Speaking of crudity...

...I try to avoid it, but maybe it's time to write like a Nobel Prize winner. It's not just Pinter: the work of Elfriede Jelinek, last year's winner,

has also been described as "pornographic" for its frank depictions of sex and violence, but Jelinek's reputation as an overtly political writer has kept critics from denouncing her work as simply prurient.

So as long as you're political , it's OK to be pornographic. However, political seems to mean left-wing anti-American.

Theory rules

The Hatemonger's Quarterly wrote,

As far as we, the crack young staff of "The Hatemonger's Quartery," can tell, graduate students in English don't study English literature.

Even more intriguingly, graduate students in Comparative Literature neither write about literature nor compare things.

Perhaps this is a rather old story for those venerable culture warriors among you. Many of today's academic departments have eschewed their fields' ostensible subject matters in favor or noxious political hectoring. Hence so many dissertation titles begin with the words "Queering the Other."

Call us behind the curve, but we still find this a rather odd situation. After all, you don't very well see Mathematics students writing dissertations on the aesthetics of music. And those in Business Administration don't tend to write about William Faulkner.

So why do those in English and Comparative Literature feel as if their training miraculously transforms them into experts on practically everything? Why do English professors appear to believe that they are the world's leading experts on the World Trade Organization, origami, transgender bathrooms, and NASCAR?

The answer, of course, is what contemporary graduate students call—without a trace of irony, alas—theory. Apparently, a few reader-proof pages of Jacques Lacan turn anyone into an instant authority on particle physics, Tampax, neo-conservatism, and the War of 1812.

This has all compelled us, the crack young staff of "The Hatemonger's Quarterly," to urge universities nationwide to disband all academic departments besides English and Comparative Literature. With these omnipotent experts on board, why would a college require any other faculty members?

Latin

Quoting Donald Sensing

How can you tell a real demon from a mere psychological disorder? Speak to it in Latin. (Or, one would assume, Aramiac, since that is what Jesus spoke.)

In all the Chinese ghosts stories I've read, none of them speak Latin or Aramiac. Also reminds me of the French expression "Y perdre son latin" (literally, "to lose one's Latin over something"): to find something incomprehensible; to make neither head nor tail of it.

Hating the U.S.

The Literary Saloon writes of Harold Pinter's receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature:

It will, again, be a controversial choice, in particular because of Pinter's recent anti-war writings. Indeed, it's hard not to see this also as yet another Nobel signal that they really disapprove of the Anglo-American handling of all things Iraq (as the IAEA getting the Peace Prize obviously was). But Pinter is a globally acknowledged significant playwright, and there will be fewer is-he-worthy-debates than there were with Jelinek.

Yeah, the Swedes hate us. And while I've at least heard of Pinter, I'm not sure this is great literature:

Democracy

There's no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They'll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.

Harold Pinter Februrary 2003

(It's under the rubric War Against Iraq?). And let's not even start with his politics. He really needs to read Sasha Abramsky.

Update
The Times (the real one, not the one we read in the US) wrote,

Pause for thought
Harold Pinter and the Nobel Prize for ...

. . . The Nobel Prize . . . for Literature . . . to Harold Pinter . . . Hmmm . . . there are two possibilities. First, the Nobel committee may have ruled that 2005 was the ideal moment to honour a man who wrote his signature works in the late 1950s. To be fair, Pinter produced notable plays in the succeeding decades. But he made his name, and gave birth to the adjective Pinteresque, with the stripped dialogue, edgy mistrust and air of tangible but mysterious threat of his early works.

Then there is another possibility: that Pinter is just about the biggest and sharpest stick with which the Nobel committee can poke America in the eye. His recent output has consisted almost entirely of rabid antiwar, anti-American and expletive-filled rants against the Iraq conflict.

(via AMERICAN FUTURE)

Hating "the West"

Whose al-Qaida problem? by Sasha Abramsky

....reading the voices of much of the self-proclaimed "left" in the London papers in the aftermath of the [London] bombings, I was struck by how ossified many of them have become, how analyses crafted at the height of the cold war have lingered as paltry interpretive frameworks for political fissures bearing little if anything in common with that "twilight conflict." While on the one hand I agreed with their well-reasoned arguments pointing to a certain degree of western culpability for spawning groups like al-Qaida, on the other hand I was saddened by how utterly incapable were those same arguments of generating responses to the fanaticism of our time.

