From the “FT’s review”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d98b25e6-4401-11d9-af06-00000e2511c8.html of Len Fisher’s Weighing the Soul :

bq. Weighing the Soul is a mine of delightful oddities, such as the origins of Galileo’s “scaling theory”, which is still used to estimate proportions when turning a model into an actual building. Early in his career Galileo was asked by the Pope to use his mathematical skills to work out the exact location and dimensions of Hell. His calculations showed it to be a cone-shaped structure with the point at the centre of the earth and the top a circle whose centre was below Jerusalem. The big structural problem was the unsupported roof, which spanned 5,000kms. Galileo claimed that the design used for the dome of the cathedral in Florence would do the job and was lavishly praised. In fact he rapidly realised that his calculations were wrong but kept it secret, only publishing the amended equations years later.

Timothy Burke’s latest post needs a comment box. Well, now it’s got one.

The Financial Times’s Simon Kuper is always worth reading, and in today’s paper he’s published “the best article”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/95d75b52-441b-11d9-a5eb-00000e2511c8.html (by far) I’ve yet read on the anti-Muslim backlash in the Netherlands after the Van Gogh murder.

So, there “appear”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005256.php to be _no_ explicit arguments in the “peer-reviewed scientific literature”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686 against the consensus position that, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it, “Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.” The “Tech Central Station”:http://www.google.com/search?q=flack+central+station&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 Op-Eds rebutting this finding must be in the hopper even now. To help them out, I have cobbled together one made up largely of statements in earlier columns by the likes of “Joel Schwartz”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/080404H.html, “James Glassman”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/112000A.html and “Iain Murray”:http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/murray200311030813.asp.

*The Main Source of Hot Air is Plain to See*
Kieran Healy (assisted by Schwartz, Murray and Glassman.)

“As Tech Central Station readers well know, there are reasons to be skeptical of claims of substantial human-caused warming.”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/080404H.html A “recent article”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686 in the fringe leftist journal _Science_ discovers a puzzle: none of these reasons is to be found in a survey of 928 peer-reviewed articles published in the past 10 years. Its author concludes that “Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.”

Remarkable, indeed. As you know, a “superb analysis”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002392.html by Ross McKitrick and Steven McIntyre showed that the famous “hockey stick”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3569604.stm finding — on which the consensus rests in part — was completely bogus, assuming you don’t know the difference between “degrees and radians”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2004/08#mckitrick6 and think that “temperature is not a physical quantity”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2004/05#georgia. (Setting “missing temperature values to zero”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2004/05#mckitrick3 helps also, but is an advanced quantitative technique.) This is just the sort of nitpickery by which the notoriously left-wing scientific establishment keeps dissenting views out of the journals. The whole affair bears strong resemblance to the recent Bellesiles controversy. Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles won a Bancroft Prize for his argument that gun ownership in early America was not widespread. It took an amateur historian, Clayton Cramer, to point out that this claim could not be substantiated on the basis of actual gun-ownership records. In an exactly parallel way, it took an incompetent analysis by two non-experts to undermine the hockey-stick finding.

Had he worked for a “hack website”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000853.html, Hayek would surely have been the first to note that the very idea of peer-review, and the free sharing of data and ideas, positively reeks of socialism. The market, and not Lysenkoist scientists, should be allowed to decide the truth about climate change. The present situation is a discouraging spectacle to anyone who expected rational, scientific discussions, but climate change has become an issue teeming with emotion, and uncertainty is not a word the participants in the so-called “scientific community” like to hear. Just like “Dow 36,000”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0609806998/002-1583111-0813632?v=glance is not a word I like to hear. Stop it. I told you, that shit ain’t funny.

Kieran Healy is unqualified to comment on matters of climate change, and is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

(Hat tip: “Chris Mooney”:http://www.chriscmooney.com/blog.asp?Id=1432.)

