British philosopher Sir Stuart Hampshire has died at the age of 89. The Telegraph has “a very interesting obituary”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/15/db1501.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/06/15/ixportal.html . I’ll add others to this post as they appear: “Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1239568,00.html , “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1146540,00.html .

James C. Moore is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential.”

He has just released “Bush’s War for Reelection: Iraq, the White House, and the People“, and is engaging in an unusual form of publicity. He’s written an essay, exclusively for blog publication, which is posted under the fold.

I haven’t read the book and am in no position to recommend it. Honestly, I just think that it’s neat to be asked to be part of this. And if the essay is just something that didn’t make it into the New York Review of Books… well, I have no pride. Enjoy the essay.

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When I am President, those people who think they are so _clever_ and such _savvy travelers_ for using the parents’ room instead of the regular bathroom — because it’s quieter and cleaner and they read about this handy trick in a “Travel Tips” column once, even though they do not have, say, an unhappy five-month-old in their arms who needs a change and a feed — had better watch out. I will have the “Justice Department”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/olcs_aug_1_2002_torture_memo_the_bybee_memo.html and a team of “Military Lawyers”:http://billmon.org/archives/001518.html by my side, together with a bag of bamboo splinters, a “Leatherman Crunch”:http://www.leatherman.com/products/tools/crunch/default.asp, a “Camping Stove”:http://www.gearreview.com/stovereview98.asp#CGTristar and a copy of the “Constitution of the United States”:http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html for kindling. And who would stop me? For one thing, a War on Irritating Frequent Flyers would command widespread popular support, and I would be willing to consider opening New Fronts in this war, e.g., on People Who Cut Me Off In Traffic, or Bloggers Who Do Not Link To My Posts. Besides, in “the words of President George W. Bush”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/11/17/60minutes/main529657.shtml, “I am the commander, see? I do not need to explain why I say things. — That’s the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”[1]

fn1. Previously thought to be mere managerial bravado but subsequently discovered by Administration lawyers to be a valid constitutional argument licensing the use of torture against unspecified numbers of persons.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has revamped its Web site making it easier than ever before to find interesting and timely reports about people’s Internet uses. They have organized the site by topic so you can jump directly to reports of particular interest. They usually do not go beyond binary analyses when writing up the findings, but it’s a helpful first cut at the material. Moreover, they are making some of their data available for secondary analysis so others can jump in and see what the deeper stories are. There are few data sets that are publicly available with this type of information so the Project has been doing a real service to this research community for quite a while. The Pew Project is run by a group of great folks, do hop on over and check out their work! (Check here for some additional data sources on the topic.)

It’s looking like another bad week for the Bush Administration. The torture memos haven’t stopped coming, and Bush’s lawyerly dismissals haven’t satisfied anyone. It’s considerably harder to hold on to the “few bad apples” theory. The Vice President’s office was much more involved in arranging sole-source contracts for Halliburton than previously revealed. Iraq’s power production is still below pre-war levels, as insurgents hold Falloujah.

It sounds to me like it’s time for another manufactured Kerry scandal. I’ve taken the liberty of scripting it out below.

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Like racehorses, Australia’s monarchs[1] all have the same official birthday, normally the second Monday in June (according to today’s Australian, this was based on the actual birthday of George IV III). It’s fair to say that, of all Australian public holidays, this is the one for which the official occasion is most completely ignored. (Labour Day isn’t marked by much, but taking the day off is an observance in itself).

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They’ll be dancing in the streets of Glasgow and Cardiff tonight after England’s “last minute collapse to France”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787491.stm at Euro 2004. Not fatal, but very deflating to English morale. It is the worst way to lose a game, to think you’re home and dry and then to concede twice in extra time and I’m feeling almost as let down now as I did when Man U beat Bayern Munich in the European Cup (it isn’t quite that bad). Still, an entertaining start to the tournament with a “splendid Greek performance”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3787343.stm against Portugal yesterday, and I rather fancy the Danes to shock Italy tomorrow.

Eugene Volokh says he’s “not going to comment”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_07.shtml#1087053377 about the “torture memo”:http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/06/07/0988582, which has already been discussed in detail by “a number”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html of “well-known”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_06_06_balkin_archive.html#108678914722707979 law bloggers. Eugene says he doesn’t want to talk about it partly because it’s outside his main areas of legal expertise, but mostly because he finds the topic

bq. not just difficult but also sickening. Torture is disgusting. … Does the need to save people’s lives justify torturing suspects? How many lives? Would it take hundreds of thousands (as in the hidden nuclear bomb scenario)? Thousands? Dozens? A couple? I don’t know the answers, and while I have no doubt about the importance of the questions, I don’t enjoy thinking about them. The whole topic is sad and horrible, whatever the right answer is. … It’s not a rational reaction; it’s a visceral one. I’m not proud of my squeamishness, but there it is. I know that just because something is sickening doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. Sometimes people need to do disgusting things to avoid greater harms. … But if I had a choice in how to invest my scarce time, I’d rather not invest it here.

I was surprised to read this, for two reasons.

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I know I’m way late with this, but I must have missed it on my travels last month. The “Gadflyer”:http://www.gadflyer.com brings me “the story”:http://gadflyer.com/articles/?ArticleID=131 that the Rev Sun Myung Moon had himself “crowned Emporer of the United States”:http://www.gorenfeld.net/blog/2004/05/im-and-i-approve-this-messiah.html and “declared the Messiah”:http://www.jonsullivan.com/DiaryDetail.php?pg=1337&mat=ddef at a ceremony in the “Dirksen Senate Office Building”:http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/32914 in “the presence”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_03_28_atrios_archive.html#108067610445417648 and with the “enthusiastic participation”:http://www.gorenfeld.net/blog/2004/05/im-and-i-approve-this-messiah.html of a bipartisan contingent of Members of Congress. No, really. Did this even make the newspapers?