"(No) one should doubt that these were Blair’s bombs," Pilger, famous for helping to bring to light the genocidal actions of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, wrote in the New Statesman (11 July 2005) while the bodies of the 7 July victims were still being identified. British journalists Robert Fisk, John Pilger, and Tariq Ali, along with British MP George Galloway, and, on the other side of the Atlantic, commentators such as Naomi Klein have all essentially blamed Britain and the United States for bringing the attacks upon themselves. While being careful to denounce the bombers and their agenda, these advocates uttered variations on the same theme: get out of Iraq, bring home the troops from all points east, curtail support for Israel, develop a more sensible, non-oil-based energy policy, and our troubles would dissipate in the wind.

...

Pilger, Fisk, Ali, Galloway, and Klein grasp the undeniable fact that shortsighted western policies and alliances of convenience over the past century have contributed to today’s mass alienation of young Muslims, to a climate in which millennial groups such as al-Qaida flourish.

These advocates understand – in a way the cartoonish "good versus evil" language in which George W Bush frames world events certainly cannot – the rage the Iraq war in general has stoked among Muslims, and in particular, how searing are the images of humiliation rituals and torture emanating out of Abu Ghraib. They rightly recoil at the news-in-brief references to "collateral damage" when Iraqi civilians are killed compared with the oceans of ink generated whenever a western target is hit by terrorism.

But theirs is also a truncated analysis. They assume that groups like al-Qaida are almost entirely reactive, responding to western policies and actions, rather than being pro-active creatures with a virulent homegrown agenda, one not just of defence but of conquest, destruction of rivals, and, ultimately and at its most megalomaniacal, absolute subjugation.

It misses the central point: that, unlike traditional "third-world" liberation movements looking for a bit of peace and quiet in which to nurture embryonic states, al-Qaida is classically imperialist, looking to subvert established social orders and to replace the cultural and institutional infrastructure of its enemies with a (divinely inspired) hierarchical autocracy of its own, looking to craft the next chapter of human history in its own image.

Simply blaming the never quite defined, yet implicitly all-powerful "west" for the ills of the world doesn’t explain why al-Qaida slaughtered thousands of Americans eighteen months before Saddam was overthrown. Nor does it explain the psychopathic joy this death cult takes in mass killings and in ritualistic, snuff-movie-style beheadings. The term "collateral damage" may be inept, but it at least suggests that the killing of civilians in pursuit of a state’s war aims is unintentional, regrettable; there is nothing unintentional, there is no regret, in the targeting of civilians by al-Qaida’s bombers.

Moreover, many of those who reflexively blame the west do not honestly hold up a mirror to the rest of the world, including the Muslim world, and the racism and sexism and anti-semitism that is rife in many parts of it. If bigotry were indeed the exclusive preserve of the west, their arguments would have greater moral force. But given the fundamentalist prejudices that are so much a part of bin Ladenism, the cry of western racism is a long way from being a case-closer.

We should attend to the way bin Laden and his followers invoke "the west." They do so alternately to describe any expansive and domineering "first world" economic and political system and, even more ominously, to demarcate a set of ostensibly decadent liberal political, cultural, social, and religious beliefs and practices.

Indeed, what al-Qaida apparently hates most about "the west" are its best points: the pluralism, the rationalism, individual liberty, the emancipation of women, the openness and social dynamism that represent the strongest legacy of the Enlightenment. These values stand in counterpoint to the tyrannical social code idealised by al-Qaida and by related political groupings such as Afghanistan’s Taliban.

Geez, I Wanted to Panic over this

Floodwater Not as Toxic As Feared, Experts Say: Metals Seen as Chief Hazard In Survey of New Orleans By David Brown

The floodwater that covered New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was not unusually toxic and was "typical of storm water runoff in the region," according to a study published yesterday.

Most of the gasoline-derived substances in the water evaporated quickly, and the bacteria from sewage also declined over time, the scientist leading the study said. The water's chief hazard was from metals that are potentially toxic to fish. However, no fish kills have been reported in Lake Pontchartrain, where the water that once covered 80 percent of the city was pumped.

