June 30, 2006
News Flash: Money Doesn't Bring Happiness
Normally I'd be skeptical about any such study, even one emanating from Princeton, but this caught my eye due to Kahneman's name. For those not familiar Kahneman did some important—strike that, critical—ground-breaking work in economics over twenty years ago, in which he experimentally showed that economists' central postulates about people's rationality are untrue. Not that those findings were ever incorporated in a significant way into the discipline, but anyway... I'd have to sit down and read this new study closely to understand its strengths and limitations, but a first gloss rings true: money is not the actual answer to people's problems. Indeed, when you die, if all you've got is a bed of gold coins that's going to be cold comfort.
Bush Flips Off SCOTUS
It isn't everyday that I notice my cynicism rise a notch. But looking over initial reports of the SCOTUS Guantanamo decision—the New York Times is a good example—I had to ask myself, what's the judicial world's equivalent of a signing statement? Because that's what the administration's initial response amounts to. And we're basically one vote from the Supreme Court acquiescing in being rolled. I'm touched that so many tough journalism types have faith in the Court's ability to restrain El Jefe, but it seems more a case of wishful thinking than rational analysis.
June 29, 2006
Down The Memory Hole
When somebody seriously desecrates the punchbowl they aren't greeted with howls of outrage, but with silence. That's what happened yesterday when Germany's Defense Minister dared to suggest that Iran should be allowed to enrich uranium, provided there were enough safeguards. Reuters picked it up but so far there are no corroborating reports from our weak-kneed papers of record. Quite apart from the issue itself—I entirely agree with Herr Jung—the important thing to notice is that a significant sliver of Germany's leadership thinks, for whatever reason (there are many), that launching a war against Iran is a catastrophic idea. With defections like this, even if successfully papered over, it will be well neigh impossible for Condi to assemble a coalition of the willing 2.0, making any potential war on Iran more and more a purely domestic affair. The responsibility now rests squarely on the American public to set limits on its rulers.
June 26, 2006
Refractory Realities
The Greenland ice sheet melting story has been reported and linked all over the place so you'd think there wouldn't be much to add. But here's a quick observation I don't think I've seen elsewhere. Common sense tells us—or should tell us—if the rate of melting has doubled in the past five years, then given global warming the rate of increase of that melting is also going to increase. (Remember, I was trained as an economist and economists love talk like this.) It's important to understand the simple difference between the melting taking place at twice the rate it did a few years ago and the rate of melting accelerating. Scientists don't like to speculate, nor do journalists for the most part, but as the LA Times article hints at, straight line projections are worthless. Thus the worst case scenario of twenty foot plus rises in sea levels is most likely not only not a worry to push beyond a distant century event horizon but may well be a factor within the next several decades, or sooner. Having an elevation that ranges from one to about four hundred feet, much of Washington DC faces the prospect of turning into beach front property. Poetic justice, I suppose.
June 20, 2006
The Dark Side
There’re a number of things I could nitpick, but overall PBS’ Frontline produced an outstanding review in "The Dark Side", of the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal in the lead up to our war against Iraq. It’ll be available for viewing online on Thursday; meanwhile PBS has already posted a lot of stuff from the show, like 15 interview transcripts, that constitute an invaluable resource. Kudos to everybody who worked on it!
June 18, 2006
Peter Handke And The Watch Dogs Of War
By Diana Johnstone
Last April 8, the director of the Comédie-Française, Marcel Bozonnet, announced his decision to cancel a planned Paris production of Peter Handke's play, Voyage au pays sonore ou l'art de la question. The cancellation was in reaction to a short item in the Nouvel Observateur, attacking the Austrian playwright for having been present when Slobodan Milosevic was buried in Pozarevac, Serbia, three weeks earlier. The item fancifully described Handke as "waving a Serbian flag" and "approving the Srebrenica massacre and other crimes committed in the name of purification."
Continue reading "Peter Handke And The Watch Dogs Of War"...
June 12, 2006
Above the Tide of Hours
One of my favorite poems, "The Rose of Battle," by William Butler Yeats, inspires me to coin a phrase: heterodyne diplomacy. From the Greek hetero- 'different', and -dyne, 'power', the word heterodyne is used in telecommunications, radio astronomy, and—believe it or not—research on brain wave frequencies (don't try this at home, kids). Heterodyne diplomacy thus refers to diplomatic 'frequencies' that interact, expectedly or unexpectedly, with unusual results. Viz Iran and North Korea.
June 10, 2006
An Inconvenient Truth
Three stars out of five. I'd really wanted to like this movie, and I was impressed with Ebert's review of it. Also, it seemed to me that Gore might have been on the come-back track—he's been speaking out about all kinds of things and from time to time provides much needed substance to the Democrats. Well.... give Albert Jr. some more time. Maybe in another decade or so he'll have achieved the political maturity we've always wanted to see in him, but he ain't there yet. "An Inconvenient Truth" is thus more, and less, than it should be. More twee Hollywood mincing and less recognition of political reality. Unlike Ebert I found much of it tedious and had to stifle several yawns. On the one hand the science is right, and also this is clearly the only policy issue Gore has ever felt passionate about—he does impart and evoke a sense of connectedness; on the other his notions, such as they are, of political activism seem strangely surreal. It's as if the larger part of Gore's political consciousness never got past the adolescent growing up on the Gore family farm, and he would like to take us all back there. Blech!
June 7, 2006
Trains or Tumbrils?
I envy the Japanese—also every other civilized industrial country with a rational passenger rail system. Why on earth has the US government, for years, tried in varying degrees to make passenger rail 'pay for itself' when every other form of mass transit is heavily subsidized? What're the total subsidies for aircraft, airlines, and airports? I don't know, exactly, but it's huge. Likewise with highways. What is it that all these other countries know about train travel that we don't? I'm not just asking rhetorically: I've been looking off and on for weeks for a good person to talk to about this subject, without any good leads so far, and I invite your suggestions regarding people to ask. Thanks! (Photo credit to Mainichi Shimbun, for fair use, slightly photoshopped by me.)
June 3, 2006
Tintin honored by Dalai Lama with Truth of Light Award
Call me nostalgic and sentimental—I am. Part of the reason for that, probably, is that as a kid in what was then the Belgian Congo, and later in Belgium, I grew up on a steady diet of Tintin. I still vividly remember, for example, sitting on a cold tile floor in a kind of dumpy, dim green apartment hallway, with a bunch of little Belgian kids and a big stack of Tintin comic books, excited that we'd gotten a couple new ones. It's nice to see, now, the Dalai Lama recognize Hergé's contribution to society. This volume was said to be Hergé's favorite—it remains entirely appropriate reading for adults.
