exemplifies the badness of established, artificial authority. The pedagogue has almost absolute authority over his pupils: he often beats them and insensibly loses the sense of respect due to them as fellow human beings. He does them harm, but the harm they do him is far greater. He may easily become the all-knowing tyrant, always right, always virtuous; in any event he perpetually associates with his inferiors, the king of his company; and in a surprisingly short time alas this brands him with the mark of Cain. Have you ever known a schoolmaster fit to associate with grown men? The Dear knows I never have. They are most horribly warped indeed.

— Patrick O’Brian, “The Ionian Mission”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393308219/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, p84.

On the other hand, I wish I had the absolute authority to make my students do the reading. At least some of it.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for this Reason party. Matt Welch:

What I still can’t understand, is how anyone — seriously, anyone — can think a system where it is extremely difficult for a perfectly healthy young person untethered to an insurance-providing job to obtain health insurance without lying, or without giving up the possibility of having childbirth covered, is a good system…

What I understand even less is how some of these same people will tell you with a straight face how terrible French health care is. Last Thursday-thru-Saturday, we spent a really wonderful time at “Reason Weekend,” which is what my employer does in lieu of a celebrity booze cruise. It’s a great event, filled with smart donors to the Reason Foundation, various trustees, and a few people from the magazine. Great speakers, panels, walks on the beach, etc. Anyway, we had some small discussion group about De Tocqueville, and someone (naturally) brought up France’s high taxes and thick welfare state. “Well, the thing is,” Emmanuelle said (quotes are inexact), “some of the things the French state provides are pretty good. For instance health care.”

“Wait a minute wait a minute,” one guy said. “If you were sick — I mean, really sick — where would you rather be? France or the U.S.?”

“Um, France,” we both said.

Various sputtering ensued. What about the terrible waiting lists? (There really aren’t any.) The shoddy quality? (It’s actually quite good.) Finally, to deflect the conversation away, I said “Look, if we made twice as much money, we’d probably prefer American health care for a severe crisis. But we don’t, so we don’t.”

This weekend, I attended a townhall meeting with my Congressional representative, John Culberson. Culberson is a conservative Republican and a DeLay protegy. I’m trying to be as honest and accurate as possible, but there’s no pretending that I can be objective about the guy. There’s also no pretending that I had a recording device; I’m going from notes and memory.

My most serious concern with this Republican-controlled Congress is its apparent fiscal nihilism, and Culberson didn’t do much to relieve my concerns. In his prepared remarks, Culberson spoke with concern about the budget deficit. He said that every man, woman and child in America would have to buy $144,000 worth of Treasury bills in order to close out the national debt¹.

I was glad to hear a Republican address the deficit. I was also pleased that he didn’t pretend that the deficit could be closed simply by reducing waste. Culberson said that cutting off notorious pork barrel projects, such as the rainforest in Iowa, was a good idea on its own merits, but would not produce nearly enough savings to eliminate the deficit.

So how does this very conservative Republican intend to actually deal with the deficit? Beats me. During his remarks, he proposed more money for medical research, more money for the space program, more money for veterans, and more money for Houston’s transportation. He opposed a local military base closing. Most significantly, he repeatedly pitched Social Security privatization, which even Dick Cheney acknowledges will create at least $2.8 trillion in transaction costs. In two hours, with the exception of the Iowa rainforest, I don’t believe that Culberson identified a dollar that he would actually cut from the budget². Of course, he had voted for every tax cut put before him.

Sam Rosenfeld described this as:

a complete inability to acknowledge the costs of permanent tax-cutting and a related unwillingness to make a serious case for actual smaller government.

Rosenfeld was talking about moderate Republicans like Mike DeWine and Arlen Specter, but this rock-ribbed rightie didn’t do any better.

[click to continue…]

An interesting counterblast to The Valve, which our co-blogger John Holbo helped set up, from Cultural Revolution.

Anyway, what’s kind of interesting about this new site is that it seems to be sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, which was devised as a kind of anti-MLA devoted to ridding lit departments of their classracegenderism and deconstructive tendencies. The mottos and manifestos on the website demonstrate the same Frank Luntz-ish spin that you’d find on the sites of, say, the such organizations as the Independent Women’s Forum…

Cultural Revolution then goes on to attack the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics for using such retrograde notions as “imagination,” “shared literary culture,” “serious,” and “classicists and modernists” in its statement of purpose, and to note how it received its initial start-up money from the conservative Bradley Foundation. So far, so pedestrian. What’s interesting about the post is not what it says, but what it assumes: that an interest in literature for literature’s sake is innately conservative. And, by extension, the question it doesn’t ask: why is it that an organization which is interested in studying literature and imagination is perceived as a conservative bulwark, and has no choice but to go to conservatives for funding and support?

[click to continue…]

Via “Slashdot”:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/11/1358202&from=rss, a commentary by Michael Huang on “The Top Three Reasons for Humans in Space”:http://www.thespacereview.com/article/352/1:

Humans are in space:
3. To work
2. To live
1. To survive

The idea is that we should be out there exploring and colonizing because people are better than robots at doing a lot of things, because more life is better than less and so we should “establish habitats beyond Earth,” and because life on earth is increasingly under threat and so “If we were [living] throughout the solar system, at multiple locations, a disaster at one location would not end everything.”

These all seem like pretty weak reasons to me.

[click to continue…]