“Lynne Cheney Tops National Christmas Tree.”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4633299,00.html

Via “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/, a cool index of “photographs of cities”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/. Of the cities in the index, I’ve lived in “Cork”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Ireland/IRE-Cork-webshotscheryllynn121.jpg, “Tucson”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/UnitedStates/USA-AZ-Tucson-luvbride1.jpg and “Canberra”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Australia/AUS-Canberra-anueduau1.jpg, in that order. I imagine our cosmopolitan CT crowd can do better than that.

The database isn’t without its errors: “this”:http://www.worldcityphotos.org/Ireland/IRE-Cork-webshotstommy371.jpg claims to be Cork but is in fact “Cobh”:http://www.cork-guide.ie/cobh.htm, a town down the road that was the _Titanic’s_ “last port of call”:http://www.cobhheritage.com/index2.html.

“Kevin Drum writes”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_11/005214.php:

bq. *LAKOFF FRAMING….* it’s finally time for me to get a copy of George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1931498717/qid=1101255135/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-7671099-8551863?v=glance&s=books, which appears to be something of a Bible among despairing liberals who can’t believe that half the country likes George Bush and apparently doesn’t like us. Basically, Lakoff says we need to get our act together and “frame” our arguments in more positive ways …

Although I know (and like) his work on “Metaphor”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226468011/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, I’ve only seen Lakoff’s stuff on this at one remove or more — snippets on TV shows here and there, and talk in newspapers and blogs. So I don’t know whether he’s pitching the idea of framing as new, or his own bright idea. But it’s worth noting that this concept is pretty old. I don’t mean some equivalent concept, either, I mean the same idea with the same name. Here’s a “very short reading list”:http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/SOC924/Assignments/Framing.htm#Frames to start you off. It has its prehistory in work in micro-interaction work in linguistics and cognitive psychology (going back to Gregory Bateson). It gets named in the sociological literature by Erving Goffman’s (1974) _Frame Analysis_, but like a lot of Goffman nobody could do anything with it unless they were him. It was developed into a useful tool explicitly oriented to the study of political processes (especially social movements) in “Dave Snow”:http://today.uci.edu/Features/profile_detail.asp?key=112 et al’s “Frame Alignment Processes”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1224%28198608%2951%3A4%3C464%3AFAPMAM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-2 (American Sociological Review, 1986). That paper spawned a very big literature. Benford and Snow’s “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment”:http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611, (Annual Review of Sociology, 2000) reviews fifteen-or-so years of theory and research in the field, including plenty of stuff on the limits of the concept and its potential for overuse. If Lakoff has managed to get the media to put his name in front of this idea then I guess he’s worth listening to, because he’s clearly very good at framing indeed.

*Update*: Seems like Lakoff gives the history of the idea its due, develops a version of his own in terms of his views about conceptual metaphors, and then applies it to the liberal cause in an accessible way. All to the good. My memory of the conceptual metaphor stuff in _Metaphors We Live By_, though, is that the metaphors that book looked at (“Love is a Battlefield”, etc) can’t really explain how and why political framing is really successful, as it’s not just a cognitive process. Moreoever, the idea that metaphors underpin our concepts is very similar to the idea that the social structure decisively shapes our thinking: immensely suggestive, almost certainly right in some sense, but very difficult to specify in a satisfactory way. I guess I should read the books, though, before saying anything else.

MEMRI makes an “inept attempt to intimidate”:http://www.juancole.com/2004/11/intimidation-by-israeli-linked.html Juan Cole.

bq. Dear Professor Cole,

bq. I write in response to your article “Osama Threatening Red States?” published on November 3, 2004 on antiwar.com. The article included several statements about MEMRI which go beyond what could be considered legitimate criticism, and which in fact qualify as slander and libel. … As such, we demand that you retract the false statements you have made about MEMRI. If you will not do so, we will be forced to pursue legal action against you personally and against the University of Michigan, which the article identifies you as an employee of.

