I watched Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew yesterday. I’d been meaning to watch it after reading Jerry Cohen’s report of the effect it had had on him (see If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich?). I’m not a religious person, but the film did not disappoint. It is an extraordinarily sparse portrayal of the story, shot in black and white against the Italian countryside. The acting can’t account for the power of the film, because, there really isn’t any. The actors are all non-professionals and, mostly, they just stand around and look (there are many closeups on their faces). The camera often shakes, and the production values are crude. But Pasolini succeeds in creating something of great beauty and emotional power.

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There’s no real need to comment on Michael Meacher’s ravings about 9/11, but the BBC report (as currently displayed – I’m sure they’ll fix it) contains the following:

bq. Mr Meacher told the Today programme he was a conspiracy theorist and said he was simply “in favour of giving people the facts”.

UPDATE: They’ve now inserted the “not”.

We all know that polls taken more than a year before the election are going to have virtually no predictive power. But this analysis caught my eye:

Some 41 percent of all registered voters say they will definitely vote against Bush; just 29 percent say they will definitely vote for him. So Bush must woo about seven in ten swing voters — not a difficult task for a popular incumbent, but far from a certainty.

Does it make sense to call him a “popular incumbent” in the sentence immediately after the one that says that 41% of likely voters will vote against him, and 29% will vote for him?

Tim Dunlop and Jonathon Delacour wonder if some languages are more pleasant to listen to than others, whether you understand them or not. This is certainly true from person to person. When I moved to the U.S., I sometimes found that things I complacently thought were due to my natural wit and charm were in fact explained by my speaking in a pleasant Irish accent. Conversely, these days I am routinely berated by almost everyone for having lost that accent after a mere six or seven years in America.

The more general proposition — that some languages are inherently better-sounding than others — is usually just a step back before taking a kick at the Germans. But Clive James, I think somewhere in his autobiography, makes an elegant case for Italian. As I remember, he quotes this bit from Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, III, 1-3):

Per me si va ne la città dolente,
per me si va ne l’etterno dolore,
per me si va tra la perduta gente.

“Through me you pass to the city of woe / Through me you pass into eternal pain / Through me to amongst the lost people.”

Bitter words, James says, but because it’s Italian you still get to say “tra la.”

As a mere political scientist, I’m leery of going head to head with Eugene Volokh on the law, but I’m going to throw in my tuppence worth on his recent post on “Eric Rasmusen”:http://volokh.com/2003_08_31_volokh_archive.html#106278869634914297. Even if I’m wrong, I think there’s a useful argument to be had.

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I was happy to see the NY Times article on the ferries between the San Juan islands. I was over there this summer for a conference and a group from the conference took one of the ferries to Lopez island. It really was incredibly beautiful. The Times story online has one photo hinting at the kind of views you get, and there are a few more photos in the print version. If you’re anywhere near the San Juans, getting out to the islands is highly recommended.

A word of warning though: if you’re kayaking on the waters between the islands, and it looks like a ferry might be bearing down on you, it probably is a ferry bearing down on you and it will probably get to you quicker than you think. I managed to stay well out of ferry routes the short time I was out there, but friends who were a little more adventurous had some impressive horror stories to tell.

Via “Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/, two new scholar-blogs that are worth a special mention. As a supplement to his Conspiratorial machinations, Tyler Cowen has started a side-project with Alex Tabarrok, called “Marginal Revolution”:http://marginalrevolution.blogs.com/. As the name suggests, it mostly focuses on economic theory and its applications. Second, Rodger Payne, an international relations scholar at University of Louisville, who’s written some interesting stuff on framing, has started “blogging”:http://rpayne.blogspot.com/ too. Nice to see another IR type in the blogosphere.

Glenn Reynolds asks

“WHY DOES THE EUROPEAN UNION hate the world’s poor so much?”

and links to a Guardian article about Franz Fischler’s rejection of demands from poor countries that the Common Agricultural Policy be reformed. Fair enough, it should be: Europe should abandon its protectionist policies that, as Glenn says, harm the poor. But a more thorough reading of the same article would have led him to this paragraph:

bq. Washington and Brussels have tabled a joint proposal on agriculture that would involve far smaller cuts in protectionism than developing countries want. The proposal has been countered by a blueprint from leading developing countries that would involve far more aggressive reductions.

A joint proposal then? So it isn’t just those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys after all.

OpenDemocracy has a short piece by Paul Barker on the late Cedric Price and the idea of the Non-Plan. Here’s a quote that will delight some and annoy others:

bq. “Architects”, he once said, “are the greatest whores in town. They talk in platitudes about improving the quality of life, and then get out drawings of the prison they’re working on.”

The idea of the non-plan sounds fascinating:

bq. He and I collaborated on Non-Plan, an anti-planning polemic, which infuriated architects, planners and assorted do-gooders. The idea emerged during a conversation I had with Peter Hall, geographer and planner, in the late 1960s. Both of us were appalled at the disasters that urban planning had brought about. We wondered if things could be any worse if there were no planning at all.

bq. What worried our critics, who were many, when the four of us published our Non-Plan issue of New Society (20 March 1969), was their uncertainty about our political stance. Was this anarchism? Or deep-dyed conservatism, a precursor of Thatcherism? Our essential point was that you should always think very hard before telling other people how they ought to live. They had their own preferences, which ought to be respected.

bq. We suggested carrying out a Non-Plan test. Four districts should be freed from all controls, and we could then judge whether the upshot was any worse than what happened with the controls on. To make readers sit up, we chose four much-cherished slices of English countryside for our test. The resultant incandescence was highly satisfactory.