The “news services report”:http://www.freep.com/news/nw/gitmo3e_20041203.htm the latest effort by legal officials of the U.S. Government to get Americans to agree that the use of torture by the military is no big deal:

WASHINGTON — U.S. military panels reviewing the detention of foreigners as enemy combatants are allowed to use evidence gained by torture in deciding whether to keep them imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the government conceded in court Thursday. The acknowledgment by Principal Deputy Associate Attorney General Brian Boyle came during a U.S. District Court hearing on lawsuits brought by some of the 550 foreigners imprisoned at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The lawsuits challenge their detention without charges for up to three years so far.

Attorneys for the prisoners said some were held solely on evidence gained by torture, which they said violated fundamental fairness and U.S. due-process standards. But Boyle argued in a similar hearing Wednesday that the prisoners “have no constitutional rights enforceable in this court.”

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon asked whether a detention would be illegal if it were based solely on evidence gathered by torture, because “torture is illegal. We all know that.” Boyle replied that if the military’s combatant status-review tribunals “determine that evidence of questionable provenance were reliable, nothing in the due-process clause prohibits them from relying on it.”

I look forward to some analysis of this exchange by a good lawyer. (A good lawyer with some sense about “what issues”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002092.html are “worth their time”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002017.html, I mean.) It seems to me that the government wants to let military tribunals do whatever they like. Boyle’s claim seems to be that in balancing the reliability of any piece of evidence against its “questionable provenance” (i.e., whether it was beaten out of a detainee), the status-review tribunal should not only lean towards reliability but also get to pick and choose how questionable a “provenance” is too questionable.

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“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001773.html recommends Kenneth Waltz’s Man, The State and War as one of his December books of the month. This reminds me of something that I’ve always been curious about – the eyepopping price of Waltz’s even more influential Theory of International Politics (only $73.43 in paperback to you mate, with free Super Saver shipping). It’s not so expensive because there’s low demand – every graduate student in international relations has to read it. So is this just a simple case of gouging by the publisher, or is there some other reason why it’s so expensive?[1]

Update: “Alex Tabarrok”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/12/the_unhealthy_p.html at Marginal Revolution suggests that the problem is that these are textbooks assigned by professors who don’t have to buy the books themselves, and draws an analogy with health care. My best guess is that this isn’t the problem in this case – I don’t think that “Theory of International Politics” is usually assigned to undergraduate classes (it’s pretty dense, with lots of philosophy of science discussion _inter alia_). Instead, as Daniel suggests in comments, it’s more likely to be an inelasticity of demand problem – pretty well every serious IR academic has to have a copy on his or her shelves. If there’s an analogy to healthcare, it’s not that the key decisions are made by the people who don’t pay the costs, it’s that (like life-saving drugs etc), the demand is inelastic enough that suppliers can extract substantial rents.

Update 2: “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2004/12/itheory_of_inte.html describes my comment that “it’s not so expensive because there’s low demand” as being ‘rather naive’ – he’s misunderstanding what I’m getting at here. Academic presses do sometimes publish books for which there’s low demand, and need to charge a lot for each individual copy of the book in order to recoup their costs. What I’m saying is that this very clearly isn’t one of those cases. As Matt (and d-squared, and I) suggest, the probable reason why Waltz’s book is as expensive as it is because of inelasticity of demand with respect to price. Basic monopoly pricing, in other words.

fn1. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s similarly indispensable Power and Interdependence lends support to the price-gouging hypothesis – it’s $65.60 in paperback.

Via “Lance Knobel”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/ , this “astonishing story”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0d159fbc-4408-11d9-be59-00000e2511c8.html from the Financial Times:

bq. US distributors of the film Merchant of Venice, which premiered in London this week, have asked the director to cut out a background fresco by a Venetian old master so it is fit for American television viewers…
According to [director Michael] Radford, there was “a very curious request which said ‘Could you please paint-box out the wallpaper?’. I said wallpaper, what wallpaper? This is the 16th century, people didn’t have wall-paper.”
When he examined the scenes, he realised the letter was referring to frescoes by Paolo Veronese, the acclaimed Venetian 16th-century artist, which, when examined closely, showed a naked cupid.
“A billion dollars worth of Veronese great master’s frescoes they want paint-boxed out because of this cupid’s willy. It is absolutely absurd,” he said.