MEMRI’s threat is strongly reminiscent of Donald Luskin’s threat of legal action against Atrios a while back. It seems to me (though I note that I’m not a lawyer) that the purported complaint is completely, utterly and entirely bogus. But like Luskin’s supposed complaint, the threat isn’t so much in the possibility of a successful action, as in outcomes related to that action. In Atrios’ case, the real threat was that his identity would be revealed, possibly landing him in difficulty with the university that employed him. Similarly, MEMRI’s threat seems to me to be more about trying to create difficulties for Cole with the University of Michigan than the nugatory possibility of an adverse judgement in court against him. There’s no remotely plausible theory under which the University of Michigan can be held responsible for Cole’s private activities or statements, even if they were libellous. However, a state-funded university would presumably prefer, all things considered, not to be embroiled in an action of this sort, however frivolous. Thus, the inclusion of University of Michigan in the complaint seems to me to be an inept class of an indirect threat to embarrass the university and thus perhaps put Cole in a tricky position. I’m glad to see that he’s treating it with the contempt that it deserves. Cole urges

bq. all readers to send messages of protest to memri@memri.org. Please be polite, and simply urge MEMRI, which has a major Web presence, to withdraw the lawsuit threat and to respect the spirit of the free sharing of ideas that makes the internet possible.

Another new blog that deserves some attention – “IP-Watch”:http://www.ip-watch.org/, monitoring “the behind the scenes dynamics” of intellectual property. The politics of intellectual property is exceptionally murky and non-transparent – dubious deals done at the international level which are then presented as _faits accomplis_ to national publics. IP-Watch starts with a “particularly good account”:http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/index.php?p=10&res=1280&print=0 of the shenanigans over the recent broadcasting negotiations. One worth visiting regularly.

Update: via “BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/22/copyrights_are_award.html, Jamie Boyle has written a nice “polemic”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/4cd4941e-3cab-11d9-bb7b-00000e2511c8.html for the FT on how intellectual property policy is made.

My wife and I just bought our first jointly owned car – when we were negotiating the final details at the car dealership, they tried to use the hard sell to get us to buy “Lojack”:http://www.lojack.com, a vehicle recovery system. We didn’t bite (I don’t like hard sells), but I got to thinking afterwards that buying Lojack would have been an economically irrational contribution to a collective good (which is not to say, of course, that it would have been the wrong thing to do).

The system involves a difficult-to-detect tracer that’s put somewhere in your car – then, if the car is stolen, the police will have a much greater chance of recovering it and catching the thieves. The catch is, of course, that it doesn’t offer any visible deterrent to stealing your car – your only individual benefit is the somewhat dubious reward of getting your vehicle back, perhaps in several pieces after it’s been to the chopshop. However, Lojack offers real collective benefits if it works as the manufacturers claim. If you live in an area where there are lots of Lojack users, then car thieves are likely to be collectively deterred (or caught if they aren’t deterred).

The problem is, of course, that there will be a strong likelihood of underprovision of the collective good. If you live in a neighbourhood where there are lots of other Lojack users, then you have little incentive to buy it yourself – you can free ride on your neighbours. If you live in a neighborhood with few or no Lojack users, you still have little incentive to buy it – the marginal improvement that you make to general neighborhood security is of little value to you, compared to the substantial dollop of cash that you would have to pay to install Lojack. My musings came to an abrupt halt, however, when a Google search revealed that my clever idea had already been “written up”:http://www.nber.org/papers/w5928 several years ago by Ian Ayres and Steven Levitt, who suggest that individual Lojack users get less than 10% of its total social benefits (I note for the record that Levitt not only comes up with fun ideas, which is no more than any decent blogger or punter can do; he really excels in finding unusual data sources to test those ideas). As Ayres and Levitt suggest, if you’re an economically rational actor, you should go instead for the Club, which shifts the risk from your car to your neighbour’s.

Regular Crooked Timber readers will remember Bill Gardner, who joined us as a guest blogger immediately before and during the election to describe the scene on the ground in Ohio.

The bug has bitten him, and he’s started a blog called Maternal & Child Health, about the health of children and their parents. Says Bill:

I want to spur discussion on a broad range of topics in this area. The struggle to improve the health of children and families involves the disciplines of medicine, public health, the social and behavior sciences, economics, the information sciences, and the law.

I hope to provide a forum for discussion among both specialists and laypersons about what determines parental and child health, and how we can improve it. I hope to see discussion of how the health system works at every level, from international public health to the interaction of clinicians and families in an office visit. I would love it if any of the Crooked Timber readership would visit and comment.

These sort of blogs, like the Public Health Press, are rare in that they generate a lot more light than heat. I hope that Bill enjoys himself.

What can we do to get our BoingBoing on (since the kids all love that BoingBoing feeling)?