Henry’s Harry’s post about his only proper job, and the tea breaks which it necessitated, reminded me of the finest weblog devoted to tea and biscuits: A Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down. This week’s biscuit of the week is is Lidl’s Choco Softies: “In the second of our Lidl’s inspired reviews we couldn’t come away with out my picking up a pack of Lidl’s own brand version of a German classic the Super Dickmann.” I honestly have no idea what any of these things are, but nonetheless it is a very charming site.

I have been meaning to blog about this forever, but have not found the kind of time a post about this deserves. Since there will be a CSPAN2 airing of a related talk tomorrow, I thought I would pass on the longer serious post and just mention the book and speech so people have the opportunity to take advantage of the broadcast.

A new book that should be of interest to many readers of CT is Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. I should say up front that Paul was one of my advisors in graduate school so I am not a completely objective observer here. In fact, Paul has influenced my thinking about IT quite a bit. First, he is great at conveying the idea that studying communication media without a historical context is extremely problematic. Ignoring history is the best way to make unrealistically optimistic or pessimistic assumptions about the potential implications of a new technology. Second, he convincingly argues – as he lays out in great detail in his book – that ignoring the role of political decisions in the evolution of a communication medium misses a major part of the picture. There was a review of the book in The New York Times Book Review last weekend and the New Yorker had a piece a few weeks ago as well.

Paul Starr gave this year’s Van Zelst Lecture at the School of Communication at Northwestern last month. His talk will be aired on CPAN2 tomorrow, June 12th at 10:59am (EST). Paul is a great speaker and extremely careful and engaged scholar so viewers are in for a treat. I highly recommend catching the broadcast and reading the book!

My friend Alan Carling, “whose campaign”:http://www.betterbradford.org.uk/ I “blogged about”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001911.html a few days ago, managed to secure “342 votes in Bradford’s Heaton ward”:http://www.bradford.gov.uk/election2004/index.asp?w=12 . I hope his campaign has more impact on local debate than it had on votes, since “elsewhere in Bradford”:http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_985471.html the extreme right-wing BNP had four councillors elected. Generally, the local elections look like “a disaster for Tony Blair”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3796497.stm (I ended up voting LD in the Euros) and I imagine that nervous backbenchers are sharpening their knives already.

Since hopping across continents seems to be the CT way of life these days, I thought I’d join in on the fun. Next week I will be in London giving a talk at a conference at LSE on how people search for jobs online (the daylong workshop is on online recruitment in general). A few days later I will move on to Paris to meet Maria in person, finally! We already have tickets to the P.J. Harvey concert thanks to a friend of mine who is much more on top of these things than I am. I will give a seminar talk in an R&D group at France Télécom, but otherwise this will be my summer vacation.

Question: for someone who has pretty much seen all the touristy musts in London and Paris, what are less obvious things not to be missed? I realize entire book collections must exist on this, but I thought I’d throw it out there anyway.

In Paris in particular, there is a museum I visited years ago that I am having a hard time locating again. It is not one of the really famous ones. It featured contemporary art at the time and I think that is its theme in general. I recall that it was on a corner and possibly close to the river, although I am not sure (this was waaay too many years ago). If any of this rings a bell to anyone, please advise, although I realize my description is too vague to be of much help.

I’ve only ever had one proper job. For about 6 months in 1985 I worked for Pipkins Removals. My acquisition of the job is a classic case of being plugged into the right network; I was oddly friendly with the boss’s daughters (and still am: I say oddly because they were 9 and 11 at the time). I was the most casual of the three employees, taken on because they won the contract to move the Oxford courts into the (then new) Combined Court Center in St. Aldates. I was also, surprisingly, good at the job, compensating for my initial lack of physical strength with a good eye for space, which is a vital labour-saving asset in that line of work. Despite my remarkable lack of homosociality I also got along well with the other employees, whom I respected and whom, I imagine, knew that.
What was striking about moving office (as opposed to home) furniture was the bizarre combination of incompetence and self-importance displayed by almost every office manager we worked with. They were paying for our time, but when we arrived they would frequently have no idea where they wanted anything (the courts, and the Dole office, were both exceptions). We moved every desk in one large office three times in the same day — the manager had basically paid us for the pleasure of ordering us about, as the final arrangement differed barely at all from the original arrangement. But they certainly got pleasure ordering us about and I, as the youngest and scruffiest of the men, was a particular target. They assumed, almost to a person, that I was on a YOPS scheme, or something like it, and treated me with extreme contempt, which never bothered me (I knew it was temporary); and my colleagues (who treated me with unmerited respect) took great delight in it.
Every day was punctuated with frequent, and strong, cups of tea. We had one before getting going, had another at 10.30, a third at lunch, and a fourth at 3. We worked bloody hard, and the tea was an essential accompaniment to the brief breaks.
Where is this going? An advertisement, of sorts. I have just acquired the newly released Very Best of Bernard Cribbins which contains the two brilliant songs Right Said Fred (which is about furniture moving) and Hole in the Ground (self-important officials). They sound as fresh as the day they were first recorded to me, and between them sum up my only experience of proper work. The CD contains numerous other gems from the talented man — his When I’m 64 is better than Paul McCartney’s. It’s readily available in the US too.