Pharyngula “has a post”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/comments/sultana_of_the_texas_taliban_scourge_of_scholars_despoiler_of_textbooks/ about how the Texas School Board is trying to exclude not just the mention of evolution from school textbooks, but also references to pollution, global warming, overpopulation, contraception and “married partners” (might include gays). (This kind of thing doesn’t alarm the Dupe, who “argues”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2109377/ — if “argues” is the right word — that Bush’s victory is a triumph for the forces of secularism.)

Tyler Cowen, in India, “discusses how the people of Calcutta might adjust to rising sea levels”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/how_quickly_wil.html , how many of them would leave, etc (via “Davos Newbies”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/ ). There’s a certain Swiftian quality (no doubt unintended) to Cowen’s contemplation of the fate of these poor Indians. If the costs and burdens he suggests do fall on such people (as they probably will) then it puts in perspective the fatuousness of the arguments advanced by Bjorn Lomborg and others to the effect that we shouldn’t do anything about global warming because the costs of action will exceed the benefits. The costs will be incurred by the poor in places like India who will end up with their homes and workplaces under water, and the benefits have been and will be reaped by the already rich in the first world who carry on driving their SUVs. If the economist and policy-wonks who parrot the Lomborg line are proposing a massive compensatory transfer from the winners to the losers then I haven’t heard of it. _Qu’ils mangent de la brioche_ .

Well, the Lancet study has been out for a while now, and it seems as good a time as any to take stock of the state of the debate and wrap up a few comments which have hitherto been buried in comments threads. Lots of heavy lifting here has been done by Tim Lambert and Chris Lightfoot; I thoroughly recommend both posts, and while I’m recommending things, I also recommend a short statistics course as a useful way to spend one’s evenings (sorry); it really is satisfying to be able to take part in these debates as a participant and I would imagine, pretty embarrassing and frustrating not to be able to. As Tim Lambert commented, this study has been “like flypaper for innumerates”; people have been lining up to take a pop at it despite being manifestly not in possession of the baseline level of knowledge needed to understand what they’re talking about. (Being slightly more cynical, I suggested to Tim that it was more like “litmus paper for hacks”; it’s up to each individual to decide for themselves whether they think a particular argument is an innocent mistake or not). Below the fold, I summarise the various lines of criticism and whether they’re valid or (mostly) not.

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On the occasion of Arafat’s death, I am going to share a very personal reminiscence. When my older daughter Zoë was about 14 months old, she could not talk reliably, but she could make her preferences known with gestures. Naturally enough, given the interests of very young children, she liked to pretend that various people (dolls, stuffed animals, photographs) were nursing. This was all well and good, until she presented me with a folded page from the Economist displaying side-by-side photographs of Sharon and Arafat, and then held them up to my breasts to suggest that I nurse them. It was a little difficult to explain why I was fine with the random dude in the Gulf Air ad, but resolutely opposed to nursing either gentleman in the Middle East Politics Article. Zoë’s political acumen has increased in the intervening years, however. (She is now 3). I tried to explain to her why I was so dismayed about the recent U.S. elections, telling her of the great powers of the presidency, the relative merits of the two contenders, and so on. She thought for a moment, and then said, “you think George Bush is too stupid to have so much wesponsibility?” Yes, child. Exactly that. Plus malice.

With so many of the usual suspects showering opprobrium on the still-warm Arafat, it is perhaps worth raising the issue of consistency. If Arafat’s past included some of the items on Iyad Allawi’s _curriculum vitae_ then those acts would certainly have been added to the bills of indictment that feature on so many blogs. [1] Andrew Gilligan (formerly of the Today Programme, Hutton Report etc.) has “an article on Allawi”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5239&issue=2004-11-13 in the latest Spectator. A snippet

bq. With a friend, Adel Abdul Mahdi, he arranged to kidnap the dean of the university to publicise the Baath cause. ‘We took Iraq’s first hostages,’ recalls Mr Abdul Mahdi, now Iraq’s finance minister, nostalgically. The two men did time for the offence, until a Baathist coup got them back out again.