A deranged version of Pavlov's dog

Hold the champagne Although Democrats are jubilant about Bush's current problems,

...the Democrats are split down the middle on everything from Iraq to gay marriage. Centrists believe in working with business, protecting family values and fighting terrorism. “We believe that the September 11th attacks changed America for ever,” says the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), "and defeating terrorism is the supreme military and moral mission of our time." Liberal activists believe the opposite: that corporations are bad, family values are hogwash, and the war on terror a delusion.

Worse still, the wrong side is getting the upper hand. A new generation of angry young activists have used their mastery of the internet to tilt the party to the left. Groups such as Moveon.org (which claims 3.3m members) and blogs such as the Daily Kos (which has thousands of partisans venting daily) now colour the whole tone of the political debate on the left.

The teenage scribblers of the left seem to be turning the Democrats into a deranged version of Pavlov's dog—reacting to every stimulus from Professor Rove's laboratory rather than thinking ahead. Look what has happened in Congress, where the combination of a re-energised left and a ruthlessly partisan White House is making life miserable for would-be centrists. In 1994, 102 House Democrats voted in favour of NAFTA; this year, only 15 voted in favour of CAFTA, a more modest free-trade deal.

The teenage scribblers are wedded to a suicidal strategy: they think that their party's best chance of winning lies not in emulating Mr Clinton and moving to the centre but in emulating their nemesis, Mr Bush, and motivating their base. This ignores the most salient fact about American politics: there are three conservatives for every two liberals. The Democrats cannot win without carrying about 60% of moderates.

Stealth nominees

The great Miers mystery

In the future, presidents of both parties are likely to prefer "stealth" nominees like Ms Miers. This will have two harmful consequences. First, appointments will become more like the lottery Ms Miers once ran. No matter how good a judge of character a president may be, he will find it tougher to pick dazzling jurists if he excludes from his search judges with a long record of judging hard cases and academic lawyers with a long history of debating controversies with their peers.

Second, if obscurity is to be rewarded, the most ambitious lawyers will shy away from writing articles for law reviews or expressing clear opinions in public. That will surely stultify debate about the proper role of the law in America—hardly a trivial matter in the most legalistic society on earth.

Religion isn't necessarily the problem

Nassim Taleb finds opposition to teaching religious ideas in schools "somewhat misplaced", criticizing instead what he calls "the opiates of the middle class" and criticizes the gullible fool who invests in the stock market.

...he does not realize that the manager of his mutual fund does not fare better than chance — actually a bit worse, after the (generous) fees. Nor does he realize that markets are far more random and far riskier that he is being made to believe by the high priests of the brokerage industry.

But what about index funds? They've got low fees, and do better than average. Long term, an investment in a basket of stocks will outperform other investments. The problem is many people are too afraid to invest anything in stocks, or put their money all in one company, or buy high and sell low.

Taleb also criticizes the "fool" who

...believes in the news media providing an accurate representation of the risks in the world. They don't. By what I call the narrative fallacy, the media distorts our mental map of the world by feeding us what can be made into a story that can be squeezed into our minds. For instance (preventable) cancer, not terrorism remains the greatest danger. The number of persons killed by hurricanes, while consequential, is dwarfed by that of the thousands of isolated daily victims dying in hospital beds. These are not story-worthy, implying; the absence of attention on the part of the press maps into disproportionately reduced resources allocated to their welfare. The difference between actual, actuarially defined risks and the perception of dangers is enormous — and, sadly, growing with the globalization and the media, and our increased vulnerability to visual stimuli.

Theory at the periphery

In A New Postwar History of Europe Examines the Uneasy Embrace of East and West, RICHARD BYRNE's review of Tony R. Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 he notes that Judt debunks the notion that the United States was the major player in ending the cold war. I've always been a little skeptical of the credit given Reagan.

Anyway, what I liked to see was this:

Mr. Judt also dispenses judgments that will raise eyebrows, especially in the United States. Poststructuralist theory, for instance, takes a few sharp knocks. (In one footnote, Mr. Judt writes of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan that "even by the lax standards of Sixties-era Paris he remained quite remarkably ignorant of contemporary developments in medicine, biology, and neurology, with no discernible harm to his practice or reputation.")