Here’s a link to a French SF site, Noosphere; but I’ll hustle you through the front door straight to the very best stuff: scans – covers and insides – from a series entitled Club Du Livre D’Anticipation. If you can’t read French (which is really just a mixed-up form of English, so give it a try) this page explains that this was a series of translations of classic English language SF, which you would have figured out anyway. It’s all here: Asimov, Van Vogt, C. S. Lewis, Heinlein, Hamilton, Dick, Moorcock, Smith, Farmer, Sturgeon, Brunner, Butler, Niven, on and on. Pages and pages of mostly charming, Gallic-style illustrations to accompany old familiar titles. Much Metal Hurlant-style goodness. The titles are fun, too. A la Poursuite des Slan. (Not sure what was wrong with plain Slan.) En Attendant l’Année Dernière. (That’s Now Wait For Last Year, but the other way sounds more Proustian than paranoid, no?)

Which is your favorite of the lot?

I’ll just presume to point out a few choice bits from elsewhere in the site. The 17 pages of Ace SF doubles are worth checking. In other news, George Clooney is The Demolished Man. These funny little guns are funny. Conan as you’ve never imagined him. A couple of the Italian covers give you that Gina Lollobrigida in space feeling. Nice horizon on that one.

My top pick is Salome, My First 2,000 Years of Love, by Viereck and Eldridge. The cover is so-so, but I delight in lavish blurbs by famous authors on cheesy editions from unknown authors. Here Thomas Mann does not disappoint: "A great book … a monumental conception … amazingly rich in world vision and in sensuous pictures." That Thomas Mann? Off to Amazon we go. All is explained, more or less. A repackaging of sorts. Sounds strangely fascinating. Does anyone know anything more about it?

One of the points made most insistently by critics of the Lancet study was that they disbelieved the claim that infant mortality had increased since the war. Heiko, a contributor to “one of Dsquared’s threads”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002780.html , wrote: “I do believe infant mortality may have dropped (though maybe not halved as yet), because a lot of things are available now that weren’t before the war.” The Washington Post “has now published an article”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A809-2004Nov20.html suggesting that there has been a dramatic rise in child malnutrition since the war:

bq. Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 months ago, according to surveys by the United Nations, aid agencies and the interim Iraqi government.

bq. After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq’s Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway’s Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program. The new figure translates to roughly 400,000 Iraqi children suffering from “wasting,” a condition characterized by chronic diarrhea and dangerous deficiencies of protein.

The article makes grim reading for anyone concerned about winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people:

bq. “Believe me, we thought a magic thing would happen” with the fall of Hussein and the start of the U.S.-led occupation, said an administrator at Baghdad’s Central Teaching Hospital for Pediatrics. “So we’re surprised that nothing has been done. And people talk now about how the days of Saddam were very nice,” the official said.

The other day, I went to see Cry of the Snow Lion, about the Tibetan independence struggle. The film was interesting and well worth seeing, and jogged me to start on a post I’ve been meaning to write for some time on the question: How long can the current Chinese government survive?

It struck me, after watching the film, that the closest parallel is with the last days of the Suharto period in Indonesia. Among the themes suggested to me were

* the decay of Communist ideology, and its replacement by a vague (ethnic Han) nationalism, bolstered by, and dependent on, rapid economic growth

* the rise of faceless nonentities like Hu Jintao to replace monstrous giants like Mao

* the role of the People’s Liberation Army in a range of business ventures

* transmigration programs of Han Chinese into Tibet and other minority areas

Just like Golkar in its latter days, the Communist Party has no real class base, no compelling ideological claim to power, and a rapidly depreciating “mandate of heaven” derived from the revolutionary period. Its 60 million members are now, for the most part, mere card-carriers. And although the party and army leaders have their fingers in plenty of business pies, they don’t constitute an effective management committee of the ruling class. Rather they are a backward and parasitic component of that class.

All of this, it seems to me, is symptomatic of a regime that appears immovable, but may collapse like a house of cards given the appropriate push, which may come either from an economic crisis or from a succession crisis, if Hu runs into some trouble or other. The results of this may not be pretty, and could be extremely dangerous for world peace, but I conjecture that they will eventually include Tibetan independence.

I’d be interested if anyone can point me to an analysis that would tend either to confirm or refute the one I’ve proposed above.