And later ….

bq. The INA’s most controversial operation during this period was a campaign of what can only be termed terrorism against civilians. In 1994 and 1995 a series of bombings at cinemas, mosques and other public places in Baghdad claimed up to 100 civilian lives. The leading British Iraq expert, Patrick Cockburn, obtained a videotape of one of the bombers, Abu Amneh al-Khadami, speaking from his place of refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming that the attacks had been ordered and orchestrated by Adnan Nuri, the INA’s Kurdistan director of operations — an account that has not been seriously disputed.

He may be a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard?

fn1. Of course Arafat’s biography does include many disreputable actions.

November 11 marks the armistice that was supposed to bring an end to the Great War in 1918. In fact, it was little more than a temporary and partial truce in a war that has continued, in one form or another, until the present. Hitler’s War and the various Cold War conflicts were direct continuations of the first Great War, and we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.

The Great War was at the root of most of the catastrophes that befell the human race in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism and various forms of virulent nationalism all derived their justification from the ten million dead of 1914-18. Even the apparently hopeful projects that emerged from the war, from the League of Nations to the creation of new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia ended in failure or worse. And along with war, conquest and famine came the pestilence of the Spanish Flu, which killed many more millions[1].

And yet this catastrophe was brought about under the leadership of politicians remarkable for their ordinariness. Nothing about Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Bethmann Holllweg or the other leaders on both sides marks them out for the company of Attila or Tamerlane or Stalin. How could men like these continue grinding their populations through years of pointless slaughter, and what led people to follow them? In retrospect, it is surely clear that both sides would have been better if peace had been made on the basis of any of the proposals put up in 1917 on the general basis of of “no annexations or indemnities”. The same was true, in reality, at any time from the outbreak of war in 1914 until the final collapse of the Central Powers, and even then the terms of 1917 would have been better for all than those of Versailles. We should think about this every time we are called to war with sweet-sounding slogans.

War is among the greatest of crimes. It may be the lesser evil on rare occasions, but it is always a crime. On Remembrance Day and always, this is what we should remember.

fn1. It’s not clear whether the War exacerbated the pandemic, for example through massive movements of people and widespread privation. But it seems right to consider them together when we remember the War.

I promised I’d have plenty of unsolicited advice for the Democrats this week, and I do. However, after reading round the web about all the things that are wrong with “the Left” and how they’re not in touch with the “real America” (no links provided, they’re not exactly hard to find), I got a bit depressed. So I invented this game to cheer myself up.

I call it “Six Degrees Of This Googlewhack Is A Serious Problem For The Left”.

It kind of combines the fun of the Kevin Bacon game with the fun of Googlewhacking, and at the same time helps you generate yet more self-flagellating theories about the election results, which must be fun or people wouldn’t do it so much.

The idea is that, it seems, you can connect almost anything to the phrase “this is a serious problem for The Left” in much less than six steps of argument. So the name of the game is to start with a googlewhack from the site and end via a chain of fairly close reasoning with an argument that the Democrats need to consider your googlewhack in depth.

Thus, gesticulate tatties is a googlewhack (or at least it is until this page gets indexed), and it links to the Life and Opinions of Sir Andrew Wylie. On page 14 of this document, there is the line:

No man in his senses would ever expect to see an ignoramus bush, far less a doddered holly-bush, take up a pen to write a book

which is clearly an example of an aristocrat, who is British, referring to President Bush as an ignoramus. This is the sort of high-handed patronising attitude that the Real America hates, and is therefore A Real Problem For The Left

Meanwhile, liposome yarmulke not only has undertones of anti-semitism, but the actual googlewhack is to a spam page pushing cheap Viagra. As long as the Democrats don’t have a credible healthcare plan or a definite policy on parallel importation of pharmaceuticals, they will always be the party of Hillarycare and this is therefore A Real Problem For The Left

And so on. There is perhaps some small kudos for any CT reader who can find a Googlewhack so obscure and nonpolitical that it can’t be used as a stick to beat the democrats with. There is also slightly more kudos for anyone who spots an “in the wild” application; a breast-beating “death of the Left” essay that looks like its original kernel was a googlewhack. Have fun.

