My beloved fiancee received two hermit crabs for Christmas. Due to pressures both foreign and domestic, she has not named the crabs yet, and has consistently (cruelly, some would say) rejected my suggestions.
(pictured: a very similar hermit crab)
Luckily, I have the wisdom of crowds on my side. If any commentor suggests a pair of names for two hermit crabs which are adopted by my fiancee, I’ll donate $20 to Habitat for Humanity in his or her name.
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The eminently reasonable Jack O’Toole has been driven to despair by this one-two punch.
This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends’ bets are now on radical Islam. (emphasis added) What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.
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Like “Ted”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003098.html, I sometimes worry about whether the blogging medium is being used to its full potential. Then I stumble across uses for the medium that reaffirm my faith in it. “1000 Bars”:http://thousandbars.blogspot.com/ is, as the name suggests, the story of one drinker’s quest to drink at 1000 different bars in 12 months. He is well on the way, with 189 in the first 41 days of the year. I’ll be following his progress, and the pithy summaries of the decor, crowd and ambience of various fine drinking establishments. When taken in large quantities the bar reports all start to sound the same, and they have a pleasing relaxing effect, which is a marked contrast to some political blogs I used to know.
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“Michael Totten”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000730.html recounts his night out with Christopher Hitchens and a couple of Iraqis that they talked to. Some of the latter weren’t too happy. Totten reflects:
bq. Maybe there was no way to avoid the tension wrought by invasion and occupation, and the air just had to be cleared. Perhaps our Iraqi guests … really didn’t (and don’t) completely understand how we differ from the colonialists and imperialists of the past.
He goes on to say that “Friendly Arabs are the easiest people to bond with I’ve ever met.” It’s the unfriendly ones that cause everyone such problems. And, he continues,
bq. I respected them more, too, because they stood up to me and Christopher Hitchens. They are not servile people. They will never, _ever_, be anyone’s puppets.
They’ve got spirit, the little buggers. Me ‘n’ Hitch are quite the team, but when you’re trying your best to tell them the way things are, they will be interrupting and getting annoyed and saying unreasonable things like “Who are you to tell us what to do!?” What’s that phrase again? “The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard.” But dissent is the lifeblood of democracy. Of course, we can’t permit them to pick the wrong government for themselves. “If the Iraqis were to elect either a Sunni or Shia Taliban, we would not let them take power” (Hitchens). The invasion force would consist of “the US and Britain … along with — hopefully — everyone here at this table” (Totten). Or, as Tom Lehrer put it “more succinctly”:http://members.aol.com/quentncree/lehrer/marines.htm some years ago, “They’ve got to be protected / All their rights respected / Till somebody we like can be elected.”
“Read the whole thing”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000730.html if you like. It’s full of small moments of whatever the opposite of an epiphany is. Like Hitchens’ schoolboy-debater habit of calling people “Sir” as he talks down at them (as in “So you’re saying, sir, that you can be bought”). Or Totten’s heartfelt comment that “Something I said must have got through to him, and thank God for that. He and I — truly — were on the same side. I knew it, and I’m pretty certain he knew it too.” Or Hitchens saying that he has to leave because “I have to get up in the morning and continue the fight on CNN.” Couldn’t have put it better myself, mate.
(Via “Jim Henley”:http://www.highclearing.com/archivesuo/week_2005_02_06.html#005890.)
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Apologies to readers for the rather odd post below, which was meant for my own blog. Since people have made comments, I’ll leave it in place, and add a few notes of explanation. The post refers to a state election campaign in Western Australia, which the incumbent Labor government was, at the outset, expected to lose. A major issue in the campaign is the water supply problems facing Perth, the capital city where the great majority of the population lives. Issues include the traditional Australian ideology of developmentalism, and the role of public-private partnerships
My piece in today’s Australian Financial Review, over the fold, brings together arguments about the Kimberley canal project, which has been debated here on the blog on my blog. As usual, I got a lot out of all the comments, whether or not this is obvious in the published article. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the debate.
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Here’s a picture of a small part of Milford Sound, on New Zealand’s beautiful South Island. I took it when I was there about a year and a half ago. It was my laptop wallpaper for a while. All this is really apropos of nothing, but I can’t look at that “tentacle mole”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003223.html any more. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.
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Carl Zimmer has a nice piece on the voracity of star-nosed moles in the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/science/08mole.html?ex=1265605200&en=a9187294b8ddfa2d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland today. But am I the only one to think they look like escapees from the Cthulhu mythos? If I found one poking its snout up through my lawn, I’d be distinctly unnerved …
Update: by popular demand, I’ve moved the disturbing cthonic entity beneath the fold. Here’s an old kitten photo instead (Aoife is now 2 years older and 7 pounds tubbier than she was then).
!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/aoife.jpg!
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I am editing a special issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication on The Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines. I hope to receive submissions from people in a variety of disciplines. Details below the fold.
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I’ve mentioned Peter Griffiths and his book “An Economist’s Tale” before, and I’m going to mention it again in future, because it’s important. The book is a detailed case study of what Griffiths did when he was working for the government of Sierra Leone during a period when the World Bank suddenly got the free market religion. It’s a fantastic read, and by reading it you will get two valuable pieces of information; you’ll understand what economic consultants (those people whose jobs are advertised in the front bits of the Economist) actually do for a living, and you’ll understand the exact why and wherefore of what it is that people are complaining about when they protest against the Bretton Woods institutions and the Washington Consensus. Griffiths isn’t an “anti” in the normal sense; he makes clear at a number of points in the book that he’s actually in favour of free market reforms as the long term solution to a lot of development problems. But he is someone with very detailed, on-the-ground experience of the problem that Joe Stiglitz identified; the regrettable state of affairs that lets poor countries’ governments get bullied around by “third-rate students from first-rate universities”, with often disastrous results.