Following on from “last week’s case”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002867.html, which was concerned with the ontological argument, this week’s nutter in “Laurie’s”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul Inbox gives us the complete and comprehensive solution to consciousness and morality, two perennial favorites.

*The Essay       (Forward this to all!)*
[Name Redacted to Protect the Innocent]
This universe is filled with atoms, unified into clusters or systems. They make up all things of matter from rocks to humans. All things of matter are either unconscious (a.k.a dead/ non living), semi- conscious (partially conscious), or fully conscious. Intelligence is the ability to be conscious. If one conceives, then one also sees an amount of right and wrong. One always does what one truly conceives is right.  When one does not conceive what is right, then one is blind and may do wrong. Right and wrong will always exist as long as life exists. …

Emphasis in the original, naturally. Onward:

The condition of being unconscious is having no consciousness of all the worlds components, including right and wrong, at any given point in time (not being aware of anything) … The condition of semi-consciousness is defined as not fully conceiving the world at any point in time. … The condition of being fully conscious is being conscious of everything in existence at any point in time, past, present, and future (a.k.a all knowing). … *The more conscious one is, the more likely one would be to make righteous decisions. The less conscious one is, the more likely one would be to make wrongful decisions.* The humans living on Earth, and all other living beings on Earth are not fully conscious.

The following are not rules. They are statements that are *facts* (not mere philosophies) that my semi-conscious mind has conceived. …

You can’t make this stuff up. Apart from the semi-consciousness, I like the insistence on facts. Reminds me of the work of “another philosopher”:http://hitch14.tripod.com/chapter_25.htm: “I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that is a solid fact! What we demand is solid facts!”

This may simply be a sign that I’m past 30 and culturally marooned, but most of my favourite bands haven’t done anything good since 1994.

Which is not to say popular music in general has been rubbish since then – it hasn’t – just that if I was completely honest about it, I’d rather some acts stopped putting out records that I feel compelled to buy out nostalgia, consistency, and a slight feeling of guilt that I’ve moved on and they clearly haven’t.

I’m tired of going into record shops and coming out with mediocre albums of artists who were once truly or almost great. So, reluctantly, I’ve recently compiled my list of bands/artists whose work I will now stop buying just because they were good ten years ago.

[click to continue…]

Regular readers will know that I’ve been trying to learn German since January of this year. And it is going ok. I just want to put in a plug for my favourite German resource: the online German-English dictionary “Leo”:http://dict.leo.org/?lang=en&lp=ende&search= from the Technical University of Munich. Not only is Leo invaluable as you’re trying to decipher that article in Der Spiegel or FAZ, it also enables registered users to enter the words they don’t know into a little personal list and then to test themselves repeatedly on their chosen vocabulary. Leo is also very easy to integrate with Mozilla Firefox both by adding to the search engines box and — this is really great — by installing the ConQuery plugin so you can highlight the German text and then have the dictionary open with a translation in a new tab.

Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias (and again) are happy to take Chait’s hint: abolish the NEA.  Well, the NEA did two nice things for me this week, so let me tell you what they were. First, as mentioned, I’m studying the NEA’s Reading At Risk survey. I’m glad someone does this kind of stuff. Who knew reading literature was strongly correlated with attending sporting events? (Maybe the NASCAR folks aren’t hating on this arts stuff so badly after all.)

But this survey is hardly matchmaking Eddie Punchclock and Suzy Housecoat to the Divine Muse of Art. This brings me to item two. NEA support for The Capital of Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeyland Review. The DNA of Literature Project. This is just fantastic. It’s great. Wonderful! Searchable and everything.

Welcome to the DNA of literature—over 50 years of literary wisdom
rolled up in 300+ Writers-at-Work interviews, now available
online—free. Founder and former Editor George Plimpton dreamed of a day
when anyone—a struggling writer in Texas, an English teacher in
Amsterdam, even a subscriber in Central Asia—could easily access this
vast literary resource; with the establishment of this online archive
that day has finally come. Now, for the first time, you can read,
search and download any or all of over three hundred in-depth
interviews with poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists, critics,
musicians, and more, whose work set the compass of twentieth-century
writing, and continue to do so into the twenty-first century.

"There is no other archive quite like The Paris Review interviews.
The National Endowment for the Arts could not be more pleased or more
proud than to make this resource available free to the American public."

—Dana Gioia, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

[click to continue…]