Gosh, my pet issues are piling up today! George Galloway won his libel case against the Telegraph.

The week before last I suggested that “Galloway wins, but wins small as he is in large part the author of his own misfortune by cuddling up to Saddam so much.” Well, he won, but he didn’t win small – £150k is a lot of money given that UK libel awards are de facto capped at £200K these days. Basically, I suggested at the time that “much will depend on the judge’s interpretation of a Telegraph editorial at the time which contained the phrase ‘there is a word for taking money from a foreign power … treason'” and it did. The judge decided that the Telegraph had crossed the line between neutral reporting of (after all, pretty damning) facts, and putting the boot into Galloway. This more or less amounted to malice, and the word “qualified” in “qualified privilege” is there to indicate that you can’t use this defence to make statements motivated by malice.

If the Telegraph had won this case, we would have the public interest defence for newspapers established, and the British press would have been that much freer from our ludicrous libel laws. So it’s a bit of a bummer all round.

Galloway’s name is not cleared by this (nor could it be; the truth of the allegations was not an issue in the trial because of the Telegraph’s use of the privilege defence). There are still big questions outstanding over the funding of Galloway’s charities, which are being investigated by Parliament. The really irritating thing here is that the Telegraph threw away a potentially very strong story simply because they could not resist the temptation to throw a load of nasty abuse at a prominent lefty and anti-war figure. This is a lesson which I hope that the pro-war side will pick up (and one I’ve commented on in the past ; it’s simply not on to claim that people who disagreed with you about the specific rush to war in March 2003, did so because they were supporters of Saddam Hussein. That’s not an honest way to carry on the debate, it’s unpleasant and it is, apparently, in the strictest sense, malicious.

Congratulations really go to Tim Lambert, who has been playing a fine game of whack-a-mole with respect to Lancet study denialists. The state of the game, as far as I can see it is pretty much as we left it at the last CT summary; the Lancet editors mischaracterized the 100K excess deaths as civilian, but the study itself is sound science. The only methodological critique I regard as currently having any validity is that the clusters were selected based on 2003 census data without adjusting for population movements since the war; this could have resulted in an overestimate or an underestimate; what I’d call an “unknown bias in an unknown direction”. By Sod’s Law (a statistical regularity), this critique was made in the CT comments thread about five minutes before the post fell off the front page; I’d be very interested in continuing that discussion.

But anyway, another party not usually associated with the blogosphere has entered the fray; the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. And their critique is … to be honest, not very good. Detailed comments below the fold.

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Via “About Last Night”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/ , SF author John Scalzi presents us with the “ten worst Christmas specials ever”:http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/003030.html. Starting with Dorothy Parker and gang.

bq. An Algonquin Round Table Christmas (1927)

bq. Alexander Woolcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, George Kaufman, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker were the stars of this 1927 NBC Red radio network special, one of the earliest Christmas specials ever performed. Unfortunately the principals, lured to the table for an unusual evening gathering by the promise of free drinks and pirogies, appeared unaware they were live and on the air, avoiding witty seasonal banter to concentrate on trashing absent Round Tabler Edna Ferber’s latest novel, Mother Knows Best, and complaining, in progressively drunken fashion, about their lack of sex lives. Seasonal material of a sort finally appears in the 23rd minute when Dorothy Parker, already on her fifth drink, can be heard to remark, “one more of these and I’ll be sliding down Santa’s chimney.” The feed was cut shortly thereafter. NBC Red’s 1928 holiday special “Christmas with the Fitzgeralds” was similarly unsuccessful.