Deutsche Welle has “an interesting article”:http://www.deutsche-welle.de/dw/article/0,1564,1391096,00.html about the Edelweiss Pirates, an anti-Nazi German youth movement whose members carried out numerous low-level acts of resistance and defiance during the war. “A feature film”:http://www.palladiofilm.de/palladio/englisch/projekte-e.htm about their exploits played at the Montreal film festival in September.

The election, kid’s birthday party, and work in general, have delayed my Christmas Cake making to the coming weekend. Still, I’m now on track for Saturday morning. Making Christmas Cake generates several challenges. The first is the absence of edible glace cherries (which tend to be way too sweet here, if you can manage to find them) and appropriate chopped peel (can’t get the Whitworth’s kind, just candied muck). I overcame these problems last year rather well, by substituting dried cherries and dried strawberries. Expensive, but worth it. The second is keeping it moist enough. I’ve finally acknowledged that our oven overcooks everything, so am just doing everything at 50 degrees lower, and a bit longer — hope it will work. I’m also going to add more butter than my recipe says (I use Katie Stewart’s from the 1975 edition of the Times Calendar Cookery Book). But the unsolved problem is how to get it boozy enough. She demands just two tablespoons of brandy, which is nowhere near enough for a 3lb cake; so I have been doubling it the past couple of years, as well as sprinkling it over the cake sporadically in the weeks before Christmas. Still not enough. Should I be soaking the fruit in brandy beforehand? Should I be using even more brandy? Does anyone have experience of adding Port? While I am in my non-cake eating life all-but-a-teetotaller, I like boozy cake, but am constrained by the fact that I don’t want it to be so boozy that my kids will reject it. Advice? (And if anyone can tell me an easy way of getting edible glace cherries and Whitworth mixed peel in the Midwest that’d be great too).

Update: here’s the recipe (as modified by me from Katie Stewart):

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There’s a nice piece in the Times about Irish emigrants returning home from New York because they think they can do better these days in Ireland. (Many of them do, though very low-skill service jobs are done by emigrants from Eastern Europe and elsewhere.) The article gives some sense of the surprise many of them feel when they see how much the country has changed. That used to take a generation or more to happen — one of our American cousins, returning to Ireland in 1978 after nearly fifty years in San Francisco, lasted only three days before the presence of televisions and the absence of livestock in the house caused him to fly home in disgust — but now returning emigrants can get culture shock after only a few years away:

bq. Counselors in immigrant advice bureaus on both sides of the Atlantic say that many returnees will have a rude awakening in Ireland — especially those who were stuck in the underground economy in the United States, unable to travel abroad for fear of not getting back in. The Irish government now puts out brochures warning that they will find not the Ireland of memory, but rather a fast-paced multiracial society where their dollars are weak against the euro and affordable housing scarce.

I go back as often as I can, in part to inoculate myself against misplaced nostalgia for the ole Green-n-Lovely. With typical good timing, I left Ireland in the Autumn of 1995, more or less exactly when the things were really starting to pick up. My younger brother had left the year before that, coming to college in the U.S. on an athletics scholarship. When he graduated, he convinced a big financial services company to sponsor his work visa and he got his green card last week. By contrast, my youngest brother and my sister left school a few years later and never gave a thought to emigrating. Neither of them even bothered to go to University and both have good jobs. Quite a transformation from a world where, around 1990, Career Guidance Counseling amounted to a recipes for leaving the country efficiently, and getting a Summer job stacking shelves in a department store required a family connection.

The war between advocates of whole language and phonics as methods of teaching reading has broken out again in Australia. I have no particular axe to grind in this dispute. In the spirit of wishy-washy liberal compromise, I suspect that both have their place.

But it strikes me as a rather odd feature of the debate that advocates of phonics should also be the ones most concerned about spelling. The vast majority of spelling errors arise from the use of the obvious phonetic spelling rather than the “correct” spelling that is part of the whole language. So one of the costs of the phonic approach is the need to learn, by rote, the vast number of exceptions and special cases that make spelling English such a miserable experience for the uninitiated.