I’m intruiged, and mean to find out more.

Today, EPIC & Privacy International launch ‘Privacy and Human Rights 2003, an international survey of privacy laws and developments’. It is a meaty tome that summarises developments in privacy law and policy in 55 countries during the past year.

This year’s review “finds increased data sharing among government agencies, the use of anti-terrorism laws to suppress political dissent, and the growing use of new technologies of surveillance.” Familiar themes to readers of my entries…

It includes an introductory chapter on the war on terror and a country by country guide. Each country entry is a short essay on the key developments with links to many original sources. Within the introductory essays, there is excellent information and analysis to be found on topics like biometrics, airline passenger data, electronic surveillance, WHOIS, Total/Terrorist Information Awareness, and so on. It really is an indispensable guide to a still rather under-reported field, given the massive erosions of personal liberty in the past couple of years.

By way of disclosure – I did the chapter on Ireland and bits and pieces on the UK, EU and electronic surveillance. A great big tip of the hat to Tiffany Stedman who was the law clerk at EPIC working on my chapter, and of course to Cedric Laurant who pulled the whole thing together.

There’ll be a webcast of today’s launch at the National Press Club (1300 ET) on the EPIC home page.

There’s an old law of software development that says every application expands to the point where it can read mail. A little-known corollary is that Google can always do more than you think.

For example, try searching for expressions like 213 * 718, or 76 kilos in pounds, or even (G * mass of Earth) / (radius of Earth^2). Amazing. Wait till Brad DeLong hears about it.

Update: Naturally, the google calculator also knows the answer to life, the universe and everything. (Hat tip: Geek Notes.)

I’d like to point out that if you’re not reading the “Pointless Waste of Time” Newsskim, you’re missing out.

ASTEROID TO END CIVILIZATION IN 2014…

…says scientists after discovering what NASA has labelled “God’s Flyswatter.”

All nine Democratic Presidential candidates have held press conferences blasting President Bush for leaving the Earth vulnerable and “naked in the dark Detroit alley of the cosmos,” (John Kerry) and for “transforming the planet – through a series of irresponsible tax cuts for the rich – into a virtual Meteor Magnet,” (Howard Dean).

The Bush Administration, meanwhile, has assembled a $60 billion emergency task force made up of NASA and military officials to devise a way to deflect the oncoming Democratic criticism. Their first pro-Bush advertisements are expected to be deployed by Spring of 2004.

…

Action star Charles Bronson died of pneumonia over the weekend to the delight of hack comics everywhere, who are now able to use the approximately 167,933 Death Wish play-on-word jokes they have been stockpiling for decades….

Subsequent performances in The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Battle of the Bulge and The Dirty Dozen cemented Bronson’s legacy as the ugliest man ever to have a camera pointed at him for the purposes of showing others for money. Acting without the benefit of a “Tom Cruise smile,” a “Brad Pitt chin” or even a “Kevin Spacey mild presentableness,” Bronson proved that a disturbingly ugly man can make it to the top in Hollywood, then die of pneumonia.

In other news, Kieran has previously noted that my pro-Stalin agenda has come under blistering attack. In my defense, I’d like to point out that fluffy bunnies are adorable.

All right, I’ve lowered the tone enough. Sorry.

“Iain Murray”:http://www.iainmurray.org/MT/archives/000267.html blogs approvingly on a recent Robert Helmer speech. Helmer claims that federalism in the European Union doesn’t have much in common with its American equivalent; it isn’t democratic, and it isn’t really federalism either. He’s trying to square a rather inconvenient circle for the righties – by and large, right-wingers in the UK and US approve of federalism in the US (more rights for the states), but disapprove of it in Europe. Helmer’s basic argument is that federalism is only legitimate if it applies within a single nation-state, where people share a common national identity and common sympathies. Thus, EU federalism is Bad – there’s no such thing as a European national identity. However, US federalism is Good – after all America is ‘One Nation under God.’

There’s one small problem with this argument. Any half-way intelligent reading of American history will tell you that it’s utter nonsense. 150 years ago, the US bore a remarkable resemblance to the EU today; a scattering of loosely affiliated states without all that much of a shared national identity. Then, from the Civil War on, it began to centralize. If Helmer and Murray are right, then, the modern American political system is at best a massive mistake, and at worst, a democratically illegitimate usurpation of powers by a centralizing federal government.

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A little while ago, Kos asked for good things Bush has done. (Specifically, he asked for three good things.) Whatever your list looked like, there’s a new addition:

WASHINGTON D.C. – President George W. Bush signed into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 today, marking the first time the U.S. government has ever passed a law to deal with sexual assault behind bars…

The law calls for the gathering of national statistics about the problem; the development of guidelines for states about how to address prisoner rape; the creation of a review panel to hold annual hearings; and the provision of grants to states to combat the problem.

Also due for praise are the sponsors of this bill, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) in the Senate and Frank R. Wolf (R-Va) in the House.

Iain at Grim Amusements is a little less hopeful, noting that it’s an unfunded mandate and that states will have an incentive to minimize evidence that the situation exists. Still, I agree with Glenn Renolds that “It’s not like it’s going to solve the problem, but at least it puts it on the table.” Kudos.