Ayn Rand’s ‘A Selfish Christmas,’ the lost Star Trek special (‘A Most Illogical Holiday’) and the David Cronenberg Canadian Christmas special (‘The virus causes Santa to develop both a large, tooth-bearing orifice in his belly and a lustful hunger for human flesh, which he sates by graphically devouring Canadian celebrities Bryan Adams, Dan Ackroyd and Gordie Howe on national television’) also excel.

Columns in the Guardian by Jonathan Steele and John Laughland, asserting that demonstrations against the rigging of the Ukraine election were a Western-funded plot, have been the subject of a lot of criticism here and on other blogs. As far as Laughland is concerned, Chris gave us a good rundown on his views and assocations (which could broadly be described as lunar right) some months ago, and there’s more, in the Guardian itself, from David Aaronovitch.

Now we get this column from Anne Applebaum claiming that Steele and Laughland are part of a leftwing plot

The larger point, though, is that the “it’s-all-an-American-plot” arguments circulating in cyberspace again demonstrate something that the writer Christopher Hitchens, himself a former Trotskyite, has been talking about for a long time: At least a part of the Western left — or rather the Western far left — is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States.

Applebaum is generally well-informed and, while she does not name either Steele or Laughland, she says “Neither author was a fringe journalist”, which implies some familiarity with their positions. In any case, she presumably reads The Guardian. Why then doesn’t she acknowledge that the views they put forward draw the (minuscule) support they have attracted from the right as well as the left ?

UpdateOver at my blog, commenter Alex points out that Applebaum used to work for The Spectator which has published Laughland fairly regularly.

Eugene Volokh “complains”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_12_00.shtml#1101930018 that a recent draft of one his papers is missing something:

bq. Verve. “Energy and enthusiasm in the expression of ideas . . . . Vitality; liveliness.” My writing was the usual lawyerese, flabby and clausy. The substance was getting there (though it still needs a lot of work), but it was missing vigor, concreteness, punch. So I’ve been doing Vervification Edits as part of my substantive editing passes.

“Verve” is a good word for the quality he’s after, but I think “brio” is better, if only because its roots are mostly Italian and those people know how to live it up. In Jonathan Coe’s terrific novel, _What a Carve Up_ (published in the United States as The Winshaw Legacy) the narrator phones in a book review. Its chief complaint is that the book’s author “lacks the necessary brio” to carry off the story. Unfortunately something goes wrong in the transcription and the published version claims that the author “lacks the necessary biro,” instead. Just as debilitating to the writing process, to be sure, but as a critical observation of character perhaps not so incisive.

I’m recovering from a bad cold, so I’ve been feeling a little short of brio myself. I have three papers to draft, a review to write and a book manuscript to revise (I sign the contract this week). So if anyone has any strategies for revivifying oneself, let me know in the comments.

The Ukraine crisis is dragging on, and could still collapse into violence, but I’ll restate my view that the likely outcome is a new runoff election, which Yushchenko will win. He almost certainly had a majority to begin with, and has generally behaved in a statesmanlike manner after the election, while Yanukovich has floundered, and generally looked like the thug he apparently is.

I’m appending another eyewitness report from Tarik Amar, forwarded by Dan Hardie

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I’ve been looking through the headlines on international AIDS day. The BBC discusses “the disproportionate impact on women in Africa”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4052531.stm . “India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV”:http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/01/china.india.aids.reut/ , and nobody really knows how many victims there are in China (CNN). “HIV and Aids are expected to kill 16 million farm workers in Southern Africa by 2010” reports the “South African Independent Online”:http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=vn20041201042230610C465958 . In Britain the “Guardian tells us”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1363277,00.html that a fifth of respondents to a poll blame the victims. In “Lebanon”:http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=10570 , only a quarter of victims receive any kind of treatment. In Uganda “a government minister warns the UN”:http://www.365gay.com/newscon04/11/113004uganda.htm not to give advice to gays on safe sex because homosexuality is illegal. Please add more links in comments throughout the day.