Below the fold is an article written by Peter, summarising some of the themes of the book; there are lots of good bits (including my favourite one-sentence summary of the moral dilemma of the economics profession, on which I will post anon) which aren’t mentioned there, so reading the article isn’t a substitute for buying the book. The book can be bought from Peter’s website; link above. Non-economists are not excused this one; if you can understand a Grisham novel you can understand this. It’s pacey, it’s exciting and it all really happened. It even has a happy ending (of a sort; given that the setting is the country of Sierra Leone, a genuinely happy ending was never on the cards).
(Full disclosure: I have no commercial or personal connection with Peter Griffiths other than through sending him an email to get this article. I bought the book with my own cash after seeing it advertised on the Zed Books website).
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Via “Cliopatria”:http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html?id=1829, Thomas Brown, an assistant professor of sociology at Lamar University, has posted an “essay”:http://hal.lamar.edu/~BROWNTF/Churchill1.htm that accuses Ward Churchill of having committed fraud in his research. I know nothing about the historical issues at stake, so can’t comment on the truth of the allegations – however, if the accusations have merit, they transform the case from one of free speech and academic freedom, to one of whether or not Churchill has lived up to the minimal standards required of a tenured academic.
Also, see this “Timothy Burke essay”:http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma20805.html which responds gracefully to my (and apparently others’) criticism of his lumping Glenn Reynolds and Ward Churchill in together.
Update: “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/insider/a_new_ward_churchill_controversy has a follow-up story, with some interesting quotes from people on both sides of this issue.
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Per my Amazon Associates fundraising efforts, I was going to send
another check for about $150 to the Singapore Red Cross. But they’ve
maxed out their fundraising. In general, tsunami
relief seem to be doing OK. So who should I give to, do you think?
Oxfam general fund?
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Last week Gawker Media launched Lifehacker, a site I have gotten addicted to quite quickly. It’s a great resource for any geek or geek-wannabe. One of today’s finds is the most recent service launched by Google: Google Maps. They offer very nice clean maps that allow searches for more than just addresses. For example, see chocolate in evanston. Click on the red pointers and get the exact addresses. With another quick click you can add an address for directions. By clicking on “Link to this page” you get a static link you can share with others. (Note that the arrows for navigating are in the upper left hand corner not on the sides of the map as with some other services.)
The results to searches are far from exhaustive though. I’m afraid the above search misses my favorite chocolate store in town. In fact, curiously, it misses relevant stores that a regular Google search will bring up and Google Local doesn’t seem to be using Google Maps yet either. Since they’re still in beta, hopefully we’ll see some improvements. Regardless, it looks like a very nice new service worth checking out.
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Alex Tabarrok “protests too much”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/02/schelling_is_ow.html in response to John Q.’s “post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003214.html on the Lomborg ranking exercise.
bq. Thus, believe it or not, the new theory of how Lomborg rigged the climate change study is that he chose someone to write the global climate change chapter who was too strong an proponent of its importance! Give me a break.
Alex may sneer, but this is exactly what at least one, and possibly two of the members of the Lomborg panel suggest, according to the “Economist”:http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3630425
bq. Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland, who voted on the final choices, thinks that presenting climate change at the bottom of the list as “bad” is misleading. He says he and the other gurus did not like Kyoto or the aggressive proposals made by Dr Cline, whom he sees as the “most alarmist of the serious climate policy experts”, but Dr Schelling says he would have ranked modest climate proposals higher on the list, because he sees climate as a real problem. Robert Mendelsohn, a conservative Yale economist who was an official “critic” of the climate paper in this process, goes further: because Dr Cline’s positions are “well out of the mainstream”, he had no choice but to reject them. He worries that “climate change was set up to fail.”
This is strong language for academics – Mendelsohn is saying that Lomborg may have tried to predetermine the outcome by ensuring that the climate change choice was unpalatable to all the panelists. Nor does this invalidate John’s previous argument that the panelists as well as the choices on offer were selected in order to conduct towards this outcome – a different group of economists might well have preferred even the more radical climate change option that was on offer. I’m not sure what the point is to Tabarrok’s surly and ungracious post. If he doesn’t believe that choices between several options can be fixed so that individuals go for the one rather than the other, he only needs to find out a little more about the gentle art of push-polling. If he’d like a slightly more rigorous discussion, I refer him to William Riker’s work on heresthetics. If he doesn’t believe that there’s some serious reason to suspect that this is what happened here, he should re-read Schelling’s and Mendelsohn’s descriptions of the process, as quoted in the Economist. There’s nothing here that’s exactly difficult to get.
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Try “Juan Cole’s critique of Jonah Goldberg”:http://www.juancole.com/2005/02/goldberg-v.html and his ilk. Fewer calories and more satisfying.
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From the Guardian, a sample from the test administered to recruits to the Iraqi Police Force:
bq. Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person is: a) torture; b) interview techniques; c) interrogation techniques; d) informative and reliable.
How sad that the United States now has an Attorney General who would get this question wrong.
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