Quizzed about those barbs, Mr. Judt observes that "one of the distorting effects" of theory's influence in American academe is that theory's totemic figures — Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva — are "seen as much more prominently at the center of European thought than they actually are. Whereas I deliberately 'decentered' them, to use a cliché, and put them where I think they belong, which is within the intellectual and cultural world of Europe, but much more at the periphery."

Today's European intellectuals, he adds, have lost their public platform. As an example, he cites the apathy surrounding a 1993 essay project, led by Derrida (who died in 2004) and the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, to forge a European response to growing American unilateralism. "The whole project sputtered out," writes Mr. Judt. "One hundred years after the Dreyfus affair, 50 years after the apotheosis of Jean-Paul Sartre, Europe's leading intellectuals had thrown a petition — and no one came."

The secular left made the world safe for intelligent design

Backward, Christian Soldiers! Why must intelligent design be stopped? Because this—God forbid—could be the moment when the theocratization of America makes a real advance. By Kurt Andersen

For several decades the philosophical ground has been softened up by the relativism and political correctness of the secular left, which succeeded in undermining the very idea of objective reality and of calling a spade a spade—so now, in the resulting marsh, fantasies like intelligent design (or Scientology or feng shui or 9/11 as a CIA plot) take root and spread like weeds. Liberals pioneered squishy-minded indulgence of their key constituencies’ unfortunate new ideas, like reparations and criminalized hate speech; now it’s the right’s turn.

The ID people, I’m afraid, remind me of Holocaust deniers. They’re not evil, but they are distorting and ignoring a century and a half of overwhelming empirical evidence to make it easier for people to believe in a historical miracle, just as Holocaust deniers distort and ignore half a century of overwhelming empirical evidence to make it easier for people to disbelieve a historical crime. Both are enemies of truth.

Erin Brockovich--self-promoter

All About Erin: Heroine of screen and courtroom Erin Brockovich deserves a prize, all right. But not for what you think. by Walter Olson led me to
GINA KOLATA's April 11, 2000A Hit Movie Is Rated 'F' In Science

...scientists said, the movie encouraged exactly the wrong way to think about data, elevating individuals' medical histories to the level of proof and distorting the notion of risk. Scientists, seeing the evidence that so infuriated Erin Brockovich, would be much more cautious -- and skeptical. The first question to ask is whether residents of Hinkley really did have more sickness than people living elsewhere. And, if so, what illnesses are being discussed?

"Everyone has symptoms," said Dr. John C. Bailar III, a professor of health studies at the University of Chicago. Half the adult population eventually gets cancer. One out of every 700 children gets cancer before age 15, he said. Vague complaints, like aches and pains and difficulty sleeping are ubiquitous. If people look for diseases, they will find them, simply because illness is so common.

The next red flag is the sheer number of diseases. "Any time I see half a dozen diseases attributed to some exposure, I get very nervous," Dr. Bailar said. Biological agents, he said, "are very well targeted."

Vinyl chloride has been shown to cause liver cancer, but not asthma. Asbestos has been shown to cause lung cancer, but not breast cancer or brain cancer. The list of illnesses that any chemical is known to cause is very short, said Dr. Stephen Safe, a toxicologist at Texas A & M University. "The list is not 10,000 diseases," he said.

Scientists would also ask if it is even plausible that chromium (VI) in drinking water was making hundreds of people gravely ill. Of course, both sides in the litigation that ensued over the Hinkley groundwater contamination brought in their own scientific experts, although that was not pursued in the movie, but federal agencies whose scientists were not involved in the litigation said evidence was lacking that chromium (VI) in groundwater caused a myriad of health problems. The chemical's main problem, they said, is that it can cause lung cancer if workers inhale it as particulates in large doses for long periods of time.

More recently, Norma Zager, editor-in-chief of a free weekly has exposed how Broko is trying to whip up hysteria over pollution on the campus of Beverly Hills High School.

So who cares? Well, Harvard School of Public Health is preparing to give its highest award, the Julius Richmond Award, to Erin Brockovich.