Phonics phans never seem to recognise this.

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Adam Posen at the IIE has an interesting article in today’s FT about the political motivations and consequences of Bush’s economic policy.[1] For me, the key quote:

bq. However, the Bush administration is putting its political staying power ahead of economic responsibility – indeed it is weakening the independence of those very institutions on which Americans rely to check economic radicalism. For example, the current Republican congressional leadership is trying to override the constitutional design whereby the Senate acts as a brake on the executive branch and on the self-interest of “majority faction”. Bill Frist, senate majority leader and George Allen, the Republican senate campaign committee chair, said their unprecedented direct campaign against Tom Daschle, the defeated Senate minority leader, should warn moderate Republican and Democratic senators not to be “obstructionist”, even though that is precisely what the Founding Fathers intended the Senate to do.

bq. … Markets tend to assume that the US political system will prevent lasting extremist policies so, even now, observers discount the likelihood of the Bush administration fully pursuing – let alone passing – this economic agenda. If the thin blue line of Democrats and the responsible Republican moderates in the Senate bravely fulfil their constitutional role, perhaps the damage will be limited. If not, we can foresee the US economy following the path to extended decline of the British economy in the 1960s and 1970s and of Japan in the 1990s.

I think that there’s an important message for the anti-Bush opposition here, if it can only articulate it clearly and simply. The current administration claims to be both conservative and strict constructionist; it’s neither. In fact, it’s trying to short-circuit the basic constitutional checks and balances of the US political system in order to ram through its agenda. The US apart, presidential democracies are extremely fragile, in large part because presidents tend to grab all power to themselves. This is exactly what the Bush administration is doing, both in its sweeping constitutional arguments about the extent of presidential privilege, and in its efforts to impose strict discipline on the Senate. This is something that shouldn’t only be worrying to lefties – it’s something that should be of deep concern both to serious conservatives, and to libertarians who are worth their salt.

fn1. No hyperlink because it’s behind their paywall.

In the comments to “John’s post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002842.html about a jailed spammer, “George Williams”:http://ghw.wordherders.net/ notes that “If we outlaw spam, only outlaws will send spam.” This is exactly right. The solution is to put industrial-strength spamming technology into the hands of ordinary citizens. The resulting deterrent effect would reduce the flood of spam to almost nothing, as no rational spammer would risk immediate retaliation in kind. Of course, no-one would be _required_ to own huge email lists, spambot factories or “relay-rape”:http://www.comedia.com/hot/jargon-4.2.3/html/entry/relay-rape.html kits, but enough decent citizens would legally conceal them on their person and use them as needed that the problem would take care of itself very quickly. Moreover, actual use of spam technology would be very uncommon. A survey[1] I did a few years ago while not quite on the faculty of the University of Chicago showed[2] that simply brandishing a DVD of the software was enough to deter would-be spammers 98% of the time. In the American West of the early 19th century, where this approach prevailed, letter-writing was far more common than it is today, but spam was virtually unknown. Also indoor plumbing.

fn1. The data are unavailable for reasons “too complex”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/Lott/survey/ to go into here. You would be amazed how easy it is to lose every last shred of evidence showing you conducted a major piece of social research.

fn2. When appropriately, um, weighted.

This is old news for many, but some may have missed it in the blanket election coverage. Target has decided not to allow the Sally Army to collect outside its doors this winter. I have no particular affection for the Salvation Army, but I shop with my kids a lot, and I like them to see people colecting for charity in the midst of the commercial horrors of Christmas. Since I raise them in an atheist household I also believe that I have an obligation to ensure that they are exposed to a wide range of non-atheist viewpoints and practices, and welcome them seeing positive images of religious life. I also resent the power that large corporations like Target have over the public space. Some critics of this decision suggest lobbying Target to include the SA among its charitable partners; I don’t, because I see no reason to filter individual charity through corporate entities. Instead, I fired off an email, expressing disappointment, to Guest.Relations@target.com. I invite you to do the same, and perhaps to encourage others. The text of my email is below the fold: please modify according to your situation.

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