Bringing Home the Bacon

Mickey Kaus writes about how much time & money following Davis-Bacon can take, and concludes,

Preserving Davis-Bacon may endear Democrats to the AFL-CIO's construction unions, but it's a slightly trickier case to make to voters--"Hey, this will really slow rebuilding and make it way more expensive for taxpayers!" Why take a stand defending the indefensible?

Dick Durbin, Idiot

Durbin proposes tax on oil industry's "excessive" profits

Associated Press

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin proposed a new tax on oil companies' "excessive" profits Tuesday, saying the money could help consumers cope with the high cost of gasoline and heating oil.

He said refineries have seen their profits soar 255 percent over the past year. High fuel costs threaten the economy and hurt working families, he said.

"Every dollar that you're paying at that gas pump is going into more profits for the oil companies - dramatically higher profits than they have ever seen," the Democratic senator said at a news conference.

He proposes taxing 50 percent of the profit that companies make when oil prices rise above the 2004 average of $40 a barrel. Oil is now selling for more than $60 a barrel.

The estimated $40 billion in tax money could be used to give consumers a $150 rebate, help poor families pay their home heating bills and provide $1 billion in incentives for auto companies to improve fuel efficiency.

Durbin, the Senate's minority whip, acknowledged his proposal faces long odds in the Republican-controlled Congress.

He defended his proposal as a fair response to rising prices in a critical industry. Durbin's aides later said a windfall profits tax was imposed on the oil industry in the 1980s.

The National Petrochemical and Refiners Association did not return a call seeking comment.

In addition, on the local news, I heard Durbin quoted as saying that this was not "anti-capitalist".

I wonder if he knows it's not going to pass, or if he doesn't care, and is only doing it for his typical rabble-rousing politics.

Hysteria?

Benjamin Joffe-Walt wrote 'They beat him until he was lifeless'

The last time I saw Lu Banglie, he was lying in a ditch on the side of the street - placid, numb and lifeless - the spit, snot and urine of about 20 men mixing with his blood, and running all over his body....He lay there - his eye out of its socket, his tongue cut, a stream of blood dropping from his mouth, his body limp, twisted. The ligaments in his neck were broken, so his head lay sideways as if connected to the rest of his body by a rubber band.

It turns out this former human shield is a bit of an hysteric. Jonathan Watts added Protests surge as reforms fail to match rising hopes

The government says 3.6 million people took part in 74,000 "mass incidents" last year, an increase of more than 20% on 2003. Most of these protests were sporadic, disorganised and centred on local issues, typically land ownership rights, official corruption and environmental destruction. But they have alarmed the authorities. At last year's central party meeting, the leadership called rural unrest a "life or death" issue for the party, which pledged to make itself more responsive to the concerns of the people.

But plodding political reforms have failed to keep up with rising expectations among the public. According to the local media, the most ambitious proposal on the agenda this year is to allow towns in three provinces to vote for their mayor. The main thrust of the reforms is to maintain Communist party rule.

Civil rights activists say this is out of touch with public opinion and a rising grass-roots democracy movement. "There is growing coordination among activists," said Hou Wenzhou, director of the Empowerment and Rights Institute. "There is growing awareness of rights among the public and there is growing resentment of the government."

She said that while the number of activists was still small - just a few hundred in Beijing, and less in other cities - numbers had increased sharply in the past three years. The Taishi case, in which outside activists supported the locals in their attempt to impeach their mayor, showed they were becoming more organised.

And finally Activist found alive after beating by mob. So he's not dead after all. Many more details of the the Taishi 太石 elections at EastWestNorthSouth

Happiness

A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom By ANDREW C. REVKIN
In Bhutan, happiness is

preserving cultural traditions, protecting the environment and maintaining a responsive government.

Around the world, a growing number of economists, social scientists, corporate leaders and bureaucrats are trying to develop measurements that take into account not just the flow of money but also access to health care, free time with family, conservation of natural resources and other noneconomic factors.

They're thinking about what makes them happy. That's not what makes me happy.

The article also concedes that people in some relatively poor countries are happy.

Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, found that Latin American countries, for example, registered far more subjective happiness than their economic status would suggest.

In contrast, countries that had experienced communist rule were unhappier than noncommunist countries with similar household incomes - even long after communism had collapsed.

So anyway, does that mean we'll stop looking at economic inequality as a bad thing?

Adam Davidson and "neoliberalism"

Yesterday on NPR on a broadcast before the Nobel prizes for economics were announced, Davidson said that the prize was controversial, because

• It was not part of Alfred Nobel's bequest
• It was biased in favor of neoliberalism
• The most influential economists were awarded the prize in the 70's and early 80's

Interestingly, these points raised in the wikipedia entry about the controversy about the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Then Steve Inskeep asked what "neoliberalism" was. Davidson seemed a little at a loss, but ended up saying that it was the opposite of liberalism. In fact, neoliberals are often in favor of personal freedoms that leftists are, it's just that they believe in free markets as well.

The broadcast NPR has available now doesn't go into that. Davidson simply concludes that while in the past, winners were "aggressive free market economists", this year's winners "may indicate a change in how the prizes are awarded."

According to his biography

Davidson’s reports focus on the effects of increased global trade on the U.S. economy, U.S. workers, and U.S. competitiveness...

Davidson has visited countries that are undergoing dramatic economic change, such as China, to help listeners make sense of the sometimes overwhelming and confusing phenomenon of globalization. By introducing listeners to the people most affected by globalization, Davidson says he hopes to help listeners "better understand the profound changes happening in every part of the world."

It sounds like he wants to find the bad news about globalization, but in other reports, he ends up talking about the benefits of free trade.

Oh, please

I'm trying to figure out the new house bill. I find House Passes Bill to Boost Refineries, which includes the nugget

Supporters of the measure said that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita made clear that the country needed more refineries, including new ones outside of the Gulf region. No new refinery has been built since 1976, although large refineries have been expanded to meet growing demand.

Critics of the legislation argued a cash-rich industry with huge profits over the past year shouldn't need government help to build refineries. They said the bill would allow the oil industry to avoid environmental regulations and would lead to dirtier air.

But then there's this citation of a letter from Representative Sherwood L. Boehlert (R - NY):

After the Rules Committee reported the manager's amendment late last night, Mr. Boehlert wrote in a Dear Colleague letter (and I quote):

'Please join me in voting no on H.R. 3893, which will increase the deficit, harm the environment, undermine the states, and give charity to the oil companies while doing virtually nothing to help consumers.'

"It is clear that this Republican Majority is exploiting the disruption to our nation's refining capacity caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to push many of the same provisions that were dropped from the Energy Policy Act that we passed in July.

"This Republican bill, for example, would create a fund that would pay oil companies if they are sued – even if they lose in court. It would enable cities with dirty air to delay meeting Clean Air requirements. And it would preempt state and local zoning regulations related to the siting of refineries.

"What do these provisions have to do with reducing gas prices today?

"In sharp contrast, the Democratic substitute would put some bite in the Federal Trade Commission's bark. It would give the FTC explicit authority to stop price gouging – not just for gasoline and diesel fuels, but for natural gas, home heating oil and propane.

"It provides for enhanced penalties for price gouging; explicitly outlaws market manipulation; and empowers state attorneys generals to enforce the federal law...

Whoops. Gouging? He just lost me. So can I believe the rest of his criticism?

Not Pretty

The Chinese horseshoe bat is the SARS Virus Hiding Place, not the civet cat. Here's the Chinese horseshoe bat (Rhinolophus sinicus), known in Chinese as the Chinese chrysanthemum-headed bat 中華菊頭蝠 or the hoof-nosed bat 蹄鼻蝙蝠:

Taiwan's not buying

Todd Crowell writes

For the past ten years, the leaders of Taiwan appear to have calculated U.S. intervention heavily into their resource allocation equation and elected to reduce defense spending despite an ever prosperous and stable economy. And this short-change math does not work. We're watching the partisan stalemate over Taiwan's defense spending, and we're doing our own math. In a crisis . . . Taiwan will be stood up against the yardstick of 'national will' and will be measured accordingly.

Bush tried to make clear to Chen that he "did not have a blank check to be filled out in American blood."